How far may Americans properly rely on their religious beliefs when they make and defend political decisions? For example, are ordinary citizens or legislators doing something wrong when they consciously allow their decisions respecting abortion laws to be determined by their religious views? Despite its intense contemporary relevance, the full dimensions of this issue have until now not been thoroughly examined. Religious Convictions and Political Choice represents the first attempt to fill this gap. Beginning with an account of the basic premises of our liberal democracy, Greenawalt moves to a comparison between rational secular grounds of decision and grounds based on religious convictions. He discusses particular issues such as animal rights and abortion, showing how religious convictions can bear on an individual's decisions about them, and inquires whether reliance on such convictions is compatible with liberal democratic premises. In conclusion, he argues that citizens cannot be expected to rely exclusively on rational, secular grounds.

A pioneering effort to integrate ideology with formal political theory

Studies of the influence of class and religion on politics often point to their gradual decline as a result of social change. Backed up by extensive evidence from 11 case studies and a 15-country pooled analysis, the editors argue instead that the supply of choices by parties influences the extent of class divisions: political choice matters.

This 2007 book studies the impact of the media on politics in the United States during the last half-century.

This book examines the behaviour of political parties in situations where they experience conflict between two or more important objectives.

"What motivates citizens to support one party over the other? Do they carefully weigh all the relevant issues and assess which party or candidate best matches their own positions? Or do people look at politics as something more akin to a team sport-the specifics do not matter if you know what side your team is on? Understanding how and why Americans vote the way they do is central to understanding the political process. What I claim in Political Choice in a Polarized America is that individuals have core beliefs about what the government should or should not do and these attitudes explain a great deal about what party a person identifies with and votes for. Moreover, I demonstrate these attitudes' explanatory power has increased in recent decades. My thesis rests on the idea that voters generally try to support the party or candidate that best matches their orientations. However, voters' ability to successfully do so varies as a function of the signals sent by elites. Voters have an easier time connecting their own orientations with the party offerings when the parties are polarized. As a result, voters' policy attitudes explain a lot more about their partisan preferences than they did in previous eras. When the parties are polarized, people notice, even if they do not place close attention to politics. The result is an electorate divided by partisanship, policy, and ideology"--

Politics and the Architecture of Choice draws on work in political science, economics, cognitive science, and psychology to offer an innovative theory of how people and organizations adapt to change and why these adaptations don't always work. Our decision-making capabilities, Jones argues, are both rational and adaptive. But because our rationality is bounded and our adaptability limited, our actions are not based simply on objective information from our environments. Instead, we overemphasize some factors and neglect others, and our inherited limitations—such as short-term memory capacity—all act to affect our judgment. Jones shows how we compensate for and replicate these limitations in groups by linking the behavioral foundations of human nature to the operation of large-scale organizations in modern society. Situating his argument within the current debate over the rational choice model of human behavior, Jones argues that we should begin with rationality as a standard and then study the uniquely human ways in which we deviate from it.

Why do people vote as they do? Indeed, why do they vote at all? What do they think about elections and democracy? This book addresses these questions by focusing on the explanatory power of rival sociological and 'individual rationality' models.

The first book to examine voter behavior from both psychological and marketing perspectives, A Theory of Political Choice Behavior provides the tools politicians need to understand today's voter. It puts forth a comprehensive theory of voting behavior and empirically tests it on four recent elections; its prediction rate is as high as 95 percent in some cases. Section A examines the need to understand voter behavior and analyzes the traditional methods researchers have used in the past; Section B puts forth the author's new theory; Section C tests that theory; and Section D describes its implications for the present and the future. A tested recipe book for public policymakers as well as candidates, their media people, and their campaign strategists on all levels, this volume also includes sample surveys which pollsters can use to design their own polls.