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The Discursive Frames of Political Psychology
Abstract
The aim of this article is to apply elements of contemporary social theory to the major theoretical, method-ological, and ideological divisions across political psychology and to consider both the origins and the impact of a range of theories and models. In so doing, we clarify some of the complexity surrounding the discursive and cultural origins of political psychology. On the basis of this analysis, we aim to overcome the redundant binaries and dualisms—both conceptual and geo-spatial—that have characterized the field up to now. These binary pairs relate to matters of epistemology, ideology, and methodology, and we show how each pair has been the basis of claims made regarding continental differences. As we shall see, such black-and-white thinking limits our capacity to understand the nature and potential of political psychology. Instead we wish to encourage a greater degree of universalism and globalism that is appropriate to political psychology as it evolves into a broader global discipline. We argue that political psychology as a field must attempt to deal with the consequences of an increasingly borderless world in which political identities are becoming more fluid, increasingly hybridized, and open to transformation.
... Political psychology must address the outcomes of a world with increasingly porous borders, where identities are mutable, transformed, mixed, or seeking secure identities. This approach is well-suited to developing genuinely global traditions and research centres in political psychology worldwide, especially in postcolonial and global southern areas, while remaining receptive to the discipline's future direction (Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, 2012). ...
... This orientation is particularly relevant for developing a genuinely global research community in political psychology, including in regions such as the postcolonial world and the global south. It is essential to remain open to the potential changes in the field while developing a broader understanding of politics in a changing world (Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, 2012). ...
This paper aims to describe political psychology and its significance in the context of Malaysian politics. Political studies in Malaysia primarily rely on political science, political sociology, and socio-political analysis. However, it is crucial to examine the political environment and issues in Malaysia from a psychological perspective. Political psychology provides insights into the thinking and behaviour of political leaders and enables an understanding of voters' behaviour. This interdisciplinary approach enriches our comprehension of politics from diverse angles. In the Malaysian context, studying political psychology will enhance our understanding of numerous variables related to political practices. The interaction between politics and psychology, particularly the impact of psychology on politics, is an intriguing subject to explore. A deeper comprehension of political psychology in Malaysia will enable leaders to better appreciate the aspirations of the people and work towards fulfilling their needs. The study of political psychology should aim to uncover the thought processes of political actors and voters alike.
... Although leaders speak as individuals, the politico-psychological potency of their words is embedded in the collective setting in which they operate (Elcheroth et al., 2011). For instance, Turnbull (2017) argues that the language leaders use is not just about what they believe but is also oriented toward how their followers understand and interpret the social world and whether various political actions flourish within such societal settings (Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012). Similarly, in the context of the pandemic, Reicher and Stott (2020) valuably posit that outcomes of order or disorder do not depend on leaders' actions in isolation. ...
... Mixed methods synthesize the strengths obtained through both quantitative and qualitative research toward more holistic understanding of psychological constructs (Onwuegbuzie & Leech, 2005;Power et al., 2018). In particular, corpus linguistics locates these integrative benefits in language, thereby also offering the advantage of examining politics in its naturalistic context (Finlayson, 2012), while still engaging broader patterns across multiple societal contexts (Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012). Taken together, such methodological frameworks highlight opportunities for interdisciplinary and innovative research in political psychology as enabled by computational technologies. ...
This article maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches ( N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country‐level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency‐structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions and a hierarchy‐egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top‐down enforcement from bottom‐up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of mixed‐methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis.
Highlights
During a global pandemic, political leaders must adapt their rhetoric to local societal conditions. Our work affirms the importance of political governance that elevates strong institutions while empowering public cooperation, but cautions that these may be most readily enacted in more democratic and economically developed contexts. In poorer, less democratic settings, rhetoric emphasizing accountable governance should be responsive to bottom‐up grassroots efforts in local communities, in contrast to the tightening grip of top‐down militarized policing in states witnessing the opportunistic creep of authoritarianism during a period of societal disorder. Finally, rhetoric where leaders uphold global ideals underscore wider identities of international collaborations in a global crisis, in contrast to more insularizing nationalistic rhetoric.
... Around this time, more urgent calls for internationalization began to be made, "not as an 'add-on' but as 'a lens through which we interrogate everything we do'" (Reicher, 2008, p. 17). The ISPP responded by convening a standing committee on internationalization and by instituting several structural and operational changes (ISPP, 2010;Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012). Since then, annual meetings have been held in North America only one year out of three (ISPP, 2019b). ...
