Series in Political Psychology – serie

In recent years, there has been a rise in social movements and organizations that challenge the very foundations of liberal democracy on a global scale. Discrepancies of interests, ideological or worldview contradictions, and identity differences are more likely now to transform into destructive conflicts, and violence is used as a legitimate method for attaining political and economic goals. Drawing on the knowledge accumulated in social and political psychology, this book scrutinizes these phenomena and provides an even deeper understanding of the nature of these conflicts. The book also addresses the imperfections of liberal institutions, which can exacerbate these divides, providing crucial context for understanding contemporary political tensions and their effects on the world's democracies.

Protracted occupation has become a rare phenomenon in the 21st century. One notable exception is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which began over four decades ago, after the Six-Day War in 1967. While many studies have examined the effects of occupation on the occupied society, which bears most of the burdens of occupation, this book directs its attention to the occupiers. The effects of occupation on the occupying society are not always easily observed and are therefore difficult to study. Yet through their analysis, the authors of this volume show how occupation has detrimental effects on the occupiers. The effects of occupation do not stop in the occupied territories, but penetrate deeply into the fabric of the occupying society. The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories has had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres. Occupation has shaped Israel's national identity as a whole, in addition to the day-to-day lives of Israeli citizens. Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell have brought together a wide range of academic experts to show how occupation has led to the deterioration of democracy and moral codes, threatened personal security, and limited economic growth in Israel.

Party identification may be the single most powerful predictor of voting behavior, yet scholars continue to disagree on whether this is good or bad for democracy. Some argue that party identification functions as a highly efficient information shortcut, guiding voters to candidates that represent their interests. Others argue that party identification biases voters' perceptions, thereby undermining accountability. Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which each of the characterizations is most apt. The answer hinges on whether a person has sufficient motivation and ability to defend her party identity or whether norms of good citizenship motivate her to adjust her party identity to reflect her disagreements.A series of surveys and experiments provide a window into the partisan mind during times of conflict between party identity and political attitudes. These studies show that individuals devote cognitive resources to defending their party identities against dissonant thoughts, often resorting to elaborate justifications. However, when cognitive resources are insufficient, these defenses break down and partisans are forced to adjust their identities to reflect disagreements. In addition, thoughts of civic duty can stimulate responsiveness motivation to the point that it overwhelms partisan motivation, leading individuals to adjust their identities to reflect their disagreements.In demonstrating the influence of competing motives, this book reconciles the two dominant theories of party identification. Rather than characterizing party identification as either a highly stable affective attachment or a running tally of political evaluations, it suggests that the nature of party identification hinges on the interplay between the motivations that underlie it. Perhaps even more importantly, this book shifts the discussion away from partisan change versus stability to the normative implications of party identification. While the polarization of American politics may be exacerbating partisan biases, there is plenty of reason for hope. By simply making citizens' widespread feelings of civic duty salient to them, these biases may be overcome.

Why did people mobilize for the Arab Spring? While existing research has focused on the roles of authoritarian regimes, oppositional structures, and social grievances in the movement, these explanations fail to address differences in the behavior of individuals, overlooking the fact that even when millions mobilized for the Arab Spring, the majority of the population stayed at home. To investigate this puzzle, this book traces the reasoning processes by which individuals decided to join the uprisings, or to refrain from doing so. Drawing from original ethnographic interviews with protestors and non-protestors in Egypt and Morocco, Dornschneider utilizes qualitative methods and computational modeling to identify the main components of reasoning processes: beliefs, inferences (directed connections between beliefs), and decisions. Bridging the psychology literature on reasoning and the political science literature on protest, this book systematically traces how decisions about participating in the Arab Spring were made. It shows that decisions to join the uprisings were "hot," meaning they were based on positive emotions, while decisions to stay at home were "cool," meaning they were based on safety considerations. Hot Contention, Cool Abstention adds to the extensive literature on political uprisings, offering insights on how and why movements start, stall, and evolve.

