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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

Page 1 of 2

Seeing Us in Them
  • Social Divisions and the Politics of Group Empathy
  • Cigdem V. Sirin, Nicholas A. Valentino, José D. Villalobos
  • Published online:
    11 March 2021
    Print publication:
    18 March 2021
  • What causes some people to stand in solidarity with those from other races, religions, or nationalities, even when that solidarity does not seem to benefit the individual or their group? Seeing Us in Them examines outgroup empathy as a powerful predisposition in politics that pushes individuals to see past social divisions and work together in complex, multicultural societies. It also reveals racial/ethnic intergroup differences in this predisposition, rooted in early patterns of socialization and collective memory. Outgroup empathy explains why African Americans vehemently oppose the border wall and profiling of Arabs, why Latinos are welcoming of Syrian refugees and support humanitarian assistance, why some white Americans march in support of Black Lives Matter through a pandemic, and even why many British citizens oppose Brexit. Outgroup empathy is not naïve; rather it is a rational and necessary force that helps build trust and maintain stable democratic norms of compromise and reciprocity.

Immigration and the American Ethos
  • Morris Levy, Matthew Wright
  • Published online:
    25 January 2020
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • What do Americans want from immigration policy and why? In the rise of a polarized and acrimonious immigration debate, leading accounts see racial anxieties and disputes over the meaning of American nationhood coming to a head. The resurgence of parochial identities has breathed new life into old worries about the vulnerability of the American Creed. This book tells a different story, one in which creedal values remain hard at work in shaping ordinary Americans' judgements about immigration. Levy and Wright show that perceptions of civic fairness - based on multiple, often competing values deeply rooted in the country's political culture - are the dominant guideposts by which most Americans navigate immigration controversies most of the time and explain why so many Americans simultaneously hold a mix of pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant positions. The authors test the relevance and force of the theory over time and across issue domains.

White Identity Politics
  • Ashley Jardina
  • Published online:
    25 January 2019
    Print publication:
    28 February 2019
  • Amidst discontent over America's growing diversity, many white Americans now view the political world through the lens of a racial identity. Whiteness was once thought to be invisible because of whites' dominant position and ability to claim the mainstream, but today a large portion of whites actively identify with their racial group and support policies and candidates that they view as protecting whites' power and status. In White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina offers a landmark analysis of emerging patterns of white identity and collective political behavior, drawing on sweeping data. Where past research on whites' racial attitudes emphasized out-group hostility, Jardina brings into focus the significance of in-group identity and favoritism. White Identity Politics shows that disaffected whites are not just found among the working class; they make up a broad proportion of the American public - with profound implications for political behavior and the future of racial conflict in America.

Close to Home
  • Local Ties and Voting Radical Right in Europe
  • Jennifer Fitzgerald
  • Published online:
    14 September 2018
    Print publication:
    20 September 2018
  • Who votes for radical right parties and why? This book argues that the increasing popularity of the radical right in Europe originates in community bonds: strong ties to one's locality motivate support for the radical right. These parties use nostalgic themes and symbolic politicking to idealize community, defend local autonomy, and ultimately draw local identity into the electoral realm. While other explanations of the radical right's popularity typify supporters as victims of macro-economic shifts and strains, the author's account explores people's day-to-day experiences that link local connections to political decisions. The analysis also raises questions about the political implications of different formal authority structures such as the level and nature of power devolved to local units. The localist model of radical right support illuminates the psychological, social, and institutional conditions and processes that render people's feelings about their cities, towns, and villages relevant for politics.

Politics with the People
  • Building a Directly Representative Democracy
  • Michael A. Neblo, Kevin M. Esterling, David M. J. Lazer
  • Published online:
    17 August 2018
    Print publication:
    06 September 2018
  • Many citizens in the US and abroad fear that democratic institutions have become weak, and continue to weaken. Politics with the People develops the principles and practice of 'directly representative democracy' - a new way of connecting citizens and elected officials to improve representative government. Sitting members of Congress agreed to meet with groups of their constituents via online, deliberative town hall meetings to discuss some of the most important and controversial issues of the day. The results from these experiments reveal a model of how our democracy could work, where politicians consult with and inform citizens in substantive discussions, and where otherwise marginalized citizens participate and are empowered. Moving beyond our broken system of interest group politics and partisan bloodsport, directly representative reforms will help restore citizens' faith in the institutions of democratic self-government, precisely at a time when those institutions themselves feel dysfunctional and endangered.

Unspoken Politics
  • Implicit Attitudes and Political Thinking
  • Efrén O. Pérez
  • Published online:
    05 March 2016
    Print publication:
    24 February 2016
  • This book explains why people acquire implicit attitudes, how they affect political thinking, and where in the mass public they have their strongest - and weakest - influences. A theoretically ambitious book, Unspoken Politics establishes that implicit attitudes exist outside the tightly controlled confines of the laboratory, showing that they emerge in a public opinion survey setting, which underlines their real-world impact. It also lays bare, in painstaking detail, the mechanics of a leading measure of implicit attitudes, the implicit association test (IAT). Accordingly, it outlines the strengths and limitations of this measure, while providing an illustration of how to develop an IAT for one's own purposes. By explaining how to analyze and interpret the data produced by the IAT, this book leads to a better understanding of people's unspoken cognitions and the impacts these have on the politics that individuals openly profess.

