Political Psychology

Kristen Renwick Monroe

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780805838862
• eBook ISBN: 9781135646608
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

With a list of contributors that reads like a "Who's Who" of political psychology, this comprehensive volume introduces the major concepts, debates, and themes in the field and provides an overview of its intellectual development, its disparate parts, the major controversies and some suggestions for the future direction of the field.

PART I

Political Psychology:
An Overview of the Field

1

What Is Political Psychology?

MORTON DEUTSCH
Columbia University

CATARINA KINNVALL
Lund University

Although its ancestry in social philosophy can be traced back to ancient times, modern political psychology as an academic discipline was born in the decades between the First and Second World Wars. It is a child of political science and psychology, having been conceived in the ambivalent mood of optimism and despair that has characterized the scientific age. Rapidly expanding knowledge, the increasing confidence in scientific methods, and the ever quickening technological developments stimulated the awareness that scientific methods might be applied to the understanding of political behavior. The increasing political turmoil, the irrationality and destructiveness of the First World War, the development of modern totalitarian regimes with their barbarities, the emergence of the mass media and their systematic use by propagandists, suggested an urgent need for more systematic knowledge about the relationship between political and psychological processes.

The first notable link between psychology and political science in the United States developed at the University of Chicago under the encouragement of the political scientist Charles Merriam (Davies, 1973). Merriam (1925, 1934) explicitly called for a scientific political science that would draw on psychology. It was one of Merriam’s students, Harold D. Lasswell, who responded to that call and, through his writings and his teachings, became the American founding father of political psychology as a new academic discipline.

Although Lasswell’s prolific writings touched on almost every topic of interest to political psychologists, his special emphasis on psychological processes as they affect political processes has been influential in shaping the approach of most American social scientists to the field of political psychology. His early books—Psychopathology and Politics (1930), World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935), Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How (1936), Power and Personality (1948)—helped to establish a distinctive psychological perspective for understanding political behavior, politics, and politicians. This perspective leads to a political psychology largely centering on individual and social psychological processes—such as motivation, conflict, perception, cognition, learning, socialization, attitude formation, and group dynamics—and on individual personality and psychopathology as the causal factors influencing political behavior.

The strong emphasis on psychological processes as determinants of political processes in American political psychology has led to a relative neglect of the study of the influence of political processes on psychological processes. European political psychology, although much influenced by American political psychology, has been less one-sided. The greater impact of the Marxist perspective in Europe has evoked more awareness of the role of political processes in shaping psychological processes and personality. Thus, Max Horkheimer, in his 1931 inaugural address as Director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, insisted that institute members should explore the interconnection between the economic life of society, the psychic development of the individual, and transformations in the realm of culture (Held, 1980). Various members of the Frankfurt school and those associated with the development of “critical theory”—Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and Habermas—have made important contributions to the integration of the political–economic orientations of Marxist theory with the psychological perspectives of Freudian theory.

How political, economic, and social processes are affecting individuals has also been the concern of a number of more recent European sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. Giddens, in the development of his structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984, 1990), depicts the view that agency and structure, or the individual and society, are mutually constituted and cannot be understood as separate entities. Similar to earlier sociologists such as Bourdieu (1977), Bauman (1973), and Berger and Luckmann (1966), Giddens is especially interested in those aspects of human agency that express the power of individuals to transform their social and political circumstances. The influence of sociology on political psychology has taken a number of expressions. Theorists concerned with political culture (Almond & Verba, 1963; Pye, 1986; Inglehart, 1990, 1996), political socialization (Renshon, 1977, 1989, 2000; Merelman, 1986; Wilson, 1988), and learning (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988; Sigel, 1989; Bermeo, 1992; Levy, 1994), have all contributed to the understanding of how structures and cultures inform individual action and behavior.

In our view, the field of political psychology is the study of the interaction of political and psychological processes; this is a bidirectional interaction. Just as cognitive capabilities limit and affect the nature of the political and social world of political agents so, also, the structures and processes of politics affect cognitive capabilities. Thus, 5-year-olds and mature adults, partly as a result of their differences in cognitive capabilities, develop rather different sorts of political structures and processes; similarly, certain sorts of political structures and processes foster the development of the intelligent, autonomous, reflective, active characteristics of mature adults, whereas others encourage the development of immature, passive, dependent, uncritical cognitive capabilities resembling those of a submissive child.

The field of political psychology is defined not only by its subject-matter, the interrelationship between political and psychological processes, but also by its approach to its subject-matter. This approach has historically been in the scientific tradition. As Nagel (1961) pointed out: “It is the desire for explanations which are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science” (p.). The scientifically oriented political psychologist seeks to develop explanatory hypotheses for the phenomena of interest that have logical consequences precise enough to be genuinely testable. The explanatory hypotheses, in other words, must be subject to the possibility of rejection through empirically verifiable and scientifically competent evidence that has been obtained by procedures employed with the intent of eliminating known sources of error. As Nagel (1961) indicated:

The practice of scientific method is the persistent critique of arguments, in the light of tried canons for judging the reliability of the procedures by which evidential data are obtained, and for assessing the probative force of the evidence on which conclusions are based. (p.)

