Impersonal Influence : How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology)

Rating:
Summary: Very good work
Review: Prof. Mutz is now probably one of the most well-known political communication scholars of the younger generation in the US. In this book, which consists of a number of research she had conducted in the past decade, she provided a very good discussion of the effects of how perception of public opinion can affect public opinion. Competing hypotheses are well discussed and research well designed to test the hypotheses.

Besides the empirical part of the work, Prof. Mutz is one of the fewer scholars who have an eye on larger social theories. Though much of the studies reported in the book relies on a psychological approach to the study of public opinion, Prof. Mutz also provided a very nice discussion on the tradition of the theory of mass society and pondered on the relevance of this tradition in today's world.