Since it was a presidential election year, I decided to focus my social psychology course on the psychology of political attitudes: how they are formed, how they are maintained, and how they can
predict voting behavior.
My Princeton political science colleagues Nolan McCarty and Howard Rosenthal, together with Keith Poole at the University of Houston, have done a statistical analysis showing that the
voting behavior of a congressman is much better
predicted by his party affiliation today than it was 25 years ago.