TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR.

The article focuses on the remarkable development of empirical social science in Europe, since the World War II, with considerable stimulus from the writings and visits of American social scientists. The massive data of public opinion polling may be considered as directly psychological, but they have been largely descriptive of attitude frequencies, thereby avoiding the deeper problems of their origins and place of attitudes in the respondent's psychological world. More interesting have been the large number of studies relating political attitudes to various social categories, such as economic class, education, and occupation. The form of these relationships has been that of a specific psychological attitude on the one side and that of a sociological category on the other. Political generalizations of this sociological-psychological form possess interesting properties. They can indeed serve as a source of psychological hypotheses, which must then be tested directly.