Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology

by Edited by James H. Kuklinski

• ISBN13: 9780521089425
• ISBN10: 0521089425
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements, others to human cognition and reasoning. Still others focus on perceptions or basic political attitudes such as political ideology. Several demonstrate the impact of values on policy preferences. The collection features chapters from some of the most talented political scientists in the field.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Political psychology and the study of citizens and politics

Affect and Emotion

Section Introduction

The role of affect in symbolic politics

Emotions and politics: the dynamic functions of emotionality

Cognitive neuroscience, emotion, and leadership

Commentary: emotion as virtue and vice

Political Cognition

Section Introduction

An experimental study of information search, memory, and decision making during a political campaign

Political accounts and attribution processes

The motivated construction of political judgments

Commentary: on the dynamic and goal-oriented nature of (candidate) evaluations

Political Attitudes and Perceptions

Section Introduction

Public opinion and democratic politics: the problem of nonattitudes and the social construction of political judgment

Implications of a latitude-theory model of citizen attitudes for political campaigning, debate, and representation

Where you stand depends on what you see: connections among values, perceptions of fact, and political prescriptions

Commentary: the meaning of `attitude' in representative democracies

Political Values

Section Introduction

Social welfare attitudes and the humanitarian sensibility

American individualism reconsidered

Political values judgments

Commentary: the study of values

Commentary: the value of politics

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