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This article advocates a discursive approach for examining political rhetoric. Such an approach is particularly useful for studying contemporary political ideology. The current political climate, especially in Britain, has been described as exemplifying a "Third Way," which is said to have replaced the old ideological division between "left" and "right" by a consensual, non-ideological politics. The discursive approach allows the analyst to look at the continuing dilemmas of an ideology that denies its ideological character. In discursive analyses of interviews with 20 elected local officials in the Midlands of England, the respondents (regardless of party affiliation) tended to give accounts that celebrated the development of consensual, less ideologically divisive politics. These accounts, however, were dilemmatic: As the speakers told of social change, they also stressed their own personal stability, as if they themselves existed outside the previous political climate. They also explicitly distanced themselves from the language of "left" and "right," but in this distancing a further ideological dilemma was detectable. All the local politicians were officially affiliated to a political party. In discursively subtle ways, the speakers used the left/right continuum as they distinguished between the parties, thereby showing the sort of variability that discursive theorists have noted in other contexts. The implications of such findings and of the discursive approach to studying ideology are discussed in relation to the possibilities for developing a critical political psychology. KEY WORDS:The Third Way, rhetorical psychology, ideology, British politics.In the contemporary world, there are political and intellectual trends, especially in Europe, that parallel the period in the 1950s and 1960s when the "end of ideology" was widely proclaimed. At that time, a number of theorists in the United States, most notably Daniel Bell (1960) and Seymour Lipset (1960), declared that the age of dogmatic, or "ideological," politics was over: Old adversarial and extreme politics was giving way to a more conciliatory and pragmatic era. Theorists

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N ew studies indicate that incorporating planned difficulties such as unusual font styles in study material forces students to focus and concentrate more. In our experiment 155 students under different instructors learn a core topic in operations management in an active learning environment. One group of students in each class used a standard version of the study materials while two other groups used a modified version incorporating an unusual (difficult-to-read) font or planned mistakes. Students with the unusual font materials scored highest on a post-workshop comprehension test. Students who had workshop materials with pedagogical mistakes scored second followed by students in the control group. Further, it was observed that students in the control group deceived themselves with respect to sense of material mastery.

New Labour’s Third Way philosophy, with its fervent critique of ideological politics, claims to be able to revitalize interest and participation in politics amongst the lay public. This article critically considers such claims by means of a detailed ideological analysis of interviews with English local politicians. Focusing on speakers’ tendency to deny or downgrade the political nature of their involvement in local politics, the recurrent occurrence of an assertion prefaced by the word ‘just’ is examined. On the one hand, this move performs local interpersonal work, implying that the preferred version is a reflection of the facts about self and, as such, has a rational/empirical basis. On the other hand, the operation of broader ideological constraints can at times be visualized, as if there is some underlying basis for the account which is beyond argument and consciousness. It is concluded that anti-ideological advocates of the Third Way are helping to constitute an era in which even official political representatives are unthinkingly negating their role.