The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior 2017004456, 9781483391168

Table of contents :
COVER
VOL 1 - TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CONTENTS
LIST OF ENTRIES
READER’S GUIDE
ABOUT THE EDITOR
CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
VOL 2 - TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CONTENTS
LIST OF ENTRIES
READER’S GUIDE
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
INDEX

Citation preview

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Political Behavior

Editorial Board Editor Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University

Editorial Board Rom Harré Oxford University Leonie Huddy Stony Brook University Deborah Prentice Princeton University Donald M. Taylor McGill University Tom Tyler Yale Law School Michael Wessells Columbia University

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Political Behavior 1

Editor Georgetown University

FOR INFORMATION:

Copyright © 2017 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All trade names and trademarks recited, referenced, or reflected herein are the property of their respective owners who retain all rights thereto. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Names: Moghaddam, Fathali M., editor. Title: SAGE encyclopedia of political behavior / editor, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Georgetown University. Description: First edition. | Thousand Oaks, California : SAGE Publications, Inc., [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017004456 | ISBN 9781483391168 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Political psychology. | Political science– Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC JA74.5 .S23 2017 | DDC 320.01/9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004456

Acquisitions Editor: Maureen Adams Editorial Assistant: Jordan Enobakhare Developmental Editor: Sanford Robinson Production Editor: Jane Haenel Reference Systems Manager: Leticia Gutierrez Copy Editors: Diane DiMura, Kim Husband Typesetter: Hurix Systems Pvt. Ltd. Proofreaders: Scott Oney, Susan Schon Indexer: Robie Grant Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Kate Brummitt

17  18  19  20  21  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents Volume 1 List of Entries   vii Reader’s Guide   xi About the Editor   xvii Contributors  xix Introduction  xxix Entries A 1 G 319 B 53 H 351 C 73 I 373 D 161 J 419 E 215 K 429 F 285 L 435

Volume 2 List of Entries   vii Reader’s Guide   xi Entries M 455 T 821 N 511 U 859 O 551 V 885 P 563 W 903 R 679 Y 917 S 729 Index  919

To the memory of Hannah Arendt 1906–1975

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

List of Entries Absolutism Activism Advocacy Affirmative Action Aggressive Capitulation Agonism al Qaeda Alienation Allegiances Allocation American Dream. See Self-Help Ideology American Exceptionalism Anti-Semitism Art in Political Campaigns Assassinations/Violence in Politics Assimilation Asymmetric Warfare Attitudes Attribution Theory Authoritarian Personality Authoritarianism

Civilian Intervention Civil-Military Relations Clash of Civilizations Clientelism Closure, Need for Cognitive Dissonance Collective Action Command of the Commons Communism. See Socialism and Communism Competitive Authoritarianism Confirmation Bias Conflict Theory. See Conflict Theory, Realistic; Social Dominance Theory; Social Identity Theory Conflict Theory, Realistic Conflicts, Protracted Conformity Conservatism Conspiracies Contact Theory Corporatism Corruption Counter-Elite Counterinsurgency Crisis Decision Making and Management Cyberactivism Cyberwar

Bandwagoning State Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Bellicism Bicameralism Biopolitics Blaming the Victim Blue-Dog Democrats Brand Identity and Loyalty Bully Pulpit Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic Structure Business in Politics

Death of Leaders Decision Making Decision Making, Political. See Political Deliberation Defense Planning Democracy Dependency Theory Deterrence and Crime Deterrence and International Relations Development, Theories of Deviance and Control Dictatorship Diplomacy Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Discrimination Disengagement Distributive Justice Districting

Calculus of Dissent Capitalism Caste System Charisma Citizenship Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Civic Engagement Civil Disobedience Civil Wars vii

viii   List of Entries

“Do No Harm” as a Code of Action Dogmatism Dominant Power Politics Drones Duverger’s Law on Elections Economic Judgment Economic-Based Voting Blocs Economics and Political Behavior Ecopolitics Egocentrism Egoistical Relative Deprivation Election Rigging Election Turnouts. See Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Electoral Systems Electoralism Elite Decision Making Elite Theory (Pareto) Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions and Voting End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) End of History Thesis for Corporate Law End to Terrorism, Theories of Energy Competition English-Only Movement Environmental Skepticism Equality of Opportunity Equity Theory Essentialism Ethics in Politics. See Political Morality Ethics of Political Behavior Ethnic Revival Ethnicity Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Ethnocentrism European Union Expected-Utility Model Extended Contact Extradition False Consciousness Fascism Feckless Pluralism Feminism First Ladies Followership and Personality Framing Effects Fraternal Deprivation. See Group Relative Deprivation Free Market Free Rider Problem F-Scale Functionalism Gender Bias Genetic Determinism. See Genetic Essentialism

Genetic Essentialism Genocide Gerontology, Sociopolitical Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff Globalization Governmentality Gray Political Organizations. See Advocacy Greed Versus Grievance Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership Group Ideologies Group Relative Deprivation Groupthink Hearts and Minds Approach Hegemony Heuristics Hierarchy of Needs Hostage Taking Human Duties Human Rights Human Trafficking Hybrid Regimes Hypocrisy Paradigm Identity Politics Images and Theory in International Relations Imagined Contact Immigration Implicit Association Test Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting Indoctrination Insurgency International Criminal Court International Humanitarian Law International Security Internet Jihadism Intractable Conflicts Irrationality Islam Versus Islamism Islamic State Jihad Judicial Appointments Judicial Review Just War Theory Justice Motive Keynesian Economics Language Death Legitimacy, Forms of Liberalism Life Cycle Effects Lobbying

List of Entries   ix

Locus of Control Lone Wolf Terrorism Machiavellianism Malthusian Cycle Management. See Crisis Decision Making and Management Maritime Terrorism Marxism Mass Communication Mass Political Behavior Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Media Framing Mediation Skills Meritocracy Migration Military Action Minority Voters Mission Statements Modernization Theory Moral Dilemmas Moral Hazard Morality and Politics Motivated Reasoning Multiculturalism Multilateralism Mutual Radicalization Name Order Narcissism Narcissistic Personality Inventory Narcoterrorism National Character National Language Nationalism NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Negative Peace Neoliberalism Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power New Left News, Television Non-Aligned Nations Nonviolence North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nuclear Taboo Obedience Oligarchy Omniculturalism Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Pacifism Parental Worldview and Children Parliamentarism Partisanship

Party Identification Party List Party Systems Patriarchy Patrimonialism Patriotism Peacemaking Personality Traits Persuasion. See Hearts and Minds Approach Physical Appearance and Political Candidates. See Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Pluralism Political Apologies Political Campaigns Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Political Crimes Political Deliberation Political Discourse Political Ideology Political Indoctrination Political Mandates Political Morality Political Participation Political Persuasion and Rhetoric Political Plasticity Political Psychologies of Terrorism Political Socialization Political Symbolism Politics After Tragedy Polling Positioning Theory Positive Peace Poverty Trap Powerlessness Praetorianism Prejudice Presidential Character. See Barber’s Typology of ­Presidential Character Presidentialism Pressure Groups Print Media Prisoner’s Dilemma Procedural Justice Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Profiling Proletariat and Capitalism Propaganda Prospect Theory Psychobiography Psychodynamic Theory Public Goods Public Opinion Race and Ethnicity Racism. See Symbolic Racism

x   List of Entries

Radicalization Rational Choice Rawls, John. See Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Realism Realistic Conflict Theory. See Conflict Theory, Realistic Reasoning, Motivated. See Motivated Reasoning Reconciliation Refugees Relative Deprivation Theory Religion-Based Voting Blocs Religiosity Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior Representative Democracy Resource Mobilization Retributive Justice Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution Risky Shift Ritual in Politics Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral Rule of Law Rural Voters Saber Rattling Self-Categorization Theory Self-Esteem Self-Help Ideology Selfish Gene Significance, Need for Similarity-Attraction Slavery in America Sleeper Effect Social Capital Social Categories Social Class Social Cognition Social Contract Social Darwinism Social Dominance Orientation Social Dominance Theory Social Identity Theory Social Influence Social Investment Theory Social Movements Social Networking Social Revolts Social Stratification and Inequality Social Welfare Socialism and Communism Sociobiology Source Bias “Spoiler” Effect in Politics Springboard Model of Dictatorship Stability-Instability Paradox Stag Hunt

State Development State-Sponsored Terror Stereotypes Strong President Model Suburban Voters Sultanism Symbolic Racism System Justification Talking Heads and Political Campaigns Term Limits Terror Management Theory Terrorism, Theories and Models Terrorist Networks Theories of Development. See Development, Theories of Theories of Terrorism. See Terrorism, Theories and Models Theories of Voting Behavior. See Voting Behavior, Theories of Third Party Tokenism Tolerance for Ambiguity Torture Totalitarianism Trafficking of Persons. See Human Trafficking Tragedy of the Commons Transitioning Fragile States Transitology Trust Unicameralism United Nations United Nations Security Council Universal Declaration of Human Rights Urban Voters Utopia Values Values and Politics Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Voter Disenfranchisement Voter Identification Voter Mobility Voting, History of Voting Behavior, Theories of Voting Blocs. See Economic-Based Voting Blocs; ­Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs; Religion-Based Voting Blocs Wars of Attrition Weber’s Protestant Ethic Women and Leadership Women’s Liberation Movement Youth and Political Change

Reader’s Guide The Reader’s Guide is provided to aid readers in identifying entries on related topics. It classifies entries into 11 general topical categories: (1) Cognitive Processes; (2) Group Identities and Influence; (3) Individual Political Behavior; (4) International/Comparative Perspectives; (5) Justice and Political Behavior; (6) Media, Discourse, and Communications; (7) Policies and Political Behavior; (8) Political Systems; (9) Security and Terrorism; (10) Social Political Movements; (11) Theories of Political Behavior; and (12) Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns. Entries may appear in multiple categories, and often do. Cognitive Processes

Assimilation Civil Disobedience Conflicts, Protracted Conformity Death of Leaders Deviance and Control Egocentrism Ethnic Revival Ethnicity Ethnocentrism Feminism First Ladies Gender Bias Genetic Essentialism Genocide Group Ideologies Groupthink Identity Politics Intractable Conflicts Mass Political Behavior Mutual Radicalization National Character Nationalism Nonviolence Obedience Patriotism Political Plasticity Political Psychologies of Terrorism Pressure Groups Race and Ethnicity Slavery in America Social Class Social Networking Social Stratification and Inequality Sociobiology

Attribution Theory Closure, Need for Collective Action Confirmation Bias Decision Making Hearts and Minds Approach Images and Theory in International Relations Insurgency Locus of Control Moral Dilemmas Morality and Politics Political Morality Political Plasticity Prejudice Risky Shift Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral Self-Categorization Theory Significance, Need for Similarity-Attraction Social Categories Social Cognition Source Bias Stereotypes Symbolic Racism Tolerance for Ambiguity Group Identities and Influence Activism Aggressive Capitulation Agonism American Exceptionalism xi

xii   Reader’s Guide

Values and Politics Women and Leadership Individual Political Behavior Attitudes Authoritarian Personality Authoritarianism Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Bully Pulpit Charisma Cognitive Dissonance Cyberactivism Economics and Political Behavior Emotions and Voting False Consciousness Followership and Personality F-Scale Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership Irrationality Lone Wolf Terrorism Machiavellianism Military Action Narcissism Narcissistic Personality Inventory Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Parental Worldview and Children Patrimonialism Political Plasticity Powerlessness Praetorianism Psychobiography Psychodynamic Theory Saber Rattling Self-Esteem Selfish Gene Sultanism Values and Politics International/Comparative Perspectives Allegiances Bandwagoning State Calculus of Dissent Civic Engagement Civil Wars Civilian Intervention Dependency Theory Economic Judgment Ecopolitics Energy Competition

European Union Free Market Globalization Hegemony International Criminal Court International Humanitarian Law International Security Judicial Review Language Death Migration Modernization Theory Multilateralism National Language Non-Aligned Nations North Atlantic Treaty Organization Political Crimes Poverty Trap Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior United Nations United Nations Security Council Universal Declaration of Human Rights Justice and Political Behavior Affirmative Action Anti-Semitism Biopolitics Blaming the Victim Command of the Commons Corruption Discrimination Distributive Justice “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action Equality of Opportunity Equity Theory Ethics of Political Behavior Free Rider Problem Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff Governmentality Greed Versus Grievance Human Duties Human Rights Judicial Appointments Just War Theory Justice Motive Moral Hazard Political Plasticity Procedural Justice Profiling Public Goods Retributive Justice Rule of Law

Reader’s Guide   xiii

Stag Hunt Tokenism Torture Tragedy of the Commons Utopia Media, Discourse, and Communications Art in Political Campaigns Assassinations/Violence in Politics Business in Politics Conspiracies Cyberactivism Cyberwar Diplomacy Dogmatism Hypocrisy Paradigm Mass Communication Media Framing Mediation Skills Mission Statements Mutual Radicalization Name Order News, Television Personality Traits Political Apologies Political Campaigns Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Political Deliberation Political Discourse Political Indoctrination Political Mandates Political Persuasion and Rhetoric Political Socialization Political Symbolism Politics After Tragedy Polling Print Media Propaganda Public Opinion Source Bias Talking Heads and Political Campaigns Policies and Political Behavior Caste System Citizenship Civil-Military Relations Counterinsurgency Crisis Decision Making and Management Defense Planning Deterrence and Crime Deterrence and International Relations

Districting End to Terrorism, Theories of English-Only Movement Environmental Skepticism Extradition Feckless Pluralism Hearts and Minds Approach Immigration Keynesian Economics Multiculturalism Negative Peace Omniculturalism Peacemaking Positive Peace Public Goods Reconciliation Refugees Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior Social Welfare “Spoiler” Effect in Politics State-Sponsored Terror Third Party Values and Politics Political Systems Bicameralism Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic Structure Capitalism Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Clientelism Competitive Authoritarianism Conservatism Corporatism Democracy Dictatorship Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Duverger’s Law on Elections Election Rigging Electoral Systems Electoralism Fascism Hybrid Regimes Islam Versus Islamism Marxism Oligarchy Parliamentarism Partisanship Patriarchy Political Ideology Presidentialism

xiv   Reader’s Guide

Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Proletariat and Capitalism Public Goods Representative Democracy Socialism and Communism Strong President Model Term Limits Totalitarianism Unicameralism Security and Terrorism al Qaeda Asymmetric Warfare Drones Hostage Taking Human Trafficking Islamic State Maritime Terrorism Mutual Radicalization Narcoterrorism Nuclear Taboo Political Psychologies of Terrorism Refugees State Development State-Sponsored Terror Terrorism, Theories and Models Terrorist Networks Transitioning Fragile States Wars of Attrition Social Political Movements Alienation Biopolitics Brand Identification and Loyalty Cyberactivism Gerontology, Sociopolitical Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Internet Jihadism Islam Versus Islamism Jihad Mutual Radicalization Neoliberalism Pluralism Political Plasticity Radicalization Ritual in Politics Self-Help Ideology Social Darwinism Social Influence Social Movements Social Revolts

Values Values and Politics Women’s Liberation Movement Youth and Political Change Theories of Political Behavior Absolutism Bellicism Clash of Civilizations Conflict Theory, Realistic Contact Theory Counter-Elite Development, Theories of Dominant Power Politics Egoistical Relative Deprivation Elite Decision Making Elite Theory (Pareto) End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) End of History Thesis for Corporate Law End to Terrorism, Theories of Essentialism Extended Contact Functionalism Group Relative Deprivation Imagined Contact Indoctrination Legitimacy, Forms of Liberalism Malthusian Cycle Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Meritocracy Nationalism New Left Pacifism Positioning Theory Prisoner’s Dilemma Realism Relative Deprivation Theory Resource Mobilization Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution Sleeper Effect Social Contract Social Dominance Orientation Social Dominance Theory Social Identity Theory Social Investment Theory Springboard Model of Dictatorship Stability-Instability Paradox State-Sponsored Terror System Justification Terror Management Theory Terrorism, Theories and Models

Reader’s Guide   xv

Transitology Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Voting Behavior, Theories of Weber’s Protestant Ethic Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns Advocacy Allocation Blue-Dog Democrats Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Decision Making Disengagement Economic-Based Voting Blocs Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions and Voting Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Expected-Utility Model Framing Effects Heuristics Hierarchy of Needs Implicit Association Test Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting

Life Cycle Effects Lobbying Minority Voters Motivated Reasoning Party Identification Party List Party Systems Political Participation Political Plasticity Prospect Theory Rational Choice Religion-Based Voting Blocs Religiosity Rural Voters Social Capital Suburban Voters Trust Urban Voters Voter Disenfranchisement Voter Identification Voter Mobility Voting, History of Voting Behavior, Theories of

About the Editor Fathali M. Moghaddam, PhD (University of Surrey, England), is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, and the editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology (a quarterly journal published by the American Psychological Association). Dr. Moghaddam was born in Iran, was educated from an early age in England, and worked for the United Nations and for McGill University before joining Georgetown in 1990. He ­ returned to Iran in the “spring of revolution” in 1979 and was researching there during the hostage-taking

crisis and the early years of the Iran-Iraq war. He has conducted experimental and field research in numerous cultural contexts and published extensively on radicalization, intergroup conflict, human rights and duties, the psychology of dictatorship and democracy, and causal explanations. He has received a number of prestigious academic awards, and his most recent books include The Psychology of Democracy (2016), The Psychology of Dictatorship (2013), and Questioning Causality: Scientific Explorations of Cause and Consequence Across Social Contexts (2016, with Rom Harré).

xvii

Contributors Hyangseon Ahn Georgetown University 

Badri Bajaj  Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India

Parveen Akhtar  University of Bradford, UK 

Anjana Balakrishnan  University of Western Ontario, Canada

Kara S. Alaimo  Hofstra University 

Paolo Balduzzi  Catholic University of the Sacred Heart 

Bethany Albertson  University of Texas at Austin 

Danny L. Balfour  Grand Valley State University 

Jo-Ann Amadeo  Marymount University 

Rasa Balocˇkaite˙  Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania

Kenneth T. Andrews University of North Carolina Chapel Hill 

Smita C. Banerjee  Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center 

Arije Antinori  CRI.ME LAB “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy 

Chris Barker  Southwestern College 

Elena Aoun  Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium 

Daniel Barnhizer Michigan State University College of Law 

Robert Apel  Rutgers University 

David Barnhizer  Cleveland State University, Marshall College of Law 

Jean-Louis Arcand  Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland 

Brock Bastian  University of Melbourne, Australia

Robert W. William Armstrong  University of North Alabama 

Alexander Baturo  Dublin City University, Ireland

Jamie Arndt  University of Missouri, Columbia 

Roy Baumeister  Florida State University 

Jacob Aronson  University of Maryland

Cristiano Bee  Kadir Has University, Turkey

Lonna Rae Atkeson  University of New Mexico 

Jean-François Bélanger  McGill University, Canada 

Catherine Atwong  California State University Fullerton 

Laura N. Bell  West Texas A&M University 

Daniel Augenstein  Tilburg University, The Netherlands 

Lihi Ben Shitrit  University of Georgia 

Constantina Badea  Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, France 

Arthur Asa Berger  San Francisco State University 

xix

xx   Contributors

Christofer Berglund  Uppsala University, Sweden

Howard Campbell  University of Texas at El Paso 

Sten Berglund  Örebro University, Sweden

John L. Campbell  Dartmouth College 

Joan Berzoff  Smith College 

Sierra Campbell  Georgetown University 

Tina Besley  University of Waikato, New Zealand

Diana Cárdenas  Université de Montréal, Canada

Robert J. Bies  Georgetown University 

David Carment  Carleton University, Canada

Thomas A. Birkland  North Carolina State University 

Edward G. Carmines  Indiana University 

Madeleine Blackman  Georgetown University 

Michael Carrell  Northern Kentucky University

Sarai Blincoe  Longwood University 

William Case  City University of Hong Kong 

Klaus Boehnke  Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH, Germany Louis Bolce  Baruch College 

Emilio J. Castilla  Massachusetts Institute of Technology  Viktorija L. A. Cˇeginskas  University of Turku, Finland

Angela L. Bos  College of Wooster 

Ivan Cerovac  University of Trieste, Italy

David Bradley  La Trobe University, Australia

Amanda Chappell  Longwood University 

Cindy Brock  University of Wyoming 

Ioannis Chapsos  Coventry University, UK

David Brulé  Independent Scholar, Sweetwater, Tennessee

Benoît Cherré Université du Québec a Montréal, Canada

Justin P. Bruner  Australian National University, Canberra

Daniel J. Christie  Ohio State University 

Dominic Bryan  Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Kursat Cinar  Bilkent University, Turkey

Kenneth Bryant Jr. University of Missouri 

Andrew Civettini  Knox College 

Heather E. Bullock  University of California, Santa Cruz 

Lorenzo Cladi  Plymouth University, UK

Michael N. Bultmann  University of Missouri, Columbia 

Michele Anne Clark  George Washington University 

Tom R. Burns  Uppsala University, Sweden

Harold D. Clarke  University of Texas at Dallas 

Fredrik Bynander  Swedish Defence University 

David Coates  Wake Forest University 

Michael A. Cacciatore  University of Georgia 

Raphael S. Cohen  RAND Corporation 

Lindsey Cameron  University of Kent, UK

Meghan Condon  DePaul University 

Contributors   xxi

Corey L. Cook  University of Washington Tacoma 

Judith Escuin Checa  Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Rachel Corbman  Stony Brook University 

Victoria M. Esses  University of Western Ontario, Canada 

William Costanza  Marymount University 

Aaron Ettinger  University of Waterloo, Canada

Rory Costello  University of Limerick, Ireland

Giuseppe Eusepi  Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Lauren Covalucci American Psychological Association

