Acta Politica, 2003, 38, (175–177) r 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 0001-6810/03 $25.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/ap
Book Review Thinking About Political Psychology James H. Kuklinski (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, 354 pp. USD 65.00. ISBN 0521593778. Acta Politica (2003) 38, 175–177. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500013
Political psychology has become an identifiable interdisciplinary area with a distinct community, identity, and institutional structure in the last two decades. As with other, relatively young areas of inquiry, many overviews of the subfield to date have focused on justifying the area (typically vis-a`-vis the rational choice perspective), identifying common themes and commitments in research, and tracing the intellectual roots and evolution of inquiry. Reflecting the maturing of the subfield, Thinking About Political Psychology breaks new ground by assessing the challenges and debates within the current practice of political psychology. As the preface states, the aim of this edited volume is to ‘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’ in order to improve political psychology and generate new discussion and research. The collection of chapters will certainly achieve this goal. The book is structured around several themes. After defining and introducing the volume and the area of political psychology, the chapters cover methodological and theoretical debates, the relative use and contributions of psychological and political science theories in current research, and the relation between micro-psychological and macro-political processes. Within each theme, different chapters take alternative cuts at the issues. For example, in ‘Part II: Theory and Research,’ Lupia proposes combinations of psychological theory and experimental methods with rational choice and formal models, while Conover and Searing call for abandoning the positivist model of testing for generalizations in favor of discovering context-dependent interpretations. In ‘Part III: The Psychological-Politics Nexus,’ Rahn, Sullivan, and Rudolph assess (and reject) the claim that political psychology is not political enough, while Krosnick argues that it is not psychological enough and offers ways in which research in the political context can contribute to general psychological theory, particularly if psychologists pay more attention to political science theory. The final section, ‘Part IV: Political Psychology and Aggregate Opinion,’ looks at the levels of analysis challenge in various research programs, such as changes in the policy mood of public opinion (Stimson) and political sophistication (Luskin). The chapters in this section offer a variety of
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ways in which individual characteristics can aggregate to the polity level. (The introductory chapter by Kuklinski provides a very good, detailed, critical summary of each chapter and how it relates to the themes.) What is useful about this collection of chapters is that these themes capture explicitly the challenges and debates in the subfield. Almost every piece of individual research in political psychology touches on or raises implications for one or more of these issues, but until now there has not been a conscious metadiscussion, if you will, of these common challenges. I suspect that the themes included in Thinking About Political Psychology are currently running through many graduate seminars on political psychology (they are in the seminar I teach), and this volume will be an extremely useful tool for discussion in these courses. Many of the chapters will also be helpful to graduate students and researchers new to an area as they provide brief overviews of important research topics. The chapter by Conover and Searing, for example, gives a nice, brief review of issues included in the research on citizenship. Similarly, one of the Krosnick chapters (chapter 4) summarizes the evolution of the projection hypotheses and the Stimson chapter reviews research on domestic policy mood. Even when they do not include summaries of research programs, many of the chapters do a terrific job at utilizing current research to illustrate their points. In this way, Thinking About Political Psychology is not an abstract discussion, but a look at challenges to the subfield in a way that is grounded in a very sophisticated understanding of published research. Thinking About Political Psychology is, however, quite a narrow look at the area of political psychology. Political psychology is a broad range of inquiry, encompassing mass and elite levels of analysis, American, comparative, and international politics, and cognitive, motivational, personality, and clinical psychological orientations. The current volume shares with many other previous efforts the inability to cover this wide range, although it is, I believe, more narrow than most. It primarily concerns American political behavior, particularly voting behavior and public opinion, from a cognitive, informationprocessing perspective. The overview of the field by Sullivan, Rahn, and Rudolph does acknowledge some of the other areas within political psychology (and misses others), and the chapter by Conover and Searing explicitly calls for more comparative, cross-national analyses, but the focus of the volume is on information-processing approaches to some types of American political behavior (as acknowledged in the editor’s introductory chapter). Luskin (chapter 7) specifically asserts that ‘ypolitical psychology is largely a subfield of political behavior: most political psychologists study mass politics’. I doubt the veracity of this claim, but it certainly reflects the volume’s assumptions about the subfield. The focus of the volume stems from the characteristics of the contributors — all study American voting behavior, all are affiliated with US institutions (despite the international membership of the subfield as a Acta Politica 2003 38
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whole), and all but one are appointed in political science departments (Krosnick, with a joint appointment in political science and psychology departments, contributes one of the more interesting chapters in the book (chapter 6), reflecting the different standpoint he brings to the volume, compared to the other contributors). My point is not that this volume should have included all of the many perspectives in political psychology — it would lose its coherence if it did. Within the study of mass-level political behavior, however, it would have been a stronger collection if it included more psychologists and at least one nonAmerican perspective. More fruitfully, though, the themes and challenges that this volume discusses as they apply to research on information-processing in candidate evaluation and public opinion could have been set in the context of the larger area of political psychology in a conclusion (the volume has no conclusion). For example, the debate on positivist vs interpretist philosophies of science raised in the Conover and Searing chapter is similar to methodological and epistemological discussions occurring in the study of international relations and comparative politics. The question of whether or not political psychology is sufficiently political or contributes to psychological theory can also be linked to research outside American political behavior in the subfield of political psychology. Finally, the critical question of aggregation and how micro- and macro-processes surfaces in research on the role of identity in ethnic conflict, group decision-making, and the influence of leaders in domestic institutions and the international environment. The strength of this book is that it has identified the issues at the core of contemporary political psychology; the weakness is that it misses the opportunity to link these issues to the broader subfield. A concluding chapter that related the very strong discussion of these questions as they play out in the information-processing political behavior area to the broader field of political psychology would have advanced the subfield as a whole by comparing different forms and responses to these challenges across research programs. A conclusion to the book could have also engaged in a commentary or dialogue in an attempt to integrate, or at least make clear, the multiple and contrasting points raised by the chapters. It could have also linked the various themes to each other, asking, for example, how methodological challenges relate to the aggregation issue. As it stands, this integration is left to the reader, but the contributions to Thinking About Political Psychology offer us extraordinary insights to use in this task. Juliet Kaarbo Graduate Institute of International Studies (Switzerland) and University of Kansas (USA). Acta Politica 2003 38
