Abstract:  As one of the long-standing and important topics in political psychology， political attitude has also been most frequently reflected in ordinary people’s daily life. However， studies of political attitude have long been below the radar of most researchers simply because of their closeness to daily life， thus calling for historical reexamination. A review of the century-long history of political attitude studies in the West reveals five outstanding topics in the previous studies， namely， connotations， components， structure and properties， measurement， influencing factors and evolution. Having yielded a considerable amount of outputs though， political attitude studies face a myriad of hard-to-resolve disputes and controversies. Lack of a defining paradigm， political attitude studies can hardly free themselves from the traps of “instrumentality”， “micro-level mentality” and “over-scientification”. In view of this， it is necessary to define clear connotations and the unique properties of political attitudes， and examine the institutional origins of the formation and transformation of political attitudes by employing some hybrid methodologies. By so doing， researchers will be in a better position to present the idiosyncratic properties of political attitudes and the underling mechanisms behind them.

Key words: political attitudes, western studies of political attitude, political psychology