Natasha Ezrow  University of Essex, UK

Richard J. Crisp  Aston Business School 

Mark Fagiano  University of Tennessee 

Ruth Dassonneville  Université de Montréal, Canada

Lisa Farwell  Santa Monica College 

H. Louise Davis  Miami University 

Nathan Favero  Texas A&M University 

Paul K. Davis  Pardee RAND Graduate School 

Lars P. Feld  University of Freiburg, Germany

Roxane de la Sablonnière  Université de Montréal, Canada

Stanley Feldman  Stony Brook University 

Gerald De Maio  Baruch College 

Melissa Fellin  Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Tim Dekkers  Leiden Law School, The Netherlands

Ana Mar Fernández Pasarín  Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain

Samuel C. Dicke  University of Missouri 

Andrew Fiala  California State University, Fresno 

Myrthe Doedens  Georgetown University 

Joël Ficet  Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

James M. Dorsey  S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore

Olivier Fillieule  University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Steven N. Durlauf  University of Wisconsin 

Eerika Finell  University of Tampere, Finland

Megan Earle  Brock University 

Matthew Fowler  Indiana University, Bloomington 

Eric C. Edwards  Utah State University 

Joshua A. Freeman  University of Georgia 

Boia Efraime  Mozambican Association of Psychology 

Charles (Chuck) D. Freilich  Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government 

Nir Eisikovits  Suffolk University, UK

Bruce K. Friesen  University of Tampa 

Said Elbanna  Qatar University 

Shana Kushner Gadarian  Syracuse University 

Michael Ent  Florida State University 

Barry L. Gan  St. Bonaventure University 

Secil Ertorer  York University, Canada

Daniel J. Gilman  Federal Trade Commission 

xxii   Contributors

Fernand Gobet  University of Liverpool, UK

Arnold K. Ho  University of Michigan 

Grigorii V. Golosov  European University at St. Petersburg 

Gordon Hodson  Brock University, Canada

Kevin H. Govern  Ave Maria School of Law, Naples, Florida

Anke Hoeffler  Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford, UK 

Kellen Gracey  University of Iowa 

Karla Hoff  World Bank 

Bligh Grant  University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Tom Hoffman  Spring Hill College 

Wyn Grant  University of Warwick, UK

R. Lance Holbert  Temple University 

Roger Griffin  Oxford Brookes University, UK

Stephanie Seidel Holmsten  University of Texas at Austin 

Amos N. Guiora  SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah 

Peter Hough  Middlesex University, UK

Ingrid J. Haas  University of Nebraska, Lincoln 

Charles Howard  Georgetown University 

Amjad Hadjikhani  Uppsala University, Sweden

Leonie Huddy  Stony Brook University 

John R. Hall  University of California, Davis 

Christopher G. Hudson  Salem State University 

Eran Halperin  Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel

Kathryn K. Hughes  Independent Researcher, Alexandria, VA

Leah K. Hamilton  Mount Royal University, Canada

William G. Huitt  Valdosta State University 

Nazir N. Harb Michel  Georgetown University 

J. Guido Hülsmann  Université d’Angers, France

Heidi Hardt  University of California, Irvine 

Brandon T. Humphrey  Miami University 

Carmen V. Harris  University of South Carolina Upstate 

Swen Hutter  European University Institute, Italy

Ann (Chen) Hascalovitz  University of Cambridge, UK

Vincenzo Iacoviello  University of Geneva, Switzerland

John Dixon Haskell  University of Manchester, UK

Jason Imbrogno  University of North Alabama 

Helen Haste  Harvard University, Graduate School of Education

Molly Inman  Georgetown University

Erica Heinsen-Roach  University of South Florida, St. Petersburg 

Galen A. Irwin  Leiden University, The Netherlands 

Matt Henn  Nottingham Trent University, UK

Tami Amanda Jacoby  University of Manitoba, Canada 

Victoria Hesford  Stony Brook University (SUNY) 

Peter J. Jacques  University of Central Florida 

Luke Hinsenkamp  Ohio State University 

Rusi Jaspal  De Montfort University, UK

Contributors   xxiii

Thijmen Jeroense  Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands  Daphne Jeyapal  Thompson Rivers University, Canada Svein Tvedt Johansen  Harstad University College, Norway 

Alexander Kleibrink  Free University Berlin, Germany  Chiranjeev Kohli  California State University Fullerton  Efi Kokaliari  Springfield College 

Adam Jones  University of British Columbia, Canada

Andrey Korotayev  National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

Garett Jones  George Mason University 

Andreas Krieg  King’s College London 

Melina Juárez  University of New Mexico 

Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr.  University of Alabama 

Frank Jake Kachanoff  McGill University, Canada 

Andre Krouwel  VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana  Georgetown University

Andreas Kruse  University of Heidelberg, Germany

Kerem Ozan Kalkan  Eastern Kentucky University 

Clara Kulich  University of Geneva, Switzerland 

Vinod Kannuthurai Stimson Center Washington, DC

Jon Kvist  Roskilde University, Denmark 

Stefanie Kappler  Durham University, UK

Sameer P. Lalwani  Stimson Center, Washington, DC 

S. Paul Kapur  United States Naval Postgraduate School 

Jacques Launay  Oxford University, UK

Jacob Kathman  University at Buffalo 

Christopher N. Lawrence  Middle Georgia State University 

Karen M. Kaufmann  UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs 

Chia-yi Lee  Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 

Mark V. Kauppi  Georgetown University 

Anne Leiser  Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Germany 

Steven T. Keener  Virginia Commonwealth University  Thomas Keil  University of Zurich, Switzerland Joshua B. Kennedy  Georgia Southern University  Menusch Khadjavi  Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany Michael King  Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society 

Gerhard Leitner  Freie Universität Berlin, Germany  Shana Levin  Claremont McKenna College  Aharon Levy  Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel  Michael S. Lewis-Beck  University of Iowa  Martin Libicki  U.S. Naval Academy 

Bert Klandermans  Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands

Darren G. Lilleker  Bournemouth University, UK 

Samara Klar  University of Arizona 

Eunjung Lim  Johns Hopkins University 

xxiv   Contributors

Maria Livaudais  University of New Mexico 

Marilyn McMorrow  Georgetown University 

John Benedict Londregan  Princeton University 

Shana M. Mell  Virginia Commonwealth University 

Jennifer Long  Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada 

Alexandra Mello  Mozambican Association of Psychology 

Jasmine Lorenzini  European University Institute, Italy 

Jochen I. Menges  WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Management, Germany

Bernice Lott  University of Rhode Island 

Peter Merrotsy  The University of Western Australia 

Patrick L. Lown  University of Essex, UK 

Melissa R. Michelson  Menlo College 

James Loxton  University of Sydney, Australia 

Franklin G. Mixon Jr.  Columbus State University 

Giacomo Luciani  Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland

Fathali M. Moghaddam  Georgetown University 

Klarissa Lueg  Europa-University Flensburg, Germany  Bernd Luig  University of Mannheim, Germany  Diane M. Mackie  University of California, Santa Barbara  Heather E. Madonia  Northwestern University  Leena Malkki  University of Helsinki, Finland  Xavier Márquez  Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand Anthony J. Marsella  University of Hawaii at Manoa  Martha A. Martinez  DePaul University  Takaaki Masaki  Postdoctoral Research Fellow, College of William and Mary

Oscar Molina  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain  Jose G. Montalvo  Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain  Cristina Jayme Montiel  Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines  Caitlin Moore  Georgetown University  Cornelia Mothes  The Ohio State University  Ronaldo Munck  City University, Dublin, Ireland  James Murphy  University of the West of England, UK Daniel S. Nagin  Carnegie Mellon University  Amos Nascimento  University of Washington  Barbara Nevicka  University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands 

Lilliana Hall Mason  University of Maryland, College Park 

Olivia Newman  Rider University 

Miriam Matthews  RAND Corporation 

Dennis Nigbur  Canterbury Christ Church University, UK 

Angie Maxwell  University of Arkansas 

August H. Nimtz  University of Minnesota 

Daren Maynard  University of Technology Sydney, Australia 

Jacqueline Nolan-Haley  Fordham University School of Law 

Allen R. McConnell  Miami University 

Math Noortmann  Coventry University, UK 

Contributors   xxv

Deborah L. Norden  Whittier College 

Andrew Pilecki  Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel

Erin O’Brien  University of Massachusetts, Boston 

Robert D. Plotnick  University of Washington 

Thomas Christopher O’Brien  University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

Michael J. Pomante II Northern Illinois University 

Alanna O’Malley  Leiden University, The Netherlands 

Joseph G. Ponterotto  Fordham University–Lincoln Center 

Edward Orehek  University of Pittsburgh 

Jeannette H. Porter  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Hannah Osborn  Ohio University 

Jerrold M. Post  Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University

Danny Osborne  University of Auckland, New Zealand  Riku Österman  Aalto University, Finland  Victor Ottati  Loyola University Chicago  Patrick Overeem  Leiden University, The Netherlands  Richard L. Pacelle Jr.  University of Tennessee, Knoxville Eleonora Pasotti  University of California, Santa Cruz 

Rodrigo Praino  Flinders University, Australia  Anthony R. Pratkanis  University of California, Santa Cruz  Janosch Prinz  Queen’s University Belfast, UK Devon Proudfoot  Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business  John Quiggin  University of Queensland, Australia 

Jenny L. Paterson  University of Sussex, UK 

José Ramos  Honorary Fellow, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, Australia

Janet V. T. Pauketat  University of California, Santa Barbara 

Amy E. Randel  San Diego State University 

T. V. Paul  McGill University, Canada 

Halim Rane  Griffith University, Australia 

Rebecca Pearse  University of Sydney, Australia 

Elizabeth Rata  University of Auckland, New Zealand 

Frederic S. Pearson  Wayne State University 

Christopher D. Raymond  Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland 

Rasmus T. Pedersen  University of Copenhagen, Denmark 

Hilde Eliassen Restad  Bjørknes University College, Norway 

William V. Pelfrey Jr.  Virginia Commonwealth University 

Liana Eustacia Reyes-Reardon  New York University 

Stéphane Perreault  Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada 

Marta Reynal-Querol  Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Michael A. Peters  University of Waikato, New Zealand 

Katherine J. Reynolds  Australian National University, Canberra 

Andrew Peterson  Canterbury Christ Church University, UK 

Stephen M. Rich  University of Southern California 

Richard Petty  Ohio State University 

David Rigby  University of North Carolina Chapel Hill 

xxvi   Contributors

Heidi Rimke  University of Winnipeg, Canada 

John S. Seiter  Utah State University 

Kimberly Rios  Ohio University 

Petros G. Sekeris  Montpellier Business School, France 

Steven C. Roach  University of South Florida 

Maor Shani  Jacobs University Bremen, Germany 

David L. Roberts  University of Texas Health Science Center 

Steven Shepherd  Oklahoma State University 

Steven Othello Roberts  University of Michigan 

Jae Hyeok Shin  Korea University, South Korea

Nicholas W. Robinson  Temple University 

Chris G. Sibley  University of Auckland, New Zealand 

Martin Rosema  University of Twente, The Netherlands 

Daniel Silander  Linnaeus University, Sweden 

Ewa Roszkowska  University of Bialystok, Poland 

Joanne Silvester  Cass Business School, City University London, UK 

Leonard I. Rotman  Dalhousie University, Canada  Andrew Rowcroft  University of Lincoln, UK  Desiree Ryan  Humboldt State University  David L. Sam  University of Bergen, Norway  Gabriel R. Sanchez  University of New Mexico Omar Sanchez-Sibony  Texas State University Kyla Sankey  Queen Mary University of London, UK Mehwish Sarwari  Buffalo State University

Alberto Simpser  ITAM, Mexico  Manoj Kumar Sinha  Indian Law Institute, New Delhi, India Ronald Skeldon  University of Sussex, UK  Heather J. Smith  Sonoma State University  William Smith  The Chinese University of Hong Kong  Frederick Solt  University of Iowa  Nicholas Sosa  Ohio University 

Ryan Schacht  University of Utah

Brian G. Southwell  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Richard K. Scher  Professor Emeritus, University of Florida

Ramón Spaaij  Victoria University, Australia

Elizabeth Schmitt  University of Arizona 

Seth M. Spain  Binghamton University 

Stephen P. Schneider  University of Nebraska, Lincoln 

Mary Stegmaier  University of Missouri 

Lee Schrader  United Nations University/Waseda University, Japan

Daniel Stockemer  University of Ottawa, Canada 

Scot Schraufnagel  Northern Illinois University 

Peter Strelan  University of Adelaide, Australia 

Contributors   xxvii

Elizabeth Suhay  American University 

Agnieszka Tymula  University of Sydney, Australia

Sara A. Sutherland  University of California, Santa Barbara 

Dinoj K. Upadhyay  Indian Council of World Affairs, India

Paulina Tambakaki  University of Westminster, UK 

Brian R. Urlacher  University of North Dakota

Kegon Tan  University of Wisconsin, Madison 

Eric M. Uslaner  University of Maryland 

Raymond Tatalovich  Loyola University Chicago 

Bethany Van Brunt National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, Berwyn, PA

Donald M. Taylor  McGill University, Canada  Laura Taylor  Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Brian Van Brunt  National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, Berwyn, PA

Simon Teune  Technische Universität Berlin, Germany 

Dirk Van de Gaer  Ghent University, Belgium

Kevin Theakston  University of Leeds, UK 

Maartje van der Woude  Leiden Law School, The Netherlands

Tobias Theiler  University College Dublin, Ireland 

Joop J. M. Van Holsteyn  Leiden University, The Netherlands

Leslie Paul Thiele  University of Florida 

Jacquelien van Stekelenburg  Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands

Naomi Thompson  Goldsmiths, University of London, UK 

Martijn van Zomeren  University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Clint Thomson  University of Western Ontario, Canada 

Richard Vernon  University of Western Ontario, Canada

Michele E. Tolson  University of Massachusetts, Boston 

Barbara Vis  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Robert Tomes  St. Augustine Hall 

Sebastian von Einsiedel  United Nations University, Japan

Mariano Torcal  Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain 

Jeppe von Platz  Suffolk University

Judith Torney-Purta  University of Maryland 

Konstantin M. Wacker  University of Mainz, Germany

Aris Trantidis  George Mason University 

Michael Wahman  University of Missouri, Columbia 

Linda R. Tropp  University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

Alan Walks  University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada

Marlene E. Turner  San Jose State University 

Peter Wallensteen  Uppsala University/University of Notre Dame 

Rhiannon N. Turner  Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Kevin Wallsten  University of California, Berkeley 

Jim Twombly  Elmira College 

Ching-Hsing Wang  Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston 

xxviii   Contributors

Bernard Weiner  University of California, Los Angeles 

Ernest J. Yanarella  University of Kentucky 

Aaron C. Weinschenk  University of Wisconsin, Green Bay 

Heather E. Yates  University of Central Arkansas 

Harper Weissburg  Georgetown University 

Sara K. Yeo  University of Utah 

Gary D. Wekkin  University of Central Arkansas 

Gozde Yilmaz  Uppsala University, Sweden

John J. Welch  University of Cambridge, UK

Omar Yousaf  University of Bath, UK 

Gordon Welty  Mercy College 

Chi-Wa Yuen  University of Hong Kong 

Dennis Lu-Chung Weng  State University of New York at Cortland 

Marie-Joëlle Zahar  Université de Montréal, Canada 

Anne Wetzel  University of Mannheim, Germany 

Oleg Zaznaev  Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Russia 

Chase Wilson  Loyola University Chicago 

Yahong Zhang  Rutgers University, Newark 

Luke B. Wood  Indiana University 

Cristina Zogmaister  University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy 

Joshua D. Wright  University of Western Ontario, Canada

Corri Zoli  Syracuse University

Introduction “Your article has to be written in a clear, jargon-free style so that students and the general public will find it interesting, instructive, and easy to understand but, at the same time, insightful and novel enough so that experts will also find it useful as a resource.” This is the challenging guideline followed by the authors who have contributed to this encyclopedia. I am happy to say that we succeeded in this ambitious goal. It is essential that The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior be accessible to a wide audience, because it is part of a broader effort to improve political and civic education and engagement. We can agree that this is a very worthwhile goal, irrespective of our political allegiances. This encyclopedia plays an important part in spreading knowledge about how people behave in the political domain. I strongly believe in the dictum that knowledge is power and that by spreading knowledge more broadly we are also spreading power more evenly, giving the general public greater opportunities to participate in political processes and influence the most important political decisions. Of course, this increased participation is essential to move us toward societies that are more open and in which political power is more evenly distributed among the population. Spreading knowledge about political processes and political behavior runs counter to the current trend of increasing the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This is a global trend, which has accelerated in recent decades. We learn from the 2016 Oxfam Davos Report that the 62 richest people in the world now own as much wealth as half of the world’s population. Since 2010, the wealth of the 62 richest people has increased by 1.76 trillion U.S. dollars, while the wealth of the poorest half of the world has declined by about 1 trillion U.S. dollars. This trend of increasing wealth inequality can be changed and even reversed through better knowledge dissemination, giving greater power and political influence to ordinary people. Our globalized world should not and does not have to be stuck in the age of robber barons. Better education, of which this encyclopedia is a part, must concern itself with improving the understandings of citizens about political behavior. In this context,

political behavior is interpreted very broadly to mean any and all behavior that influences the distribution of resources in society. Such resources include knowledge, information, and skills, as well as wealth and income. Very importantly, “resources” include understandings, such as the understanding of how important it is to engage in the political process. At present, barely 50% of the eligible population vote in even the most important elections in the United States, and those who vote tend to be richer, whiter, and older. Even in most relatively “advanced” democracies, the majority of the population remains disengaged and lacks understanding of, and influence in, key decision-making processes. This lack of engagement by vast numbers of people, mostly minorities, weakens democracy. Will the major democracies survive in the long term? Will dictatorships expand and overtake the more open societies, perhaps by the end of the twenty-first century? The most important rising economic and military power in the world is China, a dictatorship that shows no signs of becoming more politically open. Under the dictatorial leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russian militarism has become resurgent. Iran, North Korea, and various other smaller dictatorships are becoming more confident and active, attempting to influence events outside their borders. A number of countries that until recently seemed to be becoming more open, such as Venezuela, Poland, and Turkey, are becoming less open and even sliding back into dictatorship. The European Union is deeply troubled by ethnic, cultural, and other group-based divisions, giving new opportunities for the growth of extremist, antidemocratic movements. The “democratic experiment” is under pressure from dictatorial states and movements throughout the world. We have gotten used to living with the lazy assumption that democracy will win out against dictatorship, that the societies of tomorrow will be freer and more open than ever before. History teaches us the folly of resting on this assumption. From the democratic movements of Athens 2,500 years ago and of Rome 2,000 years ago to those in evidence during recent revolutions (Iran 1979; Egypt and other Arab Spring countries from 2010), it is clear that forward movement toward

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xxx   Introduction

democracy is not guaranteed. Societies do not inevitably change in only one direction; they can and often do change back toward dictatorship. I returned to Iran (my country of birth) with the revolution in 1979 to taste freedom on Tehran streets when the momentum toward democracy seemed unstoppable. The seemingly invincible dictatorship of the Shah, supported by vast oil resources and an expansive security apparatus, had been toppled. The road to freedom and democracy seemed wide open. But only a year after the dictatorship of the Shah crashed to the ground and he fled the country, we were back under another dictatorship. This time it was absolute rule by the mullahs, with their state-sponsored religious terror. Democracy has extremely powerful enemies in the 21st century, and some of them are new. The populist antidemocratic movements of the 20th century, using fascism, communism, and other “isms” as (often misleading) ideologies, have been replaced. The major authoritarian states that formerly used communism as a justification, such as China and Russia, now rely on a complex mixture of ideological justifications, including nationalism and manipulated forms of capitalism. For example, China is supposedly a communist state, but it now has more billionaires than does the United States. The most prominent common characteristic of China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and other such countries is not adherence to communist ideology but to authoritarianism and enmity toward openness. These are all dictatorships, heavily invested to prevent movement toward democracy—in some cases, despite the facade of putting on “elections.” The most prominent new enemy of democracy comes under the guise of Islam. One shape of this antidemocracy front is dictatorial regimes, such as those that rule in Iran and Saudi Arabia. These regimes use Islam to justify repression, violations of human rights, and lack of basic freedom and justice. They are particularly harsh on women and on religious and ethnic minorities, persecuting them and depriving them of even the most basic human rights. What these regimes have in common with non-Islamic dictatorships is a high level of corruption: Because ordinary people do not have the right to protest inefficiency and waste, the level of corruption in all dictatorships rises higher and higher. Paying bribes and buying favors is part of everyday life in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other dictatorships that use Islam as a front. But there is a second, more insidious global antidemocratic front that comes with an Islamic face. This is the consequence of Islamic terrorism. As the threat of Islamic terrorism has spread across the globe, governments have used the excuse of a “need for security” to restrict freedoms, increase surveillance, and generally

attain tighter control of information flow. In the name of “defending freedom,” governments have limited freedoms and restricted openness—including in democratic societies such as the United States. This has become clear from the information leaks made by Edward Snowden and others. It is highly ironic, and very unfortunate, that an open society must rely on computer hackers for its defense. Without Snowden, we would remain blind to the extent of government surveillance, some of it probably illegal and certainly against the spirit of democracy. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior, then, serves an important role as part of a larger effort to strengthen civic and political education in the effort to support movement toward democracy and openness.

