Suchergebnisse

The attitudes of the European Union (EU) citizens towards immigration and the impact of their national identification on attitudes towards the EU have received ample attention in the literature. However, the immigrants' identification with Europe has not been adequately studied. This article investigates the impact of non-EU immigration heritage on European identification. Based on social identity theory and using Eurobarometer cross-sectional data, it compares the European identification of those with a first generation non-EU immigration heritage to that of EU country natives. Moreover, it focuses on salient aspects of immigrant experience such as country policies directed at reducing discrimination and personal experience of discrimination. The results show that those with non-EU immigration heritage have higher European identification compared to the natives. Furthermore, in line with social identity theory, this article shows that successful anti-discrimination policies pull immigrants towards national identification rather than European identification.

This article takes a comparative political behaviour approach to examine the multifaceted nature of Turkey's European Union (EU) membership bid from the perspective of the EU citizens. We propose a multidimensional explanation for EU citizens' attitude towards Turkey's membership by referring to the political psychology literature on attitudinal ambivalence. We examine whether EU citizens simultaneously hold multiple and conflicting considerations on Turkey's EU accession bid, and whether this ambivalence has attitudinal consequences. To that end, we use the Eurobarometer 66.1 data set to analyze the EU public attitudes on various aspects of possible Turkish EU membership. The findings show that the EU citizens maintain ambivalent views about Turkish membership across three domain pairs: economy-security, immigration-security and population-culture. The significant impact of these ambivalence domains on increasing support for Turkey's membership to the EU is further discussed in the article. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis article takes a comparative political behaviour approach to examine the multifaceted nature of Turkey's European Union (EU) membership bid from the perspective of the EU citizens. We propose a multidimensional explanation for EU citizens' attitude towards Turkey's membership by referring to the political psychology literature on attitudinal ambivalence. We examine whether EU citizens simultaneously hold multiple and conflicting considerations on Turkey's EU accession bid, and whether this ambivalence has attitudinal consequences. To that end, we use the Eurobarometer 66.1 data set to analyze the EU public attitudes on various aspects of possible Turkish EU membership. The findings show that the EU citizens maintain ambivalent views about Turkish membership across three domain pairs: economy–security, immigration–security and population–culture. The significant impact of these ambivalence domains on increasing support for Turkey's membership to the EU is further discussed in the article.

In this article we investigate the effect of social networks on the quality of political thinking. First, the article introduces new social network concepts into the literature and develops the corresponding measures. Second, the article explores the quality of political thinking as a concept and develops its measures based on the volume and the causality of thoughts, and their integrative complexity. We make use of a survey to collect information on social networks and the experimental manipulation controls for the effect of policy frames. Our findings consistently show the significant negative impact of cohesive social networks on the quality of policy‐relevant thinking. We conclude that close‐knit social networks could create "social bubbles" that would limit how one communicates with others and reasons about politics.

In this article, we explore whether incongruent information influences what people recall to mind about a presidential candidate's policy statements. We investigate whether the volume of people's political thoughts, their ability to produce arguments, the affective valence of these thoughts, and their integrative complexity are influenced by the congruency between new political information and prior political convictions. We conducted an experiment via MTurk manipulating the congruency of information with respect to ideology. Our results show that incongruency significantly alters how people think about politics. Incongruent information increases integrative complexity of the opposing thoughts, becomes more voluminous, and includes more rationales. Moreover, these defensive thoughts are significantly more negative and less positive about the incongruent information. Parallel to what studies on motivated reasoning demonstrated, we also find that politically knowledgeable people in particular seem to strengthen their thoughts' cognitive structure while defending their priors against information counter to their political views. We further discuss the general effects of these results and the importance of challenges to existing beliefs in generating complex thought systems.

Populism is a powerful social force that has reshaped the political landscapes of many nations since the turn of the 21st century. Much of the success of populist movements is attributed to various social crises and a deep dissatisfaction with political systems. In the present issue, we sought to find papers that investigate what drives the demand for populist politics during crises on a psychological level and, correspondingly, how populist rhetoric influences the way individuals think about, and respond, to crises. In this editorial, we introduce a multidisciplinary issue and summarize the key themes stemming from the articles included. The contributions addressed various forms of crises; from identity issues to global transformations, and various aspects of populism; from the antiestablishment attitudes of the public, to the populist rhetoric of political actors. There was also a key theme centered on the role of emotions. We believe that these topics are of great interest to political psychologists of any mold. We hope that this special issue can play a part in increasing our understanding of how populism thrives during crises and in driving future research on this topic.

This book examines the ways by which the European Union impacts economic and political processes in its member and candidate countries. Positive Turkish and negative Greek experiences suggest that the EU functions as a powerful catalyst of political and economic change, if towards various ends.