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The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape - and are shaped by - their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.

The Dark Duo Model of Post‐Colonial Ideology states that post‐colonial nations possess a specific set of sociostructural conditions that foster a unique pair of complementary ideologies responsible for maintaining the status quo. These are the ideologies of Historical Negation and Symbolic Exclusion. Together, these ideologies articulate a pair of discourses that draw upon culturally sanctioned repertoires to effectively resolve the collective dissonance created by past—and present—injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples. Historical Negation and Symbolic Exclusion form a joint ideological system that legitimizes inequality in two critical social domains common to all post‐colonial societies: one domain relating to resource allocations for Indigenous peoples and the other domain relating to representation and membership in the nation's identity. In the current article, we review and integrate over 10 years of research on post‐colonial intergroup relations in New Zealand, leading up to a formal presentation of the Dark Duo Model. Our work in this area indicates that Historical Negation and Symbolic Exclusion are psychometrically distinct constructs that are stable over time. A meta‐analytic review of 13 independent samples (N = 18,903) shows that both ideologies are independently associated with Social Dominance Orientation and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism among members of the dominant (European) group in New Zealand. We review and explain why there are systematic ethnic group differences in support for these dual ideologies and why positive intergroup contact with the dominant group attenuates resistance to Symbolic Exclusion amongst Māori (the Indigenous peoples). We also show that Historical Negation and Symbolic Exclusion exert powerful unique effects on voter sentiment and support for different social policies relating to biculturalism and that these ideologies mediate the effects of Social Dominance Orientation and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism on various sociopolitical attitudes. Our Dark Duo Model is a context‐specific extension of the Dual‐Process Model of Ideology and Prejudice that explains how specific post‐colonial ideologies are generated and used to maintain social inequalities that systematically disadvantage Indigenous peoples.

Research demonstrates that the Big‐Five's Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. This literature, however, implicitly assumes that the strength of this relationship is invariant across the electorate. We challenge this assumption by arguing that education—an institution designed to increase civic competence—affects the degree to which personality predicts various political attitudes. Specifically, we posit that education facilitates people's ability to identify issue positions that (theoretically) resonate with their personality. Using a national probability sample of New Zealand voters (n = 6,518), we show that education consistently moderates the relationship between personality and a host of political attitudes. Whereas Openness to Experience is inversely associated with politically conservative issue positions among the highly educated, it is often uncorrelated with the same attitudes among those with low levels of educational attainment. These results identify an important—though often neglected—moderator of the relationship between personality and political attitudes.

AbstractAlthough national flags arguably reflect a unified nation, support for a particular flag design may vary across ideological cleavages within the electorate. Here, we examined the impact of system‐challenging and system‐justifying ideologies, as well as political party support, on support for flag‐change in a large (N = 13,559) nationally representative sample of New Zealand adults. As hypothesized, system‐justifying ideologies (e.g., conservatism, right‐wing authoritarianism, historical negation, and symbolic exclusion) correlated negatively with flag change support, whereas system‐challenging ideologies (e.g., support for multiculturalism) correlated positively with support for change. Yet, consistent with an identity politics perspective, support for the National Party—the center‐right/conservative party in New Zealand whose leader advocated change—correlated positively (rather than negatively) with support for changing the flag. These results demonstrate the countervailing effects of system‐justifying and system‐challenging ideologies on support for change, and identify a boundary condition of conservatives' opposition to change (namely, party support).

The partisan realignment of the White South, which transformed this region from being solidly Democratic to being the base of the Republican Party, has been the focus of much scholarship. Exactly how it occurred is unclear. Widespread individual-level attitude changes would be contrary to the well-known within-person stability of party identification. However, according to the impressionable-years hypothesis, events that occur during adolescence and early adulthood may have a lasting impact on later political attitudes. This would suggest that cohort replacement may be driving partisan realignment. We test this possibility using data from the American National Election Studies from 1960 to 2008. Consistent with the impressionable-years hypothesis, Southern Whites from the pre-Civil Rights cohort (born before 1936) maintained their Democratic Party identification longer than their younger counterparts. However, all cohorts in the South have changed their partisan attitudes at comparable rates over time, contrary to the impressionable-years hypothesis. These data suggest that the partisan realignment of the South was driven by both cohort replacement and within-cohort attitude change. More targeted case studies of older cohorts living through the civil rights era, and of younger cohorts in the post-Reagan era, yield results generally consistent with the impressionable-years hypothesis. More generally, our findings suggest that very large scale events are required to disrupt the normal continuity of party identification across the life span. Adapted from the source document.