Organization of the Encyclopedia This encyclopedia is composed of nearly 700,000 words, which make up 365 alphabetically arranged entries ranging in length from 1,000 to 3,000 words. Each entry is developed and written to be self-­contained, but is linked to particular other entries through a “See also” list. The fact that every entry has a “See also” list means that the reader could begin with an entry and continue reading other associated entries using these cross-references. In this way, readers actively develop new networks of ideas and discussions by creatively reading across connected entries. This is the first way in which readers can further explore the topic of an entry; in this case, the emphasis being on achieving more breadth by exploring the interconnections across topics. The second way in which readers can further explore the topic of an entry is by following up on the list given under the heading “Further Readings” at the end of each entry. Each list of readings is designed to include a small set of core works. In this case, the emphasis is placed on achieving greater depth in discussion of a topic. The selection of topics has been made to include, first, the most important “classic” topics on political behavior and, second, the most important cutting-edge topics in political behavior, the ones that reflect surging new interest. For example, topics such as Dictatorship and Feminism are well established and have become classics, whereas we are witnessing a surge of new interest in topics such as the International Criminal Court and “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action. Through very careful diligence and assessment, we have achieved a successful balance between classic and cutting-edge topics, as well as between topics that are more important in research and those more important in practice.

Introduction      xxxi

Readers will also find that we have purposely crossed disciplinary boundaries, moving through political science, psychology, sociology, communications studies, and other major fields to achieve the goal of providing solid and innovative coverage of political behavior. Clearly political behavior in everyday life does not stop at the boundary of any academic discipline, and we should not adhere to such boundaries in this kind of project. Reflecting this broad, inclusive perspective, our authors come from many different educational and professional backgrounds. The geographical distribution of authors is also wide. What authors have in ­common is a very high level of expertise and professionalism and a strong motivation to communicate their ideas and knowledge to a wide audience. In selecting the topics for this encyclopedia, using expert advice and classic and current literature, the ­following broad categories served as a general guide: Cognitive Processes Group Identities and Influence Individual Political Behavior International/Comparative Perspectives Justice and Political Behavior Media, Discourse, and Communications Policies and Political Behavior Political Systems Security and Terrorism Social Political Movements Theories of Political Behavior Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns

This encyclopedia provides a balanced coverage of topics in all of these major areas. To achieve further breadth on a topic, readers can follow the “See also” lists provided at the end of each entry; and for further depth, the readings listed at the end of each entry.

Acknowledgments The completion of this large multidisciplinary encyclopedia, with 365 entries and almost 400 contributors scattered across the world, was only possible through the enthusiastic support and hearty cooperation of a great number of people. I am very grateful to the Editorial Board and the authors for their contributions. All of their names appear in the encyclopedia. The names that are less visible are those of the diligent and creative individuals who worked in the background to bring this encyclopedia to life. Maureen Adams played a key role in initiating the project with SAGE; I owe a great deal to Diana Axelsen and Sanford Robinson for skillfully guiding the project to completion. I am also indebted to Sue Moskowitz for her highly efficient work and timely interventions. Diana, Sanford, and Sue are the magical hidden hands that make such highly ­complex projects run smoothly. I also want to thank Nancy Swartz, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, for helping create a departmental atmosphere in which this large and complex project could be successfully completed. Finally, I am as always deeply indebted to Maryam, my wife, for her indefatigable ­support of my academic projects. Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University

A of scripture. For Lutherans as well as other Protestants who were skeptical of Calvinist theology, the doctrine of predestination and the above concomitant eschatological doctrine were considered absolutistic primarily because they denied free will; and thus, they didn’t provide good reasons for why humans are responsible for their actions. For if God has knowledge of what we will do and our actions could not be otherwise, then how could we be held accountable for our actions? How could we have free will? If we don’t have free will yet we are held eternally responsible for our sins, how can we say that God is just? Beyond the doctrine of predestination, theological absolutism in both Western and non-Western traditions (especially within monotheistic religions) will sometimes refer to any rigid, absolutistic belief, system of beliefs, doctrine, and/or practice, that asserts a divine or ultimate reality to be in control of the collective will and fate of humankind in a way that could not be otherwise.

Absolutism Absolutism refers to the act of believing that certain principles, values, claims, and doctrines are universally valid independent of their relation to different contexts of, and variations within, experience. Although it is occasionally viewed in a positive light (especially by those who hold these beliefs), absolutism is generally a pejorative term signifying the existence of a rigid ­permanence and order within and among things and their relations, the natural world, and/or social political systems. Though absolutism is manifested within a variety of social dynamics and experiential circumstances, historically it has been recognized within four interrelated traditions of thought: theology, politics, philosophy, and morality.

Theological Absolutism Derived from the Latin absoluˉtus (meaning complete, unconditional, and perfect), theological absolutism—as with all other types of absolutism—could be applied to earlier times in human history. But in the modern era, it arose during the 18th century as a pejorative term for the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Though there are many articulations of it, this doctrine centrally holds that whatever comes to pass is in accord with God’s foreknowledge and will. Based on interpretations of the Christian Bible and the concept of original sin, this theological belief gave rise to and supported the eschatological doctrine that both the salvation and damnation of individual souls have already been determined (even before time began). It wasn’t the Calvinists, of course, who held their doctrine to be absolutistic; rather, it was centrally Lutherans who leveled this charge of absolutism against Calvinists’ interpretations

Political Absolutism Political absolutism refers to those political doctrines, ideals, and practices of a government that are believed to be authoritarian, tyrannous, and/or despotic. Political absolutism as a pejorative term likewise arose during the modern era, and although what constituted such absolutism is debated, it generally, and without too much controversy, refers to the rule of absolute monarchs throughout Europe during the Age of Absolutism (c. 1550–c. 1789). The ruling power and practices of these monarchs were legitimized by a c­entral theological and absolutistic belief called the “divine right of kings.” The divine right of kings is simultaneously a theological and political doctrine claiming that a monarch’s right to rule is derived from and justified by the will and mandate of God. In John Locke’s Two 1

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Absolutism

Treatises of Government, we find the most convincing and influential argument against this combination of theological and political absolutism. In these treatises, Locke’s critique of Patriarcha (a work by Robert Filmer that defended the idea of the divine right of kings), his arguments for representative governments, the consent of the governed, and the right of revolution contributed to a historical dissatisfaction with absolutistic monarchical rule and served as an impetus toward the establishment of Western democratic governments. Thomas Hobbes’s social-political vision in Leviathan, some argue, while also contributing to the historical turn away from theological-political absolutism, was, at the same time, a secular justification of a monarch’s absolute power. Hobbes’s political philosophy, with its primary idea that bestowing absolute power upon one individual (or an assembly of individuals) will contribute to the goal of establishing a functional and peaceful society, is absolutistic in that under Hobbes’s vision the legitimacy, sovereignty, and power of a ruler or rulers cannot be challenged. Though political absolutism is most commonly a reference to both theological and secular monarchies, the term may also be applied to any political doctrine, ideal, or practice within a socialpolitical system that is considered to be true beyond question, irrefutably necessary, and/or not subject to change.

Philosophical Absolutism Absolutism in philosophy is widely accepted as being synonymous with monism. And while there are many different types of monism, all doctrines of monism attrib­ ute oneness to reality or some dimension of it and favor singleness over plurality. One type of monism, called substance monism, posits that among the multiplicity of things, there is one single substance that underlies all of them. In Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, examples of this one single substance include the Tao (Taoism) and Brahman (Hinduism), while in ancient Greek philosophy this substance was conceived as being a variety of things, for example Water (Thales), Air (Anaximenes), Number (Pythagoras), Fire (Heraclitus), and so on. A modern example of substance monism is exemplified in Baruch Spinoza’s belief that only one infinite substance exists, God or Nature, and this substance has all possible attributes. Another monistic doctrine, priority monism, puts forth the view that the whole is prior to its parts and that the parts are fragments dependent upon the unity and oneness of the whole. Neoplatonism exemplifies this doctrine, namely with the claim that things overflow from the “One” and all things are in some way dependent upon the One. In contemporary philosophy, there are many other

­ efinitions and types of monism, such as idealism (all is d mind), materialism (all is matter), and neutral monism (all is neutral, neither mind nor matter). With the ­exception of neutral monism, which is fundamentally pluralistic, the absolutistic dimension of monist doctrines is noted by a common methodological approach that involves a movement from the whole to the parts; that is, a top-down approach that starts with the idea of a whole and builds downward. All such monistic, absolutist projects (e.g., G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) are totalizing projects wherein the varieties, relations, and differences among the parts are excluded from the ultimate character of the whole. In direct opposition to the methods of absolutism, pluralistic methods call for a bottom-up approach in order to grasp the contextualized relations of a variety of experiences and historical circumstances.

Moral Absolutism Moral absolutism is the belief or system of beliefs that hold certain standards, principles, and actions to be intrinsically right or wrong. Absolutism in this form has been historically noted throughout the history of different religious beliefs usually in the form of commandments of some type of divine moral revelation written down in a text. Moral absolutism in many religious traditions, then, involves directives, not simply beliefs. Beyond these religious manifestations of absolutism, moral absolutism is sometimes supported and sustained by philosophical frameworks in which moral standards, principles, and actions are thought to be valid or good independent of their relation to different contexts of, and variations within, experience. In antiquity, we find the most glaring example of moral absolutism in Plato’s theory of the Forms, specifically in what Plato called “The Form of the Supreme Good.” But in the modern era, it is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, or deontology, which is most commonly interpreted to be an ­absolutistic moral theory. Derived from the Greek deon meaning duty or obligation, deontology is a form of moral philosophy that holds that the morality of an action can only be determined by its relation and adherence to moral laws or rules. For Kant, there is one thing and one thing alone that is good: a good will. One’s will (or one’s moral intent) is considered good not by the consequences it produces through action but by its adherence to the maxims (principles of action) that are both rational and universally valid. Our actions are moral, then, according to Kant, whenever they are in accord with the categorical imperative rather than hypothetical imperatives. Hypothetical imperatives tell us how to act in order to achieve a specific goal, for example, “Do ‘X’ to achieve ‘Y,” or “Work hard to

Activism

become successful.” These types of imperatives, in which our actions are instrumental, are not grounded in the moral law, and thus for Kant, they do not help us to determine what makes a will good. The only way to determine the goodness of our wills is by noting how our actions follow or do not follow the categorical imperative. Kant formulates this imperative in different ways, each of which describes the duty we have to the well-being of others and to the moral law within. For example: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law, or Never act in such a way that you treat Humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. The ­reason why these imperatives (and deontology in general) are considered to be absolutistic is that for Kant, moral goodness can only be determined in this way, namely one must follow the directives and principles of the categorical imperative in order to act morally. The consequences of our actions do not matter; only principles do. Despite such a claim, evidence within ­ contemporary moral social psychology suggests that this belief in the power of our principles to affect our actions is somewhat illusory.

Absolutism, Relativism, and Contextualism Absolutism is often contrasted with relativism, in which the former signifies belief in unalterable truths or timeless realities, while the latter holds truth to be relative and reality to be ultimately perspectival. This distinction is as simplistic as it is problematic, for there are many different types of absolutism, and what people mean by “relativism” isn’t uniformly the same. Moreover, relativism itself is often absolutistic. We might clarify this last point by distinguishing between what might be called absolutistic relativism and relationalism. Absolutistic relativism is a perspective that “anything goes,” that one’s perspective on any particular issue is just as good or valid as any others, and since there is no way to judge objectively the truth or value of anything, my vision of the good life is just as valid as another’s, and yours is just as good or valid as mine. This is a very common narrative of relativism, but in truth people only believe this narrative superficially. That is to say, once one is asked a series of contextually specific questions about the truth or validity of certain standards, principles, and actions, stalwart belief in this type of relativism begins to falter. Relationalism is a type of relativism, which we might call a pluralistic relativism, in which multiple experienced relations between things provide the foundations for different dimensions of contextualized truths. Accordingly, reality is never, nor ever to be, wholly complete, and since our lives are always in

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process, all things are works in progress. All forms of absolutism, therefore, are not only distortions of reality but also conceptually incoherent. Mark Fagiano See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Corruption; Dictatorship; Fascism; Rent-Seeking Behavior; Torture

Further Readings Batson, D. (2016). What’s wrong with morality: A socialpsychological perspective. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Beik, W. (1989). Absolutism and society in seventeenth-century France. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Filmer, R. (1680/1991). Patriarcha and other writings (J. P. Sommerville, Ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Guthrie, W. K. C. (1950). The Greek philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle. London, England: Methuen. Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/1977). The phenomenology of spirit. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. (1651/2008). Leviathan (J. C. A. Gaskin, Ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. James, W. (1909/1996). A pluralistic universe: Hibbert lectures at Manchester College on the present situation of philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. James, W. (1912/1996). Essays in radical empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Johnson, R. (2004/2016). Kant’s moral philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#Cat HypImp Kant, I. (1785/1981). Grounding for the metaphysics of morals: On a supposed right to lie because of philanthropic concerns [J. W. Ellington, Trans.]. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Locke, J. (1680–1690/1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Activism Activism refers to single or repeated actions taken by individuals and groups in order to promote a cause, which usually involves a social, political, or economic agenda. Activism takes place in both authoritarian and democratic states, but typically only the latter offer citizens legal means of nonviolent protest, including public meetings, demonstrations, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and more. Since the early 2000s, information technologies are becoming increasingly important for activism. In modern history, activism has been a major force

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Activism

behind fundamental social and political reforms, including the fall of dictatorships and national revolutions, the abolition of slavery, women’s emancipation, gay rights, and many other social and political changes. Nevertheless, activism has also been utilized to support violent causes, such as promoting wars and restricting minority rights. This entry reviews major themes in research on and practice of activism. It first reviews several definitions and typologies of activism, followed by an introduction to social psychology research on activists, their motivations, and their characteristics. The third section ­provides a general overview of activist groups, organizations, and social movements. Thereafter, a discussion of basic approaches of social and political activism is offered. The text concludes with remarks on the current state of activism and possible future developments.

Typologies of Activism What constitutes activism is in the eye of the beholder. The academic literature classifies types of activism by looking at the topical spectrum of activism domains, as well as at the extent and scope of the envisioned goals. One common distinction refers to the methods of activities, which can be understood in either a narrow or broad sense. A broad view of activism encompasses all forms of political behaviors, regardless of their context. From this viewpoint, one may even argue that the mere awareness of social problems and injustices is a form of activism. The narrow understanding of activism distinguishes between protest activism and conventional activism. Democratic participation in conventional politics is concerned with the role citizens play in e­ lections (e.g., voting) and parties (e.g., campaign work) with the aim of influencing the government’s composition. Protest activism, on the other hand, includes c­ ause-oriented actions such as mass demonstrations, petitions, boycotts, and even political violence. This article focuses on the latter understanding of activism. However, the extent to which the distinction between conventional and protest activism remains appropriate in the 21st century is a matter of scholarly debate. Both formal and informal political actors use a mixture of traditional and alternative modes of activism, and political parties increasingly make use of protest activism methods for recruitment and advocacy. Although activism is often identified with progressive and liberal causes such as promoting equal rights and freedom, activists may also choose to act for the preservation of existing social conventions, to protect the government or powerful individuals and institutions, and even to limit the rights of others. Nevertheless, most activists in Western democracies push for

liberal reforms in laws and policies. Whether a particular activist’s goal is seen as—normatively—positive or negative depends on social and cultural values and situation specifics. Activism goals can be particular or abstract. Activists can push not only for reforms in actual policies but also to encourage a fundamental change in the political system and social institutions. Many global social ­ movements are oriented toward broad, ambitious, and sustained goals, such as achieving reconciliation after conflict or global nuclear disarmament. Another continuum to characterize activism is the one ranging from local to global. Activists may fight to preserve an ancient structure in one specific town, or they may campaign for broader issues of national or global importance, such as women’s rights or the environment. Global campaigns spread across a wide array of advocacy circles, creating powerful coalitions of groups and networks. Local goals, however, can even be focused around a particular person, such as activists fighting against wrongful convictions. They can also focus on change in the immediate vicinity of activists’ residence areas. Such activism is sometimes apostrophized pejoratively as NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) activism. Activism can also be characterized by its target. While most activists’ strategies aim to influence laws and policies, they may also be directed toward non-state actors in the public and private sectors. For example, activists have targeted food corporations such as McDonald’s with demands in the domain of labor and animal rights. Some activists also aim at changing the public’s behavior and not that of any political institution. Finally, while certain social movements are temporary and push for an immediate governmental reaction, some movements are oriented toward long-term goals. The former type of movement is often triggered by particular circumstances, situations, or events, and they tend to dissolve once the goal has been achieved or become irrelevant. The latter type, however, may continue to be active for a longer time. For example, within the peace movement, some activist groups have been focused on preventing or ending specific wars, while others have been promoting the idea of world peace. In many cases, the goals of activists are related to prevalent cultural values and ideologies in their respective societies. In the West, core issues have shifted from survival concerns to self-expression-related topics such as globalization, equality, and the politics of sexual or ethnic identities, and this change is reflected in the causes promoted by activists and social movements in the 21st century. In developing societies, however, grassroots activism is still mainly concerned with basic livelihood means such as food, health, and education, and with basic freedoms and the reduction of inequalities.

Activism

Activists and Their Characteristics Who is an activist? Similar to the action itself, the definition here may also vary between broad and narrow. Some people become activists for a short period of time, or occasionally engage in activism throughout their lives, while others make activism their life’s work. Some activists begin with small actions like passively attending meetings and demonstrations, and gradually become more involved in a movement. Evidently, everyone can perform acts of activism with or without being perceived by themselves or others as activists. Some activists are also scholars (conversely some scholars are also activists), who often conduct research on topics related to their activist causes. ­Universities constitute one of the most important places where activism takes place, and it is rather common for students to be involved in activism campaigns during their studies. Youth activism is also prevalent in certain societies. Youth are often passionate about their ideas and are motivated to transform their communities and even the world. Generational replacement theory explains youth activism as filling generational gaps, leading to the formation of new political groups among youth and young adults. Some scholars see youth involvement in activism and volunteering as an important step in their sociopolitical development. In many societies, there are mechanisms for youth to be involved in social and political activism, such as school clubs, youth movements, and volunteering organizations. Activism is commonly performed at the grassroots level, by individuals and groups who are interested in challenging governmental policies and actions that cause them or others harm. Citizens engage in various forms of political activities for various reasons. Level of education, income, occupational status, and demographic factors (­gender, age, or ethnicity) as well as motivationally engaging factors (culture-specific attitudes and internal and external efficacy) impact the degree of activism. People who feel well informed and do care about a cause, while believing that they or their movement can make a difference, are more likely to become activists. Research has also shown that people with ideological consistency, whether liberal or conservative, who also hold strong negative views of political adversaries, are more likely to become politically engaged and active. Social identity theory explains collective action by emphasizing the role of identification of activists with their political and ideological groups, who motivate them to commit to ­ their norms and goals. Accordingly, studies on peace activists have found that their motivation was linked to personal networks with other activists. The desire to avert threat of social or political change was also found to be a powerful motivator for activism.

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Research has supplemented the sociopsychological framework with contextual factors. For example, political and civic institutions, such as political parties and voluntary associations, also play a role in mobilizing individuals to act. The mass media, including newspapers, television, and the Internet, also promote awareness of social problems, and thereby raise political involvement. In particular, studies on social mobilization in the 21st century have found that the use of Internet and social media is linked to greater involvement in social movements. For many activists, activism is a vocation, and it often involves adopting a particular lifestyle. Studies show that activists are psychologically rewarded by their involvement in activism. They develop interpersonal contact and strong ties with peers, enjoy mutual support, and gain a sense of belonging. Studies also revealed long-term psychosocial consequences of activism, particularly among youth. A study on young activists in the 1980s German peace movement found that activists report having better mental health and wellbeing than nonactivists with similar levels of concern about war 25 years later.

Activist Groups and Social Movements Although activists can operate individually, activism almost always requires an organizational structure, to a varying degree of formality and centralization. Working in groups is necessary for both organizational and social reasons: groups enable activists to perform activism tasks more efficiently, to use specialists and professionals, and to organize events of large magnitude, such as mass demonstrations and nationwide campaigns. Moreover, activist groups provide their members mutual support, solidarity, and encouragement. In many cases, activists in groups develop strong and emotional ties and loyalty to other group members, which increase their motivation for sustained action and contribute to their sense of efficacy. Some activist groups oppose hierarchy and leadership from an ideological stance and embrace egalitarian practices such as role sharing and methods of consensus decision making. Activist groups are usually nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations. However, mostly in authoritarian states, government-organized nongovernmental organizations (so-called GONGOS) also exist. Activist groups consist of both volunteers and paid staff and dedicate much attention to fund-raising, lobbying, and other behind-the-scenes activities, as well as recruiting new activists and training them. Activists usually go through stages of training as they become increasingly involved in their organization. Although education and training of activists is done mostly in an informal manner in the

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Activism

field, some activists and groups disseminate manuals with information about the cause, inspiring messages, and practical guidelines for activism (see, e.g., Shaw’s 1991 The Activist’s Handbook). When a coalition of groups and individuals join forces to promote a common goal, they become a part of a social movement, which is a framework for activists to promote a common cause, push for social change, and engage in collective action. Some scholars see in social movements the culmination of democracy and the main social institution within which influential and effective citizen activism can take place. Similarly to organizations, movements include mobilizing features that enable activists to organize actions, and social features such as networks and support mechanisms. In social movements, activists face challenges together, show internal solidarity, and engage in sustained interaction. Nevertheless, movements’ structure is more informal and nonhierarchical, with fluid boundaries. It is seldom required that all organizations in the movement coordinate their activities, but the movement provides a framework for communication between activists and groups, and enables them to learn from each other and plan common strategies. Activists from different organizations included in a movement may still act independently. Research on social movements has focused on their structure, as well as on the process through which they are formed and developed, the methods they use to mobilize, and their demise. One of the challenges of social movements is first to gain momentum and attract activists, and later, to preserve the initial enthusiasm. Eventually, most social movements collapse or become institutionalized, for example, by becoming a part of the formal political system through elected parties. When a movement fades out, the cause may be kept alive by a small number of dedicated activists, but their impact is likely to be marginal. Activism is increasingly utilized by global, international, and transnational organizations and movements. The rise of global activism is rooted in the emergence of broad online social communities, and in the transformation of social structures and identities in the postindustrial era, in which personal narratives replace ethnic and national ones. Global social movements are concerned with issues such as trade policies, social justice, and the environment. They not only include networks of a­ ctivists from different parts of the world but also f­requently engage with non-state and transnational targets such as corporations and international monetary institutions. The environmental movement is one of the most influential global movements, which has managed to remain highly active for decades while constantly adapting their specific causes based on developments in

relevant fields. The movement consists of a diverse coalition of activist groups and professional organizations, covering the entire political spectrum. The e­ nvironmental movement demonstrated a successful institutionalization of a social movement, as is evident by the popularity of “green” parties in the Western world, and by expanding governmental attention to environmental issues.

