Political Psychology

I aim to examine the psychological mechanisms behind political behaviours. These topics include—but are not limited to—voting behaviour, partisanship and party identities. I am interested not just in describing what happens in the political world but explaining the psychological mechanisms behind those issues.

But what exactly is Political Psychology? This uncredited text adequately summarises the contemporary history of Political Psychology.

Political psychology is an interdisciplinary academic field that emphasises the psychological dimension of political life. Its practitioners use psychological constructs, such as personality, attitudes, beliefs, values, needs, goals and expectations, to explain political behaviour and to examine the complex and reciprocal relationship between politics and psychology. Political psychologists presume that political actions, like all other forms of human behaviour, are the result of interplay between the individual and the environment. Because the scientific study of politics investigates relations and interactions among individuals behaving as political actors, it is inevitably linked with psychology, which is concerned with human thinking and behaviour. Political analysts throughout the ages and across civilisations have been interested in the interrelation between personality traits and political contexts. They have employed many concepts and theories to explain why rulers and subjects think and act as they do, and how their thoughts and actions shape the course of politics. Hence, political psychology focuses on the important role of psychological factors in determining the individual’s responses to various contextual and environmental stimuli.

Born in the decades between World Wars I and II, modern political psychology has developed to cover a wide variety of subjects. It traces its intellectual roots back to the eminent American political scientist and communications theorist Harold D. Lasswell (1902–1978). His classic writings, such as Psychopathology and Politics (1930), World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935), Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How (1936), Power and Personality (1948) and Power and Society (1950), centred on the impact of individual and social psychological processes—perception, motivation, conflict, cognition, learning, socialisation, attitude formation and group dynamics—as causal factors influencing politics. It was Lasswell’s pioneering work in political psychology that contributed to the field’s initial unidirectional nature, characterised by a specific focus on how the individual psyche shapes political behaviour and values.

Several leading members of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt (the so-called Frankfurt School) who had arrived in the United States as refugees from Nazi Germany—Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Erich Fromm (1900–1980), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), among others—developed the concept of authoritarian personality, which deals with the causal relationship between political views and personality types. Their ideas inspired Adorno and his associates at the University of California, Berkeley, to conduct a seminal empirical study, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), based on the F (fascism) scale measurement, which linked right-wing authoritarianism to a family pattern of rigidity, discipline, strict rules and fearful subservience to the demands of parents. Even though it has been widely criticised, including for its heavy reliance on the psychoanalytical perspectives of Freudian theory, this now classic work reveals how certain politically relevant aspects of the psyche lead to fascist or authoritarian belief systems. The F-scale describes a personality type characterised by ethnocentric nationalism, extreme in-group conformity, rigid adherence to conventional values, submissiveness to authority, a readiness to punish, opposition to the free-thinking and kind-hearted, arrogance towards those considered inferior and other authoritarian attitudes that explain major political outcomes.

Political psychology received a significant impetus from and, in turn, was a major contributor to the behavioural revolution that swept the field of political science in the 1950s and 1960s. Behaviouralist-oriented researchers directed their scholarly attention to new issues such as analysing the impact of personality characteristics upon political participation and party preference. Lasswell, for one, came up with eight psychological reasons for participation in politics: power, wealth, well-being, skill, enlightenment, affection, rectitude and respect. Similarly, Robert E. Lane in his Political Life: Why and How People Get Involved in Politics (1965) argued that political participation serves a number of conscious and unconscious needs and motives, including power, economic and material gain, friendship and affection, self-esteem, relief from psychic tensions and a need to understand the world. Thanks to the behavioural revolution, survey methods showed marked improvement from early studies such as The People’s Choice (1944), the classic study of the 1940 U.S. presidential election conducted by the Austrian-born sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), to later ones such as The American Voter (1960), the best-known research study of American voting behaviour by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, William Miller and Donald Stokes. Electoral behaviour was examined in relation to various demographic and population variables, including age, gender, education, employment, social class, ethnicity, race, religion and ideology. The increased sophistication of public-opinion polling led to numerous in-depth analyses of belief systems at both the mass and elite level.

Largely under Lasswell’s influence, early political psychology had centred on the unidirectional impact of individual and social psychological processes upon the polity, but in later decades attention began to be devoted also to the reverse effect of politics on personality systems. Studies of political culture and political socialisation looked at how political systems inform individual behaviour and values. By the 1980s, most political psychologists had accepted the bidirectional nature of the interaction between individual psychology and the polity: individual perceptions, beliefs, motives, opinions, values, interests, styles, defences and experiences influence political action; in turn, political culture, institutions, movements, parties and international systems shape individuals.

Political psychology finally took shape as an academic discipline in its own right when the International Society of Political Psychology was founded in 1978 and began holding annual scientific meetings and publishing the quarterly journal Political Psychology. Today, political psychology is a key component of the political behaviour subfield of political science. Its diverse objects of analysis range from the psychobiography of political leaders to inquiries into the post-material bases of identity politics. Psychological terminology is now an important and pervasive part of political-science discourse, as numerous psychological concepts have been incorporated into political studies at both the national and international level. Psychological concepts are widely used in research on voting behaviour, political socialisation, political leadership, the dynamics of public opinion, political attitudes, political conflict and co-operation, international negotiation, decision-making and political information processing.

The two empirical research methods most often employed to study psychological variables are the sample survey and the in-depth interview. Political psychologists frequently use attitude surveys to probe the connections among personality structures, demographic variables and dispositions towards political participation and party preference. Other research tools include simulation, projective techniques, content analysis, focus groups and controlled experiments. The application of psychological insights to political inquiry remains a widespread and growing trend, as many political psychology studies continue to appear within related social-science disciplines, especially political science. Although no single basic theory provides unity to this eclectic interdisciplinary field, political psychology has acquired a permanent, heterogeneous and pluralistic presence within political science.

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