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Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and U.S. Party Coalitions, by Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 342 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-19-829492-1.
Paul Abramson and his colleagues organize their presidential election monographs, which have appeared after every presidential election for the last twenty years, around three distinct approaches to explaining the presidential vote. There is the "sociological approach" that focuses on the impact of social group membership on voting behavior and attitudes; there is the "political psychological approach" that focuses on attitudes to issues and to candidates; and there is the "rational choice approach" that focuses on the reasonableness of voter behavior. Abramson and his colleagues give more or less equal time to each approach in explaining electoral outcomes, which is one of the most refreshing features of their studies. However each approach has also, from time to time, been appropriated by zealots who wish to claim more for it than is justified and correspondingly to denigrate the other approaches. Rational choice theorists have colonized, or are attempting to colonize, several political science departments in the U.S., including that of my own university. The political psychological approach is always prominent, if only because the attitudinal questions-for whom do you intend to vote and why-are the paramount questions of most candidate-funded surveys.
The goal of Manza and Brooks in this impressive book, is...