Authors
Gary King, Kay L Schlozman, Norman Nie
Publication date
2009/3/15
Book
The Future of Political Science
Pages
93-94
Publisher
Routledge
Description
A great many of our political decisions are made within small groups. Sidney Verba’s first book, Small Groups and Political Behavior (1961), marks something close to the end of major efforts in several disciplines to take these small, informal groups seriously as loci of decision-making. This is evidently true of this discipline, but it is also true, with the major exception of families, in sociology. In psychology, the study of social settings has, at least in the American academy, gravitated toward the study of how an individual views some social context, rather than the study of social interactions. In economics, the Marshallian view was to make households a single person-like entity and to privilege individual choice. In our discipline, we are terrific at understanding individual choice, the role of organizations and large groups such as reference groups and others that shape our identity and beliefs and thus our choices, and of …
Scholar articles
G King, KL Schlozman, N Nie - The Future of Political Science, 2009