This book is dedicated to investigating the political implications of interdependent citizens within the context of the 1984 presidential election campaign as it was experienced in the metropolitan area of South Bend, Indiana. National politics is experienced locally through a series of filters unique to a particular setting. Several different themes are explored: the dynamic implications of social communication among citizens, the importance of communication networks for citizen decision-making, the exercise of citizen purpose in locating sources of information, the constraints on individual...

What are the root causes of intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory of what determines intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance, moral intolerance 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, particularly resonant in the present political climate, that exacerbate...

What are the root causes of intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory of what determines intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance, moral intolerance 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, particularly resonant in the present political climate, that exacerbate...

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 book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and new survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout,...

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the current 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 judgments, 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...

Overcoming Historical Land Injustices in South Africa 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 judgments 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...

Leading scholars in political psychology discuss and debate major issues facing the field of political psychology. They define the boundaries of the field, debate its relevance, consider whether the field is too methodologically individualistic, and whether it can help scholars to understand collective public opinion.

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...

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...

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. Drawing on data from a nation-wide survey of both races, 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...