While scholars in political science, social psychology, and mass communications have made notable contributions to understanding democratic citizenship, they concentrate on very different dimensions of citizenship. The current volume challenges this fragmentary pattern of inquiry, and adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of citizenship that offers new insights and integrates previously disparate research agendas. It also suggests the possibility of informed interventions aimed at meeting new challenges faced by citizens in modern democracies.
The volume is organized around five themes related to democratic citizenship: citizen knowledge about politics; persuasion processes and intervention processes; group identity and perception of individual citizens and social groups; hate crimes and intolerance; and the challenge of rapid changes in technology and mass media. These themes address the key challenges to existing perspectives on citizenship, represent themes that are central to the health of democratic societies, and reflect ongoing lines of research that offer important contributions to an interdisciplinary political psychology perspective on citizenship. In several cases, scholars may be unaware of work in other disciplines on the same topic and might well benefit from greater intellectual commerce. These themes provide excellent opportunities for the interdisciplinary cross-talk that characterizes the contributions to this volume by prominent scholars from psychology, political science, sociology, and mass communications. In the final section, distinguished commentators reflect on different aspects of the scholarly agenda put forth in this volume, including what this body of work suggests about the state of political psychology's contributions to our understanding of these issues.
Thus this volume aims to provide a multifaceted, interdisciplinary look at the political psychology of democratic citizenship. The interdisciplinary bent of contemporary work in political psychology may uniquely equip it to create a more nuanced understanding of citizenship issues and of competing democratic theories.
1. Introduction: Normative Conceptions of Democratic Citizenship and Evolving Empirical Research ; Part I: Civic Knowledge ; 2. The Psychology of Civic Learning ; 3. What Knowledge is of Most Worth? ; Part II: Persuasion processes and interventions in contemporary democracies ; 4. Shallow cues with deep effects: Trait judgments from faces and voting decisions ; 5. Taking the Political Environment Seriously: Strategic Political Rhetoric and Citizen Decision-Making ; 6. The Role of Persuasion Strategies in Motivating Individual and Collective Action ; Part III: Group identity ; 7. Social Identity and Citizenship in a Pluralistic Society ; 8. The politics of recognition: A social psychological perspective ; Part IV: Hate crimes and tolerance ; 9. Diverging Ideological Viewpoints on Pathways to More Harmonious Intergroup Relations ; 10. Tolerance and the Contact Hypothesis: A Field Experiment ; 11. Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes: The View from Political Science ; Part V: Technology and mass media ; 12. Collective identity and the mass media ; 13. Social Identity and Representations of Society and Politics in The News ; Part VI: Commentaries ; 14. Experimental Social Psychology, Broader Contexts, and the Politics of Multiculturalism ; 15. Political Psychology: The Promise of (and Impediments to) Synergistic Interdisciplinary Scholarship ; 16. What has Political Psychology to offer regarding Democratic Citizenship?
