Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, and Public Policy

Voorkant
University of Chicago Press, 1994 - 277 pagina's
Most models of political decision-making maintain that individual preferences remain relatively constant. Why, then, are there often sudden abrupt changes in public opinion on political issues? Or total reversals by politicians on specific issues? Bryan D. Jones answers these questions by innovatively connecting insights from cognitive science and rational choice theory to political life.

Individuals and political systems alike, Jones argues, tend to be attentive to only one issue at a time. Using numerous examples from elections, public opinion polls, congressional deliberations, and of bureaucratic decision-making, he shows how shifting attentiveness can and does alter choices and political outcomes—even when underlying preferences remain relatively fixed. An individual, for example, may initially decide to vote for a candidate because of her stand on spending but change his vote when he learns of her position on abortion, never really balancing the two options.

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Inhoudsopgave

Attention and Agendas in Politics
7
Rationality in Political Choice
31
Attention and Temporal Choice in Politics
58
A Change of Mind or a Change of Focus?
78
Raising and Focusing Attention in the Mass Public
103
Macropolitics Is Political Conflict Recurrent?
135
Policy Subsystems and the Processing of Issues
157
The Serial Policy Shift
180
Governments as Adaptive Systems
205
Political Choice and Democratic Governance
224
Spatial Choice Theory and Attentional Dynamics
241
Bibliography
247
Index
271
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Over de auteur (1994)

Bryan D. Jones is the J. J. "Jake" Pickle Regent's Chair in Congressional Studies in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Together, they are the authors of several books, including, most recently, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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