José Manuel Sabucedo

Mobilization through online social networks: the political protest of the indignados in Spain

The 15M demonstration (the origin of the indignados movement in Spain and the seed of the occupy mobilizations) presents some outstanding characteristics that defy the established principles of the collective action paradigm. This article develops some observable implications of the concept of connective action and tests them against the case of the 15M demonstration. Cases of self-organized connective action networks are expected to be different from traditional collective action cases with regard to the characteristics of the organizations involved, the prevalent mobilization channels and the characteristics of participants. Based on a comparative analysis of data gathered from participants and organizations in nine demonstrations held in Spain between 2010 and 2011, relevant and significant differences were found in the characteristics of the 15M staging organizations (recently created, without formal membership and mainly online presence), the main mobilization channels (personal contact and online social networks rather than co-members or broadcast media), and participants (younger, more educated and less politically involved). These findings help to understand the large turnout figures of this movement and have important implications for the mobilization potential of social networks, particularly as it can affect the political participation of the less-involved citizens.

Identity processes in collective action participation: farmer's identity and farmer's protest in the Netherlands and Spain

This study tested the assumption that a sense of collective identity stimulates participation in collective action. Contextual circumstances supposedly make a collective identity more salient and compel people to act as members of the group; protest participation is more likely among people with a strong collective identity. Group identification and participation in identity organizations were used as indicators of collective identity in a study of 248 farmers from Galicia (Spain) and 167 farmers from the Netherlands. The farmers were interviewed three times at intervals of 1 year. The longitudinal design also allowed a test of causality. A sense of collective identity appeared to stimulate preparedness to take part in farmers’ protest. Action preparedness leads to action participation, which in turn appears to foster collective identity.

Symptomatic profile and health-related quality of life of persons affected by the Prestige catastrophe

This study analyses the impact of the Prestige oil spill on the mental health and the perception of physical health and functional capacity in the affected population. The sample comprised 926 residents from the section of the Spanish coast affected by the oil spill. The data was collected slightly more than one year after the accident. Scales referring to clinical symptoms (SCL-36) and health-related quality of life (SF-36) were administered. The results suggest that individuals with higher degrees of exposure or residing in areas closest to the spill show lower levels of mental health in comparison to those with lower levels of exposure or living in areas farther away from the spill. This study also finds that women and fishermen tend to suffer more from the consequences of these types of disaster.

Sociological and Psychological Predictors of Voting in Great Britain

Abstract In a nationally representative sample of 1,073 British adults, the roles of sociological and psychological variables as predictors of voting participation was investigated. The total variance explained was 18.4%. The psychological variables were more strongly associated with electoral participation than the sociological ones. The relationship between these two sets of variables was considered. The main predictor of electoral participation was the degree of party allegiance, which explained 10.4% of the variance. These results emphasize the role of political parties in mobilizing voters.

Culture of Peace and Mass Media

Currently, political violence is a central issue in the world-wide social agenda. This paper describes the psychosocial logic that legitimizes that violence, analyzed as a challenge for social and political psychology, implying that we have to work toward the construction of a culture of peace. Additionally, diverse concepts about peace are discussed. Finally, the transcendental role played by mass media in this dynamic and particularly the framing theory, are analyzed. Moreover, this paper considers how mass media and news are determinant factors in the beliefs, relational frames, and construction of feelings and are, thus, a barrier to coping and peacefully solving the conflicts that end in political violence.

Estereotipos regionales y nacionales: del conocimiento individual a la sociedad pensante

ResumenEste trabajo pretende descubrir la estructura subyacente a la percepcion que los sujetos gallegos tienen de diferentes estereotipos regionales y nacionales (i. e. andaluces, castellanos, vascos, europeos, espanoles, catalanes y gallegos). Este objetivo sera contemplado desde un modelo de distancia espacial, el Escalamiento Multidimensional, que nos permitiria estudiar la distancia psicologica entre los diferentes grupos, en la configuracion espacial ofrecida por el modelo. Los resultados apuntan a una doble dimensionalidad: competencia personal y valores sociales, a la hora de valorar a los diferentes estereotipos. Ademas esta dimensionalidad se mantiene a traves de las distintas submuestras utilizadas: orientacion politica de derecha vs. de izquierda, universitarios—no universitarios, hombres—mujeres, dando cuenta de la estabilidad de los estereotipos, y de la dimension social de los mismos.