... Even within the positivistic epistemology predominant in North American political psychology, there are advantages to internationalization related to sampling and generalization. However, more profound advantages may be gained by extending the variety of epistemological perspectives visible to the "mainstream" of the discipline (Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012;de Sousa Santos, 2016). ...
Internationalization is a key aim of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). This article uses bibliometric techniques to explore international collaborations in the Society’s core activities, namely the journal Political Psychology and annual meetings. We explore how authors from different regions of the world are interconnected through coauthorship, using country information extracted from authors’ affiliation and coded as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) or non-WEIRD. Study 1 analyzes coauthorship in the Society’s journal Political Psychology from 1985–2014 (30 years), with 1151 authors from 42 countries and 1337 coauthorship ties between them. Study 2 mapped the coauthorship relationships for annual meetings for which documentation was available, eventually collecting data from 2006 to 2014 (9 years). In total, 4260 authors from 74 countries were represented, with 6884 collaborative ties. Annual meetings reflected more international collaboration than the journal on several dimensions, including a large internationally connected giant component of collaborating authors evident in annual meetings, but not the journals. In annual meetings, there were more collaborations between WEIRD and non-WEIRD authors. However, even at annual meetings, deep internationalization involving non-WEIRD authors was rare, and the activities of the Society primarily represent academics from WEIRD countries, particularly the United States
... The task of making effective use of current critiques and perceived gaps that Haste (2012) was proposing assumes a repositioning of the importance of temporal and cultural contexts in defining research questions in political psychology. That project is already underway (see Billig, 2003;Condor et al., 2013;Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012). ...
This chapter explores the particular background of critical psychology and its links with political psychology. We discuss of some of the most significant features of critical perspectives in political psychology: historical awareness and critique, and the pursuit of social justice. In the remainder of the chapter, we focus specifically on the ways in which the discursive turn in psychology has advanced our understanding of two key topics of interest to political psychologists: prejudice, and political discourse. We end with a discussion of how alternative ways of advancing intellectual critique can drive new political psychology projects on the most pressing social problems of our age.
... However, this does not mean that they do not question the main tenets of narratives while seeking their ways to stay within the rules that the paradigm sets. Hence, critical reflection leads to the generation of new pieties and moral evaluations, but not to departure.The subject's decision-making in effect to micro-politics of daily life exists in relationship to Islam, where Islam is rarely monolithic but mediated and interpreted(Blackwood, Hopkins, and Reicher 2016;Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall 2012).However, the reaction remains with the agency. To continue with this debate, we look into how IST5 mentioned imam's view on abortion and why he disagreed with him: I experienced this not during a hutbe, but during a conversation with a preacher. ...
... International scholars must understand the challenges that unstable, conservative, and authoritarian contexts pose, while encouraging and appreciating innovative and unconventional approaches to research in the region. The growing recognition of the roles of critical, indigenous, discursive, and liberation psychology in challenging traditional approaches and navigating diverse contexts is a positive move in that direction (Andreouli & Figgou, 2019;Bhatia, 2019;Nesbitt-Larking & Kinnvall, 2012). ...
This chapter examines the history, challenges, and future of political psychology research in the Arab region, and argues that lack of attention to such regions is detrimental not only for these regions, but also for Western research and for the discipline as a whole.
... Political psychology as a field must attempt to deal with the consequences of an increasingly borderless world in which identities are fluid, transformed, hybrid, or in search of secure identities. Such an orientation is, for us, highly suited to the tasks of developing truly global traditions and centres of research in political psychology throughout the world, notably the postcolonial world and the global south, while retaining openness to whatever the discipline might become (Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, 2012). ...
This paper intends to describe political psychology and the importance of the subject matter to the Malaysian politics. Political studies in Malaysia are largely based on political science, political sociology and socio-political analysis. It is a high time that political environment and issues in Malaysia to be looked upon from a psychological perspective. It is important because the discipline will allow the understanding of why political leaders think and behave in a certain manner. It will also allow the appreciation of voters’ behaviour. These perspectives will enrich our ability to understand politics from different roots. In the context of Malaysia, studying political psychology will help to enhance the understanding of many variables related to the practice of politics in this country. The interactions between politics and psychology particularly the impact of psychology to politics would be an interesting study. As far as Malaysia is concerned, a deeper understanding on political psychology will help leaders to appreciate the nerves and needs of the people and they should put every effort to fulfil their aspirations. Political psychology should help to unfold the minds of the political actors as well as the voters.
