The Political Psychology of Liberation: From Politics to Ethics and Back

The origins and development of the psychology of liberation are described, detailing the intellectual and political context in which the concept of liberation emerged in Latin American social sciences. Its constitution as a mode of doing psychology, and the founding ideas of Ignacio Martin Baró, its pioneer, are analyzed. Primary concepts such as problematization, de-ideologization, and de-alienation are discussed, and I explain how they are integrated into a central process characterized as conscientization. The role of relatedness as an epistemological base for knowledge construction and liberation is highlighted. The dynamics in which these processes interact in order to facilitate and catalyze the transformation of negative living conditions through participatory action and reflection, to empower people so they become conscious citizens, and to strengthening civil society and democracy is also discussed. I argue that the ethical, critical, and political character of the liberating actions respond for the participatory, reflexive, and transformative conception of this form of psychology.     

Impact of the Political Context on Foreign Policy Decision-Making

One of the most pressing concerns in the study of international relations today is to develop a systematic account of the impact of domestic politics on foreign policy. This paper argues that domestic politics frequently influences foreign policy through a process of decision-making that grows out of the decision-maker's awareness of the requirements for effective action in the political context. It is therefore necessary to develop a theory that can explain how the political context's characteristic features affect decision-makers' thinking. In attempting to combine insights culled from the literature on political decision-making with psychological theories of decision-making processes, this paper offers a first step toward such a theory.     

Community Psychology, Political Efficacy, and Trust

Much attention has been paid to the effects of political efficacy and trust on political participation. Most studies tend to use efficacy or trust as an independent variable to explain political actions such as voting, campaign involvement, and the like. Despite their importance in explanations of political behavior, relatively little is known regarding mechanisms through which social involvement may influence trust and efficacy. If efficacy and trust are of value, then it is important that we determine how their development can be fostered, and especially whether their development can be promoted through social interaction—such as a sense of community. Borrowing from the field of community psychology, I employ the Sense of Community Index to provide a more nuanced measure of community based on individual perceptions of their community that previous studies were unable to capture. Analyzing original survey data, this paper examines to what extent, if any, a sense of community matters for trust and efficacy. The results demonstrate that social forces, such as community, exert positive and significant effects on internal and external efficacy and personal and political trust, independently of individual traits such as income, age, gender, and education.     

Broadening Political Psychology

One hundred years ago, if we proposed that we could make you happy with a pill, we would have been ridiculed and would have entered the realm of science fiction and not science itself. Yet that is precisely where we are today. The genetics and neurobiological revolution is upon us, and we advocate that political psychology not simply join this revolution but take a lead role in it. Here in this review, we explore the various ways in which political psychology can embrace this revolution and incorporate work in neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, endocrinology, and recent advances in genetics. In doing so, we advocate the adoption of an epidemiological approach and discuss the ways in which various methods including physiological experimentation, genetic analysis, and neurological explorations including MRIs and other technical advances provide critical insight into human behavior and present intriguing possibilities for exploring the nature of political attitudes, attachments, and behaviors. In advocating for broadening the approaches used in the field, we reflect critically on how we might improve and strengthen the accuracy of our understanding of the psychological bases of political preferences and behavior in the future.     

Political Psychology: Submissions,Acceptances, Downloads,and Citations

Political Psychology has experienced a marked increase in the number of submissions, downloads, citations, and global exposure over the past few years. It is also a more influential journal than it was at the beginning of the decade. Specifically, the journal is now available in more than 4,200 libraries worldwide, compared with 2,200 five years ago; the number of downloads has recently increased to more than 620,000(!), compared with about 100,000 five years ago; the number of new submissions has increased drastically over the past five years to more than 300 per year; and the impact factor has risen to 1.771—the highest in the history of the journal. In 2014 alone, more than 40 articles published in the journal have been downloaded more than 500 times each. In this article, we analyze submissions to Political Psychology, acceptances, downloads, and citations by area of study and methodology.     

