ABSTRACT
The failure of the intellectual imagination is crippling! It is also sad and tragic because it is so misleading. It permits existing explanatory theories, hegemonic models and empirically derived concepts to become entrenched and institutionalized. Then cognitive inertia sets in and paradigms cannot shift. 1 In such an intellectual context and environment “habits of the mind” start to govern scientific beliefs and these habits become cognitive barriers to new ideas, new stimuli, the old conceptual difficulties in the dominant paradigms and “novel or disputed phenomena.” 2 Things merely stand still. The future is foreclosed and in the words of philosopher Abraham Kaplan, the “conduct of inquiry” comes to a screeching halt. 3 Perhaps nowhere is this more prevalent than in the once creative field of voting behavior.
