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Abstract
The summer of 2011 has seen the first mass-scale social protest in Israel in its 70 years of existence. This social wave that shook the country, showed unique characteristics a-typical of most social and political uprisings, that go largely unexplained by social theories of social change and crowd psychology. In this article I am analyzing published reports of the social protest of 2011, and draw the analogy with the concept of 'Agoral Gathering' that may account for these events and support discussion of their aftermath.

AbstractHow does parties' use of moral rhetoric affect voter behavior? Prior comparative party research has studied party positions without much attention to how parties explain and justify their positions. Drawing insights from political and moral psychology, I argue that moral rhetoric mobilizes copartisan voters by activating positive emotions about their partisan preference. I expect this to hold among copartisans who are exposed to party rhetoric. To test my argument, I measure moral rhetoric by text‐analyzing party manifestos from six English‐speaking democracies and measure mobilization using copartisan turnout in survey data. The results support my argument. Furthermore, I find evidence in support of the theoretical mechanism using survey experiments and panel survey data from Britain. The article shows that moral rhetoric is a party campaign frame that has important consequences for voter behavior.

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation.

This book analyses how practitioners can use psychotherapy as a healing mechanism, focusing on the intersection of gender, power, and social justice within the global context. It begins by interrogating the concept of social justice itself before examining men's and women's issues from biological, sociological, contextual, and ecological perspectives. Each chapter covers individual, couple, and family therapy as well as training and supervising for heterosexual and homosexual individuals from a social justice standpoint. Witha centered andbalanced perspective about the impactof gender and power on men's and women's relationships to each other and their ecological contexts,Daneshpour aims to help mental health practitioners privilege client voices, promote justice in gendered relationships, and manage the impact of socio-political issues in therapeutic practice.

"Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life"--

It is widely supposed that the most suitable partner will be someone very much like oneself; gay fiction and cinema are often organized around this assumption. Nonetheless, power differentials are remarkably persistent -- as well as sexy. What are the personal and political implications of this insight?Sinfield argues that hierarchies in interpersonal relations are continuous with the main power differentials of our social and political life (gender, class, age, and race); therefore it is not surprising that they govern our psychic lives. Recent writing enables an exploration of their positive

Opponents rarely go to war without thinking they can win--and clearly, one side must be wrong. This conundrum lies at the heart of the so-called "war puzzle": rational states should agree on their differences in power and thus not fight. But as Dominic Johnson argues in Overconfidence and War, states are no more rational than people, who are susceptible to exaggerated ideas of their own virtue, of their ability to control events, and of the future. By looking at this bias--called "positive illusions"--as it figures in evolutionary biology, psychology, and the politics of international conflict, this book offers compelling insights into why states wage war. Johnson traces the effects of positive illusions on four turning points in twentieth-century history: two that erupted into war (World War I and Vietnam); and two that did not (the Munich crisis and the Cuban missile crisis). Examining the two wars, he shows how positive illusions have filtered into politics, causing leaders to overestimate themselves and underestimate their adversaries--and to resort to violence to settle a conflict against unreasonable odds. In the Munich and Cuban missile crises, he shows how lessening positive illusions may allow leaders to pursue peaceful solutions. The human tendency toward overconfidence may have been favored by natural selection throughout our evolutionary history because of the advantages it conferred--heightening combat performance or improving one's ability to bluff an opponent. And yet, as this book suggests--and as the recent conflict in Iraq bears out--in the modern world the consequences of this evolutionary legacy are potentially deadly

Conspiracy mentality (CM), the general propensity to believe in conspiracy theories, has been linked to political behaviors, prejudice, and non‐compliance with public health guidelines. While there is increasing evidence that conspiracy beliefs are pervasive, research on individual‐level predictors of CM is scarce. Specifically, we identify three gaps in research: First, evidence on the question which individual‐level characteristics predict CM is inconsistent and often based on small samples. Second, personality, political, and religious predictors are usually examined in isolation. Third, differences on the societal level have been mostly neglected. In the present research, we gathered CAWI (Study 1) and CATI (Study 2) data on generalized interpersonal trust (GIT), right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), and religiosity in two politically and culturally different European countries, namely Germany (N = 2,760) and Poland (N = 2,651). This allowed for a well‐powered test of three theoretically relevant predictors of CM, including their unique predictive value. Moreover, we were able to explore whether these associations replicate across or are moderated by country context. Our findings underline the role of GIT and RWA in predicting CM in both countries. Analyses based on RWA subdimensions yielded a differentiated picture of the role of RWA. Furthermore, we found cross‐country differences with stronger associations of GIT and RWA with CM in Germany. Findings are discussed concerning political and religious differences between the examined countries.

AbstractStarting from the debate on democratic decline, this article introduces the concept of 'mainstreaming authoritarianism' in a bid to turn attention to the role and agency of traditional political actors in the process. The article summarises key findings of relevant studies on autocratisation and highlights issues with the many concepts employed to describe the problem. It moves on to define authoritarianism and suggests a turn towards practice‐based approaches. This facilitates the analysis of authoritarian discourses and practices of mainstream political actors in established democracies and helps bridge the gap between social psychology‐based and political science‐based classic conceptualisations of authoritarianism. Testing the hypothesis that authoritarianism has been mainstreamed, the author develops a comparative survey of the actions and practices of key political actors in Europe, concluding with a note on the importance of acknowledging this authoritarian turn, dealing with its consequences and focussing on the role of agency.

