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Americans often complain about the operation of their government, but scholars have never developed a complete picture of people's preferred type of government. In this provocative and timely book, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, employing an original national survey and focus groups, report the governmental procedures Americans desire. Contrary to the prevailing view that people want greater involvement in politics, most citizens do not care about most policies and therefore are content to turn over decision-making authority to someone else. People's wish for the political system is that decision makers be empathetic and, especially, non-self-interested, not that they be responsive and accountable to the people's largely nonexistent policy preferences or, even worse, that the people be obligated to participate directly in decision making. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude by cautioning communitarians, direct democrats, social capitalists, deliberation theorists, and all those who think that greater citizen involvement is the solution to society's problems.

Social Divisions and the Politics of Group Empathy. Politics, social theory, history of ideas, American government, politics, policy, Comparative politics

As reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict, the Rodney King beating, and the Amadou Diallo killing make clear, whites and African Americans in the United States inhabit two different perceptual worlds, with the former seeing the justice system as largely fair and color blind and the latter believing it to be replete with bias and discrimination. The authors tackle two important questions in this book: what explains the widely differing perceptions, and why do such differences matter? They attribute much of the racial chasm to the relatively common personal confrontations that many blacks have with law enforcement - confrontations seldom experienced by whites. More importantly, the authors demonstrate that this racial chasm is consequential: it leads African Americans to react much more cynically to incidents of police brutality and racial profiling, and also to be far more skeptical of punitive anti-crime policies ranging from the death penalty to three-strikes laws.

Overcoming Historical Injustices is the last entry in Gibson's 'overcoming trilogy' on South Africa's transformation from apartheid to democracy. Focusing on the issue of historical land dispossessions - the taking of African land under colonialism and apartheid - this book investigates the judgements South Africans make about the fairness of their country's past. Should, for instance, land seized under apartheid be returned today to its rightful owner? Gibson's research zeroes in on group identities and attachments as the thread that connects people to the past. Even when individuals have experienced no direct harm in the past, they care about the fairness of the treatment of their group to the extent that they identify with that group. Gibson's analysis shows that land issues in contemporary South Africa are salient, volatile, and enshrouded in symbols and, most important, that interracial differences in understandings of the past and preferences for the future are profound.

In Elements of Reason, scholars from across the social sciences use recent advances in the social sciences to uncover the cognitive foundations of social decision making. They answer tough questions about how people see and process information and provide new explanations of how basic human needs affect human choices.

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. The collection features chapters from some of the most talented political scientists in the field.

People decide about political parties by taking into account the preferences, values, expectations, and perceptions of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. Analyzing data from extensive German and British household surveys, this book shows that wives and husbands influence each other; young adults influence their parents, especially their mothers.

Some of the leading scholars in political psychology discuss and debate some of the major issues in the field. Scholars define the boundaries of the field, debate its relevance, consider whether the field is, methodologically, too individualistic and consider whether the field can help scholars to understand collective public opinion.

The impact of television and the Internet on politics in the United States during the last half-century. The 2007 study shows that the degree of choice among different media content affects political learning, turnout, and the polarization of elections.

This 2006 book proposes a new framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented for getting 'inside the heads' of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information during modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad types of decision strategies are described.

This book develops a general theory of intolerance of difference that provides a unified explanation of all kinds of intolerance, including racial, political and moral intolerance, and punitiveness. It recognizes universal regularities in human behavior that predispose certain individuals to authoritarianism, which is aggravated by changing conditions of societal threat.

Investigates the degree to which the political culture of South Africa impedes or promotes the consolidation of democratic reform. The authors contend that political tolerance is a crucial element of all democratic political cultures, but that in polyglot South Africa, tolerance is perhaps more important than any other democratic value.

In Elements of Reason, scholars from across the social sciences use recent advances in the social sciences to uncover the cognitive foundations of social decision making. They answer tough questions about how people see and process information and provide new explanations of how basic human needs affect human choices.

This book is about how people are affected by their perceptions of the collective opinions of others.