Approaches to Activism Cause-oriented activists have a large, diverse, and everincreasing repertoire of tools to express themselves politically and bring forward their demands. The variety of methods activists use can be divided into traditional approaches that have been practiced by activists and social movements in the real world and new, Internet-based activities that have become prominent in the 21st century. Here we cover only traditional activism approaches; for Internet-based forms of activism, the reader is referred to the entry on cyberactivism in this encyclopedia. Traditionally, activism takes place in the form of direct and nonviolent public protests. The most ­common approaches to public protest include demonstrations, marches, and rallies. Organized mass demonstrations surged in established democracies during the 1950s, for example by the U.S. civil rights movement and by antiwar campaigns in Europe, and occasionally even became trendy in social movements concerned with peace and war, women’s rights, and the environment throughout the second half of the 20th century. Whereas demonstrations were considered a radical political activity until the 1970s, they have since become widespread and an integral part of mainstream political life. Other popular activism approaches are signing petitions, organizing conferences, lobbying, making public speeches, and writing letters to the media. Activists’ collective actions also include civil disobedience (i.e., refusal to obey laws that are considered unfair), strikes, sit-ins, and occupying economic and political institutions. Economic activism is mainly practiced through boycotting specific shops, companies, and even countries that do not conform to the activists’ values or demands. An example of a successful civil boycott c­ ampaign is the worldwide boycott of South Africa’s apartheid regime from the early 1970s until its abolition in 1994. Recently, buycotting—intentionally buying certain products that are deemed to aid a particular political goal—has become an approach in economic activism. An example for the buycotting strategy is the global support for the purchase of ­fair-trade products.

Activism

Innovations in approaches to nonviolent activism are continually introduced. Activism is also practiced using art such as literature and music, sporting events, and public performances such as so-called flash mobs. Activists sometimes go beyond mere protesting and engage in community building and enhancement, such as ­organizing community projects to improve accessibility and environmental health. Activism can also be conducted using destructive and even violent methods, from blocking roads, to ­violent demonstrations and vandalism, to assassinations and even terrorism. In some cases, nonviolent methods include violent elements, such as demonstrations that are accompanied by damage and arson, whether as a result of a deliberate strategy or on the spur of the moment. The decision on approaches to activism by social movements is influenced by many factors. In general, the more activists believe that their cause is perceived as legitimate by the public, and that they can convince policy-makers to change their policies, the less likely they are to adopt disruptive and violent tactics. If, however, the government delegitimizes the campaign and shows little willingness to change, activists might turn to less conventional modes of protest. In the present century, advances in technology and communication have led to new and efficient modes of digital and online activism, sometimes called cyberactivism; for details, see the separate entry under that title.

Current and Future Trends in Activism Scholars and public figures are divided as to whether a high level of conventional and cause-based political participation is necessary for democracy to function well. While some scholars suggest that even limited and minimal civic engagement is sufficient to achieve an accountable system, others advocate for more extensive public involvement in political activism. Nevertheless, both camps agree that activism makes governments more accountable and more attentive to citizens’ will. Is activism in decline? During the 1990s and the 2000s, studies have systematically documented the decline in political participation, volunteerism, and membership in traditional agencies such as trade unions and cooperative associations in many democracies. However, people’s willingness to attend lawful protest activism events has consistently increased since the mid1970s. Moreover, while some argue that activism has seen periods of outbreaks and declines, cross-national survey data indicate that there is a linear increase in popular protest acts, such as demonstrations and petition signing, in both established and emerging ­ democracies.

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Although it is not safe to predict that activism will increase and become more effective in the future, we can be sure that as long as social problems exist, individuals, groups, and movements will continue to promote their causes. The repertoire of activism methods is also likely to continue to expand and to diversify in the future, in parallel to innovations in technology. New and more accessible methods of cyberactivism are likely to continue engaging more and more people all over the world, possibly increasing activism in nondemocratic countries, where activists face major challenges and threats. The declining autonomy of states and processes of privatization and transnationality may suggest that the target of activism will continue to expand from state actors to intergovernmental organizations and private corporations. Activists may find it more and more difficult to make real changes when aiming only at the official state-level systems. Research still needs to pay greater attention to new elements and forms of activism, to global and transnational social movements, and to emerging activism in authoritarian states, as well as engage more in systematic and comparative examination of activism between social groups, over time, and across cultures. Klaus Boehnke and Maor Shani See also Citizenship; Collective Action; Obedience; Resource Mobilization

Further Readings Boehnke, K., & Wong, B. (2011). Adolescent political activism and long-term happiness: A 21-year longitudinal study on the development of micro- and macrosocial worries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(3), 435–447. Fischer, C., & Boehnke, K. (2004). “Obstruction Galore”: A case study of non-violent resistance against nuclear waste disposal in Germany. Environmental Politics, 13, 393–413. doi:  10.1080/0964401042000209630 Norris, P. (2007). Political activism: New challenges, new opportunities. In C. Boix and S. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative politics (pp. 628–651). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Olesen, T. (Ed.). (2010). Power and transnational activism. New York, NY: Routledge. Reitan, R. (2012). Global activism. New York, NY: Routledge. Shaw, R. (2001). The activist’s handbook: A primer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Valocchi, S. (2009). Social movements and activism in the USA. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Advocacy

Advocacy Advocacy in the legal sense is very much like advocacy in the ordinary sense of the word: supporting, recommending, or pleading on behalf of a person, organization, or position. Advocacy before government bodies includes diverse forms of petitioning commonly p ­rotected by constitutional or statutory provisions: representation in court, lobbying legislative bodies, and participation in administrative processes. Private individuals, firms, and interest groups—stakeholders—engage in advocacy directly and through professional advocates. This entry focuses on a type of advocacy conducted by government authorities themselves. Particularly in complex regulatory states, overlapping authority or legislative mandate can prompt interagency cooperation. Agencies can share information and work to avoid conflicts as they administer areas of mutual concern. Government advocacy occurs when agencies advocate for particular policies with other government bodies. This is akin to public lobbying, often for a clear and legally established public interest. Advocacy is a type of soft law, as government bodies use their expertise and authority to inform and persuade each other, often when neither has legal authority over the other. This entry begins by sketching two theories of regulation, the market failure theory, called normative analysis as a positive theory (NPT), and the economic theory of regulation (ETR). It then illustrates government advocacy, and advocacy’s role in regulation, by describing the competition advocacy program of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which seeks to promote competition and ameliorate competitive harm that other government actors might do. This is by no means the only government advocacy program—or even the only competition advocacy program; the Department of Justice also conducts competition advocacy in the United States, and competition authorities in other nations have analogous programs. Still, it is a longstanding, wide-ranging, and, often, apparently effective example of government advocacy.

Theories of Regulation NPT sees regulation as a response to market failure. For example, the notion of a natural monopoly might explain why an area has only one electric power company. A monopoly power company does not, on its own, need to offer low prices or reliable service to compete because it has no competitors. Regulation can seek to moderate these problems by, for example, setting prices: in theory, high enough to prompt adequate ­production but low enough to approximate competitive pricing.

Information asymmetries might explain regulation in areas such as health care. If a patient cannot obtain the same information about her condition and treatment as a doctor or hospital, then she will be at a disadvantage when she decides, with a provider’s advice, what health care services she needs or where she should obtain them. In response, expert regulators might set minimum standards for hospitals and practitioners, providing at least some assurance of a basic level of care. Regulators might also make information more accessible. ETR, developed by George Stigler, Sam Peltzman, and Gary Becker, begins with two basic observations. First, if NPT seems to fit well with some regulation, it seems to fit poorly with much else, either because a systematic market failure is not demonstrated or because a particular rule is not an effective or efficient  response to a demonstrated problem. Second, ­lawmakers are themselves interested parties, subject to preferences—notably a preference for reelection—and economic constraints. ETR models a concern that a sort of political market failure will be common, as legislatures respond to stakeholders and, through agencies, assign different regulatory costs and benefits to different stakeholders. Coordination or collective action problems—organization costs and the risks of free riding—can dilute the influence of large numbers of private stakeholders, particularly when each stakeholder has many voting (and contributing) interests. Information costs can even make it difficult for small stakeholders to know what policies affect them and to what degree. But concentrated interests—such as those of a corporation, trade association, or union—might have fewer coordination problems and secure outsize benefits. Both NPT and ETR have applications and, as ­Peltzman and others recognize, limitations in explaining or predicting various areas of regulation or deregulation. Government advocacy has a role to play under either approach or in a mixed model of regulation.

Competition Advocacy The FTC, created in 1914, has law enforcement authority over competition and consumer protection matters in most sectors of the economy. The FTC Act, which establishes and authorizes the FTC, also gives the FTC a research, education, and policy mission. In particular, the FTC is to investigate and report on market developments in the public interest and make legislative recommendations based on its findings. Economic research and competition advocacy have been part of the FTC’s statutory mission since the agency’s creation, and the FTC has maintained a distinct program of competition advocacy since at least the early 1980s.

Affirmative Action

At the request of federal or state policy-makers, the FTC and its staff may advocate on the likely competitive effects of existing or contemplated regulations. Published reports, comments to legislatures, testimony, and amicus briefs have addressed competition concerns in areas such as health care, e-commerce, occupational regulation, transportation, and real estate. Such advocacies do not generally seek to replace existing ­ policy priorities. Rather, the advocacies seek to convince policy-makers to consider competitive effects and ­consumer impact too, and to reference FTC economic and enforcement experience in doing so. In brief, the FTC pushes a research-based approach to asking and answering several questions: Do existing or proposed regulations address demonstrated consumer harms? Are regulations effective and efficient? Are regulations narrowly targeted to avoid unanticipated or undue ­ competition problems—barriers to free market competition, unnecessary price increases, reduced access to goods and services, or diminished innovation? Are there less harmful alternatives? Competition advocacy can be expert agency input under NPT—testing for systematic and durable market failures and analyzing whether regulatory responses are effective and efficient. It can also work as a counterweight to special interest lobbying and ­ rent-seeking behavior under ETR—helping identify ­ inefficiencies and the ­ relative winners and losers of regulatory r­ estrictions, and helping ameliorate harm to competition, as self-interested stakeholders seek advantages at the expense of competition and the larger population. Daniel J. Gilman Author’s Note: This article represents the views of the author alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner. See also Collective Action; Economics and Political Behavior; Free Market; Lobbying; Rent-Seeking Behavior

Further Readings Cooper, J. C., Pautler, P., & Zywicki, T. (2005). Theory and practice of competition advocacy at the FTC. George Mason Law Review, 72, 1991–1112. Ohlhausen, M. K. (2006). Identifying, challenging, and assigning political responsibility for state regulation restricting competition. Competition Policy International, 2, 151–166. Peltzman, S. (1976). Toward a more general theory of regulation. Journal of Law & Economics, 19, 211–240. Stigler, G. J. (1971). The theory of economic regulation. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2, 3–21.

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Affirmative Action Affirmative action refers to a broad range of policies and rules in which the ethnic, gender, or other group characteristics matter in the determination of education and labor market opportunities. Policies of this type are in effect in many countries, with historical context determining the targeted groups. For example, India has an extensive reservation system that allocates seats at educational institutions in a way that provides quotas for disadvantaged castes. Castes are social classes within Indian society transmitted across generations with strong restrictions on intermarriage. Another prominent example along racial lines is the privilege given to Bumiputera members (primarily Malay and other indigenous ethnicities) in Malaysia and Brunei, although in this case affirmative action is in favor of the majority ethnicity rather than minorities. A 2004 book by Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action, provides an international survey.

Background The term comes from an executive order issued during the Kennedy administration that “affirmative action” be taken by government contractors to ensure employment opportunities regardless of ethnic or religious class. Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1965, provided a famous justification for such policies: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

The key idea underlying this justification is that the consequences of past injustices should be addressed in setting rules for the allocation of opportunities and resources in a society. In particular, affirmative action policies constitute a set of interventions into the process of matching in education and in labor markets to facilitate equality between groups of individuals who have experienced either a history of racial discrimination or contemporary biases. For the United States, the history of affirmative action policies is comprehensively surveyed and placed in the context of general race-based policies by John David Skrentny, in his 1996 book The Ironies of Affirmative Action. The United States is also a uniquely informative case study due to the wealth of data and policy analysis that has been performed. This entry therefore centers on affirmative action and its costs and

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Affirmative Action

benefits in the United States, while acknowledging that many other societies also implement or are considering the implementation of affirmative action policies.

The Policies and the Courts Affirmative action policies have engendered enormous political opposition. Further, Supreme Court decisions have delimited the bases on which it can be i­ mplemented, particularly in higher education. Regents of California v. Bakke (1976) was seminal both in banning explicit racial quotas and in treating diversity as a “compelling state interest” in education. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) upheld the basic Bakke logic as have the decisions in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016). The preservation of affirmative action across different ideological compositions of the Supreme Court suggests that current policies are likely to survive future legal challenges. In contrast, it is easy to imagine that states, following California (1996), Michigan (2008), and Texas (1997) among ­ others, might ban the policy via legislation, executive order, or referendum.

Studies and Critiques There is substantial evidence that affirmative action matters; that is, it materially affects the allocation of students across colleges and workers across firms. For higher education, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok conclude that for five private elite colleges, eliminating affirmative action would reduce the conditional probability of admission for an African American applicant from 42% to 13%. Other studies that include public universities draw similar conclusions. Mark Long (2004) finds that for top decile schools, elimination of affirmative action would reduce minority enrollment from 10.6% to 7.8%. While one cannot determine how many of these students would simply not have been admitted anywhere, these studies indicate that a large number of minority students are affected by affirmative action. The literature also uncovers similar results at the graduate level. Other evidence of the efficacy of the policies may be deduced from bans implemented against the policy. David Card and Alan B. Krueger examine this with respect to college admissions, exploring the elimination of affirmative action in California and Texas between 1996 and 1998. They found that Black and Hispanic admission rates fell at top state schools but did not change the SAT-score-sending behavior of highly qualified minority students. Other papers link variation in race-neutral admissions with college choice and find effects consistent with those of Card and Krueger.

Other work has explored the interplay of class-based versus race-based affirmative action. Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter present data from a larger number of states including Texas, California, Florida, and Michigan. They argue in favor of reducing the reliance on race by university admissions officers and emphasizing classbased affirmative action instead. They show that the removal of race-based affirmative action does not end affirmative action in general, although the distribution of its effects is changed. Recent research has focused on how affirmative action interacts with educational experiences and outcomes. Richard H. Sander received wide attention in arguing that affirmative action results in a “mismatch” between some students and law schools. The idea is that students with weaker academic backgrounds have difficulty completing more selective law schools, or succeeding in postgraduation employment, so that the policy reduces the number of Black lawyers. Sander’s work has been subject to substantial criticism, mounted using evidence based on the same data that Sander examines. Peter Arcidiacono and Mike Lovenheim survey evidence on mismatch throughout higher education. For the case of law schools, Black students who are reasonably competitive can reap the positive effects of elite law institutions, but those who are less competitive do not. Enrollment effects of affirmative action are also much larger at selective schools, although they caution that these may be overestimates. Further, they note that the effect of mismatch on passing the bar weakens over time from graduation. Whether these findings should be controversial is open to question. Students who benefit from affirmative action on average will have weaker educational backgrounds and have experienced relatively more socioeconomic disadvantages. It is perhaps not surprising that these factors matter in subsequent educational experiences. Nor is it the case that mismatch evidence justifies reduced affirmative action. Rather, it suggests that affirmative action does not create a blank slate. Similarly, affirmative action has had important effects on Black unemployment (see Holzer & N ­ eumark, 2000). They discuss the trend of increasing Black employment in federally contracted firms from the early years of affirmative action policy to the 1990s and note that most of the increase occurred by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Another feature of interest is the heterogeneity at the firm level with regard to engaging in affirmative action. This heterogeneity implies that current estimates may understate the effects of affirmative action if firms that are more likely to have affirmative action policies also have higher minority shares to begin with. Other papers examine similar phenomena

Affirmative Action

in other employers such as police departments, and recent work explores another dimension of affirmative action, the duration of its impact after the policy is removed. While the obvious objective of affirmative action policies is to diminish racial disparities, a distinct question involves the ways that affirmative action policies alter individual decision making. Theoretical models of the effects of affirmative action have addressed such questions and are surveyed by Hamming Fang and Andrea Moro. Much of this literature has focused on how these policies interact with the decision processes of the individuals involved in matching workers to firms or students to colleges. Shelly Lundberg and Richard Startz showed, in an early paper, how affirmative action can be efficiency enhancing when White employers have relative difficulty in distinguishing quality among Black job candidates as opposed to White ones. In contrast, Stephen Coate and Glenn Loury advanced a classic argument that affirmative action can create disincentives for individual effort that, in principle could create situations in which a “patronizing” equilibrium emerges in which the only minority candidates admitted to schools are those who require affirmative action. Empirical work has yet to provide direct evidence on these mechanisms; in our judgment, this is a major challenge for future empirical studies and means that structural approaches to empirical work are especially needed. Similarly, while general equilibrium analyses of affirmative action programs have been developed, they have yet to be integrated in empirical work. Other theoretical work has focused on understanding the effects of the design of the policies. An early topic is the consequences of shifting from race-based to class-based policies, as discussed by Roland G. Fryer and Glenn Loury. An important theme of Fryer and Loury is the inefficiency associated with substituting class for ethnicity when the objective is increasing enrollment of ethnic groups. Recent research has analyzed affirmative action from a market design perspective. Fuhito Kojima demonstrates how, depending on the preference of parents, affirmative action policies can inadvertently harm minorities. Affirmative action policies have generated a rich philosophical literature. One facet of ethical debates amounts to asking whether a blanket ethical proscription on discrimination places affirmative action ­outside the domain of legitimate policy tools. Other aspects of the debate focus on the dimensions of distributive justice. Advocates of affirmative action focus on a range of arguments. Some arguments are compensatory, that is, affirmative action is justified as it diminishes unjust historical and contemporaneous

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inequalities. The most compelling of these types of claims, in our view, involve equality of opportunity. Following ideas such as those developed by John Roemer, if differences in school or employment applicants derive from factors for which they are not responsible, then inequalities in outcomes are unjust. From this vantage point, affirmative action reverses inequalities that derive from the legacy of discrimination as well as current socioeconomic inequalities across families and communities. Arguments against affirmative action often focus on whether the policy violates notions of desert. The premise of this position is that slots in schools or firms are more deserved by some than others, and the conclusion is that affirmative action violates this. This is equivalent to the basic meritocratic argument against affirmative action. George Sher, an important defender of desert in the philosophy literature, has analyzed the interplay of desert and affirmative action defenses and concluded that the better affirmative action justifications need to be compensatory. A related objection to affirmative action is that it concentrates the costs of compensation for past injustices onto a small subset of individuals who are not responsible for the injustice that led to the need for affirmative action. Steven Durlauf argues that even if desert is the proper criterion for admissions, there is little reason to believe that acceptance rules that are based on test score and grade thresholds can be said to reward the deserving. The reason for this is that admissions and hiring are forward-looking decisions and not rewards; that is, efficiency-based notions of desert, for example, depend on the quality of the match of an individual to a position. What has yet to be delineated is how equality of opportunity and desert claims can be mapped into admissions and hiring policies. Steven N. Durlauf and Kegon Tan See also Activism; Discrimination; Ethnicity; Multiculturalism; Omniculturalism; Self-Esteem; Symbolic Racism

Further Readings Arcidiacono, P., & Lovenheim, M. (2016). Affirmative action and the quality–fit tradeoff. Journal of Economic Literature, 54(1), 3–51. Bowen, W. G., & Bok, D. (2000). The shape of the river. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Card, D., & Krueger, A. (2005). Would the elimination of affirmative action affect highly qualified minority applicants? Evidence from California and Texas. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 58(3), 415–434.