... The claims made by the LJP above illustrate these recompositions by way of the subjects' deliberation within their allocated spaces under polarization. The subject's decision-making in effect to micro-politics of daily life exists in relation to Islam, whereby Islam is rarely monolithic but mediated and interpreted (Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, 2012). ...
Turkey under the AKP governments constitutes an exemplary case for understanding how centralized religion, authoritarianism, and economic logic of neoliberalism interrelate. AKP uses state-guided religion to legitimize its neoliberal economic policies and create docile, economized citizens. This article specifically focuses on how pious Muslims resist AKP’s religious neoliberalism by focusing on actions and deliberations of Labor and Justice Platform members. Our discussion, which consists of face-to-face interviews with the members of this social movement, delineates the group’s justice-oriented, egalitarian, and pluralist orientation of Islam and depicts their dialogues with power – embodied in AKP’s domination of Islamic discourse in Turkey. We discuss how group members reinterpret religious concepts such as kader (fate), kısmet (destiny), and sabır (patience) that the AKP uses as micro-discursive mechanisms to create economically compliant citizens. We also discuss the specific frames of resistance they develop in order to break out from the resilience and adaptation that AKP has embedded in its narratives of economy and work. These frames include a sharp criticism of market Islam, a challenge to political Islam and dissent against state Islam. Theoretically, the article refers to neoliberal governmentality and explores its contestation – an understudied concept in Foucauldian studies.
... It is definitely a truism to suggest that social psychology is related to politics. According to Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall (2012) by adopting a 'social problem' orientation, social psychological theory and research has historically paid close attention to topics distinctively and deeply political, such as mass psychology and collective action, intergroup relations and racism, fascism and authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the relation between psychology and politics is not always transparent and it "stands in need of explanation" (Tileaga, 2013, p. 4). ...
... In the twenty-first century, political psychology stands to serve a vital public interest by providing the kind of interdisciplinary analysis that fuses levels and perspectives to interrogate politics in motion. In the context of an increasingly connected and globalised political world, methods that are able to reveal the way in which language is deployed to challenge or maintain inequalities and conflicts are vital (Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, 2012). Narrative and discourse provide both conceptual frameworks and practical prescriptions for the interrogation of language 1 power and social relations that stands to elevate the contributions of political psychology. ...
... According to Nesbitt- Larking and Kinnvall (2012), the still emerging field of political psychology takes stock of its progress, achievements, and future developments every ten years or so. Since its foundation in the 1970's, political psychology has found it useful to "construct spatial maps of the field and, in particular, to trace origins, development and impact of the field across different countries and regions (Nesbitt- Larking and Kinnvall, 2012, p. 45). ...
This research set out to describe the level of internationalization that exists within the journal, Political Psychology. The primary way in which this was done was through exploring the patterns of coauthorship between authors from different countries who have published together. The terms ‘WEIRD’ (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and ‘non-WEIRD’ were adopted from Heinrich et al., (2010) and used in this research to differentiate between ‘Western/core’ countries (WEIRD) and ‘non-Western/periphery’ (non-WEIRD). Bibliographic data was used to extract and produce social network maps of academic co-author collaborations that have occurred within Political Psychology since 1985 (when the journal was first uploaded and stored on the Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge database) until the data was collected in 2013.
A considerable amount of experimental research has been devoted to uncovering biased forms of reasoning. Notwithstanding the richness and overall empirical soundness of the bias research, the field can be described as disjointed, incomplete, and undertheorized. In this article, we seek to address this disconnect by offering “coherence-based reasoning” as a parsimonious theoretical framework that explains a sizable number of important deviations from normative forms of reasoning. Represented in connectionist networks and processed through constraint-satisfaction processing, coherence-based reasoning serves as a ubiquitous, essential, and overwhelmingly adaptive apparatus in people’s mental toolbox. This adaptive process, however, can readily be overrun by bias when the network is dominated by nodes or links that are incorrect, overweighted, or otherwise nonnormative. We apply this framework to explain a variety of well-established biased forms of reasoning, including confirmation bias, the halo effect, stereotype spillovers, hindsight bias, motivated reasoning, emotion-driven reasoning, ideological reasoning, and more.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
Many Arab countries have experienced deep social, political, and psychological struggles and transformations, yet political psychological analyses of the region remain scarce. This chapter provides a brief overview of the historical context, present, and future directions of the field. Some challenges are epistemological and theoretical, including culturally decontextualized literature and under-theorised topics. Other challenges lie in research production, with difficulties in acquiring qualified researchers, institutional support, training, representative samples, and elaborate, culturally relevant approaches. The final set of challenges are social, political, and ethical in nature, especially pertinent in unstable and conflict-ridden settings, where sensitive questions may pose risks to the community and researchers, trigger suspicion, and highlight researchers’ positionalities and biases. Despite these challenges, however, growing recognition of critical, indigenous, innovative, and collaborative psychology points to promising signs for the future of political psychology in the Arab region, much like the rest of the Global South.
