Dennis Chong – författare

Those who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches in the social sciences, contending that political conflict over cultural values is best explained by group loyalties, symbolic motives, and other "nonrational" factors. However, Chong shows that a single model can explain how people make decisions across both social and economic realms. He argues that our preferences result from a combination of psychological dispositions, which are shaped by social influences and developed over the life span. Chong''s book yields insights about the circumstances under which preferences, beliefs, values, norms and group identifications are formed. It offers a provocative explanation of how ingrained social norms and values can change over time despite the forces maintaining the status quo. "Going beyond the tired polemics on both sides, [Chong] constructs a new interpretation of human behavior in which culture and individual rationality both matter. The synthesis is a more comprehensive and powerful explanatory framework than either side could have produced, and Chong''s creativity should influence subsequent interpretations of our social life in fundamental ways."—Christopher H. Achen, University of Michigan

Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and moral incentives of political activism that are often neglected by rational choice theorists. Using game theoretic concepts as well as dynamic models, he explores how rational individuals decide to participate in social movements and how these individual decisions translate into collective outcomes. In addition to applying formal modeling to the puzzling and important social phenomenon of collective action, he offers persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that provoke and sustain public activism. This remarkably accessible study demonstrates how the civil rights movement succeeded against difficult odds by mobilizing community resources, resisting powerful opposition, and winning concessions from the government.

In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate, and presidential elections. The thoery is constructed from four basic premises. The first is that individuals differ substantially in their attention to politics and therefore in their exposure to elite sources of political information. The second is that people react critically to political communication only to the extent that they are knowledgeable about political affairs. The third is that people rarely have fixed attitudes on specific issues; rather, they construct 'preference statements' on the fly as they confront each issue raised. The fourth is that, in constructing these statements, people make the greatest use of ideas that are, for various reasons, the most immediately salient to them. Zaller emphasizes the role of political elites in establishing the terms of political discourse in the mass media and the powerful effect of this framing of issues on the dynamics of mass opinion on any given issue over time.

With Malice toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments addresses an issue integral to democratic societies: how people faced with a complex variety of considerations decide whether or not to tolerate extremist groups. Relying on several survey-experiments, Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse, and Wood identify and compare the impact on decision making of contemporary information, long-standing predispositions, and enduring values and beliefs. Citizens react most strongly to information about a group's violations of behavioral norms and information about the implications for democracy of the group's actions. The authors conclude that democratic citizens should have a strong baseline of tolerance yet be attentive to and thoughtful about current information.

This book, first published in 1995, explores how the everyday person reasons about nuclear strategy. James DeNardo's data reveals surprising patterns of thinking on basic issues from SDI, arms control, and proliferation to the end of the Cold War. The book describes a fascinating cast of players, including 'Nice Hawks' like Ronald Reagan, who wanted to give SDI to the Russians, and the 'NIFFs,' whose procurement rule, expressed simply, was: 'If they have it, we don't want it, but they don't have it, we should get it.' To explain his remarkable evidence, Professor DeNardo presents an innovative theory of intuitive deterrence reasoning. He then confronts the theory with data from professional nuclear strategists. His discovery that the amateur's strategic reasoning defies all conventional theories lays the groundwork for a new understanding of national security politics. His demonstration that professional strategists reason like novices - that we are all Amateur Strategists - challenges the intellectual foundations of modern deterrence theory, public opinion studies, and game theory.

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of their own branch of government, the US Congress. Intensive focus group sessions held across the country and a specially designed national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress. John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that, although the public is deeply disturbed by debate, compromise, delicate pace, the presence of interest groups, and the professionalization of politics, many of these traits are actually endemic to modern democratic government. Congress is an enemy of the public partially because it is so public. Calls for reform, such as term limitations, reflect the public's desire to attack these disliked features. But the authors conclude, the public's unwitting desire to reform democracy out of a democratic legislature is a cure more dangerous than the disease.

This book, first published in 1995, explores how the everyday person reasons about nuclear strategy. James DeNardo's data reveals surprising patterns of thinking on basic issues from SDI, arms control, and proliferation to the end of the Cold War. The book describes a fascinating cast of players, including 'Nice Hawks' like Ronald Reagan, who wanted to give SDI to the Russians, and the 'NIFFs,' whose procurement rule, expressed simply, was: 'If they have it, we don't want it, but they don't have it, we should get it.' To explain his remarkable evidence, Professor DeNardo presents an innovative theory of intuitive deterrence reasoning. He then confronts the theory with data from professional nuclear strategists. His discovery that the amateur's strategic reasoning defies all conventional theories lays the groundwork for a new understanding of national security politics. His demonstration that professional strategists reason like novices - that we are all Amateur Strategists - challenges the intellectual foundations of modern deterrence theory, public opinion studies, and game theory.

People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society.