Youth Bulge in a Pandemic-Stricken World

As the year 2020 dawned, the world underwent a paradigmatic shift that impacted all aspects of life. While it is axiomatic that the coronavirus pandemic left an indelible effect on all age groups, the author is especially interested in analysing the impressions that the pandemic can leave on the lives of youth. With history providing anecdotes of contagions having led to political violence and widespread massacres, this chapter will explore how the current pandemic can lead to youth radicalisation in an age of social media and in countries witnessing youth bulge. This study will be carried out at the intersection of international relations, international security, and political psychology and within the parameters of youth bulge, social-psychology, and radicalisation. In doing so, the author will propose a prognostic approach to provent youth radicalisation rather than prevent it in retrospect.

Hardwired to attack. Candidates’ personality traits and negative campaigning in three European countries

A growing body of studies shows that the reasons for competing candidates to “go negative” on their opponents during elections—that is, attacking their opponents instead of promoting their own programs or ideas stem from strategic considerations. Yet, existing research has, at this stage, failed to assess whether candidates’ personality traits also play a role. In this article, we bridge the gap between existing work in political psychology and political communication and study to what extent the personality traits of competing candidates are linked with their use of negative campaigning strategies. We rely on candidate survey data for recent elections in three countries—Germany (2017), Switzerland (2019), and Finland (2019). The data includes self-reported measures for candidates’ “Big Five” personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness) and the the use of attacks towards their opponents during the campaign. Controlling for the usual suspects driving the use of negative campaigning we show that this latter is associated with low agreeableness and (marginally) with high extraversion and low conscientiousness. The role of personality for the focus of an attack (issue vs. character attacks) is somewhat less clear-cut. All in all, kinder and more stable candidates tend to go less negative; when they do, they tend to stay away from character-based attacks and somehow focus on issues.

López-López, Wilson, and Laura Taylor, eds. 2021. Transitioning to Peace: Promoting Global Social Justice and Non-violence. Cham: Springer. Peace Psychology Book Series. 328 p.

Frequently, the transition to peace seems impossible for groups affected by collective violence. The search for a peaceful society, where the memory, the victims' suffering, and the perpetrators' responsibilities coexist, requires titanic efforts in multiple dimensions that may seem unattainable. These efforts are the focus of the book “Transitioning to Peace: Promoting Global Social Justice and Non-Violence” edited by two distinguished scholars in the social and political psychology field with contributions from over twenty researchers from all continents

Zúñiga, Claudia, and Wilson Lopez-Lopez, ed. 2021. Political psychology in Latin America. Washington: American Psychological Association. 268 p.

The book is part of the Psychology in Latin America series of the American Psychological Association (APA) edited by Judith Gibbons and Patricio Cumsille. The book presents a series of chapters written by Latin American researchers from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador and Peru on different topics relevant to political psychology in Latin America. The problem of human rights violations and how to confront them, socio-political conflicts and the building of a culture of democracy and peace are transversal axes of the chapters of this book.

Spirited Psychology and Civic Temperament in the Statesman

Chapter 9 argues that the Statesman characterizes the task of the politician as one that prominently requires attention to distinctively spirited aspects of the human soul. According to the dialogue’s final section, the primary problem of politics is that of producing harmony between, or “weaving” together, two main types of citizens that naturally tend toward conflict with one another: the “courageous” and the “moderate.” This chapter argues that the Statesman’s treatment of civic unity is largely a discussion of spirited political psychology: the “courageous” citizens incline toward behavior associated with the aggressive side of thumos, while the “moderate” tend toward behavior associated with its gentle side. Moreover, this treatment is set up earlier in the dialogue through the Myth of Cronus, which is designed to expose the inadequacy of conceptions of politics that ignore the social desires and emotions of human beings that are most relevant to politics.

Political Psychology in the Great Speech of the Protagoras

Chapter 4 argues that in the Great Speech of the Protagoras, Plato characterizes spirited motivation as the sine qua non of human social and political life. Protagoras provides a mythic comparison of the conditions of pre-political vs. political human life and claims that human beings were incapable of living together in cities until the gods granted them “the art of politics.” The chapter argues that this “art” consists in capacities for (what Plato will eventually identify as) distinctively spirited forms of motivation. Both the aggressive and the gentle sides of thumos are the necessary psychological conditions of human civilization, without which moral education and political life are impossible.