Aggressive Capitulation

Coate, S., & Loury, G. (1993). Will affirmative-action policies eliminate negative stereotypes? American Economic Review, 83(5), 1220–1240. Durlauf, S. (2008). Affirmative action, meritocracy, and efficiency. Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 7, 131–158. Fang, H., & Moro, A. (2011). Theories of statistical discrimination and affirmative action: A survey. In J. Benhabib, A. Bisin, & M. Jackson (Eds.), Handbook of social economics. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier. Fryer, R., & Loury, G. (2005). Affirmative action and its mythology. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(3), 147–162. Holzer, H., & Neumark, D. (2000). Assessing affirmative action. Journal of Economic Literature, 38(3), 483–568. Johnson, L. B. (1966). Commencement Address at Howard University, June 4, 1965. In Public Papers of the President of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, vol. 2, 635–640. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Kahlenberg, R., & Potter, H. (2012). A better affirmative action: State universities that created alternatives to racial preferences. New York, NY: The Century Foundation. Kojima, F. (2012). School choice: Impossibilities for affirmative action. Games and Economic Behavior, 75, 685–693. Long, M. (2004). Race and college admissions: An alternative to affirmative action? Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(4), 1020–1033. Lundberg, S. J., & Startz, R. (1983). Private discrimination and social intervention in competitive labor market. American Economic Review, 73(3), 340–347. Sander, R. (2004). A systemic analysis of affirmative action in American law schools. Stanford Law Review, 57(2), 367–483. Skrentny, J. (1996). The ironies of affirmative action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sowell, T. (2004). Affirmative action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Aggressive Capitulation

Persuasion

Figure 1

Overview Individuals and groups throughout history have sought to impose their will on others, employing tactics ranging from persuasion to physical force. Aggressive capitulation is one such tactic whereby a person or organization seeks the capitulation—or submission—of another ­individual or organization to a desired outcome by using fear. Aggressive capitulation falls shy of the use of physical force on this spectrum of tactics, using coercion to achieve its aims. The defining elements of aggressive capitulation are the use of intimidation as its mechanism to achieve its preferred outcome (see Figure 1).

Intimidation . . . Unlike rhetorical persuasion, aggressive capitulation uses rhetoric to implicitly or explicitly threaten the audience into desired behaviors. It does not seek to convince or win over its target but rather to intimidate or bully the target audience. This tactic of using intimidation may overtly threaten harm or consequence—for example, by rhetorically highlighting how the target audience will be punished for a failure to capitulate. Alternatively, intimidation may implicitly be conveyed through allusions to others’ fates for a failure to capitulate. Regardless, the use of intimidation is central to aggressive capitulation.

. . . to Control Behavior

Aggressive capitulation is the use of fear to compel individuals and/or groups to surrender or yield to the demands of an aggressor. It is a psychological tool used by individuals, groups, and states to achieve domination. Aggressive capitulation involves a threat—explicit or implicit—designed to compel individuals or groups to behave a certain way out of fear of the consequences for failing to submit to the aggressor’s demands. This entry first provides an overview of the elements of aggressive Rhetorical Persuasion

capitulation, focusing on how the use of threat shapes the individual’s or group’s response to demands, concluding with a brief discussion of the efficacy and vulnerabilities of such an approach. It then introduces and discusses recent trends in the use of aggressive capitulation by terrorist organizations, using the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as a mini case study.

The purpose of the threat is to achieve control over the target audience’s behavior and can have as its intended outcome a discreet, near-term action, such as getting a voter to vote a certain way, or a long-term behavior, such as acquiescence to an individual’s or group’s rule. Studies have found that threats can be an effective way to achieve desired actions or behaviors. For example, Aarti Iyer and colleagues, in two studies conducted in 2008 and 2010, examined how participants

Aggressive Capitulation

Physical Force

Coercion

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Agonism

responded to threats of violence from Osama bin Laden if troops were to remain in Afghanistan. These studies concluded that a heightened fear response resulted in aggressive capitulation that was characterized by submission to the demanded action. Specifically, these studies found that participants were more likely to support troop withdrawal if they were first primed with a fear reaction to Osama bin Laden’s threats of violence for a failure to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

Vulnerabilities of Aggressive Capitulation Strategy The use of this psychological tool by individuals and groups may effectively win over supporters in the near term but likely will not result in an enduring, cohesive support base. Nehemiah Friedland and Ariel Merari find that terrorism is highly effective in inducing fear but fails to produce underlying attitudinal change. Similarly, Iyer and colleagues’ research concludes that, although fear-inducing threats did result in aggressive capitulation, it also produced a deeper ­commitment to combating the source of the threat. Collectively, this body of research points to a clear vulnerability of aggressive capitulation; that is, it may solidify hostile, internal feelings that may provoke a more enduring commitment to countering the source of the threat, even as aggressive capitulation is producing a desired near-term action or behavior.

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and psychological factors that begins to explain how such a hated and feared terrorist group can expand its support base and gain power as it pursues territorial control in pursuit of a worldwide caliphate. While this terrorist group’s expansion is best understood in this broader context of sectarian conflict, poverty, and regional power struggles, one element of the group’s recruitment success and ability to gain ­supporters has been its effective use of aggressive capitulation. The ISIL propaganda machine has successfully used violent and graphic images and messages of torture and murder to convey a clear, implicit and explicit threat to its target audience that they face a choice to either capitulate to the organization’s worldview or face horrific torture and death. Through this intimidation, ISIL has been able to coerce individuals in parts of Syria and Iraq to acquiesce to their governance and provide support for their cause—demonstrating how the use of aggressive capitulation relies on intimidation to effect a desired outcome. However, this strategy is not without vulnerability. The terrorist group’s difficulty in retaining supporters when ISIL’s immediate threat to locals declines demonstrates this. As the terrorist group has physically withdrawn from a specific territory, ISIL has faced challenges in retaining governance of that territory, suggesting that the tactic of aggressive capitulation is unlikely to result in enduring attitudinal changes. Kathryn K. Hughes See also Terrorism, Theories and Models

Aggressive Capitulation as a Terrorist Strategy: The Case of ISIL Fear Allah as he should be feared and do not die except as Muslims. . . . Go forth, O mujahidin in the path of Allah. Terrify the enemies of Allah and seek death . . . for the world will come to an end, and the hereafter will last forever. —Abu Bakr al-Husayni al-Baghdadi, ­

Further Readings Friedland, N., & Merari, A. (1985, December). The psychological impact of terrorism: A double-edged sword. Political Psychology, 6(4), 591–604. Iyer, A., Hornsey, M. J., Vanman, E. J., Esposo, S., & Ale, S. (2014). Fight and flight: Evidence of aggressive capitulation in the face of fear messages from terrorists. Political Psychology, 36(6), 631–648.

Self-Proclaimed Caliph, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

As illustrated by Abu-Bakr’s quotation encouraging violence, modern terrorism today, particularly as embodied by the terrorist group ISIL, uses aggressive capitulation as one strategy to proliferate its power and secure its successes. As ISIL continues to attract fighters of various nationalities, reports of their violent, inhumane tactics proliferate. A discerning observer of international affairs recognizes that within this puzzling juxtaposition lies a tangled web of political, religious, cultural, economic,

Agonism Agonism refers to a form of limited contest considered necessary for contemporary democracies. It gives political expression to differences and guards against the emergence of extreme forms of conflict that aim at fragmenting, if not undermining, democratic life. Theorists who have developed an agonistic account of democracy include William E. Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, and James Tully. This entry

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Agonism

briefly introduces the main tenets of agonistic theory and discusses the different versions that agonism takes in the work of its main proponents. It concludes with a discussion of the distinctive impact of the agonistic perspective on democratic theory.

Agonism and Democracy The idea that agonism strengthens democracy is rooted in a set of theoretical assumptions about the nature of sociopolitical life. The first assumption is that differences are ever-present and constitutive of sociopolitical life. They are constitutive because they define and shape identities. This means, first, that differences contribute to the formation and coherence of identities. Subjects acquire their identity in relation to some (designated) difference and, as a result, difference constitutes an inseparable component of individual and collective identity. Second, the type of disagreements that such constitutive differences give rise to are existential in nature. They issue from deep-seated assumptions and experiences of selfhood and, thus, run deeper than disagreements that issue from plural interests in the course of the negotiating process. In contrast with the latter, the former defy easy resolution through recourse to state mechanisms. Existential disagreements also defy appeals to common reason. To prevent, therefore, their mutation into a dangerous antagonism, their agonistic expression must be encouraged. Agonistic expressions of difference are tamed and moderate. They are contests between subjects who respectfully voice their disagreements with others who differ from them. They are also political and democratic contests. They are political because they foster a politicization of difference. They encourage its political expression and, thus, do away with its more dangerous antagonistic manifestation. At the same time, agonistic contests are democratic contests because they exemplify an ethos of critique and disturbance that helps secure pluralistic openness. It follows that the second related assumption lodged at the center of the agonistic perspective is that democratic pluralism—the enduring presence of constitutive differences—supposes openness. Agonistic contests secure this openness by exposing and challenging the closures, normalizations, and exclusions generated by dominant practices, norms, and institutions—the ways in which they silence and repress differences. In so doing, agonistic contests pluralize—open up, expand, and extend—the perspectives, practices, norms, and sites of democratic politics. What counts as an agonistic contest is a topic on which theorists who identify with agonism show pronounced differences.

Different Versions of Agonism William Connolly, a leading theorist of agonism, develops the idea of agonistic respect. Agonistic respect, he argues, is a civic virtue that if cultivated leads political actors to express their constitutive differences in a respectful and self-limiting manner. The virtue of respect gives root to an ethical attitude of interacting with difference that draws its source from an appreciation of the diversity constitutive of life. Therefore, subjects who cultivate such an ethic of care and take on board this larger perspective on life develop an awareness of the contingency, interdependence, and contestability of their different value systems. In so doing, they moderate their response to the conflicts that erupt as a result of these differences, and they politicize—contest and challenge—differences that have become naturalized or hegemonic. By contrast, Mouffe speaks not of agonistic respect but of agonistic politics. Agonism for Mouffe is different from antagonism. It involves a contest between adversaries. Adversaries are not enemies. They agree on the importance of liberty and equality for all, that is, on the  liberal democratic framework, but they disagree on the way they interpret liberty and equality. The common ground that adversaries share is what serves to limit and moderate their confrontation. Therefore, Mouffe’s version of agonism does not require the cultivation of the virtue of respect. Agonism is already a democratic and, thus, limited form of conflict. Connolly’s and Mouffe’s versions of agonism are those most discussed in the relevant literature. However, Honig’s and Tully’s versions of agonism are also worth mentioning because they respectively draw attention to the need for the pluralization of agonistic practices (Honig) and dialogical participation in relations of ­governance (Tully). Alongside Connolly’s and Mouffe’s, Honig’s and Tully’s versions have challenged dominant—liberal and deliberative—assumptions of ­ democratic theory.

Agonism and Democratic Theory Agonistic theory has, first, challenged the focus of mainstream liberal theory on institutional and rightsbased accounts of politics. Democracy does not just exceed institutions, according to agonistic theorists, but also institutionalizes means often to close off and exclude from politics that identity which does not conform to dominant norms. While formal rights and constitutional recognition of difference are important from an agonistic perspective, they are not enough. Drives toward pluralization, argues Connolly, will always arise to destabilize formal arrangements, and

al Qaeda

this highlights the need for critical responsiveness to demands for difference. In dissociating pluralism from the formal, institutional, and governmental process, agonistic theory ­challenges the restrictive focus on interest group pluralism, dominant in American political science for the greater part of the 20th century. At the same time, ­agonistic theory challenges the optimism, manifest in deliberative accounts of democracy, that the right ­mixture of procedures and open exchanges of reasons might resolve constitutive differences and conflicts. The way that agonistic theory proposes to address such conflicts is a topic that merits further attention. Paulina Tambakaki See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Democracy; Pluralism

Further Readings Connolly, W. E. (1991). Identity/difference: Democratic negotiations of political paradox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honig, B. (1993). Political theory and the displacement of politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
 Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London, England: Verso. Tully, J. (2008). Public philosophy in a new key, Vol. 1, Democracy and civic freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wenman, M. (2013). Agonistic democracy: Constituent power in the era of globalisation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Wingenbach, E. (2011). Institutionalizing agonistic democracy: Post-foundationalism and political liberalism. Surrey and Burlington, England: Ashgate.

al

Qaeda

The creation of al Qaeda may be traced back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The struggle between the Soviets and the Muslim fighters, the Mujahideen, became the root of the modern global jihadist movement, as notable Islamist activists like Abdullah Azzam called for Muslims worldwide to unite in support of their brethren in Afghanistan. In 1984, Azzam issued a fatwa (religious decree), declaring that the infidels had invaded Muslim territory and degraded Muslim inhabitants. He claimed that fighting the Soviets was the duty of all Muslims throughout the world. As a result, a flow of foreign fighters journeyed to join the fight against the “communist infidels.” Among them was Osama bin Laden, whose participation in the infamous 1987 Battle of Jaji secured him the

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reputation as a mighty warrior who stood up to a superpower. For the Arab-Afghans, the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and its ultimate collapse was seen as major victory and a model strategy for future conflict: to lure “infidels” into a territory where they could be surrounded and attacked by Muslims. The steady supply of foreign fighters eager to wage jihad provided the perfect foundation for the subsequent conception of a larger mission following the war. In 1988, Osama bin Laden founded al Qaeda. Inspired by the ideas of jihadist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, Bin Laden sought to create a global jihadist movement that would organize and direct the resources of Muslims worldwide. However, from its inception, the al Qaeda movement involved Sunni Muslims and shunned the minority Shi’a Muslims, who make up only about 10% of the global Muslim population. Shi’a Muslims live for the most part in Iran and Iraq, with much smaller numbers in Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and India. After the 1978/1979 revolution in Iran, ­Ayatollah Khomeini attempted to win leadership of the Muslim world, but his leadership was rejected by the Sunni majority. The rise of Sunni and Shi’a extremism has been associated with considerable bloodshed between the two groups since the late 1970s, including the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war and the continuing factional Sunni–Shi’a fighting in Iraq and Syria. On February 23, 1998, bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri issued a fatwa outlining their grievances ­ against the West, particularly the United States. The statement declared that it was the duty of all Muslims worldwide to kill Americans and their allies, irrespective of whether they are military or civilians. On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding thousands. These attacks represented a shift in al Qaeda activity as this was the first operation that was truly international in its scope. The attacks’ success required the involvement of al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, Kenya, Yemen, the United Kingdom, and Egypt; and the level of sophistication exhibited by these coordinated strikes brought al Qaeda to the forefront of U.S. security concerns. In the years leading up to 9/11, the world would witness a number of al Qaeda sponsored and inspired attacks demonstrating the group’s increasing influence, skills, and capabilities. The attacks on September 11, 2001, were the deadliest terrorists attacks in history, killing almost 3,000 people. The mastermind behind the attack was a ­Pakistani national, born and raised in Kuwait, by the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, whom U.S. intelligence officials would later refer to as KSM. A former engineering student at North Carolina’s Agricultural

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al Qaeda

and Technical State University, KSM became disillusioned with the United States as result of U.S. policy in the Middle East, especially U.S. support for Israel. Although KSM began plotting the 9/11 attacks in 1996, he did not affiliate with al Qaeda until late 1998 or early 1999, at which point bin Laden approved the “planes operation” and invested as much as $500,000 into the attack. On September 11, 2001, 19 al Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial airplanes: two flew into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroying both; one flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and one crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania, having been prevented by its passengers from reaching its intended target, probably the U.S. Capitol or the White House. Although the 9/11 attacks were praised by some in the Muslim world and secured al Qaeda a reputation of notoriety, many Islamist and religious leaders denounced the attacks and al Qaeda’s actions. In fact, as many as 46 leaders from various Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jamaat-e Islami, and ­others, went so far as to sign a declaration stating that the attacks were against all Islamic norms. Al Qaeda responded with a detailed statement outlining the religious justifications for the attacks. The statement cited passages from the Qur’an and questioned the credentials of al Qaeda’s critics, accusing them of corruption. It claimed that U.S. policies such as sanctions against Iraq, the bombing of Iraq in the 1990s, and its close relationship with Israel were justifications for jihad. The statement also cited U.S. support for the killing of ­Palestinian civilians as justification for the killing of American civilians. Although many extremist groups subscribe to these types of arguments to validate violence and brutality, the mainstream Islamic consensus continues to be that such actions are not justified within Islamic tradition. Mainstream Muslims regard the “greater jihad” to be the purification of the self through an internal struggle, rather than external physical violence. U.S. military action following 9/11 dealt a big blow to al Qaeda’s operational capacity. In cooperation with a group of anti-Taliban fighters known as the Northern Alliance, the United States toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan, eliminating some key al Qaeda leaders and robbing the group of its safe haven in ­Afghanistan. Additionally, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated a massive anti-terror campaign, rounding up jihadists, monitoring activities, and d ­isrupting recruitment and fundraising attempts worldwide. By the end of 2002, U.S. actions had significantly weakened al Qaeda capabilities. Due to U.S. disruptions in Afghanistan, al Qaeda began to rely more heavily on its geographically dispersed affiliates and invest more in the propagation of

its ideology, a trend that would continue during the U.S. war in Iraq. Nevertheless, the group continued to operate and attempt to carry out attacks with varying success. Many attacks were disrupted; some notable ­ failures include the 2001 shoe-bomber case (as well as the unrelated 2009 underwear bomber case). Nevertheless some attacks were carried out with a resulting loss of lives, like those in Tunisia and Indonesia in 2002, Spain in 2004, and London in 2005.

Goals and Strategy In general, al Qaeda has four main objectives. First, al Qaeda seeks to end the U.S. presence in the Middle East. From al Qaeda’s perspective, the United States is an imperialist nation that bolsters repressive regimes, condones the killing of Muslims, and robs the Muslims of their endowment by lowering oil prices. Second, al Qaeda aspires to destroy Israel, believing Israel to be a Western pawn that has stolen Muslim lands. Third, al Qaeda seeks to promote a Salafi-jihadist worldview among Muslim fighters worldwide through propaganda and recruitment to its various training camps. Fourth, al Qaeda is committed to opposing “apostate” regimes in the Muslim world, claiming that rulers in places such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others are not true Muslims and must be ousted. Additionally, in the future, al Qaeda aspires to create a true Islamic state, a caliphate. However, al Qaeda leaders are unclear about when the caliphate should come to fruition or how it would actually function. Al Qaeda believes that severing ties between the Islamic world and the West will enable like-minded militant organizations to overthrow “apostate” regimes and establish revivalist Islamist governments in their place. Al Qaeda’s pursuit of its goals is often opportunistic and contingent upon the political, economic, and social contexts in any given theater. Further, the prioritization of targets and goals often differs between the al Qaeda core and its affiliate organizations. While the al Qaeda  core concentrates on the United States and its policies in the Middle East, the local groups are often more concerned with anti-regime violence and regionally relevant social issues. In order to achieve its goals, al Qaeda utilizes a strategy of attrition warfare to exhaust its enemies, often capitalizing on economic, political, and military weaknesses in order to advance its agenda. Attacks against the West, particularly the United States, are typically intended to weaken morale and reinforce the idea that U.S. presence in the Middle East will never succeed in its goals. Furthermore, by launching attacks against an enemy homeland, al Qaeda hopes to create financial difficulties as well as divisions

al Qaeda

between allies as nations become increasingly alarmed and concerned about defense and security. Dramatic attacks like those of 9/11 support several of al Qaeda’s main objectives by intimidating enemies, inspiring ­fellow Muslims, and provoking an expensive and likely destructive response that may also be used to further inspire Muslims worldwide. Finally, a core tenet of al Qaeda strategy is suicidal martyrdom, which is a frequent feature of al Qaeda attacks. Suicide bombings have many practical advantages over other terrorist tactics mainly because they are highly effective, relatively inexpensive, and generally pretty simple. Targets of such attacks tend to be both symbolic and strategic in the hope that the event may serve as propaganda for the group as well as to benefit the overall attrition strategy.

Ideology Al Qaeda adheres to a Salafi interpretation of Islam. Salafists maintain that all Muslims should emulate the actions of the first three generations of Muslim leaders, known as the Salaf (pure), and embrace a literal ­interpretation of Islam. They reject the religious jurisprudence that emerged after this early period, instead championing a narrow focus on the Qur’an and the life  (sunna) and teachings (hadith) of the Prophet ­Muhammad. Salafi Muslims believe that sharia (Islamic law) is a complete system that does not require analogy, interpretation, or any form of adaptation in order to apply to the modern world. Salafi Muslims uphold that the interpretation of the stories and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad by religious clerics has corrupted Islam. Some key thinkers that have influenced the jihadist ideology include Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Sayyid Qutb, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, Abdullah Azzam, and Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Other strict interpretations of Islam such as ­Wahhabism, Deobandism, and Ahl-e Hadith are also considered part of the Salafi movement. It is important to note that most of these movements’ adherents are not jihadists. Within the Salafi jihadist movement, there is debate over the appropriate use of violence in defense of Islam. For example, many criticize the indiscriminate nature of suicide bombings and the resulting collateral damage, condemning the slaughter of other Muslims or innocent civilians. Consequently, some Salafi jihadists have been forced to embrace the doctrine of takfir, arguing that some Muslims victims are not “true” Muslims due to their support for an apostate regime, cooperation with infidels, and so on. Nevertheless, the majority of ­Muslims condemn suicide bombings; and while Salafi Muslims are highly conservative and may share some of

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the same beliefs as jihadists, many of them focus their energies on spreading Islam through proselytizing rather than physical violence.

