Partisan Families: The Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology)

People decide about political parties by taking into account the preferences, values, expectations, and perceptions of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. As most persons live with others, members of their households influence each other's political decisions. How and what they think about politics and what they do are the outcomes of social processes. Analyzing data from extensive German and British household surveys, this book shows that wives and husbands influence each other; young adults influence their parents, especially their mothers. Wives and mothers sit at the center of households: their partisanship influences the partisanship of everyone else, and the others affect them.

Alan S. Zuckerman is a Professor of Political Science, and former chair of the department, at Brown University and a research professor at the DIW (German Institute of Economic Research). He has served as a visiting professor and scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Istituto di Scienze Umane, Florence, Italy, New York University, the University of Pisa, Stanford University, Tel-Aviv University, and the University of Essex. He is the author of Politics of Faction: Christian Democratic Rule in Italy and Doing Political Science; co-author of The Transformation of the Jews; editor of The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior; and co-editor of Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure (Cambridge University Press, 1997). In addition, Professor Zuckerman has published numerous articles in leading political science journals.

Josip Dasovic (M.A. Central European University, B.A. University of British Columbia) is an adjunct lecturer in political science at the University of Richmond. He is completing his Ph.D. in political science at Brown University. Prior to graduate school, he worked extensively in the former Yugoslavia with, among other organizations, the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, at which he was a human rights activist and the organization's liaison to the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). His research interests include ethnic violence and peace, and politics in Eastern Europe. During the 2002–3 academic year he was a United States Institute of Peace Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellow.

Jennifer Fitzgerald received her Ph.D. from Brown University and is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She has also been a visiting researcher at the DIW in Berlin, Germany, and the Centre d'étude et de recherche sur la vie locale (CERVL) in Bordeaux, France. Her research interests center around the influence of social context on political behavior and the social dimensions of immigration politics in Western Europe.