A scientifically oriented political psychology must, by necessity, be concerned with “methodology”: It must be concerned with developing the “tried canons” for judging the reliability of procedures for collecting data and for assessing the validity of the evidence for testing explanatory hypotheses. It must also be concerned with developing the data collection procedures that will produce reliable and valid data.

The practice of scientific method in a field such as political psychology is difficult to achieve and to sustain. The inherent nature of its subject-matter makes it largely inappropriate to transfer uncritically the methodological canons of the well-established physical and biological sciences to political psychology. Yet there is the common temptation to use the natural sciences as a model and also the opposite temptation to reject the possibility of a scientific approach because the appropriateness of the model is rejected. The scientific approach of the natural sciences has mainly reflected a technical cognitive interest (Habermas, 1971) that has been oriented toward developing knowledge for instrumental action toward defined goals under given conditions. To the extent that the social sciences, including political psychology, have uncritically imitated the methodologies appropriate to a technical cognitive interest, they have tended to neglect the fact that human action has to be understood with reference to the meanings that the action has for the actors and for its audience: Human action is rooted in intersubjective contexts of communication, in intersubjective practices and forms of life that have distinctive historical origins (Bernstein, 1976; Giddens, 1984, 1991). The uncritical imitation of the technical orientation of the natural sciences has also led many social scientists to ignore how their theoretical and empirical work—that is, their scientific activities—are influenced by the implicit assumptions, the value positions, ideological orientations, and political–economic viewpoints in the communities in which they participate.

Common as such imitation of an exalted, older idol is, it has had some ill-effects on the development of a scientific political psychology. It has led some to confuse “scientism” and science: namely, to consider techniques labeled “objective,” “behavioristic,” “value free,” and “quantitative” as scientific even when critical reflection would have revealed how inappropriate the techniques (as well as the labels) were, and also how thoroughly value-laden they were. Others have reacted against the pseudo-objectivism of scientism by a retreat to an unbridled subjectivism, a subjectivism which, in effect, denies the possibility or value of an intersubjective methodology for the scientific study of political psychology. Present academic discourse tends to describe these in the juxtaposed terminology of rationalism versus postmodernism, where the former reflects a belief in active, rational, goal-oriented individuals with strong selves, whereas the latter sees individual subjectivity as a historical discursive construction lacking any such thing as a core-self. Both are, of course, simplified accounts of complex processes. Not only do they disregard the intersubjective nature of individuals, but they also fail to acknowledge the bidirectional interplay between psychological and political processes.

Fortunately, neither scientism nor subjectivism is the dominant trend in political psychology. Most political psychologists are practitioners of the well-tried art of “methodological opportunism.” They employ research designs and established procedures—for example, content analysis, systematic interviewing, questionnaire methods, analysis of nonverbal behavior, small-group experiments, projective techniques, controlled observa- tions, polling, analysis of recorded data—borrowed from any of the various behavioral and social science disciplines and adapted so as to be appropriate to the problem they are investigating. If the research design or procedures are poorly implemented by the researcher or inappropriate to the research problem, one can normally expect that the “persistent critique of arguments, in the light of tried canons” will reveal the deficiencies in the research (if the research is considered significant enough to warrant attention). Sometimes, of course, error goes unrecognized because everyone in a field of study is subject to the same incorrect assumption.

Much of the work being done in political psychology is exploratory and formulative, meant to stimulate insight and to develop hypotheses rather than to test them. There is considerable latitude in doing such research but inasmuch as there are no good rules for being creative, a good deal of exploratory research turns out to be unproductive. The latitudes for acceptable descriptive and hypothesis-testing kinds of studies are much smaller. The rules and procedures for conducting such studies are fairly well articulated. Nevertheless, many such studies, even when done well technically, are often of little value because not enough critical thought has preceded the formulation of the research problem. A common critique of small-group experiments and controlled observations, for instance, has to do with their sometimes irrelevant conclusions for understanding and predicting an outside world affected by cultural and structural constraints under whose influence individuals act. Another and more recent critique has to do with the methodological differences between political science and psychology which, according to Hermann (1989), may threaten to make the promise of a field of political psychology a mere fantasy. This divide is particularly evident in case study research (Tetlock, 1983), where political scientists and psychologists simply lack a common language for their investigations (Kaarbo & Beasley, 1999).

Although much political psychology is in the scientific tradition, it is also concerned with being socially useful and with applying its knowledge and insights to improvement of political processes and to human betterment. Many of the “applications” are speculative in the sense that there are numerous important gaps in our relevant theoretical and empirical knowledge and we must take a s...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: AN OVERVIEW
• PART I: POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIELD
• PART II: POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN RELATION TO OTHER FIELDS
• PART III: SPECIAL AREAS OF APPLICATION
• PART IV: FOCUS ON THE FUTURE
• CONTRIBUTORS