Political Psychology Specialist Group 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).
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Upcoming Group News & Events
Political Psychology Spring Seminars
All seminars are held on Teams. Any enquiries or problems registering should be sent to Ben Seyd ([email protected])
27 May, 13:00-14:00 (UK time)
How to ‘Get Out the Participation’? Testing the Efficacy of Policy-Oriented versus Social-Relational Recruitment Approaches
Julia Schulte-Cloos (Marburg), Jennifer Oser (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and Hahrie Han (Johns Hopkins)
What kind of messages motivate people to become politically engaged? Although thousands of studies have investigated this question from the “get out the vote” perspective, much less attention has been paid to the increasingly important question in the digital age of how to recruit citizens into civic and political action beyond voting. We integrate two distinctive lines of research on recruitment strategies that thus far have been studied separately, namely policy-oriented messages versus social-relational messages. To test the efficacy of these recruitment messages, we will conduct a visual conjoint experiment that mirrors the online environment of contemporary social media platforms using a survey sample in the United States. In addition to recruitment outcomes, we will also explore heterogeneous effects across key socio-demographic characteristics, and in political contexts of affective polarization. By investigating the efficacy of policy-oriented versus social-relational recruitment messaging, we will extend the longstanding focus in the “get out the vote” (GOTV) literature on electoral turnout to contribute new knowledge on mobilizing civic engagement.
Note that this presentation takes the form of a ‘pre-analysis plan’.
Register for this seminar.
Recent Group News & Events
30 April, 12:00-13:00
Yara Sleiman (Queen Mary) ‘Thinking twice: How language shapes what voters remember’
Bilingual citizens represent a substantial and growing share of the electorate in many established democracies. Political candidates and parties increasingly campaign across languages, governments translate policy communications, and misinformation spreads through multilingual information environments. Yet we still know very little about how language influences political information processing. We examine whether processing political information in a secondary language moderates partisan bias in memory – the tendency to misremember political information in line with prior beliefs. Secondary-language processing may reduce partisan distortions by encouraging more deliberate monitoring of information. Alternatively, it may increase such distortions by taxing cognitive resources, pushing individuals to rely more heavily on heuristics. We test these predictions in a preregistered experiment with 1,000 English-French bilinguals in Canada who read immigration arguments in either their primary or secondary language before completing a controlled recognition task. The study speaks to normative debates about multilingual democracy, where equal access to translated information may not ensure equal retention, or equal informational footing, at the moment of political choice.
16 April, 12:00-13:00
Yasemin Ulusahin (Université Libre de Bruxelles), ‘Who represents “the people” in 2023 Turkey? The political utilisation of crowds at political rallies’
This presentation will explore the political utilization of crowds at rallies during Turkey’s 2023 general and presidential elections, a pivotal moment in the country’s history. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, each held significant rallies to assert their visions for Turkey. Through ethnographic observations and speech analyses from these rallies, the presentation examines how political leaders and their followers interact to define the “true” citizens of Turkey. The AKP’s coalition emphasized nationalism and religiosity, portraying Erdoğan as a saviour, while the CHP’s coalition focused on inclusivity and secularism, symbolized by Atatürk. The study highlights the role of political rallies in shaping social identities and the dynamics of leadership and followership in an increasingly authoritarian context.