Judgment and choice are at the core of all politics. I discuss a general framework for the study of individual decision making that applies equally well to both elites and the mass public, based on my chapter (with Richard Lau) in the 2013 Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. I consider the psychological processes employed by citizens and elites to identify alternative choices, gather information, evaluate alternatives, and ultimately choose one alternative from many possibilities. I draw on the framework of Behavioral Decision Theory (BDT) which begins with the proposition that how decisions are made can be best studied by actually observing them in the making. I contrast BDT with Rational Choice Theory (RCT) arguing that BDT provides a superior way to understand how people make decisions and allows for the study of additional dimensions in the decision making process. Psychological models derived from BDT have been applied to voter decision making to examine decision strategies, decision quality, and election outcomes.
