Thinking About Political Psychology
- PDF / 73,316 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 226 Views
Book Review Thinking About Political Psychology James H. Kuklinski (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, 354 pp. USD 65.00. ISBN 0521593778. Acta Politica (2003) 38, 175–177. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500013
Political psychology has become an identifiable interdisciplinary area with a distinct community, identity, and institutional structure in the last two decades. As with other, relatively young areas of inquiry, many overviews of the subfield to date have focused on justifying the area (typically vis-a`-vis the rational choice perspective), identifying common themes and commitments in research, and tracing the intellectual roots and evolution of inquiry. Reflecting the maturing of the subfield, Thinking About Political Psychology breaks new ground by assessing the challenges and debates within the current practice of political psychology. As the preface states, the aim of this edited volume is to ‘pose, and then address, the kinds of tough questions that those outside the field would be inclined to ask and those inside should be able to answer’ in order to improve political psychology and generate new discussion and research. The collection of chapters will certainly achieve this goal. The book is structured around several themes. After defining and introducing the volume and the area of political psychology, the chapters cover methodological and theoretical debates, the relative use and contributions of psychological and political science theories in current research, and the relation between micro-psychological and macro-political processes. Within each theme, different chapters take alternative cuts at the issues. For example, in ‘Part II: Theory and Research,’ Lupia proposes combinations of psychological theory and experimental methods with rational choice and formal models, while Conover and Searing call for abandoning the positivist model of testing for generalizations in favor of discovering context-dependent interpretations. In ‘Part III: The Psychological-Politics Nexus,’ Rahn, Sullivan, and Rudolph assess (and reject) the claim that political psychology is not political enough, while Krosnick argues that it is not psychological enough and offers ways in which research in the political context can contribute to general psychological theory, particularly if psychologists pay more attention to political science theory. The final section, ‘Part IV: Political Psychology and Aggregate Opinion,’ looks at the levels of analysis challenge in various research programs, such as changes in the policy mood of public opinion (Stimson) and political sophistication (Luskin). The chapters in this section offer a variety of
Book Review
176
ways in which individual characteristics can aggregate to the polity level. (The introductory chapter by Kuklinski provides a very good, detailed, critical summary of each chapter and how it relates to the themes.) What is useful about this collection of chapters is that these themes capture explicitly the challenges and debates in the subfield. Almost every piece of i
Data Loading...