Values are fundamental to political attitudes. Ideals like freedom, equality, democracy, and fairness give us standards to judge whether conditions are good or bad and whether policy solutions are preferable or detrimental. Political Persuasion examines how partisan communicators recruit social and political values to persuade the public to support their positions on controversial issues, making it one weapon in the arsenal that communicators and political entrepreneurs deploy to shape public opinion. In this book, Thomas E. Nelson explores the different strategies and tactics constituting value recruitment and examines how communicators respond to the value recruitment efforts of their opponents. Drawing primarily from two cases in modern American politics, Nelson presents interviews with activists and policymakers to understand the values at stake and the tactics in play, and provides evidence from experiments that examine how value recruitment shapes our opinions. Through this analysis, readers will gain greater recognition and understanding of value recruitment, which in turn will deepen our knowledge about the dynamics of political debate and public attitudes.

This new volume on Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification brings together several of the most prominent social and political psychologists who are responsible for the resurgence of interest in the study of ideology, broadly defined. Leading scientists and scholars from several related disciplines, including psychology, sociology, political science, law, and organizational behavior present their cutting-edge theorizing and research. Topics include the social, personality, cognitive and motivational antecedents and consequences of adopting liberal versus conservative ideologies, the social and psychological functions served by political and religious ideologies, and the myriad ways in which people defend, bolster, and justify the social systems they inhabit. This book is the first of its kind, bringing together formerly independent lines of research on ideology and system justification.

While scholars in political science, social psychology, and mass communications have made notable contributions to understanding democratic citizenship, they concentrate on very different dimensions of citizenship. The current volume challenges this fragmentary pattern of inquiry, and adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of citizenship that offers new insights and integrates previously disparate research agendas. It also suggests the possibility of informed interventions aimed at meeting new challenges faced by citizens in modern democracies. The volume is organized around five themes related to democratic citizenship: citizen knowledge about politics; persuasion processes and intervention processes; group identity and perception of individual citizens and social groups; hate crimes and intolerance; and the challenge of rapid changes in technology and mass media. These themes address the key challenges to existing perspectives on citizenship, represent themes that are central to the health of democratic societies, and reflect ongoing lines of research that offer important contributions to an interdisciplinary political psychology perspective on citizenship. In several cases, scholars may be unaware of work in other disciplines on the same topic and might well benefit from greater intellectual commerce. These themes provide excellent opportunities for the interdisciplinary cross-talk that characterizes the contributions to this volume by prominent scholars from psychology, political science, sociology, and mass communications. In the final section, distinguished commentators reflect on different aspects of the scholarly agenda put forth in this volume, including what this body of work suggests about the state of political psychology's contributions to our understanding of these issues. Thus this volume aims to provide a multifaceted, interdisciplinary look at the political psychology of democratic citizenship. The interdisciplinary bent of contemporary work in political psychology may uniquely equip it to create a more nuanced understanding of citizenship issues and of competing democratic theories.

Image Bite Politics is the first book to systematically assess the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and to connect these visual images with shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential campaigns, the authors highlight the remarkably potent influence of television images when it comes to evaluating leaders. The book draws from a variety of disciplines, including political science, behavioral biology, cognitive neuroscience, and media studies, to investigate the visual framing of elections in an incisive, fresh, and interdisciplinary fashion. Moreover, the book presents findings that are counterintuitive and challenge widely held assumptions--yet are supported by systematic data. For example, Republicans receive consistently more favorable visual treatment than Democrats, countering the conventional wisdom of a "liberal media bias"; and image bites are more prevalent, and in some elections more potent, in shaping voter opinions of candidates than sound bites. Finally, the authors provide a foundation for promoting visual literacy among news audiences and bring the importance of visual analysis to the forefront of research.

