You could be driving home, on your usual route, and you are lost in thought. Next thing you know you are home, and you don’t remember having taken any of the turns. That is intuition, what many of us use to think about politics. But democratic politics requires that we say stop, you need to reassess and come to a different decision. That’s reflection.

Are voters rational beings, choosing carefully whom to vote for based on their preferences and most desirable outcomes? Or are they more like cheerleaders, led by emotion and affect towards their preferred political parties? This heated and incredibly pertinent debate is the focus of this episode. Dr. Kevin Arceneaux delves into the topic of electoral choice, and revisits many of the arguments made in his book Taming Intuition, where he argues that every voter is different in the way he reaches a decision, and that some voters are more likely to be led astray by their gut feeling than others. 

Borrowing from social psychology, Arceneaux brings us through many interesting considerations of why voters behave the way they do, what connection that may have with increasing polarization, and how we can use reflection to, indeed, tame our intuition.

Kevin (Vin) Arceneaux is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po Paris (CEVIPOF) since June 2021. He studies how people make political decisions. He has published articles on psychological biases, the influence of partisan campaigns on voting behavior, and the role of human biology in explaining individual variation in predispositions.

Additional resource

• Kevin Arceneaux, Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Taming intuition: how reflection minimizes partisan reasoning and promotes democratic accountability. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Recorded on 24th November 2023

Conversations with Sergei GURIEV  is a podcast by Sciences Po. Hélène NAUDET supervised the production of this series., with the help of Blanca GONZALEZ MARTINEZ, Sciences Po Master student in Political Science. The Sciences Po audio department produced and mixed it.

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