Processes of and capabilities for exercising political judgement were once at the centre of thought about politics. In the twentieth century, these topics were eclipsed by concerns about the design of constitutions and patterns of distributional outcomes for citizens. To situate the arguments to follow that understanding politics should return to examining political judgement and that we need better explanations for its forms, this chapter begins with a brief review of the main traditions of thought about judgement and decision-making in politics. Much of this writing has been normative in character. The section ends with a short consideration of the risks in using normatively defined notions of judgement as the objects of explanation.

This chapter's central task, though, is to argue that the corpus of recent explanatory theoretical writing on the subject provides inadequate explanations for the varieties and shaping forces of judgement. This will make the case that we need something like the theory which will be set out in detail in Chapter 3. Perhaps the simplest and commonest explanation is the appeal to individual character. The next section examines the weakness of this approach.