ABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years, domain-speci®c approaches to cognitive development have gradually supplanted domain-general Piagetian theory, stimulating a renewed interest in children's knowledge, i.e., in the content, rather than the structure, of children's thinking (Wellman & Gelman, 1998). This has led to numerous investigations of children's conceptions and naive theories about several subjects, including the social world (Bennett, 1993). Although naõÈve politics is one of the few naõÈve theories that lay adults possess, the acquisition of which can be tracked in children (Carey, 1985; Wellman, 1990), followers of the domain-speci®c approach have shown little interest in it. In the past too, when the leading approach was Piagetian, very few psychologists addressed this subject, and the most comprehensive studies were carried out by sociologists or political scientists (such as Connell, 1971; Moore, Lare, & Wagner, 1985) rather than psychologists.
