# Political Behavior > [!info] Gateway page > Orientation is here; the full subfield — voting, political psychology, socialisation, polarisation, media effects and backsliding — lives at [[Political Behavior Hub]]. Political behaviour is the empirical study of what voters actually do, as opposed to what a theory of democracy assumes they do. The gap between those two is the subfield's entire subject, and it is wider than most political commentary allows. The foundational finding is the uncomfortable one. Decades of survey research find that most voters hold few stable, internally consistent policy positions; that **party identification behaves more like a social identity than like a conclusion**; and that people typically adopt positions from the party they already belong to rather than choosing a party from their positions. Vote choice is better predicted by group membership than by issue agreement. Three consequences run through the vault's coverage. **Persuasion is rarer than mobilisation.** If identity precedes position, campaigns mostly work by activating people who already agree rather than converting people who don't — which is why the field operations documented at [[America PAC]] are a more consequential investment than advertising. **Motivated reasoning scales with sophistication.** [[Identity-Protective Cognition]] finds that better-informed, more numerate partisans are often *better* at rejecting evidence that threatens their group's position, because they have more cognitive resources with which to argue. More information does not reliably correct; it can sharpen. **Polarisation is mostly affective.** Americans' policy positions have diverged far less than their feelings about the other side have. That distinction matters because affective polarisation responds to different interventions than issue disagreement does — and because a public that dislikes the opposition more than it disagrees with it is a public with unusual tolerance for procedural hardball. This subfield is also where the vault's authoritarianism material becomes measurable: the predisposition described in [[The Authoritarian Personality]] and the activation mechanism in [[The Authoritarian Dynamic]] are both behaviour-research claims, testable against survey data rather than inferred from rhetoric. ## Where to go from here | Destination | What's there | |---|---| | [[Political Behavior Hub]] | The full subfield — voting, psychology, socialisation, polarisation, backsliding | | [[Political Science Hub]] | The parent discipline | | [[Identity-Protective Cognition]] · [[Confirmation Bias]] · [[Groupthink]] | The cognitive mechanisms | | [[The Authoritarian Dynamic]] · [[The Authoritarian Personality]] | The predisposition literature | | [[Authoritarianism]] | The concept gateway those books sit under | ## See also [[Political Behavior Hub]] · [[Political Science Hub]] · [[Authoritarianism]] · [[Sociology]] · [[Media Theory]]