Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience: The University of Chicago
John Brehm
The University of Chicago
Department of Political Science
5828 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637Office Phone: (773) 702-8075
Office: Pick Hall 502
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Faculty
John Brehm
Position
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Field Specialties
American political behavior
Political psychology
Public opinion
Political organizations.
Research
Brehm's first book, The Phantom Respondents: Opinion Surveys and Political Representation (Michigan Press, 1993), studies one of the most serious flaws in the public opinion industry, namely, the enormously high non-response rates. This book develops a psychologically based model to explain why people choose or refuse to participate in surveys, and then uses that model to examine the consequences of non-response for analysis of politics.
Brehm's second book, Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public (Michigan Press 1997), written with Scott Gates (Michigan State), examines the reasons why local, state, and federal bureaucrats allocate effort toward their assigned tasks. We apply a combination of formal theoretic models, computer simulations, and advanced statistical analysis of police officers, social workers, state utility regulators and federal bureaucrats from across the government. Contrary to dominant economic models of workplace compliance, we find that supervisors are severely constrained in their abilities to influence their subordinates. Instead, we find that the best explanation for high performance in bureaucracies stems from the preferences of the bureaucrats themselves for the tasks at hand, and the degree of esteem and appreciation they receive from fellow subordinates.
Brehm's third book, Hard Choices, Easy Answers: Values, Information, and American Public Opinion (Princeton University Press, 2002), written with R. Michael Alvarez (CalTech), develops a new model of public opinion based on the idea that survey respondents use their values and beliefs in order to answer the questions posed to them. In this we examine attitudes towards policies such as affirmative action, abortion, euthanasia, foreign policy, and the performance of government. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of American public opinion as vacuous and uninformed, we demonstrate that the values people hold are stable and strong predictors of individual attitudes, but that their degree of informedness accounts for the variability of their beliefs.
Brehm is the author of numerous articles in the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. Brehm teaches classes in public opinion, political organizations, political psychology, American politics, and statistics.
