Redigeret af Sigge Winther Nielsen & Thomas Høgenhaven Med introduktion af Brent A. Strathman
POLITISK PSYKOLOGI
Fordi politik er personligt
FORORD
Denne bog handler om psykologi i politik. Bogen samler en række centrale historiske og nutidige bidrag, som skaber disciplinen politisk psykologi. Formålet er at gøre opmærksom på mulighederne ved politisk psykologi og derved ruske op i måderne, hvorpå vi forstår og forklarer politik – at give nye redskaber til at ordne virkeligheden og indrette samfundet. Budskabet kan virke simpelt: Enhver studerende, forsker eller praktiker, der vil forstå samfundet, må forstå de individer, der udgør samfundet. Men reelt er det ikke nogen lille operation: Politisk psykologi giver læserens verdensbillede en karruseltur af dimensioner.
At udvælge og derved kanonisere tekster vil altid være kontroversielt. Vi har ud fra det muliges kunst søgt at nå så vidt omkring i den politiske psykologis emnefelt – fra individuel kognition til gruppedynamik. Vi har søgt at indkapsle nye som gamle bidrag – fra Walter Lippmann til Philip E. Tetlock. Endelig har vi søgt at medtage bidrag, der ikke blot giver en indsigt i mennesket og den politiske beslutning, men som indvirker på hele samfundet – fra krig til krise.
Det er hensigten med bogen, at den skal være en dansk introduktion til politisk psykologi. Derfor har vi valgt at skrive det indledende og afsluttende kapitel på dansk. På denne måde kan den meget amerikansk dominerede disciplin politisk psykologi få et dansk sprog og udtryk. Samtidig har vi bevaret bidragydernes tekster på engelsk for at præsentere bidragene i deres originalitet, men også fordi engelsk er et accepteret og dominerende sprog inden for statskundskaben. Bogen er inddelt i fire blokke med hver deres bidrag. Den kan læses fra A til Å, men kan også fungere som en teoretisk slikpose, der behændigt nippes et par bidder fra. Eller være et fokuseret miniopslagsværk. Det er vores håb, at læseren lader sig guide rundt i bogen efter interesse. Bidragene refererer i stor udstrækning til hinanden, og derfor er der al mulig grund til at hoppe rundt mellem tid, sted og emneområde for at stille sin akademiske sult. Det er faktisk meget menneskeligt.
At beskæftige sig med det psykologiske fundament for politik er ikke noget, der fylder meget i det danske forskningslandskab, selvom nye skud er vokset frem i de senere år. Vi sætter derfor stor pris på, at Aarhus Universitetsforlag har vist os tillid og interesse for projektet. Vi vil også gerne takke for de meget brugbare og konstruktive forslag, der blev bragt på bordet af bogens anonyme peer reviewer. Ligeledes skylder vi en stor tak til professor Brent A. Strathman fra Dartmouth College i USA. Vi står begge i intellektuel gæld til hans ukrukkede udlægning af politisk psykologi. Uden ham havde vores lange akademiske ophold i det sneklædte New Hampshire føltes meget længere. Vi ønsker samtidig at påskønne det flotte arbejde, vores studentermedhjælp, Martin Vinæs Larsen, har udført. Især i den sidste fase af bogens tilblivelse har han arbejdet utrætteligt og grundigt. Endvidere skylder vi Ida Agnete Balslev, Malene Baunsgaard, Camilla Wissing Bille og Anne-Kathrine Nielsen mange venlige ord for deres særlige hjælp med bogen. Endelig en tak til familie og venner, som har udvist støtte og alt for stor forståelse undervejs, når vi fortabte os i den politiske psykologis karrusel.
København den 28. august 2009
Sigge Winther Nielsen og Thomas Høgenhaven
INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
Brent A. Strathman
The study of politics is often tied to catastrophe or world-changing events. For example, the experience of World War I caused many continental thinkers to revisit their understanding of society. Before the war, Europeans joined widespread pacifist movements, principally motivated by Sir Ralph Angell’s pamphlet, The Great Illusion. The extension of credit and the development of a system of finance made war futile, as capturing territory did not add to the wealth of a state. To Angell, war itself was made useless by commercialism. Peace would flourish, as competition between states took on an economic dimension.
Yet war did serve a purpose that pacifists ignored. According to Sigmund Freud, commercialism exacerbated the inherent contradictions of our psychology. Humans face a difficult balancing act if society is to survive. Individual desires – emerging from the id – must be tempered to maintain a functional society. “Civilization,” he wrote, “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” Over time, this suppression of innate human desire builds, threatening the seams of civilization. This rising sense of guilt (caused by the inability to satisfy our most base desires) is the “price we pay for our advance in civilization.” The following decline in mental faculty leads to the possibility of “neurotic” civilizations; of cultures maladapted to the demands of society and the possibilities for violence. War provides direction for the expression of these violent urges.
Unfortunately, the experience of WWI did not satisfy continental bloodlust; nor did it solve the inherent dilemma of society. And during the interwar period, Freud foresaw the violence that was to follow. Hitler’s rise to power alluded to a civilizational imbalance and a looming conflict on the continent. When Freud revisited Civilization and Its Discontents, he added a rhetorical question. He asks the reader to ponder the possibility of a balance between the demands of individuals to express their needs and the requirements of society to repress. Pessimistically, Freud ends his book by saying the balance was undecided and attempts to forge peace were up in the air, “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”
After the war, many scholars attempted to refocus their study. Political theorists, economists, social scientists – each discipline realized their theories failed to predict that outbreak of war. Political psychology developed as a rival interdisciplinary approach, arguing that the discipline had strayed too far from human experience to make valid prediction. And like Angell and Freud, the history of political psychology followed the politics of the times. The experience of the Second World War motivated the first generation of scholars to explore the politics behind state behavior. And early theories followed Freudian thought, teasing out the connections between society and the citizen. The focus centered on how leaders convinced their populations to fight, via propaganda or nationalist myth. A second generation of scholarship added to this base by focusing more closely on the masses and their belief systems. Flush with new quantitative methods and new data (provided by opinion polling), scholarship tended to gauge the capacities of the democratic public, tracking the connection between the content of political beliefs and mass behavior, such as voting.
A third generation once again changed direction by focusing on the deviations from rationality. Rational choice theory dominated the study of political behavior in the second generation. But the failures of presidential leadership – Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, for example – convinced scholars that decisions were often non-rational. Cognitive theories emerged as one possible answer behind these gaffes, integrating work on perceptions and misperceptions, information processing, heuristics and schema theory to international behavior. Works questioned the ‘super-heroic’ assumptions of rational choice, developing a behavioral account of decision.
A developing fourth generation flipped the focus back to mass behavior. The genocides and civil wars of the 1990s spurred work on identity and identity politics. Scholars realized cognitive theories are too abstracted from political reality. Humans are social animals, driven to satisfy the demands of their peers. As a result, work re-integrated mass behavior into explanations of politics. ‘Hot’ processes of cognition manifest motivated misperceptions, arising from emotion and attachment to a broader in-group.
This current generation of scholarship is particularly important for understanding the pressures and politics facing European states such as Denmark. International relations theory is particularly ill-suited for a world impacted by non-state actors and non-standard threats. For example, the war in Iraq, combined with the collapse of financial giants, weakened the American capacity