Is Democratic Toleration a Rubber Duck?

Democratic politicians face pressures unknown to the prerogative rulers of the early modern period when toleration was first formulated as a political ideal. These pressures are less often expressed as demands by groups or individuals for the permission of practices they dislike than for their restraint or outright prohibition; tolerant dispositions are less politically clamorous. The executive structure of toleration as a virtue, together with the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’, make conflicts over toleration peculiarly intractable. Political conflicts are apt to take the form of mutual allegations ofintolerance; indeed, the problem of ‘tolerating the intolerant’, far from being a marginal case, is central to the theory and practice of toleration. Toleration thus exemplifies a category mistake committed in much contemporary political theory, particularly in its contractualist versions: the threshold of the political lies precisely where rational agreement proves impossible. The main prospects for democratic toleration are thus pre-emptive. The main way in which this can happen is by cultivating executive dispositions: in other words, encouraging people to detach themselves from strong evaluative commitments, so that toleration does not become politically contentious to start with. But this involves losses as well as gains. The gains in civil harmony and peace are obvious. The cost for tolerant political actors is alienation from what they have good reason to value. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

When Likeness Goes with Liking: The Case of Political Preference

Three studies show that people tend to vote for politicians (i.e., either Romano Prodi or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or George W. Bush or John Kerry in the United States) whose traits they rate as being most similar to their own. People perceived higher similarity between themselves and political figures with respect to traits that were most distinctive of each platform and their respective leaders. These findings, while corroborating the similarity-attraction relationship, further attest to the role that personal characteristics of both voters and candidates play in orienting political preference.     

The Experiences of Indigenous Australian Psychologists at University

Disparities exist between Indigenous Australians and non‐Indigenous Australians on indicators of life expectancy, alcohol and drug use, adult and juvenile incarceration, and rates of hospitalisation for self‐harm, suicide, and mental and behavioural disorders due to psychoactive substance use. Psychology is a discipline that can assist in remedying these issues, yet disparities are evident in Indigenous participation in higher education generally, as well as within tertiary psychology education specifically. Ten Indigenous Australian psychologists were interviewed to investigate possible barriers and enablers for Indigenous students studying psychology at university. Hermeneutic phenomenology guided the research and its analysis, whereby the data went through a process known as the “hermeneutic circle”; data were analysed in itself, as well as part of the whole, leading to the world views of the participant and researcher converging into a “horizon of meaning.” Sources of support for Indigenous students included family support, financial assistance, and Indigenous student support centres. Potential barriers to university study of psychology were negative conceptions of higher education and psychology by the Indigenous community, “culture shock” upon relocating to the metropolitan area, a lack of Indigenous content and staff, and culturally insensitivity by staff members. Efforts should be made to address these barriers to participation, as well as to support those structures and services that were supportive for students.     

“My natural environment has provided me with about fifty different ways of expressing frustration”: Mining the visceral angst of Australian Rules football followers

Modern spectator sports provoke intense bodily passions in fans as well as athletes yet the embodied emotions of sports fans are understudied. This paper explores the frustrations of Australian Rules football supporters. Drawing on psychoanalysis and religious studies it traces the expressions and possible causes of their frustration by mining material from a set of interviews with fans along with the comments of Australian Rules football followers in books, articles and internet forums. An underlying question is how the frustrations of these football supporters might reveal something of the intersections of emotion, bodies and sport that spectator sports provoke.     

An Investigation of Psychology Staffing in Australian Metropolitan Acute Public Hospitals

Psychology is one component of the multidisciplinary services provided to patients in acute public hospitals, with research demonstrating that psychological intervention significantly enhances clinical outcomes for patients across a range of health issues. Despite the increasingly important role that psychologists play in Australian hospitals, there remains a lack of information available about staff levels, discipline structures, and clinical activity for psychological services within acute hospital settings. The most recent Australian data about hospital‐based psychology services was collected 20 years ago. The current study provides updated information from a survey of 15 Australian metropolitan, acute public hospitals: presenting and critically reviewing staffing configurations and models of service delivery. Results suggest that: (a) hospitals employ a highly skilled workforce at a rate of 0.16 full‐time equivalent psychology staff for every 10 hospital beds; (b) psychologists have a viable career pathway within the hospital‐based health sector; (c) role diversity is common, with the primary focus varying as a function of position level; (d) neuropsychology staffing requires urgent attention to address significant delays in access to services; and (e) public hospitals actively contribute to current and future workforce development through supervision, research, and training. The implications of these results for the future of psychological services in Australian healthcare are discussed.     

Talking to God Among a Cloud of Witnesses: Collective Prayer as a Meaningful Performance

There has been much work on the effects that individual prayer has on a variety of social‐psychological indicators, yet there remains a lack of research on collective prayer. While it is tempting to assume that collective prayer may be analyzed as the aggregate of individual prayers, the research presented in this article suggests that worshipers pray differently when in community than when by themselves. To understand the role of collective prayer in the practices of faith communities, I draw on work on group culture and ritual to create a framework for analyzing collective prayer. I assert that collective prayer represents a meaningful social performance that locates those conducting it within wider fields of meaning. I conclude with suggestions for future work, including examining how collective prayer acts as an element of conflict as well as unity.     

Effect of Perceived Politics and Perceived Support on Bullying and Emotional Exhaustion: The Moderating Role of Type A Personality

Recognizing that bullying can occur in varying degrees of severity, the current study suggest the importance of individual traits in individual perceptions of being targets of bullying and ensuing emotional exhaustion. The present study extends the work environment hypothesis and trait activation theory by a joint investigation of the mediating role of (a) workplace bullying in linking perceived organization politics and perceived organization support with emotional exhaustion and (b) the moderating role of Type A behavioral pattern in influencing the mediation. Using a field sample of 262 employees working in different organizations of Pakistan, this study tested a moderated mediation model. Results were consistent with the hypothesized model, in that workplace bullying mediated the relationship of perceived organization politics and perceived organization support with emotional exhaustion. Type A behavior moderated the perceived politics—bullying, perceived support–bullying, and bullying—emotional exhaustion relationships. The mediation of bullying varied with levels of Type A behavior in these relationships.     

“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.