"ideological contest" is a perfectly acceptable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to any situation in which people have conflicting ideologies and opinions. For example: "The ideological contest between the two candidates was clearly visible in the debates."
In Iraq, America has run up against the limits of war in an ideological contest.
Born out of a fraught ideological contest, it can never escape the heat of the political battlefield.
In the long years of the Cold War, the West routinely buttressed unsavory regimes from Africa to Asia in its ideological contest with the Soviet Union.
"The underlying issue is that there's an ideological contest over the soul of the state of Israel and the Jewish people".
During the cynical, paranoid years of the post-war era, Castro brought the passion of a true believer to the ideological contest between east and west.
The special election was more a battle between two warring political camps in the Bronx than an ideological contest between two candidates.
Others have pointed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab spring as proof that ideological contests remain.
Such realistic fatalism, and the poet's duty "to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art" and to believe that "life had a secret geometry," drains "Snow" 's ideological contests of blood.
And the broader strategic environment also helped: with the Cold War just ended, the Soviet Union was desperate to forge a new partnership with the West, and the moral authority of the US as the supposed "winner" of the 20th Century's ideological contests was at its zenith.
The capitalist West won its "ideological beauty contest" with the communist East, Mr. Lanchester writes, which was good news except for this: Suddenly "there was no global antagonist to point at and jeer at the rise in the number and size of the fat cats; there was no embarrassment about allowing the rich to get so much richer so very quickly".
Access to health care should not require passing an ideological popularity contest.