This book offers both a theoretical and empirical discussion of the psychology of ethics and care in a global world. Theoretically, the book seeks to problematize the concept of globalization, ethics and care by discussing how global-local linkages may be constructed in various ways and produce a number of different ethical results depending on context. The book makes a couple of major contributions. First, it demonstrates how globalization, multiculturalism and group conflict must be reconceptualized from an ethical perspective if we are to appreciate and understand the extent to which people are likely to act on behalf of others in a global world. Second, it advances ethical ideas that provide new political and moral vocabularies that allow us to imagine social alternatives. The political psychology of real or perceived violence in a global world calls for new approaches to understanding collective experience. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how political, economic, social and psychological forces interact and are mutually reinforced in a global context.

A half century of research shows that most citizens are shockingly uninformed about public affairs, liberal-conservative ideologies, and the issues of the day. This has led most scholars to condemn typical American voters as politically brainless and to conclude that policy voting lies beyond their reach. On Voter Competence breaks sharply from this view. According to Paul Goren, people vote based on abstract policy principles, a practice that has escaped scholars because they have searched for evidence of policy voting in the wrong places. Once we turn away from liberal-conservative predispositions and issue preferences, we find that nearly everyone holds genuine policy principles and uses these to guide their votes on election day. Three key principles divide the Democratic and Republican parties: limited government, traditional morality, and military strength. Deftly integrating research in social and political history, social and political psychology, and electoral behavior, Goren argues that nearly all citizens keep these principles in mind. The principles function as central heuristics in their belief systems, are rooted deeply in basic human values, and guide presidential choice to a similar degree for voters across the sophistication spectrum. Goren's comprehensive analysis of opinion data from the past six presidential elections and several new national surveys yields unequivocal support for these claims. Contrary to the indictment leveled by most of the scholarly community and political pundits more generally, ordinary citizens who are neither deeply knowledgeable nor engaged with the world of public affairs prove as adept as their more sophisticated counterparts in grounding presidential votes in abstract views about public policy. Insofar as citizen competence can be equated with the development and use of bedrock principles, the American voter performs far better than has been recognized in the past.

The personalities of political leaders often play an important role in domestic and international outcomes. However, leaders cannot be studied directly by the usual means of interviews or psychological tests. In consequence, psychologists have developed a variety of indirect methods to assess and measure personality "at a distance." Many of these at-a-distance measures are based on content analysis of what leaders say or write.Political Leaders at a Distance begins by describing several cases when leaders' personality played critical roles in important political outcomes, such as the outbreak of war in 1914. The book then reviews the history of at-a-distance studies and offers a conceptual framework for personality, consisting of four different elements: social contexts, traits, cognitions, and motives.Subsequent chapters focus on the personality variables of each element: their theoretical bases, the validity credentials of existing at-a-distance measures, and additional measurement techniques that might be developed in the future. Each variable is discussed with case examples of particular leaders and historical figures, research results from previous at-a-distance studies of leaders, and links to instructions, procedures, and scoring systems for measuring that variable. The final chapter brings together theory and at-a-distance research from the four separate elements of personality, revisiting examples throughout the book to offer a complete assessment. The book concludes with a discussion of future directions for at-a-distance personality measurement and research such as exploring the personality characteristics of literary figures, and the work of artists and architects.

If you tune into televised newscasts or read any newspaper, it is impossible to ignore the increased polarization of political discussion. These news reports are supported by empirical research documenting increases in social and political polarization. Polarization is not completely undesirable, as differences between groups can contribute to a vibrant democratic life in which alternative solutions to social problems are fully explored. However, polarization can also produce dysfunctional outcomes, including sub-optimal decision-making processes within groups and a lower likelihood that competing groups are able to resolve differences. Extreme forms of polarization are presumably exacerbated by dogmatic or closed-minded thinking that fails to openly consider the viability of opposing viewpoints, as well as low levels of intellectual humility in which people rarely consider the possibility that their own beliefs and opinions might be fallible. This volume aims to increase the understanding of open-mindedness and dogmatism, illuminate the nature and causes of polarization, and provide clues regarding how one might attempt to reduce pernicious forms of polarization.Bringing together a diverse group of leading psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and communication scholars who investigate dogmatism and open-mindedness within social and political contexts, Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World covers a wide range of topics including key definitions of dogmatism and open-mindedness, the emergence of affective polarization, how open-mindedness relates to attitude formation and change, the correspondence between intellectual humility and open-mindedness, and how social norms and situations shape open-minded cognition. Authors consider both the beneficial and more problematic features of open-mindedness, dogmatism, and polarization. Collectively, this volume provides a format that enables readers to learn about creative approaches to understanding dogmatism and open-mindedness and, potentially, to generate innovative solutions that reduce polarization and increase constructive social compromise in the future.