Antecedents of the attitude towards inter-group reconciliation in a setting of armed conflict

BACKGROUND The concept of Reconciliation as applied to inter-group conflict has come into use only recently. Throughout the history of Psychology, Reconciliation was mostly understood at the individual and inter-personal level. METHOD In the present study we shall analyse the roles played by trust, negotiating attitude, legitimacy and ethnocentric attitude over the attitude towards social reconciliation. To this end we studied a group of 188 Colombian civilians living under conditions of real socio-political conflict. RESULTS A path analysis was performed using the statistical program AMOS whose fit indexes indicate a good fit of the model and a variance of .36. The results show that the variables of trust, negotiating attitude and legitimacy have a significant and positive effect on the reconciliation variable, and significant negative effect on the ethnocentric attitude variable. CONCLUSIONS This study contributes to the integration of a number of variables that facilitate process of social reconciliation, as it explicitly deals with some of the perceptions, attitudes and beliefs which could change the course of a confrontation.

El artificio de la violencia. Fundamentos y obstáculos para el diseño de una cultura de paz y de derechos humanos

Resumen La concepción tradicional sobre la causas de la violencia y de los conflictos violentos se corresponde con un paradigma explicativo que podemos denominar psicobiológico. No obstante, desde el punto de vista de la apuesta por una cultura de paz, este paradigma resulta manifiestamente inapropiado, tanto por razones de hecho como por motivos más pragmáticos. Este artículo describe y propugna la transición desde este primer concepto de la violencia a un segundo paradigma explicativo que destaque el carácter socio-culturalmente mediado de la agresividad humana. Al precisar los principales supuestos y argumentos que desde las diversas ciencias sociales respaldan este enfoque socio-cultural, se enumeran también los obstáculos que actualmente se plantean al diseño de una cultura de paz y de los derechos humanos.

La escala «directiveness» de Ray y el autoritarismo

The «directiveness» scak of Ray (1976) is one of the rnethods desiRned to measure authoritarianum. In this papes the relationship of the method to dogma:1m, political orienta/ion, age and ser, and variables ofinterest in the field of socio-political attitudes is studied. The obtainelresults allow us to conclude that the «directiveness» scale is inadequate for Mese purposes. Also, it needs to be emphasked that the need for a more stringent theoretical debate concerning political authoritarianrim is necessaty.

Para una Psicología social crítica no construccionista: reflexiones a partir del realismo crítico de Ignacio Martín-Baró

espanolLa naturaleza sociohistoricamente construida y compartida del conocimiento y de la subjetividad que el construccionismo social parece haberse arrogado en propiedad, forma parte de la historia de la ciencia social. Por otra parte, la critica al modelo causal-mecanicista como unica fuente de conocimiento, que el movimiento construccionista considera una de sus principales aportaciones epistemologicas, se remonta nada menos que a Kant. La verdadera aportacion del construccionismo social ha consistido en suprimir la experiencia como fuente del conocimiento y de la subjetividad, negar la existencia de una realidad externa al sujeto, mantenerse ontologicamente mudo frente a ella y desconfiar de la posibilidad de cambiarla. Parece evidente que sobre estos cimientos no es posible, tal y como se ha pretendido, construir una psicologia social critica. Frente a ella, y en sus antipodas, el realismo critico de Martin-Baro parte de la existencia de una realidad objetiva cuyas injusticias y miserias denuncio de manera insistente, se vale de metodos cuantitativos para analizarla; la estructura social es su marco de referencia preferido a la hora de estudiar las diversas modalidades y manifestaciones del comportamiento humano, no renuncia a la existencia de verdades parciales y sociohistoricamente situadas y define como objetivo de su quehacer teorico, el cambio social. EnglishThe sociohistorically built and created nature of knowledge and subjectivity that social constructionism seems to have arrogated is part of the history of social science. Moreover, criticism to the casual mechanistic model as the only source of knowledge ─that the constructionist movement considers as one of its main epistemological contributions─ goes back to none other than Kant. The real contribution of social constructionism has consisted in deleting experience as a resource for knowledge and subjectivity, denying the existence of an external reality to the subject, keeping ontologically quiet towards it, and distrusting the possibility of changing it. It seems evident that building a critical social psychology upon these foundations is not possible. Opposing this, Martin- Baro’s critical realism is based on the existence of an objective reality of which injustices and wretchedness he insistently denounced. This critical realism makes use of quantitative methods to analyze this objective reality, it holds social structure as its preferred framework when studying the different modalities and manifestations of human behavior, it does not deny the existent of partial and sociohistorically situated truths, and it identifies social change as the objective of its theoretical work.