The Unmet Potential of Interdisciplinary Research: Political Psychological Approaches to Voting and Public Opinion

Consistent with this implication, it has become fairly common for scholars with a Ph.D. in psychology to hold their main academic appointment in a department of political science, but it is rare for scholars with a Ph.D. in political science to hold their main academic appointment in a department of psychology. Herbert Simon was one such rare case, but we are hard-pressed to think of others.

This is particularly true for heuristics, media priming, and on-line processing; because motivated reasoning has emerged more recently in political science (e.g., Taber and Lodge 2006), the centrality of its status is less certain. One of the central concepts we are not considering is emotion; our impression is that a thorough examination of extant political science research might reveal dynamics similar to what we observe for our four concepts (for discussion, see Druckman and McDermott 2008, pp. 301–302).

Alternatively, Lenz (2009) argues that media priming is in fact akin to learning.

Lodge et al. (1989) focus much of their attention on Kelley and Mirer’s (1974, p. 574) model, in which “The voter canvasses his likes and dislikes of the leading candidates and major parties involved in an election. Weighing each like and dislike equally, he votes for the candidate toward whom he has the greatest number of net favorable attitudes.” However, Lodge et al. (1989, p. 417) also note the contrast with rational choice, stating “It is increasingly evident that citizens are not well informed and cannot engage in the computations required by most theories of voter rationality. We add to this the caveat that candidate memory is distorted by systematic biases that stem directly from impression-driven processing. However, from a cognitive perspective, these consequences of impression-driven evaluation are a natural and (dare we say) ‘reasonable’ way to compensate for the severe limitations on human information processing that render models of unbounded rationality psychologically unrealistic.”

The basic idea of motivated reasoning was not new to political science (e.g., Sears and Whitney 1973), but there had previously been no grounded theory.

One is, however, more likely to engage in motivated reasoning when one’s OL tally is strong (Lodge and Taber 2000, p. 211).

However, for further development of the model in yet to be published papers, see Lodge et al. (2008), and Taber et al. (2009). Also, see Braman and Nelson (2007), which was published after 2006, the cut-off year in our content analysis.

That other individual difference variables significantly matter is made clear by the aforementioned research by McGraw and her colleagues.

Another possible hurdle to integration is that the methods and measures used in psychology often differ from those employed in political science. For example, response latency measures are more common in psychology, and many psychological measures are captured with lengthier batteries of questions (e.g., the original need-to-evaluate measure uses 16 items, versus the two or three used on the National Election Study). It is important for scholars from each discipline to consider such differences when collaborating and integrating.

Psychologists do explore other concepts that clearly fall within the realm of political behavior, such as collective guilt, intergroup conflict, and ideology/values (e.g., Schwartz 1994; Branscombe and Doosje 2004; Jost et al. 2008). However, much of this work has not penetrated very deeply into political science.

Some recent political science studies that explore over-time processes include Mutz and Reeves (2005); Gerber et al. (2007); Chong and Druckman (2008).

Interestingly, the three examples we explore—heuristics, media priming, and on-line processing/motivated reasoning—all entered the political science literature due to collaborative projects involving political scientists and psychologists (e.g., Sniderman and Tetlock, Iyengar and Kinder, Lodge and McGraw). There are some positive signs of further movement in this direction. For example, applications for the Summer Institute for the Study of Political Psychology are now largely split between the two disciplines (personal communication); the National Election Studies board of overseers is now made up of scholars from multiple disciplines; and psychologists and political behavior scholars have shown considerable recent interest in the phenomena of implicit and explicit priming (e.g., Althaus and Kim 2006; Lodge et al. 2008).