Self-category constructions in political rhetoric; an analysis of Thatcher's and Kinnock's speeches concerning the British miners' strike (1984–5)

This paper examines the way in which different speakers may construe both the context and the categories involved in a single event. This is achieved through an analysis of Margaret Thatcher's and Neil Kinnock's leadership speeches to their respective party conferences during the British miners' strike of 1984–5. The analysis shows that both speakers construe the nature of the event such that their party is representative of an ingroup which encompasses almost the entire population and such that their policies are consonant with the definition of the ingroup identity. Thus their category constructions mirror the ways in which the respective leaders seek to mobilize the electorate during the strike. This analysis is used for two purposes: firstly, to argue for an integration of self-categorization theory with rhetorical/discursive psychologies and hence for further research into the ways in which self-categories may be contested in argument rather than determined by cognitive computations; secondly, to argue for further research into how political rhetoric may affect mass action through the ways in which collectivities are defined.     

The Context of Social Identity: Domination, Resistance, and Change

The task of social psychology is to explain the flexibility of human beings in creating and relating to their social worlds. Social identity and self-categorization theories provide a thoroughgoing interactionist framework for achieving such a task. However, in order to do so, it is necessary to avoid reductionist misreadings of the theories that would explain human social action simply by reference to psychological processes, without examining how the play of process depends on the cultural and structural settings in which they occur. More specifically, to the extent that self-categories shape social action, flexibility is achieved through the categories to which we belong, the others with whom we compare ourselves, and the dimensions along which such comparisons occur. These are not a fixed aspect of the human condition but are a focus for argument precisely because of their world-making consequences.     

Narrative as a Root Metaphor for Political Psychology

The idea of narrative has become increasingly appropriated in empirical research in both psychology and politics, yet there is a notable absence of integrative frameworks that specify a conceptual and methodological approach to narrative research in political psychology. An integrative conceptual framework is proposed and anchored in four principles of a narrative approach: (1) the mutual constitution of language and thought, (2) the need for personal coherence through narrative identity development, (3) the need for collective solidarity through shared meaning, and (4) the mediational property of narrative in social activity and practice. Theory and empirical research related to these principles are reviewed. We argue that a narrative framework has the potential to enhance the relevance and amplify the voice of political psychology within and beyond the academy and to offer new knowledge on the complex and dynamic relationship between context and mind.     

Political Psychology as Social Aesthetics

Political psychology may be legitimately developed as a "social aesthetic.&;rdquo; Its activities generate social forms, much as in the arts. While logic works within the confines of society's language, aesthetic forms work with its sensibility, in the understanding that significance lies within the unitary wholes. In this sense, political psychology cannot be separated from psychology in general. In both cases we participate in the generation of form. However, because these forms enter society in significant ways, reflexive attention must be given to what it is we create. Mechanical forms, which are common to the field and to society generally, contribute to a condition of social alienation; in contrast, the form of a game is more closely related to the spontaneous creation of community.     

“We Got To Live Together”: The Psychology of Encounter and the Politics of Engagement

The article is set in the normative claim that our work as political psychologists emerges from concerns with our contemporary worlds and that political psychologists should not hesitate to draw out the policy implications of their own work. Following a brief explanation of the Allport tradition of the contact hypothesis and its critics, the article proposes four analytical considerations that contribute to the further understanding of the psychology of encounter and the politics of engagement: First, the insight that the individual is already constituted as a social being, through contact; second, an exploration of the opportunities and challenges of dialogue; third, the changing nature of selfhood, agency, and identity in the contemporary world; and, finally, through deep multiculturalism, the cosmopolitical perspective, and the politics of care, the case for a viable and sustainable politics of engagement.     

