Tereza Capelos

The political psychology of participation in Turkey: civic engagement, basic values, political sophistication and the young

Abstract This article aims to understand the recent heightened levels of mobilization and unconventional political participation in Turkey. We use a political psychology model that highlights the impact of civic engagement, political sophistication, and values on conventional and unconventional participation. We argue that these factors will be significant predictors of unconventional participation setting it apart from conventional political behaviour, which will be driven by simpler considerations. We expect these qualitative differences in the drivers of conventional and unconventional participation to go beyond age and gender differences and highlight the complexity of political decision-making in Turkey’s electoral authoritarian system. We use the 2012 World Value Survey to test our hypotheses, with a nationally representative sample of Turkish citizens. We find significant variations in the role of values, sophistication and levels of civic engagement for conventional and unconventional participation when controlling for age, gender and left–right ideological orientations. Our findings confirm the complex considerations that drive citizens’ engagement with politics and can be useful to explaining recent political developments in Turkey involving youth, public mobilization and protests, but also mainstream voting choices.

Feeling the pulse of the Greek Debt Crisis: affect on the web of blame.

ABSTRACT This article examines the affective content of Greek media representations of the debt crisis, from 2009 to 2012. We analyze the content of opinion pieces from journalists, experts and public intellectuals published in Greek newspapers, and identify their affective tone towards political actors and institutions. We focus on anger, fear and hope, and identify blame attribution frames, which underpin the publics trust and confidence in domestic and European Union institutions. This article contributes to the systematic understanding of the impact of the debt crisis as a traumatic event on public opinion, and considers its implications for attitudes towards European integration.

Understanding Anxiety and Aversion: The Origins and Consequences of Affectivity in Political Campaigns

Several chapters in this book examine how conditions of threat or personal risk stimulate citizens’, often automatic, emotional reactions. Crises, tensions and political unrest provide excellent opportunities to study passionate political behaviour. However, most political stimuli are not associated with threat, risk or tensions. Everyday politics is perceived as distant and not of immediate relevance by many citizens. Interestingly, even in dull political times, we feel irritated, angry, disappointed, worried or uneasy with political parties and the leaders that represent us. Yet we know very little about how aversive and anxious emotions about political leaders are generated during an ordinary campaign context when threat is not a salient consideration, and we do not experience direct challenges for our individual well-being. To address this gap, in this chapter we focus on the role political reputations and party attachments play as generators of emotional reactions to political leaders.

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’: Stereotypes, Prejudices and Emotions on Greek Media Representation of the EU Financial Crisis

The ongoing institutional and economic crisis of the E U has created new stereotypes, as well as facilitated the return of old prejudices across the member states, with important implications for the future of European integration. The crisis has generated broad media coverage challenging the reputations of countries most affected by the recession and those who bear the financial burden of bailouts. Characteristically, Greece has been often described as the ‘sick man of Europe’ (Exadaktylos and Zahariadis, 2014), while references to ‘the sinking euro’, ‘lazy Greeks’, ‘hard-working Germans’ and ‘detached Brits’ are frequently hosted in headlines, news reports and editorial commentary in newspapers across Europe (e.g.. Der Spiegel, 2011; EU Observer, 2011; Forbes, 2011; The Economist, 2011).

Reason, Passion, and Islam: The Impact of Emotionality and Values on Political Tolerance

This paper focuses on the role of political values and gender in expressions of political tolerance towards Islamic groups. In an experimental setting with Dutch participants, the authors manipulate the emotional appraisal of an interaction with a fictional Islamic group, and examine how emotions of anger or fear interact with support for democratic values and gender to determine expressions of tolerance judgments in the Netherlands. The article shows that support for democratic values mediates the impact of fear but not anger. Specifically, while it reverses the otherwise negative impact of fear on political tolerance, it has no effect under conditions of anger. The evidence also shows that women experience significantly more intense negative emotions than men, but their levels of tolerance are indistinguishable from their male counterparts. This research is timely in an era of widespread threat perceptions, where support for tolerance and civil liberties is eroding.

As a Matter of Feeling: Emotions and the Choice of Mediator Tactics in International Mediation

This article examines the role of negative emotions in the process of international mediation. In particular,it investigates how perceptions of disputant negative emotions influence the tactics that mediators employ. Using the classification of mediator tactics into communicator, formulator or manipulator, the article argues that communicator- or formulator-oriented tactics are adopted more frequently when a mediator perceives negative emotions, such as anger or fear. The results of a web survey of North American mediators that classified mediation tactics are presented. The authors also interviewed international mediators and diplomats who have formally or informally, officially or unofficially, mediated intra-state and inter-state conflicts. Mediators are found to be more inclined to assume communicator- or formulator- oriented tactics when confronted with negative emotions. Our empirical analysis of negative emotions sheds light on the choice of mediation tactics in the field of international mediation, and offers valuable insights to scholars and practitioners of negotiation, diplomacy, international relations and political science.

Introduction: Origins, Developments and Current Trends

The aim of our Handbook is to discuss theoretically, methodologically and empirically what political psychology has become in a European and global context, how it investigates its core subject matter and what some of the main findings have been. Theoretically, the Handbook seeks to pluralise political psychology as a field by discussing how historical and contemporary approaches and ways of defining political psychology have depended on context and discipline. In particular, the book shows how moving beyond the state of the discipline as traditionally defined opens up novel theoretical discussions as well as alternative methodological approaches and empirical focuses. The content of the book further illustrates how political psychology needs to expand in terms of theoretical depth, methodological diversity and European-specific examples and approaches to account for a broad variety of work that is currently being undertaken across universities in Europe and elsewhere. The Handbook takes an interdisciplinary approach and aims at understanding how political, economic and social forces interact with psychological dynamics and how these are mutually researched and reinforced across a number of relevant empirical cases.

Political Action and Resentful Affectivity in Critical Times

How does the study of emotions help us understand engaging in or abstaining from violent and illegal political behaviors in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis? This question sits at the core of our article. We focus particularly on anger, fear, and hope hypothesizing that combined with perceptions of self-efficacy, these emotions fuse in complex affective blends of resentful or ressentiment-ful affectivity, which in turn determine the path of citizens’ political engagement. We test this using data from a three-wave cross-sectional survey from Greece, which contains measures of emotions and unique items of engagement with illegal and violent political actions. We show that such behaviors rest on complex clusters of resentful affectivity pointing to particular actions and reactions. Our theoretical and empirical framework can be useful for understanding political developments outside Greece manifested as grievances, anti-immigration demands, anti-establishment sentiment, anti-expert skepticism, and support for populist parties, extending previous theoretical and empirical work, which currently employ discrete measures of emotions.

Afterword: For Inspiration and the Future

Our Handbook is intended to address a gap in the political psychology literature by highlighting key developments in the research agenda of European and international scholars. By the time our readers reach this afterword, we hope they will share our view that variety in the epistemological approaches, theories and methodologies we use, as well as the contexts we study, can only enrich our field.