The article uses political psychology to understand how emotions such as fear, anger, hate and passion fuel the construction of emotional norms in foreign policy, and why this is important to the contributing articles to this Global Affairs special issue (SI) on emotion(al) norms in EUropean foreign policy. It argues that the SI sets out a significant stage in the political psychology of emotions from IR to the EU over the past 50 years. The value of the SI's theoretical contribution to the field is demonstrated by using the political psychologies of individual cognitive psychology, social psychology, social construction, psychoanalysis and critical political psychology to allow for engagement with the broader inter-discipline. The article concludes that the SI has made an original and interesting contribution in terms of empirically multileveled, theoretically emotional, and methodologically discursive approaches to the understanding of the political psychologies of emotional norms in EU foreign policy.
Brexit has been said to signal a shift towards more intolerance and nationalistic politics, but, on the other hand, Brexit has also been seen as representing a shift towards more accountable and democratic governance. This chapter examines such ideological tensions that ground everyday sense-making about Brexit. Drawing on focus groups just before and following the EU membership referendum in June 2016, the chapter presents an overview of a set of analyses of lay political thinking about Europe, the EU and its relationship to Britain. The data were analysed using a rhetorical psychology approach. The analyses demonstrate some fundamental ideological dilemmas at the core of Brexit debates, such as nationalism/internationalism and prejudice/tolerance. These are configured in different ways depending on the specific political projects and identities at play in different interactional contexts. The chapter highlights the value of a nuanced analysis of lay perspectives for understanding in more depth “what people think”. In a context where politicians increasingly claim to speak on behalf of “the people”, such an analysis, it is argued, is much needed.
This article uses political psychology to understand emotions such as anger, hate, and passion in the Brexit debate in order to demonstrate the wider value of the political psychology of European integration. It uses five strands of political psychology to understand European integration, drawing on evidence from the Brexit debate. These strands are individual cognitive psychology, social psychology, social construction, psychoanalysis, and critical political psychology. The article argues that the political psychology of European integration demands an understanding of the interwoven nature of feelings and illusions, the bidirectional interaction of political and psychological processes, and the multiplicity of strands of political psychology in the mutual accommodation and inclusion by European states and peoples. Only in this way is it possible to even begin to comprehend the many ways in which identity and difference are (re)produced by all partners in the Brexit debate and what these processes mean for the wider study of the political psychology of European integration.
This article focuses on the argumentative role of making factual claims and counterclaims in broadcast political debates. Despite the rise of “post‐truth politics,” this article argues that orientations to issues of “fact” and “truth” are a live and controversial matter when debating the European Union. Using Discursive Psychology (DP), the analysis is on how politicians use fact‐based (counter)claims in multiparty interactions, in the form of debates about the United Kingdom and the European Union. Three types of factual challenges are presented to illustrate the rhetorical function of claims: challenging the essence of an argument, providing another fact to recontextualize the preceding fact and using hypothetical scenarios to undermine facts. The analysis demonstrates that the use of facts is a highly strategic, argumentative, matter. This study, understood against a backdrop of the rise of post‐truth politics, highlights that concepts of “fact” and “truth” are not done away with; rather they are an argumentative resource and need to be understood in their fragmentary and rhetorical context.
The aim of our Handbook is to discuss theoretically, methodologically and empirically what political psychology has become in a European and global context, how it investigates its core subject matter and what some of the main findings have been. Theoretically, the Handbook seeks to pluralise political psychology as a field by discussing how historical and contemporary approaches and ways of defining political psychology have depended on context and discipline. In particular, the book shows how moving beyond the state of the discipline as traditionally defined opens up novel theoretical discussions as well as alternative methodological approaches and empirical focuses. The content of the book further illustrates how political psychology needs to expand in terms of theoretical depth, methodological diversity and European-specific examples and approaches to account for a broad variety of work that is currently being undertaken across universities in Europe and elsewhere. The Handbook takes an interdisciplinary approach and aims at understanding how political, economic and social forces interact with psychological dynamics and how these are mutually researched and reinforced across a number of relevant empirical cases.
