Shawn Rosenberg

In his research, Rosenberg has theorized about the nature of political psychology and has conducted significant empirical research on ideology, and political cognition, candidate image making citizen development and democracy.[9] Much of Rosenberg's early work focuses on defining political psychology and its relationship to the other social sciences. In this vein, he has critically examined the psychological presuppositions of neoclassical economics and its applicability to the study of political behavior. He argues that there is necessarily an important disconnect between government policy initiatives and the choices citizens make to realize their preferences.[10]

Addressing political sociology, Rosenberg similarly suggests that citizen attitudes and behaviors cannot adequately be explained by their social situation or cultural context. Rather than being simple learners, citizens actively reconstruct the information to which they are exposed.[11] Throughout Rosenberg argues there is a need to recognize the quasi-independent structure of how people think. At several points in his writing, he has developed his ‘structural pragmatic’ view of political psychology to integrate the individualism of psychology and the collectivism of sociology. In so doing, he also addresses the necessarily intertwined relationship between empirical research and normative inquiry.[12]

Rosenberg's empirical research has focused on the study of political ideology and cognition. In several books, he has proposed that there is a single structuring logic underlies the various political views an individual holds.[13] He further argues that over time this underlying logic may develop and the broad quality of how a person thinks about politics will thus change. Where individuals have developed to different degrees, this can lead to stark differences in the understanding of political events they construct. Rosenberg has conducted both in-depth interviews and experiments to substantiate his claims. The evidence suggests that adults construct fundamentally different understandings of the basic nature of nationality, citizenship, governance and international relations.[14]

Rosenberg shifted his attention to the study of democracy in the early 2000s. To begin he focused on deliberative democracy. He argued that research needs to attend less to the impact of deliberation on participants' attitudes and more on the quality of the deliberation itself. To facilitate this he developed a typology of forms of deliberative engagement ranging from a very simplistic, restrictive proto-discourse through a largely uncritical conventional discourse to a more reflective, creative collaborative discourse.[15] In his empirical research, Rosenberg demonstrated that in the self-directed citizen deliberations, there is a worrying lack of the more reflective, critical kind of discourse typically assumed by democratic theorists.[16]

With the rise of populism, Rosenberg has deployed his political psychological approach to assess the attractiveness of illiberal populisms and the concomitant weakness of democracy in the US and Europe. In Democracy Devouring Itself, he argues that liberal democracy is overly complicated and abstract, and thus alienating for most citizens. In contrast, populism, with its clear categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and its simple authoritarian view of power, offers a vision that is more readily understood and thus more comfortably embraced. Consequently, when free to make the choice, people reject liberal democratic concepts and institutions in favor of the populist alternative.[17]