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On Revolutions That Never Were "If you want to understand what a science is," the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 5) has written, "you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do. " If it is not always possible to follow this instruction, it is because the rate of change in scientific work is rapid and the growth of publications reporting on this work is great. It is therefore the task of a handbook, like this Hand book of Political Behavior, to summarize and evaluate what the practi tioners report. But it is always prudent to keep in mind that a handbook is only a shortcut and that there is no substitute for looking directly at what the practitioners of a science do. For when scientists are "at work" (Walter, 1971), the image of what they are doing is often quite different from that conveyed in the "briefs" that, in their own way, make a hand book so valuable that we cannot do without it. These reflections set the stage.
List of contents
1 Political Psychology: a Whig History.- The Dawn of Modern Psychology.- Political Psychology Emerges in the Twentieth Century.- The Lasswellian Era: 1930-1950.- Authoritarianism and Alienation: The 1950s.- The New Frontier in Political Psychology: Personal Efficacy and Involvement in the 1960s.- The Escalation of Psychological Approaches in the 1970s.- "Psychological" Variables: A Theoretical Note.- Summary and Concluding Statement.- References.- 2 Perception and Cognition: an Information-Processing Framework for Politics.- Some Problems in Behavioral Research on Politics.- Perception and Cognition: Clarifying the Concepts.- Perception and Politics.- Cognition and Politics.- Conclusion: The Relations between Political Thought and Political Behavior.- References.- 3 Psychobiography and Psychohistory.- Psychobiography: Causal Explanations of Individuals.- Psychobiography: Coherent Whole Explanations of Individuals.- Social Psychohistory: Causal Explanations of Group Behavior.- Social Psychohistory: Coherent Whole Explanations of Group Behavior.- References.- 4 Political Learning.- A Behaviorist Stimulus-Response Model of Political Learning.- Nonexperiential Learning.- Related Cognitive Processes.- Concluding Remarks.- References.- 5 Community Psychology.- Historical Events in the Formation of Community Psychology.- Issues in the Definition of Community Psychology.- Models of Community Psychology.- Persistent Common Concerns.- References.