The Political Psychology of Contemporary Anti-Politics: A Discursive Approach to the End-of-Ideology Era

This article advocates a discursive approach for examining political rhetoric. Such an approach is particularly useful for studying contemporary political ideology. The current political climate, especially in Britain, has been described as exemplifying a "Third Way," which is said to have replaced the old ideological division between "left" and "right" by a consensual, non-ideological politics. TThe discursive approach allow the analyst to look at the continuing dilemmas of an ideology that denies its ideological character. In discursive analyses of interviews with 20 elected local officials in the Midlands of England, the respondents (regardless of party affiliation) tended to give accounts that celebrated the development of consensual, less ideologically divisive politics. These accounts, however, were dilemmatic: As the speakers told of social change, they also stressed their own personal stability, as if they themselves existed outside the previous political climate. They also explicitly distanced themselves from the language of "left" and "right," but in this distancing a further ideological dilemma was detectable. All the local politicians were officially affiliated to a political party. In discursively subtle ways, the speakers used the left/right continuum as they distinguished between the parties, thereby showing the sort of variability that discursive theorists have noted in other contexts. The implications of such findings and of the discursive approach to studying ideology are discussed in relation to the possibilities for developing a critical political psychology.     

Contributions of the Cognitive Approach to Political Psychology

The social cognition tradition has had a strong impact on political psychology scholarship in the last part of the 20th century. The purpose of this essay is to review the contributions of the cognitive approach in helping political psychologists to better understand how citizens think about the world of politics. I consider research concerned with both the mental structure or representation of information about the political world and research concerned with specifying the cognitive processes that produce political judgments and opinion, and conclude that political cognition scholarship has begun to live up to its promise. In the second part of the essay, I suggest a research agenda for the future, pointing to ten directions for extending the political cognition paradigm.     

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.     

The Application of Social Role Theory to the Study of Gender in Politics

Social role theory provides a framework to help understand the complexity of gender in the political sphere. We demonstrate how SRT both helps to explain extant research findings and to generate future research that will help explain the complicated ways in which gender shapes U.S. politics. This article considers two broad categories of behavior: the gendered opinions and engagement of the citizenry and the gendered evaluations of political actors by elites and voters. Within each category, we propose moving beyond the male‐female binary and consider the effects of gender in conjunction with other key political identities, such as race, ethnicity, age, as well as examining the effects of (dis)ability, and class. As well, our work demonstrates how masculinity encompasses the U.S. political system and serves as a backdrop in front of which gender roles shape political behavior, and role incongruity can lead to prejudice. This project lays the groundwork for future work to apply theories from psychology to a gendered analysis of U.S. politics. Through a better understanding of sex, gender, and their combined effects with race and other intersectional identities, we contribute to a broader goal of creating a more inclusive U.S. politics.     

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.     

On the Importance of Attribution Theory in Political Psychology

Attribution theory, which was initially applied to the study of academic achievement, has generated a large amount of research in psychology. Judgments of causal responsibility, an important facet of attributions, have since been studied in a variety of other contexts, revealing that they pervade our understanding of the social world. The present paper considers the many ways in which causal judgments, particularly attributions of responsibility, influence political life. Examining scholarship primarily from the fields of psychology, political science, and sociology, I discuss how perceptions of responsibility are linked to ideology and how they influence policy attitudes (welfare, affirmative action, abortion, gay rights) and perceptions of international conflict (beliefs about terrorism and war). An argument is made for increased communication among fields and a more systematic application of attributional models to the study of political judgments.     

Psychology and the fall of Communism: The special case of (East) Germany

The fall of Communism is now universally agreed to be what the philosopher Hegel called a world historical event—one that few predicted but nearly everyone saw as inevitable after it happened. In the aftermath many lives—and worldviews—changed, not only, but also in the human sciences. These remarks attempt to address in a preliminary way both the impact of the fall of Communism on psychology in former East Germany (including changes in personnel and approach) and the ways in which these sciences were employed as resources for reflection on the Communist past as well as the transition to new social and political regimes.     

Undergraduate Education in Political Psychology

This article describes ways in which political psychology can be incorporated into undergraduate course curricula. The challenges of teaching political psychology to undergraduate students are discussed, and possibilities for the content and structure of undergraduate courses in political psychology are examined in the context of active learning. Suggestions for the development of an undergraduate major in political psychology are offered.     