The Grammar of Politics, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy

Books reviewed:
Cressida J. Heyes (ed.), The Grammar of Politics, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy , Cornell University Press, 2003, xii + 259, no price. Reviewed by Peter Johnson, University of Southampton Department of Philosophy University of Southampton Highfield Southampton UK     

Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice

Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992 ) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.     

Political Psychology in Canada

Although a number of political psychologists are active in Canada, there has been relatively little self-conscious development of the field. This article brings together contributions from political science and social psychology in Canada in an attempt to identify aspects of Canadian distinctiveness in the field of political psychology, notably the balance between mainstream and eclectic tendencies.     

On the Knowledge of Politics and the Politics of Knowledge: How a Social Representations Approach Helps Us Rethink the Subject of Political Psychology

Fifty years ago, Serge Moscovici first outlined a theory of social representations. In this article, we attempt to discuss and to contextualize research that has been inspired by this original impetus from the particular angle of its relevance to political psychology. We argue that four defining components of social representations need to be taken into account, and that these elements need to be articulated with insights from the social identity tradition about the centrality of self and group constructions in order to develop original insights into political psychological phenomena. First, social representations are shared knowledge, and the way interpretations of the world are collectively elaborated is critical to the way people are able to act within the world. Second, social representations are meta‐knowledge, which implies that what people assume relevant others know, think, or value is part of their own interpretative grid, and that collective behavior can often be influenced more powerfully at the level of meta‐representations than of intimate beliefs. Third, social representations are enacted communication, which means that social influence is exerted by the factors that constrain social practices as much as by the discourse that interprets these practices. Fourth, social representations are world‐making assumptions: collective understandings do not only reflect existing realities but often bring social reality into being. Put together, these four components provide a distinctive theoretical perspective on power, resistance and conflict. The added conceptual value of this perspective is illustrated by showing how it allows revisiting ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude with implications for research practices and discuss how the proposed model of social representations invites us to define new priorities and challenges for the methods used to study political psychological phenomena.     

Political Psychology as Discipline and Resource

Around the 1960s, political psychology was developed as a field of knowledge that attempted to interrelate scientific psychology and political phenomena. However, social and academic conditions are very different today. More and more, political psychology is becoming a protagonist, as much in the internal context of psychology as in the external context of its relations with the social world. Thus, political psychology can now be seen as a resource relating psychological knowledge to social practice, and relating psychological processes to social action. Political psychology is the interface that puts psychology and society in contact. The development of political psychology in Spain provides an example of this alternative view of the field.     

Political Psychology as Applied Psychology: An Introduction

On souligne, dans I'introduction du numéro spécial d' Applied Psychology: An International Review sur la Psychologie Politique, qu'il existe deux courants parmi les contributions au champ de la psychologie politique. L'un traite des implications politiques en jeu quand la politique est utilisée pour illustrer des problématiques psychologiques. L'autre est une « Psychologie Politique politique >> où les orientations des Sciences Politiques définissent les problématiques. La seconde partie de l'introduction montre que cette discipline emprunte largement à trois grandes théories de la psychologie (la théorie cognitive, la théorie de I'apprentissage et la psychanalyse) et que la plupart des publications abordent des thèmes en rapport avec les psychologies sociale, clinique, de la personnalité et du développement. Enfin, les sept contributions émanant d'auteurs de quatre continents sont brièvement introduites.
The introduction to Applied Psychology: An International Review's special issue on Political Psychology argues that there are two streams of contributions to the field of political psychology. One is work with political implications where politics are used to illustrate psychological research questions. The other is a political Political Psychology where the agenda of political science defines the research questions. A second part of the introduction shows that the discipline draws most heavily on three grand theories of psychology, namely cognitive theory, psychoanalysis, and learning theory with most publications working on questions related to social psychology, personality, clinical, and developmental psychology. Finally the seven contributions by authors from four continents are briefly introduced.