T his paper explores the etiology of ideological constraint in the United States. In an effort to gain understanding of the ideational elements of political socialization, we concentrate on a provocative new theory put forward by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff argues that many people reflexively envision proper power relations between citizens and government based on their understanding of proper power relations between children and parents: "nurturant" visions of parental roles engender egalitarian and humanitarian political values, whereas "disciplinarian" visions of proper parenting predict political individualism and traditionalism. Using data obtained from the 2000 National Election Study, we consider the empirical mettle of this account.

The authors examine U.S. public attitudes regarding global climate change, addressing the puzzle of why support for governmental action on this front is tepid relative to what existing theories predict. Introducing the theoretical concept of relative sociotropic time horizons, the authors show that believers in Christian end-times theology are less likely to support policies designed to curb global warming than are other Americans. They then provide robustness checks by analyzing other policy attitudes. In so doing, the authors provide empirical evidence to suggest that citizens possessing shorter “shadows of the future” often resist policies trading short-term costs for hypothetical long-term benefits.

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This paper seeks to understand what difference it makes if voters systematically consider a representative range of salient criteria before choosing a candidate, and whether the effects of such systematic processing are conditioned by political knowledge. To this end, we executed experiments during the 2000 electoral season that randomly exposed some subjects to an Analytic Hierarchy Processing (AHP) tool, which encourages systematic processing of various orthogonal decision criteria in complex choice environments. We predicted, and found, that the choices of knowledgeable voters exposed to AHP were weaker and less consistent than control group responses, suggesting that systematic processing induces integrative complexity and perhaps "analysis paralysis" among knowledgeable voters. However, we found that among less knowledgeable voters, the opposite pattern generally emerged-AHP exposure was associated with even greater reliance on party ID and ideology cues, perhaps even bolstering predispositions via projection and rationalization.Classic democratic theory presupposes an informed, principled, active, and deliberate electorate. And to be sure, political scientists have pondered in exhaustive detail the degree to which Americans are indeed informed (