A noticeable feature of the political discourse accompanying the rise of nationalism in white‐majority countries is that white people fare worse than other ethnic groups in their societies. However, it is unclear based on the extant literature why group‐based relative deprivation (GRD) would correlate with majority‐group nationalism. Here, we propose that the psychological function of nationalism for majority‐group members lies in its ability to assuage the negative feelings arising from GRD. Accordingly, in a New Zealand national probability sample (N = 15,607), we found that GRD among whites was negatively associated with well‐being. However, we also found an opposing indirect association mediated by nationalism. GRD was associated with higher nationalism, which was in turn associated with higher well‐being. These findings suggest that endorsing beliefs about national superiority is one way a nation's dominant ethnic group can cope with the negative psychological consequences of perceiving that their group is deprived.

A central challenge for identifying core components of a belief system is examining the position of components within the structure of the entire belief system. We test whether operational (i.e. positions on issues) or symbolic (i.e. affective attachments to political groups and labels) components are most central by modeling a political belief system as a network of interconnected attitudes and beliefs. Across seven waves of representative panel data from New Zealand, we find that symbolic components are more central than operational components (d's range 0.78 – 0.97). Symbolic components were also closer than operational components in the network to self-reported voting (d = -2.43), pro-environmental actions (d's = -1.71 and -1.63), and religious behaviors (d = -0.74). These findings are consistent with perspectives that emphasize the importance of symbolic politics in tying belief systems together and motivating behavior, and further the link between political belief system research and network science.

Since first being proposed 25 years ago, system justification theory has become a paradigm-shifting framework for understanding intergroup relations and political psychology. Based on the thesis that people are motivated to defend and bolster the societal status quo, system justification theory helps to explain varied phenomena, including resistance to change, outgroup favouritism, and other instances of false consciousness. This paper summarizes four tenets of the theory including the following: (1) antecedents to system justification, (2) palliative effects of system justification, (3) status-based asymmetries in conflict between justification motives, and (4) societal consequences of system justification. Throughout our review, we highlight how system justification theory helps to explain why disadvantaged groups might sometimes support the status quo, emphasizing research conducted outside the United States when possible. We conclude by calling on future research to (1) further utilize nationally representative and multi-level data, (2) investigate the relational motives behind system justification, (3) address social change from a system justification perspective, and (4) extend system justification theory's focus beyond WEIRD societies.

The status-legitimacy hypothesis, which predicts that low-status groups will legitimise inequality more than high-status groups, has received inconsistent empirical support. To resolve this inconsistency, we hypothesised that low-status groups would display enhanced legitimation only when evaluating the fairness of the specific hierarchy responsible for their disadvantage. In a New Zealand-based probability sample (N = 6162), we found that low-status ethnic groups (Asians and Pacific Islanders) perceived ethnic-group relations to be fairer than the high-status group (Europeans). However, these groups did not justify the overall political system more than the high-status group. In fact, Māori showed the least support for the political system. These findings clarify when the controversial status-legitimacy effects predicted by System Justification Theory will—and will not—emerge.

Documenting the relationship between Agreeableness and political conservatism has proven elusive. We address this anomaly by showing that two aspects of Agreeableness – politeness and compassion – have countervailing relationships with political conservatism through right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). To test this, we analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of New Zealanders (N = 4,553). Politeness was positively, but compassion was negatively, correlated with political conservatism. Consistent with the differential mediation hypothesis derived from the dual process model of ideology and prejudice, these opposing relationships were differentially mediated by RWA and SDO. This attenuated the bivariate relationship between the higher-order trait of Agreeableness and political conservatism. These results demonstrate the complex relationship between personality and political orientation.