Political Psychology

Political Psychology is a multi-disciplinary group established to provide a forum for collaboration, discussion and support for political psychology scholars and practitioners as well as to facilitate the dissemination of political psychology research to relevant political and social institutions and the broader public. We work closely with colleagues in Psychology, via a sister section of the British Psychological Society (BPS).

Follow us on BlueSky: @psapolpsychology.bsky.social

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Political psychology research seminars, spring 2025

(In case of any problems registering for any of these seminars, please email Ben Seyd [B.J.Seyd@kent.ac.uk] for a Teams link)

5 March, 12-1pm
Cognitive appraisal theory predicts emotions in the personal, but not in the political domain
Isabella Rebasso (Vienna)
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19 March, 12-1pm
Expressing Emotions Through Images: Modes of Affect in Citizens’ Political Discourse on Social Media
Catherine Bouko (Ghent)
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In the digital age, political engagement is increasingly expressed through images on social media. Citizens use visuals to convey attitudes, i.e. emotions (affect) and opinions (judgement), often blending the two in ways that shape public discourse. Affect and judgement are deeply interwoven, and their expression relies on a broad range of multimodal devices, cues, and discourse patterns that are not always easy to distinguish. Drawing on existing research, I examine three broad modes through which affect manifests in discourse. First, thematised emotions refer to cases where emotions and opinions become the explicit subject of communication. This can occur through emotional lexis (e.g., love, joyful) or more implicitly, through figurative language and symbolic imagery that evoke shared cultural meanings. Second, signal-like emotions encompass instances where emotions and opinions are embedded in discourse through specific linguistic and visual cues. Exclamation marks, emojis, or stylistic exaggerations function as signals of the author’s emotions. In this sense, signal-like emotions are not direct descriptions of feelings but their consequences, materialized in discourse through expressive markers. Finally, supported emotions rely on cognitive schematisations rather than explicit linguistic markers. Here, emotions and opinions emerge through the way discourse structures events, images, and temporal or spatial relationships, guiding interpretations without directly stating them. A set of eight appraisal criteria provides a systematic framework for analyzing supported emotions in discourse.

2 April, 12-1pm
Stressful Politics? The Effects of Politics as a Stress Factor for Mental Health in Adults and Young People in Polarised Democracies, Who is More Affected, How They Work, and How to Alleviate Them
Luca Bernardi (Liverpool)
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Most of the literature on mental health and political behaviour focuses on how people with mental health problems engage in politics. In this paper we want to understand how politics can act as a stress factor for mental health. The aim of our paper is to understand to what extent politics-based stress influences mental health, how big is the effect, who is more affected, what are the potential cognitive mechanisms, and how we can alleviate the effect of stressful politics on mental health. To answer our questions we rely on three original survey datasets from adults (Britain) and young people (Britain and the United States). We find that perceiving politics as more stressful decreases positive mental health and increases negative mental health. We find that the association between stressful politics and mental health is not the same for everyone: it is stronger for those who have experience with mental health problems, have dysfunctional attitudes, use maladaptive coping and emotion regulation strategies and have low cognitive control. Many of these factors mediate the relationship. Lastly, we suggest that the use of adaptive strategies may be beneficial for reducing the effect of stressful politics on mental health.

16 April, 12-1pm
“Where's my parade?” Adulthood, excitement and the anti-climax of the first-time vote across six countries
Sandra Obradovic (Open University)
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There is a paradox inherent in the act of voting: on the one hand, it is in most modern democracies seen as “the” ultimate form of democratic engagement, connecting citizens with politicians, and making their voices heard. On the other hand, the act of voting itself is often experienced as very banal, procedural and occurs every only once every 4-5 years in most countries. By drawing on qualitative interviews (N = 60) with first-time voters from Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Africa, UK and the US, we consider the first-time vote (FTV) in the context of its potential negatives, including leading to first democratic disillusions. We argue for a conceptualization of the first vote as a significant socio-cultural rite of passage and consider how this is reflected in our data. The analysis allows us to shed light on a fundamentally understudied aspect of electoral experiences, namely the perceived institutional and societal responses to first-time voters, which, in their own way, might come to impact how important we feel voting is, and whether they’ll participate in future elections. We complement the qualitative study with findings from a field experiment conducted in polling stations in November 2024 as part of the US presidential election, examining the experiential impact of including specific FTV initiatives as part of elections.

30 April, 12-1pm
Much Ado About Nothing? A Longitudinal Investigation of the Consequences of Affective Polarization
Joseph Phillips (Cardiff)
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Affective polarization, or dislike and distrust between partisans, is thought to stimulate engagement but harm political trust and commitment to democratic norms. However, recent experimental work has cast doubt on these findings. In this paper, we use longitudinal models test competing possibilities as to why manipulating affective polarization lacks effects on democratic outcomes: that the effect exists but experiments poorly capture it, reverse causation, and spurious effects. Using over a dozen separate panel studies, we find strong evidence that most effects of affective polarization on positive or negative democratic outcomes are spurious. Observed associations using traditional cross-lagged panel models do not remain when using models that perform better at separating between- and within-person effects. This suggests that affective polarization co-occurs with, but does not cause, its purported outcomes

14 May, 12-1pm
Is higher education a new political cleavage in British politics?
Ralph Scott (Bristol)
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The role that education plays in shaping an individual’s political attitudes and behaviour is increasingly well-observed across established democracies, including in Great Britain (Apfeld et al., 2024). Graduate status divides British voters on issues (such as immigration) and has led to the emergence of new parties (Reform UK) and the transformation of existing ones (Conservatives after Brexit). Some argue that it represents a new cleavage across Western Europe (Ford and Jennings, 2020). Extrapolating from the Danish case (Stubager, 2010), we test whether higher education constitutes a new political cleavage in Great Britain. We use a new representative survey of the British public, including survey experiments, to develop a measure of education-based social identity among British voters. Next, we examine the political effects of this identity, finding that it motivates political attitudes, vote choice and candidate preference, suggesting that the education divide will continue to restructure party competition.

If you would like to present your research at a seminar, please contact Ben Seyd.

Previous seminars (available to view on our YouTube channel)

20 May 2024 (Rachel Gibson, Manchester)
Personalisation versus privacy concerns as determinants of attitudes toward political micro-targeting in the US, Germany and France? Testing the 'privacy calculus’ in comparative electoral context

30 Nov 2023 (George Melios, LSE)
Origin of (A)symmetry: The Evolution of Out-Party Distrust in the United States

19 Sept 2023 (Katharina Lawall, University of London)
Angry losers? The effects of feeling electoral loss on anti-democratic attitudes

6 June 2023 (Matthew Barnfield and Rob Johns, Essex)
'Hope, Optimism and Expectations in Politics'