After taking home the David O. Sears Award from the International Society of Political Psychology for the best book on the political psychology of mass behavior in April, Professor Howard Lavine's new book, The Ambivalent Partisan, was just named recipient of the Robert E. Lane Award, given by the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association for the best book in Political Psychology in the past year. His book offers a novel approach to the two overarching questions that have dominated the study of mass political behavior over the past half century: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are those judgments from a normative perspective? Taking aim at decades of received wisdom, the central claim of this book is that high-quality political judgment hinges less on citizens' cognitive ability than on their willingness to temporarily suspend partisan habits and follow the "evidence" wherever it leads.
