Collective political rationality : partisan thinking and why it's not all bad /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:McAvoy, Gregory E., author.
Imprint:New York, NY : Routledge, 2015.
Description:xiii, 134 pages ; 23 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10299703
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9781138885127
1138885126
9781138885134
1138885134
9781315715650
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description
Summary:

Amidst the polarization of contemporary politics, partisan loyalties among citizens are regarded as one contributor to political stalemate. Partisan loyalties lead Democrats and Republicans to look at the same economic information but to come to strikingly different conclusions about the state of the economy and the performance of the president in managing it. As a result, many observers argue that democratic politics would work better if citizens would shed their party loyalty and more dispassionately assess political and economic news.

In this book, Gregory E. McAvoy argues--contra this conventional wisdom; that partisanship is a necessary feature of modern politics, making it feasible for citizens to make some sense of the vast number of issues that make their way onto the political agenda. Using unique data, he shows that the biases and distortions that partisanship introduces to collective opinion are real, but despite them, collective opinion changes meaningfully in response to economic and political news. In a comparison of the public's assessment of the economy to those of economic experts, he finds a close correspondence between the two over time, and that in modern democracies an informed public will also necessarily be partisan.

Modernizing the study of collective opinion, McAvoy's book is essential reading for scholars of American Public Opinion and Political Behavior.

Physical Description:xiii, 134 pages ; 23 cm
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9781138885127
1138885126
9781138885134
1138885134
9781315715650