Political Psychology

Theoretical Perspectives

Psychology, as a social science, depends upon empirical as well as normative study to analyze its subject material. Psychologists have tried methodologies to use as tools in generating population sets, mining them for data and analyzing their findings. The experimental quality of psychologywhich is to say its ability to postulate and test in quantitative samplesmay not always translate well into the analysis of political behavior. Psychology does, however, offer some dazzling insights into decision making, voting choices, national security, and international relations, to name just a few of the applications. Real-time polling in elections may be the most didactic example of this approach. Just as there are powerful schools in psychology, there are also distinct perspectives on interpreting political behavior. David Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis describe such precise areas as being personality theories, behaviorist theories, developmental theory, incentive theories, social cognition, and intergroup relations, among others.

Not all descriptors in political psychology are testable, or even empirically demonstrated with reference to data sets. Yet other inferences abound: biological, gender, and environmental explanations for the development of peoples, the construction of their identity, and their behavior in political processes have devoted followings in contemporary writing. Harold and Margaret Sprout postulate ecological explanations for behavior, whereas Sir Halford Mackinder has written extensively on geopolitical explanations. Graham Allison's seminal study of decision making (Essence of Decision) during the Cuban missile crisis is a wide-ranging use of normative models to explain behavior at the individual, bureaucratic, and organizational levels by analyzing the participation in the processes by individuals. Despite this accessible, normative strength, the discipline of political psychology still maintains substantial measurement tools to generate and evaluate data sets.

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