In his speech formally nominating US president Barack Obama for re-election at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton used the power of language to forge a link between Obama and the would-be voter. He crafted contrasting societal narratives of ‘you’re-on-your-own’ versus ‘we’re-all-in-this-together’, evoking contrasting imagery of isolation versus community in the midst of hardship and linking these narratives to two distinct party ideologies. The speech was rhetorically constructed to motivate and inspire an electorate that had become increasingly complacent amidst continued economic decline and the bitterness of an ugly campaign. Clinton delivered a series of rational arguments about why re-electing Obama would be vital — arguments rooted at least in part, as he put it, in ‘arithmetic’. Employing a rhetoric not just of reason but also of emotion (‘And if you will renew the president’s contract, you will feel it. You will feel it.’), he argued that Obama represented not just the sound, logical choice but the only hope for a politics of ‘cooperation’ rather than ‘constant conflict’.
Europe’s external relations with its others has been central to the European story since its inception, and remains so. The story of European identity is often told as if it had no exterior. But this tells us more about how cultural identities are constructed — as ‘imagined communities’, through the marking of difference with others — than it does about the actual relations of unequal exchange and uneven development through which a common European identity was forged. Now that a new Europe is taking shape, the same contradictory process of marking symbolic boundaries and constructing symbolic frontiers between inside and outside, interior and exterior, belonging and otherness, is providing a silent accompaniment to the march to 1992.
Guided by a self-categorisation and social-identity framework of identity entrepreneurship (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001), and social representations theory of history (Liu & Hilton, 2005), this paper examines how the Hindu nationalist movement of India defines Hindu nationhood by embedding it in an essentialising historical narrative. The heart of the paper consists of a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the ideological manifestos of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, “Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?” (1928) and “We, or Our Nationhood Defined” (1939), written by two of its founding leaders – Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, respectively. The texts constitute authoritative attempts to define Hindu nationhood that continue to guide the Hindu nationalist movement today. The derived themes and sub-themes indicate that the definition of Hindu nationhood largely was embedded in a narrative about its historical origins and trajectory, but also its future. More specifically, a ‘golden age’ was invoked to define the origins of Hindu nationhood, whereas a dark age in its historical trajectory was invoked to identify peoples considered to be enemies of Hindu nationhood, and thereby to legitimise their exclusion. Through its selective account of past events and its efforts to utilise this as a cohesive mobilising factor, the emergence and rise of the Hindu nationalist movement elucidate lessons that further our understanding of the rise of right-wing movements around the world today.
Using a discursive lens, we argue that politicians rhetorically construct categories, storylines, and moral fields. We further claim that such discursive products are action-oriented toward gaining popular support in a public sphere that is politically fault lined along similar moral orders. As a case in point, we analyze speeches delivered during congressional voting on a Reproductive Health bill (RH bill). Employing a mixed methods strategy, we first implement a quantitative lexical analysis of frequently used words, followed by a qualitative detection of cohering storylines on both sides of the debate. Results show that oppositionists mark their speeches with a deployment of the word God, while bill supporters use the word access conspicuously. One storyline claims that The RH bill stands against God, while the other purports that The RH bill advocates rights and access. Although both storylines assert moral righteousness, they invoke two different moral orders backed by power blocs and the public at large. The God story appeals to a Catholic discourse and the moral order loudly supported by the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The rights/access narrative references a liberal morality frame maintained by social liberals and Philippine President Aquino. We end our paper by introducing the idea of an intrastate discursive lens to analyze moral fields constructed by politicians, oriented toward winning support from the public at large.
