Description
Book Synopsis
Lodge and Taber propose and empirically test motivated political reasoning that predicts that when citizens think about familiar political leaders, groups and issues, their prior feelings spontaneously bias how information is encoded, retrieved, evaluated and acted upon.
Trade Review
“This is the most important book written on public opinion in the last quarter century, and it will drive research to come for years. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the basic foundation of democracy: public opinion.” – James N. Druckman, Northwestern University
"For decades Milt Lodge and Chuck Taber have been pioneers in the effort to incorporate knowledge from psychology and neuroscience about the unconscious, affectively charged processing of information to enrich standard models of decision making in political science. This is their magnum opus, and it shows how successful the effort has been. Every reader will learn something important from this book." John T. Jost, New York University
"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
Table of Contents
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?
