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Personality & Individual Differences 1991, 12(1), 99.

BOOK REVIEW


Political Behavior: Patterns in everyday life By Steven A. Peterson
Newberry Park, California: Sage. Paperbound. 291 pages $14.95.

With perhaps one exception, this book is not for readers of this journal. The author admits in his introduction that his coverage of personality as an influence on political orientations is incomplete. Even this, however, may be something of an understatement. The name of H.J. Eysenck does not appear in the references. When someone who has contributed so much to this literature can be simply ignored, one must entertain some doubt about the scholarliness of the work as a whole. The exception I refer to above, however, is a rather fascinating one. Peterson reports that Republican voters and conservatives generally seem to be the lucky ones of our society. For instance, they tend to have a greater sense of everyday efficacy, tend to be in better health, tend to have suffered less child abuse and tend to be more satisfied with their jobs. One would think, in fact, that this is a rather newsworthy finding. It is even more surprising in the context that social scientists generally seem to give conservatives a rather bad press (e.g. Glad, 1983). Peterson, however, seems unaware that what he has found conflicts with much that went before. One would have thought that some reference to the influential work by Adorno, Frenkel- Brunswik, Levinson & Sanford (1950) -- which showed conservatives in a very bad light indeed -- could have been expected, but Peterson does not appear to have heard of these authors either.

REFERENCES

Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950) The authoritarian personality N.Y.: Harper.

Glad, B. (1983) Black and white thinking: Ronald Reagan's approach to foreign policy. Political Psychology 4, 33-76.




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