Leadership Osama bin Laden A member of a wealthy family from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s early involvement with jihad involved generous donations to various jihadist groups, intended to help them sustain themselves. In doing so, bin Laden was able to create connections with experienced jihadists such as his eventual partner, Ayman Zawahiri. Over time, bin Laden’s charisma would enable him to become the most influential al Qaeda leader. Despite his calm and quiet demeanor, bin Laden was able to inspire his followers and ultimately a large portion of the Muslim world. He had a vision, and in his rhetoric, he utilized both historical and religious references, identifying a plethora of problems facing Muslims around the world. Furthermore, bin Laden had strong organizational skills. He created the al Qaeda movement in such a way that it could operate in both a centralized and decentralized manner. Al Qaeda aspired to be an elite organization made up of experienced operatives. Bin Laden’s wealth enabled him to institute and nurture affiliate organizations, create and distribute propaganda, establish training camps, and launch attacks worldwide. His ­ movement was notorious for its patience and persistence, and his leadership and wealth helped to mitigate the inevitable tensions between affiliate groups that resulted from differences in ideology and personality. The survival of al Qaeda after the death of bin Laden and the number of analogous movements that have emerged throughout the Muslim world is a testament to bin Laden’s legacy and leadership capabilities.

Ayman al-Zawahiri Although Zawahiri was not as wealthy as bin Laden, he was born into a pious family that was part of Egypt’s elite. He was well educated and became involved in politics as early as age 15 when he established his first revolutionary cell. Critical of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s peace deal with Israel, relations with the United States, and enthusiasm toward westernization, Z ­ awahiri and his comrades sought to capitalize on the resurgence in religiosity in Egypt and turn the country into an Islamic state. Zawahiri’s cell eventually merged with other likeminded groups, forming the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—the group that would ultimately assassinate Sadat

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al Qaeda

in 1981. Eventually, EIJ would become an affiliate of al Qaeda, and Zawahiri’s followers would make up the core of al Qaeda’s leadership, bringing with them some of the lessons they had learned through their struggles to overthrow the Egyptian government—including the efficacy of suicide bombings, the use of martyrdom videos as propaganda, and finally the importance of secrecy, preparation, and training for successful operations. Although Zawahiri lacks bin Laden’s charisma, he shares his pragmatism. He is adaptive and flexible in his approach, learning from his mistakes, working with groups that are not perfect ideological matches, and recognizing the benefits of common enemies.

Organizational Structure Depending on the circumstances, al Qaeda has been known to utilize both centralized and decentralized organizational styles, making it difficult to pinpoint one form of al Qaeda organization. Although the headquarters of al Qaeda central have traditionally been located in Afghanistan and Pakistan, recent developments ­indicate that al Qaeda’s central command may not be limited to this base. Since 9/11, al Qaeda has spawned several affiliate groups in areas of North Africa and the Sahel, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. The leaders of each group are required to pledge their allegiance to al Qaeda’s emir, formerly bin Laden and now Zawahiri. In addition, al Qaeda has an ­advisory committee made up of its top members that functions as the second-highest decision-making body, often playing a direct role in important operations. Notwithstanding these formal bureaucratic s­ tructures, al Qaeda today is largely a decentralized movement, operating as a network hierarchy. Levels of command authority are sometimes unclear, and personal connections between jihadists often trump the command structure. Leaders tend to focus more broadly on managing the organization’s actions and messages than on the activities of affiliates, allowing the focus to stay on al Qaeda as a movement and granting affiliate organizations a certain level of autonomy. The following is a list of al Qaeda branches, affiliates, and known collaborators: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) Al-Mouribitoun—West Africa Al-Shabaab—Somalia Ansar al Sharia—Libya

Khorasan Group—Syria Nusra Front—Syria and Iraq Lashkar-e-Taliba—Pakistan Jemaah Islamiyah—Indonesia Haqqani Network—Afghanistan Benghazi Brigade—Libya

Islamic State In 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declared bayah, or religious allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and created a new terrorist movement in coalition with al Qaeda, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Between 2004 and 2014, the group would go by several different names including the Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and finally the Islamic State. However, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the relationship was fraught with disagreement. While bin Laden and Zawahiri were focused on attacking U.S. targets, for Zarqawi and his followers, Shi’a Muslims were the real enemy. The group became an agent for sectarian chaos, distinguishing their goals from those of al Qaeda central and establishing a reputation of incredible brutality. Following the death of Zarqawi and also of his immediate successor, Abu Omar al Baghdadi, AQI began to pursue territory and power under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Capitalizing on the chaos in Syria in 2011, the jihadist group expanded, taking over large swaths of t­ erritory and changing its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Between 2011 and 2014, ISIS would increase its popular support and solidify its legitimacy in both Iraq and Syria. In the summer of 2014, ISIS swept Iraq, simplifying its name to the Islamic State and declaring that its intention to bring all Muslims under its rule was not constrained to any particular national boundary. Although Zawahiri had initially encouraged AQI to move into Syria, he had intended to create a separate group in the region led by local jihadists. The al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra was intended to be such a group. However, on April 9, 2013, Baghdadi announced the supposed merger of AQI and al Nusra, yet neither the leader of al Nusra nor the leader of al Qaeda had agreed to any such union. Zawahiri declared the two groups to be separate al Qaeda affiliates: al Nusra would be the official al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and AQI would be the official al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq. Nevertheless, Baghdadi continued to claim al Nusra’s

Alienation

subordinance to AQI. His refusal to accept the distinction eventually led to a violent confrontation between the two groups. Finally, in February 2014, Zawahiri denounced AQI, now referring to itself as ISIS, stating that the group had no organizational relationship with al Qaeda. Ultimately, al Qaeda and the Islamic State are both competing to be the leader of the contemporary international jihadist movement and share the same ultimate goal—the establishment of a global caliphate ruled by sharia law. However, the respective approaches of each group in its efforts to achieve this goal are in some respects different. While al Qaeda prioritizes its battle with Western powers and the plight of the Muslim world over the creation of the caliphate, the Islamic State seeks to build the caliphate now, eliminate its proximate enemies, consolidate control of territory in Sunni sections of Iraq and Syria, and continue to expand. This desire to conquer is vital to the distinction between the Islamic State and al Qaeda. Today al Qaeda maintains a strategy of clandestine expansion, covert affiliations and front groups, and a surreptitious organizational tactic that favors the gradual infiltration of communities and the development of broad support before engaging with an enemy. Meanwhile, the Islamic State seeks immediate military confrontation, operating in the open, exercising extreme brutality, and disseminating its propaganda to massive audiences in order to rapidly develop a support base. Thus, the al Qaeda model is one that favors long-term sustainability by exploiting regional upheaval, fostering popular support, and keeping a low profile, whereas the Islamic State model is one that favors immediacy and conquest, demonstrating its military capabilities through aggressive territorial expansion and publicizing operations for propaganda.

Current Status Among government officials, scholars, and analysts there is debate around the current status of al Qaeda. In addition to killing Osama bin Laden, the United States has eliminated several key personnel through its drone campaign, and the rise of the Islamic State has led many to believe that the al Qaeda movement is now overshadowed by the Islamic State. However, while al Qaeda central was severely weakened by the war on terror, the group’s larger network of affiliates endures and represents a decentralized jihadist movement with a different set of strengths and vulnerabilities. Al Qaeda thrives in areas where it can embed itself within local movements and exploit subsequent tensions in order to promote radicalization and the al Qaeda ideology. The Arab

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Spring that spread across the Middle East in early 2011 and the emergence of IS presented al Qaeda with an opportunity to regroup and expand operations in various unstable regions such as Syria, Libya, ­Northern Africa, and Yemen with very little opposition or ­attention from international audiences. Consequently, al Qaeda remains an active global jihadist movement that continues to pose a threat. It maintains the ability to radicalize and recruit from a distance and persuade groups and individuals to carry out attacks in its name. In this way, it could be argued that al Qaeda’s threat today is more diffuse and in some ways more difficult to detect. Madeleine Blackman and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Authoritarianism; Civil Wars; Clash of Civilizations; Conflict Theory, Realistic; End to Terrorism, Theories of; Fascism; Internet Jihadism; Islamic State; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Propaganda; Terror Management Theory; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings Byman, D. (2015). Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the global jihadist movement: What everyone needs to know. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2008). How globalization spurs terrorism. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Wright, L. (2016). The terror years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State. New York, NY: Knopf. Zelin, A. Y. (2014, June). The war between ISIS and al-Qaeda for supremacy of the global jihadist movement (Research Notes 20). Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Alienation Alienation refers to the isolation or estrangement of individuals and groups in relation to their sense of self, their status within their particular sociocultural communities, and their sense of control within the world of which they are a part. Throughout history, alienation has taken on various meanings within different traditions, conceived both as an internal psychological state and as a social relationship to the external world. It has emerged as a key concept for political and social theorists as a means of explaining certain aspects of human behavior, particularly related to subjective feelings and perceptions and how they relate to external conditions.

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Alienation

Origins in Antiquity The notion of alienation in Western thought is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition that views the disobedience of Adam and Eve as the defining moment marking the estrangement between God and human beings. In the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and in early Greek literature, the idea of estrangement was a common theme played out in narrative stories of the family that served as a metaphor for the human family’s contentious relationship with the divine. In Asian religious traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, adherents confront the alienating and never-ending struggle of earthly life along the transitory path toward the liberation of the soul. Alienation finds similar expression in Neoplatonism, in which the souls of human beings are corrupted by material concerns that lead to a separation, a self-alienation, from their true divine selves.

The Emergence of the Industrial State As nation-states emerged and the relationship between individuals and the state changed and became more intensely debated, the notion of sociopolitical alienation, the disengagement of political participation, became a central concern. In his original formulation of the political creation of civil society, English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) posited that individuals should be bound together by their commitment to each other and by a common understanding of how to govern their territory. The diversity of ethnic and cultural heritage that compose the polity becomes integrated into a shared national identity. In practice, efforts to impose a national identity have often led to marginalization of minority groups within territories where assimilation and integration have become problematical. In the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–1883), alienation of humankind is conceived within the context of an individual’s relationship to the means of production. Marx argued that inherent in human nature is the need to create. The individual engages in labor to transform the world in order to create a product and control its means of production. In Marx’s view, the individual becomes alienated when the product is taken away and is no longer under the individual’s control. For Marx, money and markets distribute products and labor, resulting in the individual’s loss of control and subsequent alienation. In contemporary market economies, however, Marx’s conception of the causes of alienation is seen as less forceful in light of the desire by individuals to seek employment as a means of upward social mobility. Within this context, some scholars argue, specialization and the division of labor have created

economic opportunities for individuals to more fully participate in the distribution of goods and services. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was similarly concerned with the social and moral consequences of a division of labor in modern industrial societies. However, his main focus was on how the division of labor impacts the ability of a society to ­effectively integrate to form a cohesive civic and social political organization. In his terminology, anomie, a sense of rootlessness, is analogous to Marx’s conception of alienation. In Marx’s formulation, the division of labor fosters class conflict and potentially a restructuring of society. For Durkheim, it is the debilitating effects of anomie, the social breakdown between different occupational groups as a result of the division of labor, which inhibit the growth of societal integration.

Existential Despair The idea of alienation became an important theme in existentialism, a philosophical system that grew in prominence during the post–World War II period exemplified in  the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and ­Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism holds that individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions and are thus free to make choices in response to a hostile and indifferent universe. There is a strong emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual and the consequent isolation that results from having to navigate a purposeless existence in search of one’s authentic self. Alienation emerges as ­individuals begin to experience a distancing between themselves and the world around them. Anxiety in the individual grows and is fostered by a sense of abandonment and belief that there is no purpose or meaning to life. The meaninglessness, lack of norms to guide behavior, purposelessness, and ultimately social isolation comprise the elements that generate the sense of alienation in an irrational world. In this regard, existentialism redirects the focus of the causes of alienation from structural flaws in societies to individual responsibility for one’s own choices. Alienation is the sense of despair at having to ­create oneself in a world where there are no objective standards to guide one’s free will to make life choices.

Impact of Digital Social Networks In contemporary expressions of alienation, it is often the marginalization of individuals or groups brought about by social and political exclusion that leads to civic disengagement and isolation. The impact of this marginalization is particularly felt among developing youths, whose search for meaning is inextricably tied to an emerging personal identity that must often reconcile multiple roles or ­identities in order to resolve one’s ambiguous social status

Allegiances

in society. The globalization of communications has paradoxically fostered ties between alienated individuals and groups through instantaneous connectivity via the Internet, which in turn has catalyzed the growth of a diverse range of new social, political, and religious relationships. The enabling impact of these social networks has had both positive and negative effects on the level of alienation experienced by marginalized individuals and groups. On one hand, social networks have empowered individuals by allowing them to gain greater access and influence in political processes, thus reducing their sense of alienation. Social networks have also reduced the sense of alienation by allowing marginalized individuals to become involved in entrepreneurial, prosocial projects that provide an opportunity for substantive reengagement with their social and political environments. For example, efforts to promote literacy via Internet-based programs sponsored by public and private organizations have empowered individuals and communities by providing them with the means to more fully take advantage of the benefits of global engagement. On the other hand, social networks have also served as conduits to attract alienated individuals to extremist causes that seek to undermine established authority, as in the case of groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which employ various modes of cyber outreach via the Internet to attract vulnerable youth to serve as foreign fighters. Consequently, while social networks have reduced ­individual alienation by nurturing prosocial civic engagement, they have also demonstrated the potential for facilitating group conflict within the broader society. William Costanza See also Disengagement; Ethnocentrism; Marxism; ­ Multicul­turalism; Proletariat and Capitalism; Youth and Political Change

Further Readings Giddens, A. (1971). Capitalism and modern social theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Oaklander, L. N. (1996). Existential philosophy: An introduction (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Allegiances Allegiances are the vital and socially integrative relationships, affiliations, and loyalties that generate different

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processes of personal and collective identity formation. Individuals possess multiple cultural and sociopolitical allegiances that are meaningful for constructing a sense of belonging to a specific culture, group, society, or place. Associated with issues of identity formation or transnational migration, allegiances are discussed especially in terms of constructing inner-group solidarity and exclusive sociocultural identities that may generate political action. In the historical context, the term allegiances referred to the reciprocal relationships and obligations of diverse duties that structured the European feudal society’s political and economic system. This entry focuses on the relevance of allegiances for constructing cultural differences as part of all processes of social and personal identity formations that result in politically relevant identities and cultural stereotypes, and it discusses the presence of multiple allegiances in social relationships. The entry concludes with a brief reference to conflicting allegiances in social interactions.

Cultural Allegiances Concepts of membership and belonging are based on an ideology of cultural and social differences among diverse categories of people, which is also psychologically meaningful for the individual’s personal ways of self-representation in relation with others. Multiple cultural allegiances assist in creating a cultural bonding between different individuals who share a common system of concepts, values, customs, symbols, and norms of conduct. Individual and group cultural identifications depend on language use, religion, gender, age, lifestyle, social class, ethnicity, nationality, or any kind of association with a group that has its own distinct cultural practices, preferences, and shared experiences. Contrasting situations of cultural contact produce notions of difference and construct frameworks or boundaries that allow for the development of exclusive sociocultural identities in relation to other group identities and outsiders alike. A sense of belonging may also derive from identification with a geographical region, persons, or groups other than the membership in an ethnocultural group, based on shared interests, responsibilities, and objectives in welfare. Some allegiances may have a strong emotional relevance for the individual, such as her family bonds or linguistic identity.

Social Identity and Belonging Distinguishing between approaches of personal and social identity formation, social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner proposed that people steadily attempt to preserve a positive social identity in terms of

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Allocation

a distinct group membership. Social relationships with family, cultural, and social groups on the one hand and with institutions and political systems on the other enable individuals to identify with and become an ­integral part of a particular social environment or system. According to Tajfel and Turner, social allegiances induce feelings of belonging among members of a distinct social, political, cultural, linguistic, religious, or economic group in relation to other groups as well as strengthen the interest in the preservation of this ­particular in-group or society. Socially constructed collective identities, such as gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality, facilitate political control and re-create categorical differences between groups, whose notion of constituting a distinctive and bounded group is affirmed from within and from outside.

Multiple Personal Allegiances Despite possessing a certain notion of bonding with a large number of other individuals, every person has her own specific set of allegiances that may create a sense of communality with multiple cultural groups, based on personal attachments and experiences. Psychologist Jean Phinney proposed that through processes of identity development in young adulthood, human beings begin to critically examine the norms and values of their childhood home, surrounding society, and authorities. Although social categories seemingly fix differences as politically relevant identities, it is important to note that allegiances are processual and relational. Individuals may continually develop new allegiances or change existing ones, depending on the context and over the course of time. As a result, every individual develops his own understanding and commitment to an ethnic group, as Phinney points out. On a personal level, individuals may therefore possess multiple and at times contradictory forms of allegiances that enable them to construct complex networks of social membership and solidarity within and across national and cultural boundaries. Overlapping local, regional, national, and supranational allegiances determine the relationships between individuals and society and affect issues of integration and citizenship. In particular, members of transnational families or second-generation migrants may sense allegiance to two or several cultures, groups, and places across the boundaries of nation-states without necessarily always sharing citizenship or cultural and historical ties.

Conflicting Allegiances Cultural boundaries are central to discourses of power relations, identities, and social cohesion within and

across nation-states. A shared language and culture are significant prerequisites for constructing a sense of group solidarity and assist in conceptualizing one’s belonging in terms of exclusive relationships with a particular entity that is defined by distinctive cultural features. The prevailing political ideology of nationstates has led to the expectation that the individual possesses exclusive allegiances that are coherent with a single nation: its language, culture, history, ethnicity, citizenship, or territory. Membership in multiple, overlapping polities or in nondominant cultural, ethnic, or national groups has therefore the potential to create sociopolitical conflicts. Theories of ethnic and national identities address the concerns over possibly ambiguous and conflicting allegiances that may lead to tensions and antagonistic expectations between culturally distinct groups as well as the resulting psychological and legal consequences for individuals with multiple allegiances to two or more cultures. Viktorija L. A. Cˇeginskas See also Citizenship; Globalization; Migration; Minority Voters; Multiculturalism

Further Readings Benhabib, S., Shapiro, I., & Petranovic´, D. (Eds.). (2007). Identities, affiliations and allegiances. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Brown, R. (2000). Social identity theory: Past achievements, current problems and future challenges. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30(6), 745–778. Maalouf, A. (2000). On identity (B. Bray, Trans.). London, England: Harvill Panther. (Original work Les Identités meurtrières published in 1998) Trimble, J. E., & Dickson, R. (2005). Ethnic identity. In C. B. Fisher & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Encyclopedia of applied developmental science (Vol. 1, pp. 415–420). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Allocation Allocation refers to the apportionment of resources to serve different purposes. Since resources are scarce, individuals or groups compete to gain a share of such limited resources to achieve their own goals. There are different mechanisms of allocation. In economics, for example, the price system is one mechanism that determines the way resources (e.g., goods and services) are distributed to meet the demands of consumers. Politics is another such mechanism. The issues of allocation are

Allocation

particularly pertinent to the topic of political behavior as the primary role of politicians (e.g., elected representatives) lies in allocating resources to best serve the competing demands of their own supporters (e.g., voters). This entry introduces research on allocation in the context of political behavior and explains how politics plays a role in determining allocation decisions.

Markets and Politics Politics is about the allocation of resources. Unlike the market system where decisions over allocation are decentralized across a countless number of different producers, politicians ultimately control purse strings and make decisions about how state resources should be allocated. Their aims of resource allocation are diverse, some of which may be for the public interest while others are more selfish. The government, for instance, plays a critical role in mobilizing resources for public goods, which are difficult to provide if resource allocation is left to market forces alone. Private c­ompanies are not necessarily willing to invest their resources in providing goods and services whose benefits can be shared by others who do not bear any costs of production, an issue known as the free rider problem. The presence of such market failures (e.g., externalities, public goods, noncompetitive markets) often serves as justification for the role of politics in resource allocation. On the other hand, such political interventions may also lead to a wasteful allocation of resources. Neoclassical economics claims that politics is often, if not always, distortionary in nature and inefficient because it is not based on economic rationality. What politicians are primarily concerned about is not necessarily the pursuit of economic welfare but, rather, their own political survival. In a democracy, elected representatives may secure resources to cater to the parochial demands of politically salient individuals or groups. Even in a nondemocracy, rulers still feel pressures to materially reward a cadre of individuals whose political allegiance is critical for them to stay in power. Worse still, public officials may squander resources for corrupt purposes and self-aggrandizement. As such, politics may significantly skew the distribution of resources in favor of certain individuals or groups, which may undermine economic welfare as a whole.

The Role of Politics in Resource Allocation Political Business Cycle Research in distributive politics often discusses the issues of allocation in the context where politicians are

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pressured to meet the competing demands of voters so as to win an election. There are a number of different ways through which the electoral game can shape resource allocation decisions. At the national level, the urge to win an election may result in a political business cycle (PBC) or a temporal boom and bust in government deficits, spending, and money supply generated by electoral cycles. Traditional PBC theory argues that since voters are myopic in nature and care about the health of the pre-election economy in making their voting decisions, opportunistic incumbent politicians seek to stimulate the economy by adopting expansionary fiscal and monetary policy just prior to the election. These temporary expansions may induce various economic woes like inflation, unsustainable debts, or destabilization in foreign trade, if pushed to the extreme.

