ABSTRACT
“Political psychology” can be defined most simply as the study of the interaction between politics and psychology, particularly the impact of psychology on politics. If we can conceive of politics as the master discipline at the center of everything, linking to everything else—a rather contentious move, one must admit, but it was good enough for Aristotle—we can conceive of political science as a kind of Venn diagram with a center circle surrounded by overlapping ones. The intersecting area between economics and politics is called “political economy,” between sociology and politics “political sociology,” and so on. The intersection of mathematics and politics has developed its own specialized terminology—rational choice, formal theory, or game theory—but it is essentially “mathematical politics.”