Conflict analysis concerns the systematic study of the causes, actors, processes and resolution of conflicts around the globe. It draws upon a number of disciplines and strives to be conflict sensitive while generating relevant suggestions on how to manage and resolve conflict. The broad focus of conflict analysis is also reflected in the multitude of methodological approaches which are utilised (see, e.g., Druckman, 2005). This diversity partly relates to the differences in the overarching purpose of research. For instance, some studies strive to predict conflict behaviour and attitudes with the utilisation of game theory and/or simulation (Colaresi and Thompson, 2002; Maoz and Mor, 1996). Other studies aim for policy relevance and to bridge the theory-practice divide (Fisher, 2009). In such studies, structured focused comparison and/or single case studies methods are frequently used not only for theory advancement of conflict analysis, but also for generic and normative prescriptions. For instance, it may concern when and how specific conflict-resolution strategies are considered most efficient to be applied during a conflict cycle. Finally, a growing number of studies use ethnography and narrative as methods to unravel the complexities between identity politics, specific contextual features of conflict and global structures (Auerbach, 2009; Jutila et al., 2008; Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, 2012). In short, the fields of research and practice of conflict analysis are vast (Monroe et al., 2009).
In ‘The Discursive Frames of Political Psychology’, Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall (2012) set out points of epistemological, ideological and methodological continuity and discontinuity between the American and European traditions in political psychology. In so doing, we place emphasis on the historical conversations and journeys that theories, ideals and research agenda have taken across the Atlantic from the era of Freud, Merriam and Lasswell to the present day. While stressing the rich interweaving of research traditions, we also make note of those historical-structural and conjunctural forces from which distinct problematiques have arisen. Among these, the hegemony of possessive individualist ideology in the formation and development of the United States, in conjunction with slavery and the Civil War, and a powerfully assimilationist immigration regime have promoted epistemological positivism, ideological liberalism and libertarianism as well as a largely quantitative social science tradition. Given the existing concentrations of expertise in political psychology in American universities, it is unsurprising that much of the overall academic output has been grounded in these traditions.
This book provides an introduction to political psychology through a focus on European politics and topics. It describes a style of doing political psychology in Europe that has developed out of dialogue with as well as critique of North American approaches. By emphasising the theoretical and methodological diversity of political psychology, the book is intended to contribute to a greater understanding of the strength and utility of the field. • Opens up and extends the study of political psychology to a variety of socio-political contexts and manifestations of political behaviour • Clearly outlines the usefulness and promises of distinctive critical approaches in social and political psychology • Explicitly considers the role of language, communication, identity and social representations in the construction of political meanings. Political Psychology will appeal to upper-level students and scholars who seek to extend their knowledge of the complex relationship between psychology, politics and society.
Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines citizens’ vote choices and public opinion as well as how political leaders deal with threat, mediate political conflicts, and make foreign policy decisions. The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology gathers together a distinguished group of international scholars to shed light on such questions as: To what extent are people’s political choices influenced by information outside of conscious awareness? Does personality affect leadership style? Do strong emotions distort the political process and worsen or enhance political decisions? Focusing on political psychology at the individual level (genes, early childhood, personality, decision-making, emotions, values, ideology) and the collective (group identity, social justice, mass mobilization, political violence, prejudice reduction), this interdisciplinary volume covers models of the mass public and political elites and addresses both domestic issues and foreign policy. The volume provides an up-to-date, comprehensive, and expertly distilled account of cutting-edge research within both psychology and political science.
Abstract. This essay seeks to reframe recent debates on sociospatial theory through the introduction of an approach that can grasp the inherently polymorphic, multidimensional character of sociospatial relations. As previous advocates of a scalar turn, we now ...
Religious and national identification are often elided when describing the Troubles in Northern Ireland: Catholicism with Irishness and Protestantism with Britishness. However, these categories do not coincide completely, and a third national identity label ‘Northern Irish’ has recently been seen to emerge, with some respondents from both major religious groupings claiming this identity. A survey study of residents in Northern Ireland (n = 359) examined religious and national identification using a scale of collective self-esteem. This measure could be described as evaluating the relative strength or thickness of the identities across the various expected (British Protestant; Catholic Irish), unexpected (Protestant Irish; Catholic British) and emerging (Protestant and Catholic Northern Irish) national and religious combinations. Alongside these measures, respondents were sampled in wards that had historically high levels of political violence and in wards matched for socio-economic status and urbanization but with historically low levels of violence. The findings suggest that the relationship between national and religious identification in Northern Ireland is influenced by the sampling based on geographical experience of violence and that unexpected identity combinations and weaker patterns of identification are evident among participants in those areas with the least experience of violence.
