American electoral psychology: The three long-term themes beyond partisanship and rational choice

This dissertation is an effort to explore the fundamental basis of American electoral psychology. It challenges and augments the psychological approach of partisanship and the theory of rational choice, and agrees partially with the retrospective and economic voting theory and goes beyond it with the analyses that are based on the poll data of the National Election Studies of five decades, from 1948 through 2000, especially that of the 1980s and the 1990s. The theoretical framework absorbs useful factors of information-processing approach of psychology, personality psychology of Freudianism, humanistic perspective and realistic conflict of interest theory in psychology, and pluralist theory of interest group in political science, and forms new theoretical approaches. It seeks profound explanation for the seemingly contradictory phenomena in the behavior and psychology of American voters. The discoveries include: (1) the cognition of American voters concerning the bipartisan politics is periodically and contingently enhanced by the political mobilization and intensity of political competition of the presidential elections based on information provision and absorption; (2) the judgment of American voters on presidential personalities is of duality, using different standards to assess the natural and acquired traits and the traits related to politics; and (3) American voters behave differently in national politics than they do in group conflicts, and base their choice of a president on three benchmarks, i.e., economic prosperity, group compatibility and national security, which form three vulnerable points in the psychology of electorate. The third discovery is the main melody of this research, which is strengthened by the discovery that the result of an American presidential election can be largely predicted by the American voters' perceptions on the presidential candidates and their parties in terms of the three policy fields of economy, group relation and national security, and the historical lessons elicited from the failed American presidencies. The research also extends the validity of the three political benchmarks into national politics in the world in general by summarizing the political lessons from Chinese history and the fundamentalist socialism.