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All Politics is Psychological: A Review of Political Psychology Syllabi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2004
Extract
Browsing the book exhibit room at any major political science conference these days, one notices what seems to be a bonanza of new edited volumes that examine political psychology as a discipline within political science or provide a variety of research essays aimed at introducing the reader to the subfield. Although psychology has always been an important component of political analysis, the prevalence of these books suggests a growing, or renewed, interest among political scientists in using insights from social and cognitive psychology to understand political phenomena—an interest that spurs these scholarly attempts to demarcate the conceptual and methodological structure of political psychology as a subfield. As Wendy Rahn, John Sullivan, and Thomas Rudolph have noted, this interest has emerged over the years partly in response to the rise of rational choice theory in political science. Regardless of the specific topic at hand, political psychology research often challenges the assumptions of rational choice models and adds nuance to the insights of rational choice theory. It offers rigorous empirical demonstrations of how systematic and predictable psychological processes affect whether traditional assumptions of rationality do or do not hold and, conversely, how the structure of political institutions affects psychological processes. These empirical critiques and modifications of rational choice theory make political psychology a compelling line of inquiry to scholars from a variety of methodological and substantive backgrounds.Deborah J. Schildkraut thanks Jennifer Hochschild, the staff at Perspectives on Politics, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous assistance.
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