Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: major themes
- 2 The role of heuristics in political reasoning: a theory sketch
- 3 Values under pressure: AIDS and civil liberties
- 4 The principle–policy puzzle: the paradox of American racial attitudes
- 5 Reasoning chains
- 6 The likability heuristic
- 7 Democratic values and mass publics
- 8 Ideological reasoning
- 9 Information and electoral choice
- 10 Stability and change in party identification: presidential to off-years
- 11 The American dilemma: the role of law as a persuasive symbol
- 12 Ideology and issue persuasibility: dynamics of racial policy attitudes
- 13 The new racism and the American ethos
- 14 Retrospect and prospect
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Subject index
- Author index
1 - Introduction: major themes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: major themes
- 2 The role of heuristics in political reasoning: a theory sketch
- 3 Values under pressure: AIDS and civil liberties
- 4 The principle–policy puzzle: the paradox of American racial attitudes
- 5 Reasoning chains
- 6 The likability heuristic
- 7 Democratic values and mass publics
- 8 Ideological reasoning
- 9 Information and electoral choice
- 10 Stability and change in party identification: presidential to off-years
- 11 The American dilemma: the role of law as a persuasive symbol
- 12 Ideology and issue persuasibility: dynamics of racial policy attitudes
- 13 The new racism and the American ethos
- 14 Retrospect and prospect
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Subject index
- Author index
Summary
One of the most striking features of the study of Americans' thinking about politics has been the submergence of politics itself. How people figure out their positions on specific issues has become a minor chord: The major chord in the analysis of public opinion, endlessly repeated, is how little attention they pay to politics, how rarely they think about even major issues, and how often they have failed to work through a consistent or genuine position on them. Why, then, ask how people make any particular political choice when the whole point to appreciate is how unlikely they are to have given it any thought?
In contrast, the argument of this book is that ordinary people do reason through their choices over a range of issues. By reason, we do not mean selfconscious acts of cerebration, merely that people can occasionally take advantage of shortcuts in judgment to figure out dependably what they favor politically. Nor should this be taken to imply that the public is well informed and politically aware. On the contrary, the whole thrust of our argument is to understand how people's modest level of political information, plus their similarly modest abilities to process it, conditions how they reason about political choices.
We write from the premise that if you want to understand how people reason about political choices, you must examine how they reason about actual choices before them. Has the eruption of AIDS excited a public backlash against gays? To what extent are Americans only giving lip service to the principle of racial equality?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reasoning and ChoiceExplorations in Political Psychology, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991