On the Historical and Conceptual Foundations of a Community Psychology of Social Transformation

We examine historical and conceptual literature in community psychology in order to understand the field's potential to be the socially transformative subdiscipline of psychology to which it aspires. By reviewing papers from two prominent journals and other literature, we conclude that the claim that community psychology is well‐suited to social transformation, because it is a product of Sixties' radicalism and is theoretically equipped, is untenable. Systematic accounts of the subdiscipline's origins suggest that the transformative aspirations of current community psychologists do not correspond to the subdiscipline's reformist past. Furthermore, in analyzing three related concepts currently employed in the field—social justice, power, and praxis—we show that each suffers from conceptual ambiguity and a restricted political scope. These conceptual flaws, coupled with community psychology's historical inclination toward social reform, inhibit the possibility of contributing to radical social transformation. We conclude that neither questionable historical claims nor ambiguous and politically dubious concepts support a community psychology of social transformation. We offer solutions for the historical and conceptual problems we identify and, as a broader solution to the problem of engaging in socially transformative work, propose that community psychologists should seek direct political engagement in solidarity with other citizens as fellow citizens not as psychologists.     

The Discursive Frames of Political Psychology

The aim of this article is to apply elements of contemporary social theory to the major theoretical, methodological, 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.     

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.     

Notes for a Critical Personality Psychology: Making Room under the Critical Psychology Umbrella

Inspired by the liberation psychologist Martin‐Baró who provocatively defined personality as that of which individuals can be robbed in conditions of social injustice and research psychologists in training whose appreciation of the possibilities of personality psychology has been limited by the dominance of trait approaches, this paper claims that we need and can practice a critical personality psychology. Conceptual and methodological tools for such an enterprise are identified in two arenas of current research: the study of narratives and new forms of history in personality psychology. Within critical personality psychology, personality is understood to be an expression of (i) a multifaceted organization that includes individual, interpersonal, social, cultural, and political contexts; (ii) individual and social change; and (iii) the moral dimensions of human psychology. Notes on future directions draw on areas of inquiry within and outside personality psychology to insure a place under the critical psychology umbrella.     

Colonialism and Psychology of Culture

There has long been a criticism that scholarship devoted to the study of cultural variation in psychology has too easily ascribed the observed differences between different societies to essentialized notions of ‘culture’ while paying less attention to historical forces that shape these differences. In this paper, we argue that the conceptual frameworks of cross‐cultural and cultural psychology should allow for analysis of how major geopolitical events and historical processes bear on people's lives. Specifically, we point to colonialism, a discussion that has been less attended to in psychology, and argue that colonialism and its legacies exert a powerful influence on many worldwide populations. Analysis of colonialism and its legacies necessarily calls for attention to its prominent ideological cornerstones: race and ‘culture’, which are also central concepts in psychology as a global discipline. In psychology, colonialism has primarily been engaged in two ways: the study of the colonial impact on individuals; and the consideration of the colonial impact on the discipline and practice of psychology in formerly colonized nation states. We review this engagement and introduce examples of scholarship from each. This paper challenges the field to pay greater attention to sociopolitical discourses and historical contexts and, in turn, to theorize culture in ways that are responsive to the fluidity and complexity of social lives.     

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.     

Expanding the Political Psychology Toolkit: The Potential of Discursive Psychology for Understanding Contentious Political Debate at a Grassroots Level

In its location at the intersection of political science and psychology, political psychology draws on many of the research techniques of both disciplines in its exploration of power, voting behavior, leadership, attitudes, and values. One hitherto relatively underutilized approach for understanding public policy debate is discursive psychology (DP). Applying this perspective to a contentious policy issue in Australia, we seek to demonstrate that this approach can add richness and depth to our understanding of how ordinary citizens engage in public policy debates. We suggest that this type of analysis can augment insights obtained from more traditional methods—such as focus groups, experimental approaches, and opinion polling—by analyzing how debates are constructed and presented at the grassroots level. This research is innovative in two ways. First, it applies a rigorous, empirical research approach to an area in which it has not previously been used: the study of public policy issues. Second, rather than analyzing the communicative practices of political leaders, we consider the rhetorical arguments made by ordinary citizens in their engagement with political issues and how they negotiate what counts as evidence. This can provide insights into how public debate can be conducted more productively and respectfully.