Political behavior : patterns in everyday life

`Everyday life′ has a more profound effect on our political behaviour than we may at first think. Peterson explores how certain personal variables can affect political behaviour: stress, health, anxiety about death and sexual abuse and then goes on to place these in the wider but just as influential context of family, religion, employment and the media. This is an important study for anyone interested in political science, psychology and sociology.

Social scientists endeavor to explain human social behavior. However, there often seems to be an unreal quality to such analyses. By this I mean that the research may be methodologi cally elegant, but it does not seem tied to people's routine ex perience. In that sense, such research ignores people's everyday lives.

This book attempts to make the case that we might be well ad vised to pay more attention to people's everyday lives as a source of deeper understanding of their political ideas and behavior. Rather than automatically applying abstract models to human political behavior, maybe we ought on occasion just to look at ordinary aspects of people's lives as these might affect their political lives. That is the basic-and simple-premise underly ing this book.