Book Reviews

Abstract

Few scholars have done as much in the past decade as George Marcus, Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen to integrate questions about the role of emotion in public opinion and political behavior into political science. In this work they present a succinct and persuasive summary of their perspective. The book is an excellent starting point for political scientists interested in the current state of work on emotion in politics, and it represents the best existing attempt to treat the role of emotion in political choice from a systematic, theoretical perspective.Marcus et al. begin by laying out the theoretical foundation they use for thinking about the role of emotion, one that draws heavily on neuropsychology. The heart of the argument is that moods or emotions are best understood as the product of two separate subsystems that operate largely below people's levels of conscious awareness: the disposition and surveillance systems. This dual affective system helps people to manage information by evaluating incoming sensory inputs and by providing information about whether people can safely rely on established habits or instead need to modify their behavior in some way. Positive affective responses, which the authors label enthusiasm, indicate to people that they can safely rely on previously learned habits. Negative affective responses, labeled anxiety, lead people to rely less on habit and to be motivated to pay closer attention to information, learn, and engage in more careful consideration of different choices, behaviors, and outcomes.The empirical support for and range of the argument is broad, drawing out implications of the theory for voting choice, candidate evaluation, policy support, and political participation and learning through a series of analyses. A good subtitle for this work, however, might be "The Politics of Anxiety." Unlike in some of the earlier work that draws on this theoretical framework (e.g., Marcus & MacKuen, 1993), the bulk of the empirical evidence is marshaled to support claims about the role of anxiety. The empirical work here that discusses or explores the role of enthusiasm is much less rich than that on anxiety; even the specific hypotheses the