Core Versus Swing Voter Models Electoral incentives may also affect resource allocation at the subnational level. There is an ongoing scholarly debate over two competing models that seek to explain how voter behaviors affect politicians’ subnational allocation decisions: the core- and swing-voter models. Both models often assume the presence of two competing parties seeking to win an election. The core-voter model posits that a party distributes resources to reward its own loyal supporters or districts and penalize opposition supporters with a lower level of resource allocation. The model often invokes the idea of a clientelistic relationship between politicians (or patrons) and voters (or clients), the former providing distributive goods to reward the latter in exchange for their electoral support. In Africa, for instance, politicians work with local patrons to distribute resources (e.g., cash, subsidies, food) to voters as a political instrument to cement their loyalty. In contrast, the swing-voter model posits that a party rewards swing voters or voters whose voting choices are divided between the two competing parties. The swingvoter model predicts that such voters can be more easily persuaded to switch their voting decisions by material rewards compared with core voters whose voting decisions are somewhat prefixed due to their strong ideological preference for one party over the other. Thus, from the rationalist perspective, there is a reason for a vote-maximizing party to target swing voters with a greater amount of resources to buy votes more efficiently. Research on distributive politics finds evidence for both of these two competing models, and the literature is divided over which model is a more effective strategy to win an election. Politics is not a panacea for market failures. That is to say, like the market system, the government also fails in allocating resources in an efficient and productive

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American Exceptionalism

manner. Distributive pressures from various stakeholder groups with narrow, private interests often complicate the government’s pursuit of the public interest. Politicians need to strike a delicate balance between winning the political game and also expending resources to serve society as a whole. This dilemma is present in any ­political system, be it a democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, or otherwise, though to varying degrees. If the narrow interests of a few politically salient individuals or groups capture state coffers, politics can do more harm than good in achieving public goals. Takaaki Masaki See also Clientelism; Corruption; Democracy; Dictatorship; Economics and Political Behavior; Free Market; Free Rider Problem; Neoliberalism; Public Goods

Further Readings Cox, G. W., & McCubbins, M. D. (1986). Electoral politics as a redistributive game. Journal of Politics, 48, 370–389. Lindbeck, A., & Weibull, J. (1987). Balanced budget redistribution and the outcome of political competition. Public Choice, 52, 273–297. Stokes, S. C. (2005). Perverse accountability: A formal model of machine politics with evidence from Argentina. American Political Science Review, 99, 315–325.

American Dream See Self-Help Ideology

American Exceptionalism American exceptionalism is a concept connoting the political superiority of the United States. There are mainly two ways social scientists approach American exceptionalism: as a subjective or as an objective concept. This entry provides an overview as well as critiques of both approaches to studying American exceptionalism.

Overview Throughout history, great powers have conceived of themselves as superior to others. Some examples include the Ottoman Turks, 19th-century Russia, imperial Great Britain, and the idea inherent in France’s mission

civilisatrice. It is, in other words, not exceptional to think one is exceptional. Thinking of one’s country as superior to other countries falls under the subjective definition of American exceptionalism. By subjective is meant exceptionalism defined as a constructed identity or set of ideas that Americans identify with. In this sense, American exceptionalism is a kind of American identity, nationalism, or civil religion. The objective approach, on the other hand, defines exceptionalism as a set of observable qualities that one can use to compare the United States with other countries.

The Subjective Definition of American Exceptionalism The subjective definition of American exceptionalism refers to a constellation of ideas that are central to the belief Americans have about themselves as a nation apart from and above others. This entry defines ­American exceptionalism as consisting of three interrelated ideas that Americans generally believe in. First is the idea that the United States is distinct from the “Old World”; second, it has a special and unique role to play in world history; and third, the United States will resist the laws of history (meaning that it will rise to great power status but will not decline). It is important to note, however, that one will find many different variations of the subjective definition in the humanities and the social sciences. First, let us examine the idea that the United States is distinct from the Old World. Originally, this referred to Europe, but today the United States is considered distinct from the rest of the world in general. Seeing the United States as “distinct” does not simply entail categorizing the United States as different from the rest of the world in terms of political, cultural, and economic institutions. Rather, it invokes superiority. The idea that the New World was superior to the Old is traceable to the period before the United States was founded and can be found in the Puritan religious communities in New England of the mid-1600s. Whereas the Pilgrims fled Europe never intending to come back, the Puritans were on a mission to teach their old country, England, the correct religious doctrine. The hope was that the old country would come to its senses and learn from the “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, put it in his discourse called “A Modell of Christian Charity.” The same idea of superiority was then later invoked by the nation’s founders, pointing to the new nation’s political, rather than religious, exceptionalism. The vanquishing of the British Empire, along with the establishment of the first modern democratic republic, was seen as heralding a new era in world history, one in which the United States

American Exceptionalism

would lead the way toward progress. This idea has been nurtured throughout U.S. history. Indeed, U.S. polling bureaus such as Gallup and Pew Research Center routinely poll Americans on their adherence to American exceptionalism, often defined as a belief that the United States is the greatest country in the world because of its history and Constitution. Because of its perceived miraculous founding and political genius, the United States, it was and is believed, should play a unique role in shaping the world. This is the second core idea that underpins the subjective definition of American exceptionalism. References to this missionary role of the United States on the world stage abound in presidential rhetoric. Most famous, perhaps, is Woodrow Wilson’s call for the United States to “make the world safe for democracy.” Exemplifying Wilson’s adherence to American exceptionalism was his belief that even though the United States eventually entered the First World War on the side of the Triple Entente, the United States was above the European conflict and would teach Europe how to conduct international relations correctly by setting up the League of Nations. The third and last idea is that the United States shall—as the only nation ever to do so—circumvent the laws of history by rising to power without subsequently declining. Proof that the United States will resist the laws of history, it is believed, can be found in its own history. First, the United States successfully wrested independence from Great Britain; then it successfully conquered a continent (nearly exterminating its native populations as well as thwarting British and French imperial designs); furthermore it extended across the oceans—vanquishing yet another powerful empire (Spain); and finally won two world wars, first over Imperial Germany and then over Nazi Germany, thereby allowing the United States to establish an international order over which it still rules. With the end of the cold war, American exceptionalism was vindicated seemingly for all eternity: The United States had proven itself to be that special nation that shall lead all other nations toward the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama argued in 1989. Inherent in this thesis was the idea that the United States was the vanguard of civilization, in that U.S.-style democracy was where the rest of the world was headed. While this may have sounded like mere post–cold war triumphalism, in fact this idea can be traced far back in U.S. history.

American Exceptionalism in International Relations/U.S. Foreign Policy In terms of political behavior, belief in American exceptionalism is argued to help push U.S. policy-makers toward choosing certain kinds of foreign policy

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approaches over others. Historians and political scientists usually depict American exceptionalism as having two versions: (1) exemplary (citing John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” speech), or (2) missionary (citing Woodrow Wilson’s quest to make the world “safe for democracy”). The exemplarist version of American exceptionalism portrays the New World as superior to the Old World, a status that can only be maintained by isolating the New World from the Old. Traditionally, historians argued that this exemplary identity inspired an isolationist foreign policy tradition, especially in the early years of the Republic. This was the foreign policy said to be favored by the nation’s founders (for instance, George Washington counseled against “permanent alliances” in his Farewell Address) and meant that the United States was reluctant to involve itself in the outside world, content instead to nurture its own superior political experiment. It was, in other words, how exemplary exceptionalism was expressed in foreign policy. The missionary version of American exceptionalism casts the United States in the role of a missionary, promoting its values of democracy and capitalism around the world. This means an active involvement in world affairs, leading the rest of the world in the right direction. An internationalist foreign policy is often argued to have won over isolationism after the so-called ­turnaround in U.S. grand strategy from isolationism to internationalism with the events of World War II. Viewing American exceptionalism as inspiring various periods of either isolationism or internationalism is now an outdated perspective in diplomatic history, however. Whereas political science has been a bit slower to absorb the new consensus, the new conventional wisdom is that the United States was always actively involved in international relations. After the Revolution, the United States was actively involved in trade, for example. More importantly, westward expansion meant waging direct or indirect wars against European empires that also harbored imperial designs in North America (not to mention the near extermination of the native population). Conquering the vast territories to the west of the original post-Revolutionary border (the Mississippi River) is now acknowledged to signify foreign policy rather than “frontier” history (which was and is designated as domestic politics). This is related to a revisionist view of how the era of manifest destiny and continental expansion during the 19th century should be studied in the field of history. A country can hardly be expansionist (or even imperialist) as well as isolationist, as historians of U.S. foreign relations point out. Recognizing that isolationism is an outdated concept that no longer holds much sway among historians, the more recent debate in the field is over whether the United States has been more multilateral or unilateral in its

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American Exceptionalism

internationalism, especially since World War I. Political scientists G. John Ikenberry and John Gerard Ruggie argue that American exceptionalism has been the cause of the U.S. commitment to multilateralism since 1945. However, in surveying the U.S. commitment to multilateralism, several authors, such as Michael Ignatieff, have found this commitment to be selective at best, and the reason for this to be American exceptionalism. Hilde Restad argues American exceptionalism in fact helps explain a steady U.S. foreign policy tradition of unilateral internationalism since the inception of the Republic. In conclusion, American exceptionalism is said to help push the United States to choose one foreign policy tradition over others, but there is little consensus among historians and political scientists over what kind of ­foreign policy tradition has won out.

The Objective Definition of American Exceptionalism It was French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville who first observed that the “position” of the Americans was “exceptional.” In his famous work Democracy in ­America, published in 1835, Tocqueville pointed back to the Americans’ “strictly Puritanical origin” as the first factor explaining this exceptional position. In the 20th century, it was Marxist observers who first applied the objective definition of American exceptionalism in an effort to explain the apparent failure of Marxist ­socialism in the United States. A famous example of this is the German economist Werner Sombart’s 1906 work Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? By the 1920s and 1930s, Marxists had concluded that the United States proved an “exception” to Marxist class patterns. The historian Max Lerner was the first one introducing the term American exceptionalism, in his book America as a Civilization. In the 1950s and 1960s, scholars as well as social and political commentators argued that the United States was exceptional because of its unique political, social, cultural, and/or economic qualities or characteristics. These analyses stressed the importance of a predominant middle class, the absence of class conflict, and the lack of divisive debates among rival social ideologies. Louis Hartz’s 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America is one of these famous works, which Seymour Martin Lipset built on when writing American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996).

American Exceptionalism in Domestic Politics American exceptionalism is also said to have important consequences in domestic politics. For instance,

Tocqueville not only wrote on what he saw as positive aspects of the United States’ exceptional democracy (at the time), but also noted its negative aspects. For instance, Tocqueville argued that while U.S. society was more free and open than those of Europe, this was only true to a certain extent. A person could say or write almost anything they pleased, but if someone were to stray beyond the bounds of the accepted views of the majority, he or she would quickly experience the limits of “freedom.” Here, Tocqueville was warning against a “tyranny of the majority.” Building on Tocqueville, Hartz argued in The Liberal Tradition in America that the real danger to American society lay in a “tyranny of unanimity” because of the hegemonic ideology of liberalism, which he saw as a kind of objective American exceptionalism. In fact, Hartz was worried about the disciplining consequences of this hegemonic ideology on domestic debate (Hartz was partly reacting to the era of McCarthyism). In electoral politics, American exceptionalism has become an important rhetorical tool since 2008. While it has a long history of being extolled—as Ronald ­Reagan, for instance, did when invoking the “shining city on a hill”—the term American exceptionalism was not explicitly uttered by political candidates until 2008. In the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, critiques were leveled at candidate, and then president, Barack Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism and Its Critics Both the subjective and objective definitions of ­American exceptionalism are contested in social science. First, while the objective approach seems “scientific,” it may be closer to the subjective definition than is commonly supposed. Why use the term exceptional if one does not mean superior? American exceptionalism seems to go beyond the assumption that every nation is unique in its own way. One could argue that undertaking research based on the assumption that the United States is more unique than other countries is itself an expression of a belief in American exceptionalism. The historian Ian Tyrrell has argued that earlier American historians too often simply assumed that the United States was exceptional. This creates a national identity feedback loop—feeling exceptional leads to scholarship based on this assumption, which strengthens the general sense of exceptionalism. Critics of Seymour Martin ­Lipset’s work have pointed out that his studies do not, in fact, conclusively show that the United States is exceptional when compared with other European countries. For instance, when it comes to collected tax revenues and beliefs in levying higher taxes on the rich, Great Britain is closer to the United States than to the other continental European countries Lipset looks at, as ­ Michael Lind has pointed out.

Anti-Semitism

Second is the critique of historical accuracy. To what extent (if at all) are academics reading contemporary ideas of American exceptionalism too far back into U.S. history? Political scientist David Hughes argues that rather than an old idea or identity, American exceptionalism is in fact a post–World War II discourse. Indeed, as Richard Gamble has shown in his book In Search of the City on a Hill, the speech, or “discourse” as he labels it, we now think of as famous—“A Modell of Christian Charity,” written by John Winthrop in 1630 and today known for containing the phrase “a city upon a hill”— was not always famous. It was President John F. Kennedy’s “city upon a hill” speech in 1961 that inaugurated the phrase’s ubiquitous quotation in political speeches, and of course Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase “shining city on a hill” in his 1989 farewell address that further cemented it in the American national narrative as the defining image of the United States in the world. In short, some authors now argue that the Puritans’ legacy was insignificant and that t­racing American exceptionalism back to before the founding of the Republic is disingenuous. This critique is technically correct—the Puritans were a small group with a religious mission that indeed failed after a few generations (long before the United States became a country). Certainly, the English colonies in North America were made up of more than just Puritans; they were also made up of other religious groups (Quakers and Anglicans) as well as colonists with more earthly missions (exploration and profit). What the Puritans arguably did for the nascent American identity, however, was to provide it with early lore and symbols that could be picked up by future generations constructing an American identity. Indeed, because the new American identity had to be constructed in explicit opposition to the British one, the ideology of American exceptionalism became the definition of “American” rather than linguistic, ethnic, religious, and historical ties to Great Britain. The images of the New World as a new beginning (religiously or in other ways) fit particularly well with the United States as a new political experiment in world history. Arguing that American exceptionalism somehow defines the American identity does not equal arguing that the term exceptional—or the term city upon a hill—must be traceable to 1776, or even 1630. It entails arguing that the ­self-understanding as exceptional must be traceable. In conclusion, American exceptionalism has two different usages in the social sciences and humanities—the subjective and the objective. In addition, the subjective definition is itself contested and comes in many variants. And yet, the concept is repeatedly invoked by researchers, politicians, and Americans in general and is an important piece in the American political and historical puzzle. Hilde Eliassen Restad

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See also End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Liberalism; Multilateralism; National Character; Nationalism; Patriotism

Further Readings Ceaser, J. (2012). The origins and character of American exceptionalism. American Political Thought, 1(1), 3–28. de Tocqueville, A. (1835/2002). Democracy in America (H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, J. A., & Weiss, D. (Eds.). (2011). The rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Gamble, R. (2012). In search of the city on a hill: The making and unmaking of an American myth. New York, NY: Continuum Books. Greene, J. P. (1993). The intellectual construction of America: Exceptionalism and identity from 1492 to 1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hughes, D. (2015). Unmaking an exception: A critical genealogy of American exceptionalism. Review of International Studies, 41(3), 527–551. Ignatieff, M. (Ed.). (2005). American exceptionalism and human rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lind, M. (1996). The American creed: Does it matter? Should it change? Foreign Affairs, 75(2). Retrieved from https://www .foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1996-03-01/ american-creed-does-it-matter-should-it-change Lipset, S. M. (1996). American exceptionalism: A double-edged sword. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. McCrisken, T. B. (2002). Exceptionalism. In A. DeConde & R. D. Burns (Eds.), Encyclopedia of American foreign policy (2nd ed., p. 63). New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Restad, H. E. (2014). American exceptionalism: An idea that made a nation and remade the world. Oxon, England: Routledge. Sombart, W. (1906/1976). Why is there is no socialism in the United States? (P. M. Hocking, Trans.). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Tyrrell, I. (1991). American exceptionalism in an age of international history. The American Historical Review, 96(4), 1031–1055. Wilsey, J. D. (2015). American exceptionalism and civil religion. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism is a negative attitude (evaluation) of Jewish people and their culture relative to other social groups. Like most prejudices, this negative attitude functions to marginalize the target (Jews), limiting their power and influence. Holding and expressing antiSemitic attitudes has a range of implications for political life and social conflict (vs. cohesion). Some of the most

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Anti-Semitism

pressing geopolitical concerns, most notably those in the Middle East, involve consideration of attitudes toward Jews (and/or Israel), including their rights and responsibilities. This entry discusses Jewish stereotypes and attitude trends, various forms or types of anti-Semitism, similarities and differences between anti-Semitism and other prejudices (e.g., sexism), contextual factors that aggravate the prejudice, and several of the more important consequences of anti-Jewish attitudes.

Thinking (Negatively) About Jewish People There is a long historical record of prejudice against Jewish people, culminating in mass genocide by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the mid-20th century. Despite a decline after World War II, negative attitudes toward Jews have persisted in the Middle East and have resurged in 21st-century Europe and America. Accompanying prejudicial attitudes are several widely shared stereotypes about Jews; that is, beliefs about their characteristics and dispositions. Many of these stereotypes are negatively valenced (e.g., manipulative, divided loyalties, materialistic, aggressive, own-group-oriented), although some are positive (e.g., intelligent), and others have meanings that can vary by context or insinuation (e.g., shrewd, powerful, religious). In broader terms, these stereotypes render Jews targets of envious prejudice; Jews are generally considered very competent but relatively unfriendly, providing an i­llustration of how perceptions of competence and intelligence can nonetheless be used against a group.

Forms (or Types) of Anti-Semitism Like other “isms” (e.g., racism, sexism), both theorists and laypeople have proposed multiple “reasons” underlying or explaining anti-Semitism present in others or themselves. These include factors such as group threat and social position (i.e., power and status used against one’s own group), beliefs that Jews are collectively responsible for killing Jesus, conspiracy beliefs about global domination, identity threats or confusions supposedly faced by nations (Jews often considered more loyal to Israel than their resident countries), declarations of Jews of being a “chosen people,” and the result of targeted propaganda (sometimes produced or at least supported by governments). Like other prejudices, antiSemitism has taken on new forms as social attitudes in the West have become increasingly tolerant, making open expressions of out-group bias less acceptable. Reflecting these distinctions, research highlights several forms (or types) of anti-Semitism. Traditional anti-Semitism is largely blatant, overt, and negative. These expressions often revolve around

religious themes, such as the killing of Jesus, and the socalled “blood libel,” the allegation that Jews historically murdered (often Christian) children for ritualistic purposes. Another, more secular, version focuses on the notion of Jewish conspiracy, the idea that Jews secretly run major businesses, banks, politics, and governments, with global domination their shared goal. In countries such as Poland, the endorsement of Jewish conspiracy typically represents the strongest predictor of a­ nti-­Jewish orientations and actions. Following the Holocaust, there has also emerged in Europe a secondary anti-Semitism. This particular bias centers on the notion that Jews create (and thus are responsible for) prejudices against themselves, a result of inducing guilt in other nations for causing (or allowing) the Holocaust to occur. Secondary anti-Semitism often takes the form of denial and unwillingness to discuss the Holocaust or Jewish suffering more generally. Finally, people can hold more subtle, covert, and relatively unconscious (i.e., implicit) antiSemitic attitudes. These are typically detected through reaction times to stimuli presented on computers (e.g., implicit association tests), with researchers comparing the strength of positive-negative evaluations of different social categories (e.g., Jewish vs. Christian).

Similarities and Differences With Other Prejudices The systematic study of intergroup prejudices increased after World War II, as social scientists struggled to make sense of the global intergroup strife and the genocide of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe. Many influential texts, such as The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno and colleagues, understandably focused heavily on anti-Semitism and authoritarianism, shaping subsequent thinking about prejudice more generally. But an intriguing statistical phenomenon also emerged: those more prejudiced against Jews (e.g., authoritarians) were also more prejudiced toward other marginalized or less powerful groups, such as Blacks, women, the disabled, and so on. This came to be known as generalized prejudice and has proven to be a valuable concept in understanding individual differences in prejudicial attitudes. In this very basic way, anti-­ Semitism shares roots with other prejudices and forms of intolerance. As noted above, anti-Semitism shares with other prejudices (e.g., sexism, racism) the presence of more traditional (and overt) versus contemporary (and covert) forms, with negative expressions toward out-groups increasingly disapproved of by institutions and schools. In other important ways, however, anti-Semitism is relatively distinct from other prejudices. For one, there exist marked differences of opinion about the

Anti-Semitism

categorization of “Jewish” people; that is, whether being Jewish concerns religion, ethnicity, or social identity. (As race and sexual and gender identities become increasingly more “fluid” and “self-identified,” antiSemitism may become less unique in this regard). Another distinction concerns the relatively small size of Jewish populations. Proportionally, Jews compose only 1% of the population in Europe and 2% in the United States. Other disadvantaged groups are considerably more numerous. Women, for instance, compose 50% of most populations, and Blacks compose approximately 15% of the U.S. population. Despite the proportionally small size of the Jewish population, however, anti-­ Semitism persists in Europe, in what some observe rather paradoxically as “anti-Semitism without Jews.” This suggests that concerns over power, influence, and group position (see conspiracies above) drive anti-­ Jewish attitudes, not mere presence or clashing cultures. Relatedly, in Europe Jews are often regarded as the “hidden enemy,” less visible than some other minorities. And, as noted earlier, the presence of secondary antiSemitism illustrates that Jews are blamed for prejudices against themselves (in ways not common or overt with regard to other groups). Yet anti-Semitism also differs from other “isms” in ways that are less problematic for Jews relative to other groups. For instance, there is less social distancing of Jews than of other marginalized groups, with a relatively high degree of social and cultural integration. Moreover, a 2012 Gallup poll indicates that whereas more than 90% of Americans are willing to vote for a Jewish president, less than 70% would vote for a gay person, and less than 60% would vote for a Muslim or atheist. Relative to other social groups, Jews in the United States have been described as a “successful” minority that can provide insights for other marginalized groups seeking better social conditions.