This book combines theoretical and empirical research across various academic disciplines including economics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and political science to describe why individuals adopt political ideologies and how this choice can potentially exacerbate conflict and violence. Ideology is particularly important to conflict. Data on intra- and international conflict shows that the number of ideologically driven conflicts has increased tremendously in recent decades. Although some researchers started to investigate this link extensively, they struggle to find holistic explanations. The book illustrates that ideologies are not only capable of shaping conflictual behavior or mobilizing political actors, but also of addressing human needs, desires, and preferences. Hence, the authors compile valuable insights from various academic disciplines to explain how individuals adopt ideologies that match their underlying needs and preferences; that ideologies have the capacity to reconcile deprived psychological human needs; and that radical groups and organizations use ideologies to recruit individuals and pursue their objectives. Real-life cases are included to better understand these relationships and to apply the theoretical background to real-world situations.

How does hope for peace form and proliferate in the seemingly hopeless reality of conflict, and why do despair and fear often prevail? How do political elites utilize hope and skepticism to manipulate their public during conflict? And how does hope manifest itself at the societal level? Hope Amidst Conflict takes on the bold challenge of answering these questions by merging insights from philosophy and social psychology and investigating hope for peace in an intense political context--the intractable, violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Hope for peace has gathered scholarly attention in the last decade. However, the work has been focusing on the mechanisms of hope while failing to ask the bigger questions about hope's role in the politics of conflict. Moreover, existing research presents a confusing account of what hope "is" and how it can be measured. This confusion yielded mixed results regarding the levels and consequences of hope during conflict. Combining the wisdom of more than a hundred years of scholarship on hope with insights from original data collected in conflict zones, Hope Amidst Conflict offers a novel conceptualization of hope and a standardized way to measure hope in a wide array of contexts. Using these new approaches, the book embarks on a journey to identify the determinants and consequences of hope amidst conflict.

More than 60 years ago, Daniel Bell proclaimed the "end of ideology." Indeed, the concept of ideology in the social sciences and in political psychology was considered anachronistic not so long ago. Those who did use it were considered ideologues themselves and sometimes worse. With the rise of populism in the last decade, this has changed, and more scholars have begun to apply the concept again. However, most publications using the term do so rather loosely to denote political ideas and beliefs, this way circumventing the contested critical connotation of the concept. The aim of The Return of Ideology is to strengthen the social theoretical potential of ideology not by ignoring but by addressing its immanent problems. It does so in three parts: first, it explores the concept's ambivalent and contested history, beginning with its Marxist roots and evolution; second, it examines the methods used to study why people hold onto their beliefs even when it's against their interests; and third, it presents empirical studies of current ideological phenomena such as populism, racism, antisemitism, intersectionality, and conspiracy thinking. Accessible and comprehensive, this book offers valuable insights for anyone interested in understanding how ideas shape society today.

Compromise is critical to democratic policymaking, but it can be hard to find on Capitol Hill. In this era of routine legislative gridlock, however, some lawmakers do still cross the aisle. In Dealmakers, David C. Barker, Andrew M.O. Ballard, and Christopher Jan Carman examine why they do—and why they tend to be Democrats. The answer, the authors contend, comes down to voter differences in personality and values. Specifically, they argue that empathetic traits and values drive Democrats to accept compromise, whereas competitive traits and values drive Republicans to reject it. Those differences filter up through the ballot box, the data suggest, guiding behavior in the halls of Congress. Drawing on evidence from opinion surveys, randomized experiments, Twitter/X, and legislative records, Dealmakers is the first analytical deep dive into the psychological factors that structure political dealmaking and its absence.

