The book "A Conflict of Visions" is by far the best treatment of this topic I have ever read. It was recommended to me some years ago by an anonymous poster on an internet forum and I am glad he/she did.

It's essentially a generalised theory that explains left/right (liberal/conservative) differences in terms of a single underlying intuition about human nature. Because it's an intuition, you can't alter people's point on the political spectrum through an interesting fact or argument, it's only experience that can change people. And yet he shows how starting from this one basic assumption you can logically extrapolate all conservative and liberal political positions from it, in an entirely rational way.