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  3. Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology

This series has been established in recognition of the resurgence of interest in political psychology and public opinion in recent years. The series focuses on work that pertains to the fundamental question: What kinds of mental processes do citizens employ when they think about democratic politics and respond, consciously or unconsciously, to their political environments? The emphasis is on systematic and rigorous empirical analysis and a wide range of methodologies are employed, including traditional surveys, experimental surveys, laboratory experiments, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. These empirically oriented studies consider normative implications for democratic politics.

  • General Editors: Dennis Chong, University of Southern California; Northwestern University, James H. Kuklinski, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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34 results in Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology

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Justice in America
  • The Separate Realities of Blacks and Whites
  • Mark Peffley, Jon Hurwitz
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 June 2010
  • 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.

Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics
  • Geographic, National, and Racial Communities
  • Cara J. Wong
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    08 March 2010
  • This book shows how ordinary Americans imagine their communities and the extent to which their communities' boundaries determine who they believe should benefit from the government's resources via redistributive policies. By contributing extensive empirical analyses to a largely theoretical discussion, it highlights the subjective nature of communities while confronting the elusive task of pinning down 'pictures in people's heads'. A deeper understanding of people's definitions of their communities and how they affect feelings of duties and obligations provides a new lens through which to look at diverse societies and the potential for both civic solidarity and humanitarian aid. This book analyzes three different types of communities and more than eight national surveys. Wong finds that the decision to help only those within certain borders and ignore the needs of those outside rests, to a certain extent, on whether and how people translate their sense of community into obligations.

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
  • John R. Zaller
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 August 1992
  • 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.

Impersonal Influence
  • How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes
  • Diana C. Mutz
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 November 1998
  • People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society.

The Macro Polity
  • Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. Mackuen, James A. Stimson
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 January 2001
  • The Macro Polity, first published in 2002, provides a comprehensive model of American politics at the system level. Focusing on the interactions between citizen evaluations and preferences, government activity and policy, and how the combined acts of citizens and governments influence one another over time, it integrates understandings of matters such as economic outcomes, presidential approval, partisanship, elections, and government policy-making into a single model. 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 book argues that the electorates and governments that emerge from these analyses respond to one another in orderly and predictable ways.

Citizens and Politics
  • Perspectives from Political Psychology
  • Edited by James H. Kuklinski
  • Published online:
    07 October 2011
    Print publication:
    11 June 2001
  • 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. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements, others to human cognition and reasoning. Still others focus on perceptions or basic political attitudes such as political ideology. Several demonstrate the impact of values on policy preferences. The collection features chapters from some of the most talented political scientists in the field.

Security Threatened
  • Surveying Israeli Opinion on Peace and War
  • Asher Arian
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    27 October 1995
  • 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. The public divided during those years into militant hardliners and more conciliatory security positions, and power either shifted between, or was shared by, the Likud and Labour parties. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the onset of the intifada, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the American victory in the Gulf War, all segments of the Israeli public became more conciliatory. Policy initiatives reflected shifts in political power which in turn magnified changes in public opinion. Leaders were constrained by public opinion and by perceptions of threat, but they could also alter policy if they had the will because opinion was rather equally divided; since most people had their minds made up, the opposition could not block their policy.

Reasoning and Choice
  • Explorations in Political Psychology
  • Paul M. Sniderman, Richard A. Brody, Phillip E. Tetlock
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    30 August 1991
  • Drawing on a multitude of data sets and building on analyses carried out over more than a decade, this book offers a major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary citizens figure out what they favour and oppose politically. Reacting against the conventional wisdom, which stresses how little attention the general public pays to political issues and the lack of consistency in their opinions, the studies presented in this book redirect attention to the processes of reasoning that can be discerned when people are confronted with choices about political issues. These studies demonstrate that ordinary people are in fact capable of reasoning dependably about political issues by the use of judgmental heuristics, even if they have only a limited knowledge of politics and of specific issues.

Citizens, Politics and Social Communication
  • Information and Influence in an Election Campaign
  • R. Robert Huckfeldt, John Sprague
  • General editor James H. Kuklinski, Robert S. Wyer
  • Edited by Stanley Feldman
  • Published online:
    22 March 2010
    Print publication:
    27 January 1995
  • 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 book is dedicated to investigating the political implications of interdependent citizens within the context of the 1984 presidential campaign as it was experienced in the metropolitan area of South Bend, Indiana. Hence this is a community study in the fullest sense of the term. National politics is experienced locally through a series of filters unique to a particular setting and its consequences for the exercise of democratic citizenship.

Political Disagreement
  • The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks
  • Robert Huckfeldt, Paul E. Johnson, John Sprague
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    12 July 2004
  • 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.

Stealth Democracy
  • Americans' Beliefs About How Government Should Work
  • John R. Hibbing, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    29 August 2002
  • 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.

Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa
  • Experiments in Democratic Persuasion
  • James L. Gibson, Amanda Gouws
  • Published online:
    22 October 2009
    Print publication:
    23 September 2002
  • Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa investigates the degree to which the political culture of South Africa - the beliefs, values, and attitudes toward politics held by ordinary people - impedes or promotes the consolidation of democratic reform. One set of values is of particular concern in this study - political tolerance. The authors contend that political tolerance is a crucial element of democratic political cultures in general, but that in the South African case, tolerance is perhaps more important than any other democratic value. Since South Africa is one of the most polyglot countries in the world, the only viable strategy for survival is tolerance toward the political views of others. The overwhelming emphasis throughout this book is on finding ways to enhance the willingness of South Africans to 'put up with' their political enemies, to allow open and widespread political competition, and to coexist in their diversity.

Thinking about Political Psychology
  • Edited by James H. Kuklinski
  • Published online:
    28 July 2009
    Print publication:
    04 March 2002
  • In this 2002 volume, political psychologists take a hard look at political psychology. They 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 satisfactorily. Not everyone will agree with the answers the authors provide and in some cases, the best an author can do is offer well-grounded speculations. Nonetheless, the chapters raise questions that will lead to an improved political psychology and will generate further discussion and research in the field. The individual chapters are organised around four themes. Part I tries to define political psychology and provides an overview of the field. Part II raises questions about theory and empirical methods in political psychology. Part III contains arguments ranging from the position that the field is too heavily psychological to the view that it is not psychological enough. Part IV considers how political psychologists might best connect individual-level mental processes to aggregate outcomes.

Overcoming Historical Injustices
  • Land Reconciliation in South Africa
  • James L. Gibson
  • Published online:
    27 July 2009
    Print publication:
    20 July 2009
  • 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.

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