The Rationalizing Voter

When citizens think about political leaders, groups and issues, their feelings bias how information is encoded, evaluated and acted upon.

Milton Lodge (Author), Charles S. Taber (Author)

9780521176149, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 22 April 2013

300 pages, 51 b/w illus. 13 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.43 kg

"Lodge and Taber’s The Rationalizing Voter makes a major contribution to the study of voter decision making. The primary argument of the book is that almost everything we do (including almost everything political we do) is guided by fast, reflexive, and unconscious information processing in the brain. If the authors are right – and I think they are – the book might be better titled 'The Illusion of Choice in Democratic Politics'. No scholar of elections and voting behavior can ignore this work."
Richard R. Lau, Rutgers University

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 hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.

1. Unconscious thinking on political judgment, reasoning, and behavior
2. The John Q. Public model of political information processing
3. Experimental tests of automatic hot cognition
4. Implicit identifications in political information processing
5. Affect transfer and the evaluation of political candidates
6. Affective contagion and political thinking
7. Motivated political reasoning
8. A computational model of the citizen as motivated reasoner
9. Affect, cognition, emotion: which way the causal arrow?

Subject Areas: Elections & referenda [JPHF], Political structure & processes [JPH], Psychology: emotions [JMQ], Psychology [JM]