The Rationalizing Voter

Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology

by Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber

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 hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.Winner of the 2014 Robert E. Lane Book Award, sponsored by the Political Psychology section of the American Political Science Association.

Genres: Politics, Political Science, Psychology, Nonfiction, Academic

301 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 31, 2013

Reviews

[Steven Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think that citizens are rational in their political decision-making? According to this book, "think again." Early, the authors state their thesis (Page xiii): "This is a book about unconscious political thinking and the subterranean forces that determine how citizens evaluate political leaders, groups, and issues. . . .It is about rationalizing, rather than rational, citizens."

The book's first chapter itself begins with a quick summary of the essence of rational decision-making, emerging from the Enlightenment. Lodge and Taber disagree with this perspective. They note the extent of unconscious thinking, the use of heuristics and biases. A diagram on page 13 illustrates. Here, we see the effect of physical attractiveness and babyfacedness appearance on people's vote choice--and neither factor is "rational" in terms of the ideal. Affect is another factor that the authors focus on, Affect is triggered very early in the information processing system, coloring much of any response to follow.

This is an important work for those interested in scholarly treatments of political thinking and its bases.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything here “tracks” as the kids say.