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What are the critical issues underlying the psychology of ethics and care in a global world? This exciting volume argues that globalization, multiculturalism, and group conflict must be reconceptualized from an ethical perspective to fully appreciate the extent to which people will act on behalf of others in a global world. In particular, the authors problematize the concepts of globalization, ethics, and care by discussing how local and global linkages may be constructed to produce diverse ethical results, depending on context. Deciphering the political psychology of real or perceived violence in a global world calls for such a new approach to understand both the collective experience and the shaping of subjectivity. The editors have assembled some of the top political psychologists to construct an interdisciplinary approach that elucidates how political, economic, social, and psychological forces interact and are mutually reinforced in a global context. Taken as a whole, the contributions explore the difficulties and possibilities for caring for others by moving beyond cognitive differences and inequalities of power. Individual chapters explore issues of social courage, bystander intervention, the psychology of prolonged occupation, political conflict and moral reasoning, the relationship between identification, threat and attitudes, and the psychology of altruism and tolerance, with special focus on societies from Finland, Germany and Northern Ireland to Israel, Poland, and the United States.

Although known as “the age of reason,” the eighteenth century was actually an era in which many leading moral and political philosophers placed equal emphasis on feeling. While Enlightenment rationalists such as Immanuel Kant separated reflective reason from the unreflective mental faculties which must obey its commands, their sentimentalist contemporaries such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. G. Herder did not. Instead, they saw moral and political reflection as the proper work of the mind as a whole. Without emotion, imagination and the imaginative sharing of emotion then known as “sympathy,” we would be incapable of developing the reflectively-refined moral sentiments which are the basis of our commitment to justice and virtue. This book seeks to reclaim the sentimentalist theory of reflection as a resource for enriching social science, normative theory, and political practice today.

While scholars in political science, social psychology and mass communications have made notable contributions to our understanding of democratic citizenship, they concentrate on very different aspects of the overall problem. The current volume challenges this fragmentary pattern of inquiry, and adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of citizenship, which holds great potential for insight and integration across topic areas, and for the development of informed interventions aimed at meeting challenges faced by democratic citizens. 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. These also represent themes for which scholars may not be aware of work in other disciplines on the same topic, or where scholars are insufficiently aware of such work and might well benefit from greater intellectual commerce. In other words, these are themes that provide opportunities for the interdisciplinary cross-talk that characterizes contributions to this volume by scholars from psychology, political science, sociology, and mass communications. In the final section, 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, the 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 provide us with a more nuanced understanding of citizenship issues — and perhaps even of competing democratic theories — in democratic societies.

Using theory and data from leading online social media, Gainous and Wagner illustrate how platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are bypassing traditional media and creating a new forum for the exchange of political information and campaigning. Beginning with a strong theoretical foundation grounded in political, communications, and psychology literature, this book examines the effect of online social media on how people come to learn, understand, and engage in politics. By lowering the cost of both supplying the information and obtaining it, social networking applications have recreated how, when, and where people are informed. The authors illustrate how political actors utilized these Internet networks to control the flow of information and win elections. These new and growing online communities are a new forum for the exchange of information that is governed by relationships formed and maintained outside traditional media. With an approach grounded in both social science theory and empirical data, Gainous and Wagner show how the online social media revolution is creating a new paradigm for political communication and shifting the very foundation of the political process.

In an era of global risk and uncertainty, individuals and political communities have been exposed to an increasingly broad and unpredicted range of economic, strategic, cultural, and political forces. Rapidly accelerating changes and sudden events exert an impact everywhere from the broadest planetary scale down to the scope of the individual mind and heart. This book explores how these shifts and shocks have conditioned the identity strategies adopted by Muslim minorities in order to construct their roles as political actors. On the basis of conversations with Muslims, the data uncover three typical identity strategies, each shaped by the citizenship regimes of particular Western states: retreatism, essentialism, and engagement. Grounded in an analysis of their colonial histories, patterns of immigration, and citizenship regimes, six Western countries—Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—serve as places for exploration of the emergence of Muslim political identities. Those regimes that have best been able to balance individual and community rights have most adequately promoted the politics of engagement, while regimes that focus on antiterrorist legislation and exclusionary majority discourses have conditioned retreatist and essentialist identity strategies among both minority and majority communities. In addition to describing the politics of engagement, the book makes the normative case for a climate of engagement among both minority and majority political communities, grounded in recognition, dialogue, deep multiculturalism, and a new global and “cosmopolitical” consciousness.

This book explores unique survey and interview data on the personality characteristics of British politicians, specifically the Basic Human Values of Members of Parliament (MPs). In doing so, it offers original insights into three compelling questions: Who enters politics and how are they different to the general public? Do politicians’ personality characteristics matter for their behaviour once they are elected to parliament? Do voters really get the ‘wrong’ politicians? Data collected from MPs are evaluated alongside comparable surveys and experiments conducted with over 400 elected councillors, over 500 unsuccessful candidates, and thousands of UK citizens. Synthesising the conceptual and empirical wisdom of political science and psychology, Weinberg uses these data and the governing questions above as a springboard from which to take an innovative and analytical dive into related areas of academic research and public interest. These include, for example, the role of basic values vis-à-vis candidate emergence and political ambition, parliamentary representation and legislative behaviour, and public voting habits. Through careful empirical analysis and theoretical dissection, this book shows that (a) politics is a profession few 'ordinary' people care to enter, (b) politicians’ basic values impact a range of actual legislative behaviours, and (c) voters have clear psychological preferences when it comes to choosing their representatives. Readers will find this book to be distinctive in its approach to familiar issues predominant in academic, popular and journalistic press. The substantive findings presented in this book do, therefore, tell a human story that has appeal beyond the ivory towers of academia.

Why did Tony Blair take Britain to war with Iraq? Because, this book argues, he was following the core political beliefs and style—the Blair identity—manifest and consistent throughout his decade in power. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and finally Iraq were wars to which Blair was drawn due to his black-and-white framing of the world, his overwhelming confidence that he could shape events, and his tightly-held, presidential style of government. This new application of political psychology to the British prime ministership analyses every answer Blair gave to a foreign policy question in the House of Commons during his decade in power in order to develop a portrait of the prime minister as decision maker. Drawing upon original interviews with major political, diplomatic and military figures at the top of British politics, the book reconstructs Blair's wars, tracing his personal influence on British foreign policy and international politics during his tumultuous tenure.

Why Tolerance Triumphed is the first accessible, data-driven account of how the LGBTQ movement achieved its most unexpected victory---the liberalization of mass opinion on gay rights. The current academic understanding of how social movements change mass opinion---through sympathetic media coverage and endorsements from political leaders---cannot provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenal success of the LGBTQ movement at changing the public’s views. The book argues that these factors were not the direct cause of changing attitudes, but contributed indirectly by signalling to other LGBTQ people across the United States that their lives were valued. The net result was a huge increase in the number of LGBTQ people who ‘came out’ and lived their lives openly. Building on recent breakthroughs in social and political psychology, the study introduces the theory of Affective Liberalization. This theory states that meeting and interacting with lesbians and gays in person---or by watching lesbian and gay characters via entertainment media---leads to more durable attitude change by subtly warming peoples’ subconscious reactions to lesbians and gays. Using expansive date-sets and cutting edge social science methods, the book finds that increased exposure to LGBTQ people, triggered by ACT-UP’s activism, provides a singular, compelling and complete explanation for the success of the LGBTQ movement in changing mass opinion.