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Provides an overview of the ways political scientists have explained political behaviour. Traces the development of approaches from the early electoral studies to economic models, to combinations of context and political agency in a political sociological response, and finally to a return to the individual voter in the form of political psychology. The politics of race is discussed as an example of the interaction of individual and social effects, representing the direction in which the broader political behaviour sub‐discipline is heading.

This chapter gives an overview of approaches to the study of governments, building explicitly on the work of A. King (1975) and C. Campbell (1993), who, respectively, offered three research themes (composition, internal dynamics and external relations) and three theoretical perspectives (institutionalism, rational choice and political sociology/psychology). Each of the three research themes is discussed separately, using examples that illustrate the theoretical perspectives: under ‘composition’, the examples are coalition formation (rational choice) and recruitment/motivation (political sociology/psychology); under ‘internal dynamics’, the examples are prime–ministerial v. cabinet government (institutionalism) and political roles/groupthink (political sociology/psychology); and under ‘external relations’, the examples are executive–legislative relations (institutionalism) and control over bureaucracy (rational choice). The last section of the chapter compares the three theoretical approaches.

In contemporary social-scientific work on citizenship and current challenges to the effective practice of citizenship, fragmentation in analysis and focus seems to be the rule. While scholars in political science, social psychology and mass communications have all made notable contributions to our understanding of present-day citizenship, it is suggested in this chapter that they concentrate on very different aspects of the overall problem. In light of this fragmentary pattern of inquiry, it is submitted that an explicitly interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of citizenship holds great potential for insight and integration across topic areas, and for the development of informed interventions aimed at meeting challenges currently faced by democratic citizens. This introductory chapter overviews five carefully selected themes related to democratic citizenship that address the key challenges to existing perspectives on citizenship. These are 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 excellent opportunities for the interdisciplinary cross-talk that we have encouraged in the various contributions to this volume.

The field of political psychology is currently flourishing, owing by and large to the strength it draws from its interdisciplinary nature. Interdisciplinary connections can generally be characterized as exportation: borrowing a principle from the other discipline while remaining steadfastly within one's own disciplinary paradigm. While exportation has yielded numerous important findings, political psychology stands to benefit the most from synergistic interdisciplinary connections. This chapter explores why genuine synergy has been so rare, and provides guidance for developing a synergistic interdisciplinary research agenda.

This chapter focuses on why all of the participants—rescuers, bystanders, or perpetrators—had claimed that they had no choice in how they treated others during World War II. It argues that self-image is the central psychological variable, with rescuers, bystanders, and Nazi supporters revealing dramatically different self-concepts. Identity constrains choice for all individuals, not just rescuers, though character and self-image are not all there is to it. The chapter further asserts that the ethical importance of values works through the fashion in which values are integrated into the speaker's sense of self and worldview. Personal suffering, in the form of past trauma, heightens awareness of the plight of others for rescuers; for bystanders and Nazis, however, it increases a sense of vulnerability manifesting itself in a defensive posture and heightened in-group/out-group distinctions. Finally, the chapter notes that the speakers' cognitive categorization systems carry strong ethical overtones.

This chapter investigates perceptions of policy and partisan polarization through the use of an interactive histogram procedure (in which respondents were asked to raise and lower bars to reflect what they perceived to be the distribution of the public on some issue). The chapter discusses how respondents handled this task, as well as the reliability of the estimates it provided. Respondents were able to use this novel method to report their perceptions and to do so in ways that were not merely the result of projecting their own attitudes. The chapter then turns to a set of important issues in political perception that these data permit us to address.

A large body of psychological research on citizen competence has resoundingly suggested that citizens are ill-equipped to meet the demands of sound democratic decision making. This chapter challenges this view, arguing that democratic politics presents a wide array of challenges, each demanding different civic skills. In particular, it contends that it is necessary to embrace a more agonistic view of democratic politics — one that places citizens at the center of a conflict over power and resources. Drawing broadly on interdisciplinary evidence, the chapter argues that citizens are actually quite adept at meeting the challenges of self-governance in the democratic polity.

This chapter reflects on the curious puzzle of how identity can influence moral choice, and why. In so doing the chapter discusses the background context within which this volume operates, as it traces an initial intellectual objective of explaining the psychology of genocide to an exploration of how the themes found in the Holocaust resonate with other periods of genocide, other instances of ethnic cleansing, other acts of prejudice, discrimination and group hatred, and animosity, just as they resonate with other instances of compassion, heroic altruism, and moral courage. The psychological forces at work during the Holocaust, this chapter argues, partake of the same political psychology underlying other political acts driven by identity. From here, the chapter develops a new theory of moral choice to tackle these issues and gives a brief overview of the succeeding chapters.

Chapter 1 introduces the central argument of the book by addressing a critically important matter that has so far been only gestured toward in the vast literature on globalization: the political psychological experience of living in a rapidly changing world. The chapter is centrally concerned with how narratives and discourses affect notions of self and others and how they construct and influence identity constructions among both majority and minority communities. More specifically, the chapter explores the ways in which political identities are actively struggled over, constructed by, and disseminated among both majority and minority group members in the context of a range of political projects. The focus is on diasporic and “postdiasporic” (second- and subsequent generations) Muslims living in the West and the various identity strategies available to them in a world characterized by global change and discourses on terror. The chapter also provides an overview of the book.

Reconciliation is now being considered in the areas of political science and political psychology because of the notion that peacemaking should be looked into with a macrosocietal perspective, thus involving reconciliation among the members of society instead of merely resolving conflict. The formal resolution of conflict usually only involves leaders, undermining the fact that they only account for a small portion of a society and that the members of the society may still be at war with each other. Reconciliation involves modifying motivations, beliefs, and attitudes of the majority, and such activities promote establishing or renewing relations within a group. This chapter looks into the nature of reconciliation as an outcome of a peacemaking and as a process.

This chapter describes how three philosophers' thinking about the emotions continues to be relevant for political psychology, arguing that philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and David Hume were systematic thinkers who grounded their ethical and political theories in a descriptive psychology of human experience. Plato's analysis of regime types in terms of modal motivating emotions points toward a kind of comparative or historical political psychology. Aristotle tries to work more cooperatively with human nature as he finds it in his psychology, and the consequence is that he countenances regimes which strike us as more plausible as well. Hume's thoroughgoing psychological naturalism, along with his attack on religious dogmatism, were in themselves part of his political theory. The impulse to theorize in systematic ways, to do psychology with political intent, serves to advance both the science of psychology and the political goals that it might serve.

Chapter 6 argues that the project of mental transformation in the service of revolution transpired largely beyond the institution. Imbued with the utopian spirit of social engineering, mental health professionals mobilized to implement their plans for psychological transformation. Nevertheless, as psychiatrists in particular discovered, this was a project that the revolutionary leadership itself planned to direct, and in many cases they were forced to take a backseat to its sui generis reeducation experiments. The end result was the unmistakable politicization of psychological change, as an assemblage of psychiatric concepts, language, and practice imbued official expectations and popular experiences of the revolutionary moment.

This chapter, which connects political psychology and decision neuroscience by addressing the challenges to the development of theory about the role of emotions in decision making, also considers the recent work in areas relating emotional processes to prudential decision making and reward, as well as social judgment. The dichotomy between cognition and emotion is described. In addition, a proposal that seeks to develop the concept of emotional processing within the context of complex decision making is reported. The methodological challenges strongly indicate that construction of inferential models of information processing in the brain needs to proceed by an integrative approach. Judgment and decision making in the social realm demonstrates some of the strongest links with emotional processing. The outlook for productive collaborative work between decision neuroscientists and political psychologists is promising.