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Borrowing from the perspective of macroeconomics, it treats electorates, politicians, and governments as unitary actors, making decisions in response to the behavior of other actors. The macro and longitudinal focus makes it possible to directly connect the behaviors of electorate and government. The surprise of macro-level analysis, emerging anew in every chapter, is that order and rationality dominate explanations.
This work draws on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. It sheds light on a range of political behaviour, including party identification.
Top scholars in the field survey the study of elections and democracy
Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in our understanding of political behavior, The Affect Effect fills the void by providing a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen seamlessly integrated essays, thirty top scholars approach this topic from a broad array of angles that address four major themes. The first section outlines the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of emotion in politics, while the second focuses on how emotions function within and among individuals. The final two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself. Opening up new paths of inquiry in an exciting new field, this volume will appeal not only to scholars of American politics and political behavior, but also to anyone interested in political psychology and sociology.
How do public laws, treaties, Senate confirmations, and other legislative achievements help us to gain insight into how our governmental system performs? This well-argued book edited by Scott Adler and John Lapinski is the first to assess our political institutions by looking at what the authors refer to as legislative accomplishment. The book moves beyond current research on Congress that focuses primarily on rules, internal structure, and the microbehavior of individual lawmakers, to look at the mechanisms that govern how policy is enacted and implemented in the United States. It includes essays on topics ranging from those dealing with the microfoundations of congressional output, to larg...
As part of the study of emotions and politics, this book explores connections between affect and cognition and their implications for political evaluation, decision and action. Emphasizing theory, methodology and empirical research, Feeling Politics is an important contribution to political science, sociology, psychology and communications.
Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. This study, the first comprehensive treatment of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality in opinion surveys, suggests some surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is distributed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect disproportionately the opinions of some groups more than others. Sometimes collective preferences seem to represent something like the will of the people, but frequently they do not. Sometimes they rigidly enforce political equality in the expression of political viewpoints, but often they do not. The primary culprit is not any inherent shortcoming in the methods of survey research. Rather, it is the limited degree of knowledge held by ordinary citizens about public affairs. Accounting for these factors can help survey researchers, journalists, politicians, and concerned citizens better appreciate the pitfalls and possibilities for using opinion polls to represent the people s voice.
Paul M. Kellstedt explains the variation in Americans' racial attitudes over the last half-century, particularly the relationship between media coverage of race and American public opinion on race. The analyses reveal that racial policy preferences have evolved in an interesting and unpredicted (if not unpredictable) fashion over the past fifty years. There have been sustained periods of liberalism, where the public prefers an active government to bring about racial equality, and these periods are invariably followed by eras of conservatism, where the public wants the government to stay out of racial politics altogether. These opinions respond to cues presented in the national media. Kellstedt then examines the relationship between attitudes on the two major issues of the twentieth century: race and the welfare state.
Mainstream liberal narratives have often depicted politics as a matter of power and competing interests, disregarding emotions or conceiving them as threats to a rational and well-ordered society. In the last decades, however, this viewpoint has been increasingly challenged by a number of scholars researching on the complex and multidimensional role of emotions in politics. This edited collection aims at providing a concise but comprehensive introduction to this area of research. The essays contained in this volume focus on a single case, the Obama phenomenon, illustrating empirically how the variable ‘emotions’ can enrich political analysis. Taken together, the essays reflect the plurality of approaches available to the study of politics and emotions and thus contribute to the cutting-edge debates on this fascinating topic.
It is common knowledge that televised political ads are meant to appeal to voters' emotions, yet little is known about how or if these tactics actually work. Ted Brader's innovative book is the first scientific study to examine the effects that these emotional appeals in political advertising have on voter decision-making. At the heart of this book are ingenious experiments, conducted by Brader during an election, with truly eye-opening results that upset conventional wisdom. They show, for example, that simply changing the music or imagery of ads while retaining the same text provokes completely different responses. He reveals that politically informed citizens are more easily manipulated b...