- [UNTITLED]
- About the Contributors
- Introduction: Theoretical Foundations of Political Psychology
- Personality Approaches to Political Behavior
- Childhood and Adult Political Development
- Degrees of Rationality in Politics
- Behavioral Decision-Making
- Emotion and Political Psychology
- Toward an Evolutionarily Informed Political Psychology
- Genetic Foundations of Political Behavior
- Political Rhetoric
- Psychology and Foreign Policy Decision-Making
- Perceptions and Image Theory in International Relations
- Threat Perception in International Relations
- Crisis Management
- Personality Profiles of Political Elites
- Psychobiography: “the Child is Father of the man”
- Conflict Analysis and Resolution
- Political Information Processing
- Political Communication: Form and Consequence of the Information Environment
- Political Ideology
- Social Justice
- Networks, Interdependence, and Social Influence in Politics
- Political Deliberation
- From Group Identity to Political Cohesion and Commitment
- Social Movements and the Dynamics of Collective Action
- Prejudice and Politics
- Migration and Multiculturalism
- Discrimination Conditions, Consequences, and “Cures”
- The Psychology of Intractable Conflicts: Eruption, Escalation, and Peacemaking
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
The topic of political rhetoric concerns the strategies used to construct persuasive arguments in political debate. The study of political rhetoric therefore spans a range of academic disciplines and touches upon the fundamental activities of democratic politics. This chapter starts out by briefly reviewing recent academic work on changing styles of political communication and on the rhetorical strategies used in debates on emergent political issues. It then turns to focus on two conceptual issues of particular significance to political psychology. First, the chapter considers how a study of argumentation may enhance our understanding of political attitudes and cognition. Second, it considers how a study of the processes by which identities are claimed, displayed, and attributed in the course of political debate may enhance our appreciation of the role of ambivalence and vagueness in democratic political life.
Keywords: argument, ideology, ideological dilemmas, identity, pronouns, ambiguity
Susan Condor is Professor of Social Psychology in the School of Social Political and Geographical Sciences, at Loughborough University, UK. She has written numerous articles on vernacular political understanding. Her empirical work combines survey methodology with close textual analysis of the content and structure of political reasoning in formal political debate, and unstructured everyday talk. She has held major research grants to study national framing in the British press, and identities, policy attitudes and constructions of citizenship in the context of regional, English, UK and EU governance.
Cristian Tileagă is Lecturer in Social Psychology and member of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at Loughborough University, UK. His research focuses on developing critical approaches for researching social and political life. He has written extensively on political discourse, critical psychology of racism, collective memory and social representations of national history. He is author of Political Psychology: Critical Perspectives (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) and Discourse Analysis and Reconciliation with the Recent Past (Romanian). He is co-editing Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (with Jovan Byford, Open University) and serves on editorial and advisory boards of international journals in Romania, Brasil, and Germany.
Michael Billig is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. He was written books on a number of different subjects, including nationalism, psycho-analytic theory, rhetoric, ideology and attitudes towards the British Royal Family. His latest book is ‘Learn to Write Badly: how to succeed in the social sciences’ (published by Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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- [UNTITLED]
- About the Contributors
- Introduction: Theoretical Foundations of Political Psychology
- Personality Approaches to Political Behavior
- Childhood and Adult Political Development
- Degrees of Rationality in Politics
- Behavioral Decision-Making
- Emotion and Political Psychology
- Toward an Evolutionarily Informed Political Psychology
- Genetic Foundations of Political Behavior
- Political Rhetoric
- Psychology and Foreign Policy Decision-Making
- Perceptions and Image Theory in International Relations
- Threat Perception in International Relations
- Crisis Management
- Personality Profiles of Political Elites
- Psychobiography: “the Child is Father of the man”
- Conflict Analysis and Resolution
- Political Information Processing
- Political Communication: Form and Consequence of the Information Environment
- Political Ideology
- Social Justice
- Networks, Interdependence, and Social Influence in Politics
- Political Deliberation
- From Group Identity to Political Cohesion and Commitment
- Social Movements and the Dynamics of Collective Action
- Prejudice and Politics
- Migration and Multiculturalism
- Discrimination Conditions, Consequences, and “Cures”
- The Psychology of Intractable Conflicts: Eruption, Escalation, and Peacemaking
- Index
