Politics and Emotion

During the 1990s, Political Science Departments in American universities filled up with economists, and economics models became the major academic field allowing predictions not only for public behavior but also for politics in the United States.
Now, in some universities like Harvard, many social scientist admit that, although economics offers very elegant models, they are often models of how people "should" behave according to the paradigm of homo oeconomicus, rather than models of how people actually do behave. And so we bring in the psychology of judgment and decision making in order to find out how people actually do make decisions: a very interesting interview with Jennifer Lerner on Emotion, Judgment and Public Policy here.