Over the last century, the United States and much of the world broadly has seen massive social change with respect to attitudes and beliefs about anti-Black racism. But change alone does not ensure a decline in racism. In Anti-Black Racism in America, renowned race relations scholar Thomas F. Pettigrew undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the key trends in racism against Black Americans, drawing on a wide range of scholarship and his own decades of experience in the field. The book describes the advances made in recent years that promise a decline in anti-Black racism--especially in politics and education, but it also highlights where American racism remains firmly entrenched--in economics, housing, and the justice system. Employing significant insights from social psychology, such as understanding implicit prejudice and the importance of intergroup contact, Pettigrew lays out a theory of racism centering the importance of segregation in housing for its perpetuation, and makes the case for reparations funded by billionaires.

Concerns about political polarization and threats to democratic ideals are on the rise in the US. The Authoritarian Divide takes on both of these issues by showing how authoritarian predispositions--desires for social conformity and in-group conformity--have influenced American political preferences, voting, and partisanship in recent decades. Voters have increasingly sorted into political parties based on their levels of authoritarianism, with higher levels tending toward the Republican Party and lower levels to Democratic. The authors reveal complexities in this trend, including the outsized effect on White Americans, the dependence on parties offering certain types of choices, and the different ways education level factors into the sorting process. Drawing from nationally representative samples, panel data, and experiments, the book demonstrates that authoritarianism has increasingly structured a wide range of attitudes and has become a growing influence on vote choice. The analysis carries crucial implications for partisan conflict and the future of American democracy.

The United States has taken a long and winding road to racial equality, especially as it pertains to relations between blacks and whites. On November 4, 2008, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the forty-fourth President of the United States and first black person to occupy the highest office in the land, many wondered whether that road had finally come to an end. Do we now live in a post-racial nation? According to this book's contributors, a more nuanced and contemporary analysis and measurement of racial attitudes undercuts this assumption. They contend that despite the election of the first black President and rise of his family as possibly the most recognized family in the world, race remains a salient issue-particularly in the United States. Looking beyond public behaviors and how people describe their own attitudes, the contributors draw from the latest research to show how, despite the Obama family's rapid rise to national prominence, many Americans continue to harbor unconscious, anti-black biases. But there are whispers of change. The Obama family's position may yet undermine, at the unconscious level, anti-black attitudes in the United States and abroad. The prominence of the Obamas on the world stage and the image they project may hasten the day when America is indeed post-racial, even at the implicit level.

Formally, the law is based solely on reasoned analysis, devoid of ideological biases or unconscious influences. Judges claim to act as umpires applying the rules, not making them. They frame their decisions as straightforward applications of an established set of legal doctrines, principles, and mandates to a given set of facts. As most legal scholars understand, however, the impression that the legal system projects is largely an illusion. As far back as 1881, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made a similar claim, writing that "the felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed." More than a century later, we are now much closer to understanding the mechanisms responsible for the gap between the formal face of the law and the actual forces shaping it. Over the last decade or so, political scientists and legal academics have begun studying the linkages between ideologies, on one hand, and legal principles and policy outcomes on the other. During that same period, mind scientists have turned to understanding the psychological sources of ideology. This book is the first to bring many of the world's experts on those topics together to examine the sometimes unsettling interactions between psychology, ideology, and law, and to better understand what, beyond and beneath the logic, animates the law.