The chapter consists of an interdisciplinary mapping of some principal lineaments of phenomenologies of power in an era of uncertainty, exploring subjectivities of risk and security, doubt and certainty, trust and betrayal, efficacy and powerlessness, and identity and dislocation. Interweaving the core themes of Yeats's Easter 1916, notably the concept of "terrible beauty," the chapter establishes the psychological impact of "terror" in the contemporary economy, society, and political order, and how acts of "beauty" might challenge them. The chapter develops the argument that it is the very contingency of ethical commitment that opens up the potential for its deepest integration into the psyche, even as such contingency is also commensurate with a technical rationality from which ethical principles have been expunged. Ethical behavior is exhibited to the extent that the individual is able to wrest power from the gaps, inversions, absurdities, and contradictions of the global order.
Held provides a succinct introduction to critical theory and the Frankfurt School. Many critical theorists saw Marx's theories as insufficient both to explain societal forces and to offer scholars a way forward. Traditional Marxists underscore the role that subjectivity and consciousness plays in preventing revolutionary actions. For critical theorists, theory should reveal the differences between the actual and the possible. It must attempt to develop a consciousness that enables conditions for political change. Critical theorists also rejected Kant's transcendental method, parts of Hegel, and a philosophy of identity. Despite their thorough examination of what they saw as problems in the political environment around them, they did not put forward a series of demands or solutions to ameliorate the problems they outlined.
This chapter deals with current attempts in International Relations (IR) to deessentialize the concept of civilization—to leave behind what Jackson calls a substantialist (essentialist) approach in favor of an approach that treats civilizations as unfolding processes, projects, practices, and relations (Jackson, 1999: 142). As discussed in the introduction, much current discourse on civilization challenges the view of civilizations as immutable natural essences. At an ontological level post-essentialist civilizational analysis prefers constructivism over objectivism, while epistemologically it is an interpretivist rather than a positivist approach. Civilizations, like cultures, nations, ethnic groups, and identities should be viewed as verbs rather than nouns.
Today new forms of critical psychology are challenging the cognitive revolution that has dominated psychology for the past three decades. This book explores the historical roots of these new psychologies. It demonstrates that their ideas are not quite as new as is often supposed.
The book critically engages with theoretical developments in international relations and security studies to develop a fresh conceptual framework for studying security.Contents 1. Politics of insecurity, technology and the political2. Security framing: the question of the meaning of security3. Displacing the spectre of the state in security studies: From referent objects to techniques of government4. Securitizing migration: Freedom from existential threats and the constitution of insecure communities5. European integration and societal insecurity6. Freedom and security in the EU: A Foucaultian view on spill-over7. Migration, securitization and the question of political community in the EU8. De-securitizing migration: Security knowledge and concepts of the political9. Conclusion: the politics of framing insecurity
Schiller's Humanism, Personalism, and PragmatismPragmatism and FrancePragmatism in ItalyGermany and PragmatismOther European Philosophers and Pragmatism
Featuring extraordinary personal accounts, this book provides a unique window through which to examine some of the great political changes of our time, and reveals both the potential and the challenge of narrating the political world. Molly Andrews' novel analysis of the relationship between history and biography presents in-depth case studies of four different countries, offers insights into controversial issues such as the explosion of patriotism in post -9/11 USA; East Germans' ambivalent reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall; the pressures on victims to tell certain kinds of stories while testifying before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the lifelong commitment to fight for social justice in England. Each of the case studies explores the implicit political worldviews which individuals impart through the stories they tell about their lives, as well as the wider social and political context which makes some stories more 'tell-able' than others.
Vico observed in 1725 that “governments must conform to the nature of the men governed” (Allport, 1968). There has actually been no shortage of speculation about the psychological sources of political acts in recorded history. We find the ancient counterpart of genetic constitutional theories in Plato’s “myth of the metals,” in which men were seen to be hereditarily disposed toward either courage or the appetites, or toward rational thought. The roots of modern discussions of reward and punishment, of motivation, and of political cognition can be found in Machiavelli’s writing. Community psychology, participation, and like topics have parallels in Greek thought concerning the polis and the nature of citizenship.
