Political Psychology

The first comprehensive textbook on political psychology, this user-friendly volume explores the psychological origins of political behavior. Using psychological concepts to explain types of political behavior, the authors introduce a broad range of theories and cases of political activity to illustrate the behavior. The book examines many patterns of political behaviors including leadership, group behavior, voting, race, ethnicity, nationalism, political extremism, terrorism, war, and genocide. Text boxes highlight current and historical events to help students see the connection between the world around them and the concepts they are learning. Examples highlight a variety of research methodologies used in the discipline such as experimentation and content analysis. The "Political Being" is used throughout to remind the reader of the psychological theories and concepts to be explored in each chapter. Introduction to Political Psychology explores some of the most horrific things people do to one another for political purposes, as well as how to prevent and resolve conflict, and how to recover from it. The goal is to help the reader understand the enormous complexity of human behavior and the significant role political psychology can play in improving the human condition. Designed for upper division courses on political psychology or political behavior, this volume also contains material of interest to those in the policymaking community.

This book will be a comprehensive, contemporary, cumulative, and international reference work for the field of political psychology. On the broadest level, political psychology is an application of what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. The topics covered will build up from the individual level (attitudes, values, decision making, ideology, personality) to the collective (group identity, mass mobilization, political violence), span models of the mass public and political elites, and cover both domestic issues, international relations, and foreign policy.

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.

The dominance of cognitive theories applied to political psychology has diminished the roles of affect, psychological needs, and the psychodynamic mechanisms that are crucial for understanding political behaviour. The goal here is to recapture these dimensions.

Brooks and Prysby have integrated and synthesized diverse existing research and offer a thorough introduction to the effects of context--defined here as a geographically bounded social unit--on individuals' political behavior. The volume first presents a general framework and a theory of contextual effects, discusses methodological problems unique to this field of study, and proposes a conceptual framework to guide future research. The volume challenges prevailing emphases and approaches--stressing the utility of an information-flow approach to contextual effects and new methodological strategies.

This volume takes a noneconomic approach to the issue of the federal deficit. By identifying the behavioral dynamics common to all people, Brembeck demonstrates how human interests perpetuate the deficit and proposes that solutions to the worsening crisis can be explored by shifting the primary focus away from money, budgets, and expenditures and toward people, power, and politics. The essays discuss different aspects of this human factor in the federal debt and aim at redefining the central issue of the debt debate based on the premise, so convincingly developed, that the debt is a human, not a fiscal, problem.