Over the past half century, two overarching questions have dominated the study of mass political behavior: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are those judgments from a normative perspective? The authors of The Ambivalent Partisan offer a novel approach to these questions, one in which political reasoning is viewed as arising from trade-offs among three generally conflicting psychological goals: making decisions easily, getting them right, and maintaining cognitive consistency. Taking aim at decades of received wisdom, the central claim of this book is that high-quality political judgment hinges less on citizens' cognitive ability than on their willingness to temporarily suspend partisan habits and follow the "evidence" wherever it leads. This occurs most readily when citizens experience a disjuncture between their stable political identities and their contemporary evaluations of party performance, a state the authors refer to as partisan ambivalence. Drawing on both experimental and survey methods -- as well as five decades of American political history -- the authors demonstrate that compared to other citizens, ambivalent partisans perceive the political world accurately, form their policy preferences in a principled manner, and communicate those preferences by making issues an important component of their electoral decisions. The book's most important conclusion is that a non-trivial portion of the electorate manages to escape the vicissitudes of apathy or wanton bias, and it is these citizens -- these ambivalent partisans -- who reliably approximate a desirable standard of democratic citizenship.

What is a political representative's job, really? Are they supposed to simply figure out what "the people" want and deliver it, or are they charged to do what they think is best for their constituents -- even if that means sometimes ignoring those constituents' wishes? In Representing Red and Blue, David Barker and Christopher Carman explore what people think about this question, why their answers vary, and what difference it makes. They observe that the citizens of "Red America" -- religious and cultural traditionalists, including most Republicans -- often prefer lawmakers who challenge public opinion, whereas "Blue Americans," or culturally progressive Democrats, typically prefer lawmakers who follow it. What is more, these preferences filter up: lawmakers who represent progressive locales tend to pursue the policies their constituents want, whereas representatives of more traditionalistic places often behave quite differently, leaning decidedly to the Right of even most Red American voters. The fundamental reason underlying these patterns, Barker and Carman argue, is that on average, traditionalists and progressives simply do not hold the values of liberal popular democracy in equally high esteem. What all of this means is that the citizens of Red America live in a different kind of democracy than that of the citizens of Blue America -- one where they have less political say over what their government does, but one that seems to suit their tastes all the same.

Protracted occupation has become a rare phenomenon in the 21st century. One notable exception is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which began over four decades ago after the Six-Day War in 1967. While many studies have examined the effects of occupation on the occupied society, which bears most of the burdens of occupation, this book directs its attention to the occupiers. The effects of occupation on the occupying society are not always easily observed, and are therefore difficult to study. Yet through their analysis, the authors of this volume show how occupation has detrimental effects on the occupiers. The effects of occupation do not stop in the occupied territories, but penetrate deeply into the fabric of the occupying society. The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres. Occupation has shaped Israel's national identity as a whole, in addition to the day-to-day lives of Israeli citizens. Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell have brought together a wide range of academic experts to show how occupation has led to the deterioration of democracy and moral codes, threatened personal security, and limited economic growth in Israel.

Party identification may be the single most powerful predictor of voting behavior, yet scholars continue to disagree whether this is good or bad for democracy. Some argue that party identification functions as a highly efficient information shortcut, guiding voters to candidates that represent their interests. Others argue that party identification biases voters' perceptions, thereby undermining accountability. Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which each of the characterizations is most apt. The answer hinges on whether a person has sufficient motivation and ability to defend her party identity or whether norms of good citizenship motivate her to adjust her party identity to reflect her disagreements.A series of surveys and experiments provide a window into the partisan mind during times of conflict between party identity and political attitudes. These studies show that individuals devote cognitive resources to defending their party identities against dissonant thoughts, often resorting to elaborate justifications. However, when cognitive resources are insufficient, these defenses break down and partisans are forced to adjust their identities to reflect disagreements. In addition, thoughts of civic duty can stimulate responsiveness motivation to the point that it overwhelms partisan motivation, leading individuals to adjust their identities to reflect their disagreements.In demonstrating the influence of competing motives, this book reconciles the two dominant theories of party identification. Rather than characterizing party identification as either a highly stable affective attachment or a running tally of political evaluations, it suggests that the nature of party identification hinges on the interplay between the motivations that underlie it. Perhaps even more importantly, this book shifts the discussion away from partisan change versus stability to the normative implications of party identification. While the polarization of American politics may be exacerbating partisan biases, there is plenty of reason for hope. By simply making citizens' widespread feelings of civic duty salient to them, these biases may be overcome.