Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan Vander Wielen. Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2017. 260 pp. $99.99 (cloth). $34.99 (paper)

Extract

Are voters rationally capable of holding politicians accountable, or are political attitudes determined solely by partisan identity? Few questions are more central to the study of political behavior and public opinion. In Taming Intuition, Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan Vander Wielen make a detailed and convincing case that the answer depends on voters’ preferences toward second-guessing themselves. Arceneaux and Vander Wielen’s book makes substantial progress toward closing the gap between psychological and economic theories of voter rationality by showing how partisan perception and motivated skepticism can be overcome—through reflection—by voters who enjoy thinking.

Previous research on heuristics and the rationality of low-information partisan voting undertheorizes voters’ preference for cognitive effort. Partisan identification is universally described as central to voter decision-making: psychological theories treat party identity as a perceptual screen that leads to motivated reasoning, while economic perspectives view partisan labels as heuristics that help rational voters assess politicians’ performance over time. Simply because partisan identification is a useful heuristic, however, does not mean that all voters are looking for a shortcut.