Some of the leading scholars in political psychology discuss and debate some of the major issues in the field. Scholars define the boundaries of the field, debate its relevance, consider whether the field is, methodologically, too individualistic and consider whether the field can help scholars to understand collective public opinion.

The Macro Polity, first published in 2002, provides a comprehensive model of American politics at the system level. Focusing on interactions between citizen preferences, government activity and policy, and the coinfluence of actions between citizens and governments, it integrates understandings of matters such as partisanship, elections, and government policy-making into a single model.

In the chapters of this edited volume, first published in 2001, the various authors report research designed to help readers understand why so many Americans do not like, trust, approve of, or support their government. Readers with interests in current affairs, American politics, American government, and American opinion should like this book.

'In sum this is a didactically, theoretically and methodologically impressive report on an important research project, scrupulously conducted over a number of years by a powerful group of scholars with a wide range of skills. It is now required reading for all who work on voting behaviour and/or political attitudes.' Michael Laver, Political Studies

Democratic politics is a collective enterprise, not simply because individual votes are counted to determine winners, but more fundamentally because the individual exercise of citizenship is an interdependent undertaking. Citizens argue with one another and they generally arrive at political decisions through processes of social interaction and deliberation.

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of the US Congress and political institutions, in general. Focus group sessions and a national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress.

How do citizens faced with a complex variety of considerations decide whether or not to tolerate extremist groups? Relying on several survey-experiments, the authors identify and compare the impact on decision making of contemporary information, long-standing predispositions, and enduring values and beliefs.

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. The collection features chapters from some of the most talented political scientists in the field.

In the chapters of this edited volume, first published in 2001, the various authors report research designed to help readers understand why so many Americans do not like, trust, approve of, or support their government. Readers with interests in current affairs, American politics, American government, and American opinion should like this book.

This book, first published in 1995, explores how the everyday person reasons about nuclear strategy. James DeNardo's discovery that the amateur's strategic reasoning defies all conventional theories lays the groundwork for a new understanding of national security politics, and challenges the intellectual foundations of modern deterrence theory, public opinion studies, and game theory.

In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate, and presidential elections. The thoery is constructed from four basic premises. The first is that individuals differ substantially in their attention to politics and therefore in their exposure to elite sources of political information. The second is that people react critically to political communication only to the extent that they are knowledgeable about political affairs. The third is that people rarely have fixed attitudes on specific issues; rather, they construct 'preference statements' on the fly as they confront each issue raised. The fourth is that, in constructing these statements, people make the greatest use of ideas that are, for various reasons, the most immediately salient to them. Zaller emphasizes the role of political elites in establishing the terms of political discourse in the mass media and the powerful effect of this framing of issues on the dynamics of mass opinion on any given issue over time.

Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.

Public opinion has played a crucial role in the transitions from war to peace in Israel since the 1967 Six Day war. Security Threatened is the first major analysis of the interactions among opinion, politics and policy in that period, based on opinion surveys of thousands of adult Jews conducted between 1962 and 1994.

This book is for people who want to understand emerging patterns of white identity and collective political behavior in an increasingly diverse America. Drawing on robust evidence, Jardina shows that many whites possess an activated racial identity and support policies and candidates they see as protecting whites' power and status.

Ideal for scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students of democratic theory and political behavior, while engaging for policy makers and concerned citizens. Politics with the People develops and tests a new model of politics - 'directly representative democracy' - connecting citizens and officials to improve representative government.

Political disagreement is widespread within the communication network of ordinary citizens; furthermore, political diversity within these networks is entirely consistent with a theory of democratic politics built on the importance of individual interdependence. The persistence of political diversity and disagreement does not imply that political interdependence is absent among citizens or that political influence is lacking. The book's analysis makes a number of contributions. The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement. They show that communication and influence within dyads is autoregressive - that the consequences of dyadic interactions depend on the distribution of opinions within larger networks of communication. They argue that the autoregressive nature of political influence serves to sustain disagreement within patterns of social interaction, as it restores the broader political relevance of social communication and influence. They eliminate the deterministic implications that have typically been connected to theories of democratic politics based on interdependent citizens.