How Do We Judge Policies?

Political science has paid scant attention to the way that citizens judge public policy, assuming that citizens do so, or should do so, in ways familiar to academics themselves, depending upon which of the various schools of thought they endorse. This paper argues that approaching citizens' judgement realistically requires attention to political psychology. Indeed, our conception of citizen judgement can be enriched by attention to research and theory in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. That work emphasises that much judgement occurs spontaneously and very rapidly, that it is involuntary and non-semantic and that it depends upon the emotional impact of experience rather than conscious weighing of situations against explicit standards of assessment such as science, self-interest or moral theory. A moral psychology for public life is sketched out, with implications for judgment by politicians.