Experts, Activists, and Democratic Politics
  • Are Electorates Self-Educating?
  • T. K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, John Barry Ryan
  • Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    13 November 2014
  • This book addresses opinion leadership in democratic politics as a process whereby individuals send and receive information through their informally based networks of political communication. The analyses are based on a series of small group experiments, conducted by the authors, which build on accumulated evidence from more than seventy years of survey data regarding political communication among interdependent actors. The various experimental designs provide an opportunity to assess the nature of the communication process, both in terms of increasing citizen expertise as well as in terms of communicating political biases.

American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism
  • Jack Citrin, David O. Sears
  • Published online:
    05 September 2014
    Print publication:
    11 August 2014
  • The civil rights movement and immigration reform transformed American politics in the mid-1960s. Demographic diversity and identity politics raised the challenge of e pluribus unum anew, and multiculturalism emerged as a new ideological response to this dilemma. This book uses national public opinion data and public opinion data from Los Angeles to compare ethnic differences in patriotism and ethnic identity and ethnic differences in support for multicultural norms and group-conscious policies. The authors find evidence of strong patriotism among all groups and the classic pattern of assimilation among the new wave of immigrants. They argue that there is a consensus in rejecting harder forms of multiculturalism that insist on group rights but also a widespread acceptance of softer forms that are tolerant of cultural differences and do not challenge norms, such as by insisting on the primacy of English.

Negativity in Democratic Politics
  • Causes and Consequences
  • Stuart N. Soroka
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    07 April 2014
  • This book explores the political implications of the human tendency to prioritize negative information over positive information. Drawing on literatures in political science, psychology, economics, communications, biology, and physiology, this book argues that 'negativity biases' should be evident across a wide range of political behaviors. These biases are then demonstrated through a diverse and cross-disciplinary set of analyses, for instance: in citizens' ratings of presidents and prime ministers; in aggregate-level reactions to economic news, across 17 countries; in the relationship between covers and newsmagazine sales; and in individuals' physiological reactions to network news content. The pervasiveness of negativity biases extends, this book suggests, to the functioning of political institutions - institutions that have been designed to prioritize negative information in the same way as the human brain.

Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America
  • Hans Noel
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    31 January 2014
  • Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America puts ideology front and center in the discussion of party coalition change. Treating ideology as neither a nuisance nor a given, the analysis describes the development of the modern liberal and conservative ideologies that form the basis of our modern political parties. Hans Noel shows that liberalism and conservatism emerged as important forces independent of existing political parties. These ideologies then reshaped parties in their own image. Modern polarization can thus be explained as the natural outcome of living in a period, perhaps the first in our history, in which two dominant ideologies have captured the two dominant political parties.

The Rationalizing Voter
  • Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber
  • Published online:
    05 March 2013
    Print publication:
    22 April 2013
  • Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.

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.

Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior
  • Jeffery J. Mondak
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 May 2010
  • Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior is the first study in more than 30 years to investigate the broad significance of personality traits for mass political behavior. Drawing on the Big Five personality trait framework, Jeffery J. Mondak argues that attention to personality provides a valuable means to integrate biological and environmental influences in rich, nuanced theories and empirical tests of the antecedents of political behavior. Development of such holistic accounts is critical, Mondak contends, if inquiry is to move beyond simple 'blank slate' environmental depictions of political engagement. Analyses examining multiple facets of political information, political attitudes and participation reveal that the Big Five trait dimensions - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability - produce both direct and indirect effects on a wide range of political phenomena.

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.

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.

Partisan Families
  • The Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain
  • Alan S. Zuckerman, Josip Dasovic, Jennifer Fitzgerald
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    09 July 2007
  • People decide about political parties by taking into account the preferences, values, expectations, and perceptions of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. As most people live with others, members of their households influence each other's political decisions. How and what they think about politics and what they do are the outcomes of social processes. Applying varied statistical models to data from extensive German and British household surveys, this book shows that wives and husbands influence each other; young adults influence their parents, especially their mothers. Wives and mothers sit at the centre of households: their partisanship influences the partisanship of everyone else, and the others affect them. Politics in households interacts with competition among the political parties to sustain bounded partisanship. People ignore one of the major parties and vary their preference of its major rival over time. Election campaigns reinforce these choices.

Post-Broadcast Democracy
  • How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections
  • Markus Prior
  • Published online:
    05 July 2014
    Print publication:
    02 April 2007
  • The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this 2007 book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout, and voting behaviour.

How Voters Decide
  • Information Processing in Election Campaigns
  • Richard R. Lau, David P. Redlawsk
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    26 June 2006
  • This book attempts to redirect the field of voting behavior research by proposing a paradigm-shifting framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented for getting 'inside the heads' of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information from modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad theoretically-defined types of decision strategies that voters employ to help decide which candidate to support are described and operationally-defined. Individual and campaign-related factors that lead voters to adopt one or another of these strategies are examined. Most importantly, this research proposes a new normative focus for the scientific study of voting behavior: we should care about not just which candidate received the most votes, but also how many citizens voted correctly - that is, in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.

The Authoritarian Dynamic
  • Karen Stenner
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    25 July 2005
  • What is the basis for intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory about what causes intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance (e.g. restriction of free speech), moral intolerance (e.g. homophobia, supporting censorship, opposing abortion) and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals' innate psychological predispositions to intolerance ('authoritarianism') interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. The threatening conditions, resonant particularly in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include national economic downturn, rapidly rising crime rates, civil dissent and unrest, loss of confidence in social institutions, presidential unpopularity, divisive presidential campaigns, and internal or external crises that undermine national pride or confidence. Using purpose-built experimental manipulations, cross-national survey data and in-depth personal interviews with extreme authoritarians, the book shows that this simple model provides the most complete account of intolerance.

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.

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