This volume is simultaneously a statement on the nature of mass political judgments and the capacity of a particular research perspective, political psychology, to reveal that nature. Using political psychology to explore citizen decision making is, of course, not new. Indeed, the two are so inextricably intertwined that it is difficult to imagine studying the latter without the help of the former. Even the authors of the Columbia studies of the 1940s and 1950s, who were largely sociological in orientation, used relevant psychological concepts to explain how people form political attitudes and why they vote as they do. The subsequent and continuing University of Michigan National Election Studies are deeply rooted in psychological notions such as affect, projection, and rationalization.

More recently, a group of scholars has applied (and modified) ideas and methodologies from the field of social cognition to the study of citizen political decision making. This research is new because the field of social cognition is itself quite new. One of the unifying themes of social cognition, and thus of contemporary political psychology, is information processing. People are seen not as passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but as active choosers and interpreters of them. Much of the new political psychology research examines how people reason and make inferences about politics. Other work delineates unconscious mental processes that influence the judgments people make.

Methodological approaches vary. Some scholars correlate traditional survey items, but unlike public opinion researchers more generally, they use concepts from social cognition to direct their empirical research.