What are the critical issues underlying the psychology of ethics and care in a global world? This exciting volume argues that globalization, multiculturalism, and group conflict must be reconceptualized from an ethical perspective to fully appreciate the extent to which people will act on behalf of others in a global world. In particular, the authors problematize the concepts of globalization, ethics, and care by discussing how local and global linkages may be constructed to produce diverse ethical results, depending on context. Deciphering the political psychology of real or perceived violence in a global world calls for such a new approach to understand both the collective experience and the shaping of subjectivity. The editors have assembled some of the top political psychologists to construct an interdisciplinary approach that elucidates how political, economic, social, and psychological forces interact and are mutually reinforced in a global context. Taken as a whole, the contributions explore the difficulties and possibilities for caring for others by moving beyond cognitive differences and inequalities of power. Individual chapters explore issues of social courage, bystander intervention, the psychology of prolonged occupation, political conflict and moral reasoning, the relationship between identification, threat and attitudes, and the psychology of altruism and tolerance, with special focus on societies from Finland, Germany and Northern Ireland to Israel, Poland, and the United States.
If psychology is the science of the experience, the behavior, and the interaction of individuals and groups, then political psychology is the science of the political experience, the political behavior, and the political interaction of individuals and groups. Science attempts to objectively study certain phenomena: it tries to transcend an author’s idiosyncracies and reach a larger consensus. Experience, behavior, and interaction constitute the subjective elements of individuals and groups: they are part and parcel of one’s unique existence in history and society. In this sense, political psychology attempts to make an objective study of political subjectivity.
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
Japan's culture and socioeconomic environment are often regarded as the major forces that affect and determine individual social and political behavior. Cultural aspects, in particular, influence the way the leaders behave, decision-making processes, and voting behavior. Changes in the economic situation in recent decades have affected the social and political attitudes of the young generation. Moreover, the role played by the news media is an important factor that can also explain some of the roots of political behavior in Japan.
There is a great deal of political activity which can be explained adequately only by taking account of the personal characteristics of the actors involved. The more intimate the vantage, the more detailed the perspective, the greater the likelihood that political actors will loom as full-blown individuals influenced by all of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses to which the species homo sapiens is subject, in addition to being role-players, creatures of situation, members of a culture, and possessors of social characteristics such as occupation, class, sex, and age.
To a non-social scientist the observation that individuals are important in politics would seem trite. Undergraduates, until they have been trained to think in terms of impersonal categories of explanation, readily make assertions about the psychology of political actors in their explanations of politics. So do journalists. Why is it that most political scientists are reluctant to deal explicitly with psychological matters (apart from using a variety of rather impersonal psychological constructs such as “party identification,” “sense of political efficacy,” and the like)? Why is political psychology not a systematically developed subdivision of political science, occupying the skill and energy of a substantial number of scholars?
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
In an era of global risk and uncertainty, individuals and political communities have been exposed to an increasingly broad and unpredicted range of economic, strategic, cultural, and political forces. Rapidly accelerating changes and sudden events exert an impact everywhere from the broadest planetary scale down to the scope of the individual mind and heart. This book explores how these shifts and shocks have conditioned the identity strategies adopted by Muslim minorities in order to construct their roles as political actors. On the basis of conversations with Muslims, the data uncover three typical identity strategies, each shaped by the citizenship regimes of particular Western states: retreatism, essentialism, and engagement. Grounded in an analysis of their colonial histories, patterns of immigration, and citizenship regimes, six Western countries-Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom-serve as places for exploration of the emergence of Muslim political identities. Those regimes that have best been able to balance individual and community rights have most adequately promoted the politics of engagement, while regimes that focus on antiterrorist legislation and exclusionary majority discourses have conditioned retreatist and essentialist identity strategies among both minority and majority communities. In addition to describing the politics of engagement, the book makes the normative case for a climate of engagement among both minority and majority political communities, grounded in recognition, dialogue, deep multiculturalism, and a new global and "cosmopolitical" consciousness.
This article is concerned with the linkages between events occurring at the macro-level and psychological phenomena. In particular it seeks to elaborate on the possible effects of globalization, migration, and multiculturalism on groups' and individuals' subjective experiences of security. Special attention is given to the concept of dialogicality in the light of the challenges posed by an increasingly globalized world in which individuals have to relate to an increasing number of others. How migration and multiculturalism are affecting the securitization of dialogical selves is discussed, and the concepts of dialogicality, positioning, and interpretation are explicated in theory as well as in practice. As a result we introduce the concepts of reciprocity and relatedness in dialogical conceptions of self and use these concepts to link the three main sections of the article. In searching for viable solutions to conflict and tension between majority and minority populations, the notions of deliberation and cosmopolitics are introduced and explicated to encompass both structural and psychological solutions to such conflicts. Ontological, epistemological, and methodological as well as practical consequences of such inquiries are considered.