The Macro Polity (Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology)

Rating:
Summary: Strong Premise Sunk By Tedious Presentation
Review: This is a book that deserves to be influential in the field of political science, for both good and bad reasons. The theories presented here deal with macro-level or system-wide trends in American political behavior. If the authors can be believed, there was little previous work done in this area. Instead, political science focused on the behavior of individuals and then tried to aggregate the resulting data into system-wide theories. The evidence indicates that the behavior of the public is not always "the sum of the parts" and there are specific phenomena at play that influence the larger electorate, at the system level. The authors have conducted an impressive amount of research, which probably took years, including macro-level data about voting patterns, partisanship, ideological trends, presidential approval, and public opinion. Their conclusions about the existence of macro-level phenomena are generally believable and supported by the evidence, and their work will probably prove to be groundbreaking in the field.

On the other hand, this book embodies everything that is wrong with the academic side of political science these days. At least the authors will be accepted by their peers who value method more than insight. Here it becomes more important to impress one's peers by piling on endlessly repetitive evidence and trotting out unnecessarily complex statistical equations, all to prop up points that were already made convincingly in prose form. Each chapter in this book makes strong and believable points, but then degenerates into the worst of academic tedium, indicating that the authors chose (or were forced) to please ivory-tower editors and academic committees, rather than people in the outside world who could truly make use of their findings. Hence, we have a book with strong and often illuminating conclusions, sunk by the worst in academic writing and presentation. Next time these authors (and their publishers) choose to release their findings for consumption by the public, they should realize that this audience expects insight, not long-winded theorizing and statistics. [~doomsdayer520~]