In our other chapter in this volume, we discussed the history of the subfield of political psychology, tracing the rise, fall, and continuity of certain themes and theoretical approaches within it. In this chapter, we attempt to situate political psychology in the wider discipline of political science. We begin by documenting its growing influence. We then offer several speculations about the causes of its increasing regard within political science. We further demonstrate how political psychology, in its current form, is relevant to the core concerns of the wider discipline.

THE GROWTH OF POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY

We can assess the visibility of political psychology in political science by examining the content of articles published in the discipline's three most prestigious general journals: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. We reviewed articles published in these journals for three time periods: 1981 to 1983 (n = 310), 1991 to 1993 (n = 326), and 1997 to 1999:3 (n = 312). We excluded research notes, workshop articles, review essays, and controversies from our tabulations. We coded each article as falling into one of four categories: rational choice, political psychology, political behavior, or something else. The “something else” category includes a variety of different types of work, including political philosophy, public policy analysis, some kinds of comparative politics, and some kinds of international relations scholarship. Given that we were attempting to document the vitality of political psychology, we followed a conservative coding strategy.