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Originally published in 1983, this book locates the behavioural approach to the study of politics in its social science and historical context. The text reviews the findings in a number of fields - public opinion, electoral behaviour, political participation, policy outputs, political recruitment, political welfare and socialisation, among others. The book is comprehensive and when first published it was the first single-author study to integrate the diverse findings of many studies both from the UK and North America. It was particularly written for students on courses in political analysis, political methods, political sociology and political behaviour

Political science has its laws, and they can predict what will happen in politics. One such law can predict whether George Bush will be reelected President in 1992.It is true that political science is not politics. This relationship between the two is no different than that between any science and the reality which it analyzes. Every science is a repository of abstractions which model the critical aspects of a much more complex underlying phenomena. While some political scientists have expected a one-to-one, deterministic relationship between the science and the material it studied, most anticipated the "deterministic randomness" (or "chaos") paradigm becoming popular even in the physical sciences today. Deterministic, because the science assumes that there are intrinsic underlying laws; but random because, with the inherent complexity, much will necessarily remain unpredictable (in statistical terms, that there always will be an "e" in the equation).

It has now been four years of contested elections for the Council of
the Association. In this note we ask: What can we learn about these
elections from a political science perspective?

Intro -- Experimental Political Science -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Notes on the Contributors -- Chapter 1 Introduction: Experimental Political Science in Perspective -- Part I Overview -- Chapter 2 Voting Behavior and Political Institutions: An Overview of Challenging Questions in Theory and Experimental Research -- Chapter 3 Laboratory Tests of Formal Theory and Behavioral Inference -- Chapter 4 Voting Mechanism Design: Modeling Institutions in Experiments -- Part II Experimental Designs -- Chapter 5 Strategic Voting in the Laboratory -- Chapter 6 Survey Experiments: Partisan Cues in Multi-party Systems -- Chapter 7 Experimental Triangulation of Coalition Signals: Varying Designs, Converging Results -- Part III Exploring and Analyzing Experimental Data -- Chapter 8 Statistical Analysis of Experimental Data -- Chapter 9 Experimental Chats: Opening the Black Box of Group Experiments -- Part IV Challenges to Inferences from Experiments -- Chapter 10 On the Validity of Laboratory Research in the Political and Social Sciences: The Example of Crime and Punishment -- Chapter 11 Gathering Counter-Factual Evidence: An Experimental Study on Voters' Responses to Pre-Electoral Coalitions -- Chapter 12 Using Time in the Laboratory -- Part V Conclusion -- 13 Conclusion: Ways Ahead in Experimental Political Science -- Appendix: Resources for Experimental Research in the Social Sciences -- Index.

To a substantial extent, political scientists continue to be in a state of shock, or even denial, over the results of the November 1994 mid-term elections. This degree of surprise has been largely attributed to the failure of the 1994 elections to conform to numerous models that have successfully predicted past election results on the basis of some combination of presidential popularity and economic performance. In a broader sense, it has become fashionable to argue alternately that the voters weren't really saying anything, or that they did not know what they were saying, or that they were saying things not fit for polite company—angry, mean, and even racist things. Such an interpretation does a disservice both to our profession and to our friends and neighbors, the real people who cast those votes.It will be some time before we are able to untangle the factors that led to the Republican sweep and to see whether it was a short-term aberration or the beginning of a long-term trend in congressional elections. Nevertheless, I would like to offer a two-part explanation for the results and the consequent academic confusion: the election models that we use as both a tool and a crutch are at the same time not precise enough and too precise.They are not precise enough because they do not capture all that needs to be taken into account even on the dimensions of the economy and presidential popularity.

This book studies the history America's political parties and the challenges they face today. In the 2016 primaries the anti-establishment candidates had an early advantage with a wild-card quality that resonated with modern voters, demonstrating how drastically America's political climate has changed and the need for nonpartisan party reform