Developed democracies in Europe and elsewhere are experiencing an unprecedented influx of culturally diverse immigrants and asylum seekers into their national communities. For the study of political psychology, a critical issue is how the pattern of ethnic group relations affects process of identity formation and change and, derivatively, the pattern of public support for a range of public policies with implications for social inclusion and equality. While there has been extensive commentary on the issue of multiculturalism both in America and abroad, the specific question of how the perceived threat of heightened immigrant diversity on the normative content of national identity (that is, the question of "who are we") has only recently begun to receive systematic attention in the scholarly literature.Multiculturalism has both a purely demographic and a political meaning. The politics of diversity also refers to specific policies governments enact in order to either encourage or discourage cultural pluralism. The specific policies at issue typically refer to the representation and recognition of minority groups and may encompass affirmative action, language policies, border control, access to welfare state programs, and citizenship laws. Debate has raged for years among political philosophers of multiculturalism over the desirability of such policies. Some suggest that government policies devoted to "cultural recognition" and minority group representation ease political tensions in these increasingly diverse communities and promote national loyalty. Others suggest the reverse: government attempts to promote cultural recognition through multiculturalism policy harden barriers among groups, foster prejudice and hostility to immigration, and erode the overall sense of national attachment in a country. This debate, too, has only now begun to receive rigorous empirical scrutiny.The present study examines three main questions: first, how can we think about what the social boundaries of the national community might be, and why do they matter? Are narrower, more bounded notions of the nation in-group related to mass preferences onimmigration, immigrants, and cultural diversity more generally? More centrally, this study examines how immigrant diversity and policies of cultural recognition shape mainstream citizens' conceptions of normative national identity. Is it indeed the case that ethnic diversity and political multiculturalism undermine social harmony, by provoking - via cultural threat - the desire among mainstream citizens to adhere to a more "ascriptive" and exclusionary definition of who truly belongs on their soil? Finally, I go to the heart of the philosophical debates on cultural recognition, by asking whether immigrants' allegiance to the nation is in indeed undermined in "multicultural" nations. Are they less willing to participate in the political process? Do they have less faith in the political system and governing institutions? Are they less trusting and/or socially engaged?Merging aggregate level economic and demographic measures with cross-national public opinion data, I argue that mass publics do indeed seem to have reacted to increased levels of immigrant diversity by constraining their notion of who truly belongs to the national community along more "ethnic" lines. Furthermore, this backlash has been heightened in the countries that have more fully committed themselves to cultural recognition, versus those that have favored minority integration; this finding provides empirical support for many of the philosophical critiques of multiculturalism that have emerged vociferously in recent years. On the other hand, immigrants themselves appear to benefit from political multiculturalism, all else equal; they exhibit higher levels of satisfaction with politics and politicians in their adoptive nation, and perceive substantially less discrimination against them along ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious lines.

Social media platforms are the latest manifestation in a series of sociotechnical innovations designed to enhance civic engagement, political participation, and global activism. While many researchers started out as optimists about the promise of social media for broadening participation and enhancing civic engagement, recent events have tempered that optimism. As this book goes to press, Facebook is fighting a battle over the massive disclosure of user information during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, social analytics company Cambridge Analytica is being revealed as a major player in micro profiling voters in that same election, bots and fake news factories are undermining democratic discourse via social media worldwide, and the president of the United States is unnerving the world as a stream-of-consciousness Twitter user. This book is a foundational review of current research on social media and civic engagement organized in terms of history, theory, practice, and challenges. History reviews how researchers and developers have continuously pushed the envelope to explore technology enhancements for political and social discourse. Theory reveals that the use of globally-networked social technologies touches many fields including political science, sociology, psychology, media studies, network science, and more. Practice is examined through studies of political engagement both in democratic situations and in confrontational situations. Challenges are identified in order to find ways forward. For better or worse, social media for civic engagement has come of age. Citizens, politicians, and activists are utilizing social media in innovative ways, while bad actors are discovering possibilities for spreading dissention and undermining trust. We are at a sobering inflection point, and this book is your foundation for understanding how we got here and where we are going

Although public support for political authorities, institutions, and even regimes is affected by the delivery of positive economic outcomes, we know that judgments on authorities are also made on the basis of several other aspects that fall into the general theme of "procedural fairness." So far, most of the literature examining satisfaction with democracy has, from this point of view, focused on the direct effects of both economic and procedural fairness indicators or evaluations. This study takes as its starting point a large number of studies in social psychology showing that procedural fairness moderates the effects of outcome favorability in the explanation of citizens' reactions to authorities. It expands those findings to the macro-political level, using representative samples of European populations in twenty-nine countries. It reveals that the general depiction of satisfaction with the way democracies work in practice as a fundamentally "performance-driven attitude" needs to qualified: economic evaluations matter, but they do not matter in the same way in all contexts and for all people, with procedural fairness playing a relevant moderating role in this respect.

UsingPetrocik's (1996)theory of issue ownership as a point of departure, I develop and test a theory of "trait ownership" that provides an explanation for the origins of candidate trait perceptions and illustrates an important way that candidates affect voters. Specifically, I argue for a direct connection between the issues owned by a political party and evaluations of the personal attributes of its candidates. As a result, the American public views Republicans as stronger leaders and more moral, while Democrats hold advantages on compassion and empathy. I also draw on "expectations gap" arguments from psychology and political science to demonstrate how a candidate may gain an electoral advantage by successfully "trespassing" on his opponent's trait territory. National Election Studies data from the 1980–2004 presidential elections are used to demonstrate the existence, durability, and effects of trait ownership in contemporary American political campaigns.