Contextual Aggravators In addition to individual differences in anti-Semitism, for example, as a function of authoritarianism or generalized prejudice, cultural factors play a strong role. The economic hardships experienced by Germans following World War I, in part because of heavy reparations paid to other nations, are commonly credited with ratcheting up resentment toward Jews as a scapegoat target (i.e., a weaker group generally not responsible for the problems). Such external aggravators persist. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, for instance, research demonstrated that among German participants (in both large-scale surveys and experiments) the financial crisis was associated with increased ethnic prejudice if immigrants were held accountable for the financial collapse,

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but was associated with greater anti-Semitism when bankers and financial speculators were held responsible. Here, relatively diffuse threats (e.g., financial collapse) can have grave consequences for specific targets (e.g., Jews), presumably as a result of commonly held stereotypes of Jews as bankers and secretive power brokers.

Consequences of Anti-Semitism Holding negative attitudes toward Jews is associated with negative outcomes for Jewish group members. The Nazis started by taking property and jobs from Jews, but discrimination quickly escalated to genocide, enabled by representations of Jews as both subhuman and responsible for societal ills. Although Jews in the 21st century experience less social distancing than do other minority groups, it is nonetheless the case that those holding anti-Semitic attitudes are more biased against voting for Jews (i.e., allowing them to hold office), support more discrimination in legal outcomes affecting Jews, offer fewer public funds devoted to ­pro-Jewish causes, and desire greater social distancing. Desecration of Jewish cemeteries and places of worship also surface to express anti-Semitism. Politically, antiSemitism represents a stumbling block to improving relations in the Middle East, one of the hot-button issues for international relations, destabilizing trust and hampering peace talks. Psychologically, anti-Semitism exerts multiple effects. In the United States, most Jews consider anti-Semitism a problem, particularly those highly ­ identified with being Jewish, and those poorer or older. Concerns among Jews also spike following media coverage specifying anti-Semitic phrases, and among those living in areas experiencing more antiJewish action. Reducing anti-Semitism would also benefit other targeted or stigmatized groups, to the extent that prejudices are intercorrelated, and that social movements protecting the rights of one group (e.g., Blacks, women) generally extend over time to others (e.g., gay people). Yet psychological research on anti-Semitism, relative to other types of prejudices, is relatively sparse, with research on the reduction of anti-Jewish attitudes even more in demand. Given the existing research, interventions focusing on guilt over past anti-Semitic transgressions look unpromising given that such an emphasis can fuel secondary antiSemitism. In addition, dominant groups often dehumanize disadvantaged groups when reminded of their own group’s past mistreatment of the disadvantaged. More promising are interventions that would focus on challenging perceptions of group threat based on group position and power, challenging Jewish stereotypes that seem closely linked and relevant to

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Art in Political Campaigns

anti-Semitism, and fostering more inclusive mental representations of Jews as members of nation-states and the global community. Gordon Hodson and Megan Earle See also Discrimination; Genocide; Prejudice; Stereotypes; Symbolic Racism

Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper. Becker, J. C., Wagner, U., & Christ, O. (2011). Consequences of the 2008 financial crisis for intergroup relations: The role of perceived threat and causal attributions. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 14, 871–885. Bergman, W. (2008). Anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe: A comparative perspective. Journal of Social Issues, 64, 343–362. Bilewicz, M., Winiewski, M., Kofta, M., & Wójcik, A. (2013). Harmful idea, the structure and consequences of anti-Semitic beliefs in Poland. Political Psychology, 34, 821–839. Cohen, J. E. (2010). Perceptions of anti-Semitism among American Jews, 2000–2005: A survey analysis. Political Psychology, 31, 85–107. Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902. Imhoff, R., & Banse, R. (2009). Ongoing victim suffering increases prejudice: The case of secondary anti-Semitism. Psychological Science, 20, 1443–1447. King, R. D., & Weiner, M. F. (2007). Group position, collective threat, and American anti-Semitism. Social Problems, 54, 47–77. Schneider, D. J. (2004). The psychology of stereotyping. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Simon, R. J., & Shaler, J. A. (2007). Anti-Semitism the world over in the twenty-first century. Current Psychology, 26, 152–182. doi:10.1007/s12144-007-9012-8

Art

in

Political Campaigns

The term political campaigns conjures up visions of candidates running for elective office: signs and billboards and TV advertisements, outlandish claims and promises, negative personal attacks, rallies, and hoopla. But there are also other kinds of campaigns: those for or against constitutional amendments or local ballot initiatives; for or against particular policies (gay marriage, gun rights, civil and voting rights, etc.); those

seeking to sway the hearts and minds of people to support an existing regime or to demand a new one; and the ultimate political campaign, war. What all political campaigns have in common is the intent to persuade: for or against a candidate, a policy proposal, a power structure. The sole raison d’être for any campaign is to convince voters, or the public generally, that its candidate or message or position is the only right one—and to motivate them to act accordingly. There are many ways to do this, of course, but the use of art—in all of its manifestations—has proven over millennia to be among the most effective means of human communication. One thinks of the Neolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira, and elsewhere, depicting early humans’ encounters with ­ powerful natural forces or the tomb paintings of ancient Egypt, meant to deify the deceased. The sculptures and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome are important not just as statements of lyrical beauty, but of the glory and power of the individual depicted, or indeed of the state itself. In more recent times, films have been employed to win over the public to the purposes of the state: for example, Triumph of the Will (1935), by Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany, or Frank Capra’s Why We Fight film series (1942–1945) sponsored by the U.S. government to bolster public support for fighting World War II. All art forms can be used to convey messages and to persuade. Poetry and prose, architecture, and even dance have been used in political campaigns. In this brief essay, we have space to consider only two: visual arts and music.

Visual Arts Paintings of wars, powerful if violent iterations of political campaigns, go back millennia; vases from ancient Greece show how dramatically they could be depicted. In European painting, battle scenes often showed the bravery and power of victorious generals and armies, and the weakness, even degradation, of the losers. But the power of painting to portray the anguish and horrors of “war as political campaign” is even more convincing than the paintings that glorify it. Two ­Spanish painters peerlessly demonstrated this in their works illustrating this theme: Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808, and Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937). The same could be said of August Rodin’s ­sculpture The Burghers of Calais (1889). During the 1930s and 1940s, the Works Progress Administration of the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) administration supported hundreds of artists across the full range of artistic genres. Among them a substantial

Assassinations/Violence in Politics

number of painters, writers, and musicians were criticized in some political circles for the leftist messages their art conveyed. Perhaps the most famous was Diego Rivera, the communist Mexican muralist, whose work in Detroit and elsewhere proved highly controversial. Posters have been the most common form of visual art used to persuade voters during election campaigns. In the United States, they were first used in the early 19th century, and no campaign nowadays is complete without them. Robust colors, forceful designs, and a simple but powerful message are their hallmark. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Shepard Fairey’s “HOPE” poster of Barack Obama became a worldwide icon. Posters play an especially important role in ­campaigns where there are multiparty systems, or where some ­portion of the population has low literacy rates. Voters learn to identify particular parties with particular colors, or colorful designs, printed on posters. Sometimes they are printed on ballots as well, to help voters locate their desired party and candidates. The most important medium for influencing voter opinion is television commercials. Even local political campaigns now use them extensively. Whether or not they qualify as art is a matter of opinion. But the care and sophistication with which they are designed rival that of any other creative visual presentation featuring powerful images advocating a political viewpoint or mobilizing people for political action.

Music Music has long been a part of political campaigns; what better way to attract public attention than a loud marching corps of brass and drums? The Romans employed this tactic often, and they were undoubtedly not the first. Campaigns to strengthen nationalism and patriotism always employ music, usually of a heroic or bombastic nature: What else is the purpose of national anthems, such as “The Star Spangled Banner,” “La Marseillaise,” or “Deutchland Über Alles”? But music has also been used to build public support for wars: “Yankee Doodle” (1780s), “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (1863), “Over There” (1917), and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” (1912). Similarly, it is used for campaigns about freedom, self-determination, and nation building: Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1805) and Verdi’s highly nationalistic operas, especially Nabucco (1841), are examples. And what July 4th celebration is complete without John Philip Sousa’s marches? Electoral campaigns have relied on music to draw public attention and support. In 1840, William Henry Harrison was the first to employ bands extensively during his presidential parades and rallies; thereafter, all

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candidates did. Perhaps the most famous campaign song was “Happy Days Are Here Again” (1929), used in FDR’s successful 1932 presidential campaign; in more recent times, candidates have borrowed (sometimes illegally) popular tunes of the day to drum up support at rallies. Richard K. Scher See also Activism; Democracy; Identity Politics; Lobbying; Mass Communication; Public Opinion; Social Movements; Values

Further Readings Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. New York, NY: Viking. Edelman, M. (1995). From art to politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. hooks, b. (1995). Art on my mind: Visual politics. New York, NY: New Press. Howells, R., & Negreiros, J. (2012). Visual culture (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity.

Assassinations/Violence in Politics Assassination is the intentional targeting and killing of a prominent individual or group of individuals based upon their role or standing in political society. These acts of violence are distinctly political in nature and have occurred throughout history. Empirical studies of assassination events are sparse, yet these events may have a significant impact on societies and political systems. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 is often described as the spark that ignited World War I. Over time, the types of assassination targets have changed and may still include heads of state (in line with the traditional view of assassination), but contemporary assassinations also include other prominent individuals such as local mayors, law enforcement officials, journalists, and leaders of extremist organizations. This entry briefly introduces the history and norms of assassination, the differing types of assassination, and the state of research into assassination outcomes.

Motivations, Norms, and Legality Violence in politics occurs for any of a number of reasons, such as the desire to destroy the state, to overthrow political elites in power, or to force policy change. Motivations may not always be clear, and questions of

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Assassinations/Violence in Politics

conspiracy often surround assassination events. Assassination is a violent tactic utilized for achieving goals in politics. Prior to the 1600s, assassination was deemed virtuous by some thinkers and considered a legitimate foreign policy tool. Hans Morgenthau argues that assassination was a tool of power politics before the morality of killing leaders came under question in the mid-1600s. Ward Thomas argues that an international norm against the use of assassination emerged, resulting in the prohibition of “treacherous killing” included in the Hague Convention of 1907. Despite the codified prohibition against assassination, many governments, groups, and individuals continue to employ assassination as a tool in achieving goals. The U.S. government instituted several failed assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and devised a plan to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba before his death at the hands of the Congolese and Belgians in 1961. The U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (also known as the Church Committee for its chair, Senator Frank Church) investigated the role of the U.S. intelligence community in assassination plots, resulting in an Executive Order in 1976 by President Gerald Ford banning assassination. President Ronald Reagan reiterated the ban on U.S. government employees’ involvement in assassination by signing Executive Order 12333 (Section 2.11).

the use of assassination has expanded and now reaches beyond the historical understanding of political assassination. Extremist groups such as the Shining Path in Peru and Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain are known to have carried out hundreds of assassinations as part of their revolutionary or separatist campaigns against their respective governments. States such as the United States and Israel also assassinate individuals deemed as risks to national security, such as the U.S. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. Contemporary assassinations suggest three categories: leader, terrorist, and state sponsored. Leader assassinations are isolated events occurring outside of broader campaigns of violence. Examples of leader assassinations include Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Anwar Sadat. Terrorist assassinations occur as part of a broader campaign of violence and target a range of prominent individuals from local government officials to journalists. Examples of terrorist assassinations include the killing of Brigadier ­General Abbas Hassan Jabr, a militia commander in Iraq, and the failed attempt on the life of Yassin Nur Gas, an interim government official in Somalia, both in 2014. State-sponsored assassinations, as noted earlier, target individuals deemed security risks by sovereign states, such as the targeting of Hamas leaders by Israel and the assassination of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by the United States.

Contemporary Assassinations

Outcomes Research

Despite the outlawing of this form of political murder, assassinations are a commonly used tactic in violent politics in contemporary society. State leaders such as U.S. president John F. Kennedy, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto have all been victims of assassination in modern history. Societal leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Russia were also assassination victims, and certain revolutionary groups (such as the Shining Path in Peru) utilize assassination in their fight against governments. Extremist groups across the globe regularly assassinate members of local governments, and states target members of extremist organizations in the fight against terrorism. Thus, contemporary assassinations encompass varying targets and a range of motivations and goals, which makes it necessary to distinguish assassination types.

A Typology of Assassinations State rulers such as monarchs and presidents are the traditional targets of assassins, but in contemporary times,

Research into the outcomes of assassination events is nascent but studies indicate that leader assassinations in stable democratic states have no impact on the political system and societal repercussions are short-lived. After an assassination event, the public is anxious owing to the shock of the event and the resulting power transitions in government. The public mourns the loss of a leader, but the disruption to society usually does not result in significant societal changes. However, further research is needed in other political systems. Certain assassination events, such as the deaths of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon in 2005 and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan in 2007, have resulted in rioting and violence, with the former resulting in a massive protest known as the Cedar Revolution. Terrorist assassinations are the most prevalent assassination type across the globe, and the broader violent environment within which these killings occur poses significant challenges to empirical research. State-­ sponsored assassinations are utilized increasingly by states in the war against extremism and are often referred to in the literature as targeted killings. This assassination type is receiving scholarly attention, but

Assimilation

challenges exist in that much of the data are classified and the data that are available are not always reliable. All assassination types merit further scrutiny, and the insight gained into this method of political violence holds the potential to enhance our understanding of violence in politics. Laura N. Bell See also Conflicts, Protracted; Death of Leaders; Drones; Lone Wolf Terrorism; Political Crimes; Relative Deprivation Theory; State-Sponsored Terror; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings George, D. (1988). Distinguishing classical tyrannicide from modern terrorism. The Review of Politics, 50(3), 390–419. doi:10.1017/S0034670500036317 Iqbal, Z., & Zorn, C. (2006). Sic semper tyrannis? Power, repression and assassination since the Second World War. Journal of Politics, 68(3), 489–501. doi:10.1111/j.14682508.2006.00440.x Thomas, W. (2000). Norms and security: The case of international assassination. International Security, 25(1), 105–133.

Assimilation Assimilation refers to the pressures that ethnic minority groups face to adopt the established norms and values of the dominant group at the expense of their own cultural heritage. Political policies of assimilation attempt to homogenize a population rather than recognize differences between subgroups. This entry ­ provides an overview of the origins of assimilation research, predictors of assimilation ideology endorsement, and a summary of current perspectives on assimilation research.

Overview During the 2014 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola released an advertisement that featured the United States’ patriotic song “America the Beautiful” sung in multiple l­ anguages, such as English, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic. The ad received immediate pushback and ignited a controversy over whether ethnic and cultural differences between groups in the United States should be celebrated or minimized. Advocates of celebrating differences made various comments about the importance and value of cultural diversity (e.g., “It’s absolutely beautiful that

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America has such diversity; that’s something that should be embraced, not hidden.”). In contrast, advocates of minimizing differences made various comments about how English should be the only language spoken in the United States (e.g., “An American song in other languages . . . not cool.”). Moreover, still other individuals expressed the belief that ethnicity should be irrelevant in the conversation (e.g., “America is for any person whether they are White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.”). These comments reflect opposite perspectives on how diversity should be handled in the United States. One perspective, reflected in the favorable comments about the ad, is referred to as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the belief that ethnic and cultural ­differences should be recognized and celebrated. Thus, multiculturalism is often associated with positive ­evaluations of minority group members and their heritage. Another perspective and the focus of the present entry, reflected in the unfavorable comments about the ad, is referred to as assimilation. Perspectives consistent with assimilation are typically related to higher levels of prejudice and ethnocentrism than are perspectives consistent with multiculturalism. Moreover, majority group members (i.e., White Americans) tend to endorse assimilation to a greater extent than do minority group members because assimilation helps preserve their group’s dominant status. An ideology that is somewhat related to assimilation is color blindness. Color blindness is the belief that ethnic differences should be ignored in favor of judging people as individuals. Although assimilation and color blindness converge on the notion that ethnic and ­cultural differences between groups should be ­ de-emphasized, color blindness is associated with positive evaluations of minority group members as individuals. By contrast, assimilation is associated with negative evaluations of minority group members, coupled with a desire that minorities abandon their cultural heritage and adopt majority group values, beliefs, and practices. In this way, assimilation—more so than color ­blindness—can function to preserve social inequalities. Assimilation, therefore, de-emphasizes the importance of ethnic differences by encouraging minority group members to relinquish their culture and identity. The next section presents a brief overview of the origins of assimilation research, followed by a discussion of predictors of assimilation endorsement among majority group members.

Origins of Assimilation Research How do diversity ideologies develop, and moreover, contribute to outcomes of intercultural contact? Research on assimilation and other “diversity ideologies” aims to

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Assimilation

answer such questions. Assimilation research stemmed largely from the efforts of John Berry, a prominent researcher in cultural psychology. In response to political policies touting the need for a single “national identity,” Berry sought to identify factors that give rise to various ideologies surrounding diversity in complex societies so as to inform alternative political policies. He came up with eight such “modes of group relations” that arise as a function of whether or not societies (a) are composed of diverse groups that retain their ethnic identity and characteristic cultural features, (b) allow diverse groups the choice to retain their ethnic identity, and (c) emphasize positive intergroup relations. Of particular importance to the present discussion, two forms of assimilation emerged from Berry’s theorizing. Under the “melting pot” form of assimilation, ethnic groups voluntarily give up their ethnic identity to adopt the majority group identity. In contrast, under the “pressure cooker” form of assimilation, diverse ethnic groups give up their ethnic identity because of the demands of the majority group. In other words, both kinds of assimilation involve ethnic minority groups giving up their diverse identities in order to promote positive intergroup relations. Their distinction lies in whether or not diverse ethnic groups are allowed to exercise a choice in forgoing their ethnic identity. Berry’s diversity ideologies reflect perspectives on a broader concept called acculturation, briefly defined as the psychological and cultural processes involved in intercultural contact. When ethnic minorities encounter a new culture, how do they decide whether to retain or forgo their ethnic identity? Evidence suggests that two dimensions operate to produce a range of acculturation strategies: the degree to which people value (a) maintaining their ethnic identity and (b) upholding positive intergroup relations. Based on this perspective, assimilation emerges as an acculturation strategy resulting from the devaluation of one’s ethnic identity and cultural characteristics in order to maintain positive intergroup relations. In sum, assimilation research originated in response to political policies that de-emphasized cultural differences as an alternative strategy for improving intergroup relations. Assimilation can be distinguished from other diversity ideologies in that it touts the sacrifice of diverse ethnic minority identities (sometimes by choice) to ultimately promote the majority group identity.

Predictors of Assimilation Minority group members who endorse an assimilationist ideology experience poorer mental health outcomes and reduced well-being (e.g., lower self-worth, depression), and they evaluate their own group less favorably, than

do those who do not endorse assimilationist ideology. Given the negative consequences of endorsing assimilation among minority group members, it is important to understand when majority group members will be more versus less inclined to adopt assimilationist viewpoints and encourage minority group members to abandon their cultural heritage. Next, four predictors of assimilation endorsement are discussed: perceived threat, conservatism, social dominance, and group identification.

Perceived Threat Research has shown that perceived threats to the majority group can lead its members to adopt a variety of ethnocentric and assimilationist responses to minority groups. One type of threat that the majority group may perceive is the notion that they are no longer the most prototypical ethnic group in their nation. Indeed, many White Americans believe that their ethnic group is the most representative of the “typical American,” and threats to this belief may elicit a variety of negative responses to minority groups. For example, when White Americans are informed that they may no longer be the ethnic majority in the United States in the future, they show an increase in support for cultural assimilation of minorities and a general resistance toward diversity. Perceived threats to majority group identity may be elicited not only by minority groups, but also by foreign countries. In one series of studies, for instance, American participants were brought into the lab during the 6-month anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks so that they were induced to perceive foreign threat. They then read a U.S. senator’s policy document on foreign and domestic intergroup relations. The senator’s document was manipulated to endorse either assimilation or multiculturalism. The results found that when a foreign threat was salient, participants endorsed assimilation as a foreign policy to a greater extent than multiculturalism. Interestingly, however, participants preferred multiculturalism to assimilation as a domestic policy because in that context, minorities were perceived as a common in-group with whom Americans could band together to deal with outside threats (i.e., from foreign countries). Perceived threats, therefore, may influence ideology endorsements differently depending on which perspective best ensures the safety of one’s group and which group (i.e., one’s ethnic group versus one’s nation) is threatened.

Political Conservatism Political conservatism generally refers to the preference for public policies that preserve rather than change the status quo. Assimilation ideology is considered

Assimilation

consistent with political conservatism because it emphasizes the notion that minority group members should change their values to match those of the majority group. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is generally considered inconsistent with political conservatism because it leaves open the possibility that minority group members’ values may change the status quo. In support of the idea that assimilation best preserves the status quo, research has shown that political conservatives are more inclined to endorse assimilation than they are to endorse multiculturalism.

Social Dominance Orientation Social dominance orientation (SDO) refers to the endorsement of social hierarchies and inequalities, and is typically conceptualized as an individual difference that measures the desire to see some groups of people dominate others. SDO is similar to political conservatism in that both emphasize preservation of the status quo. SDO is unique, however, in that it explicitly focuses on support for inequality. For example, people high in SDO tend to support public policies that legitimize group-based inequality (e.g., no same-sex marriage), yet they tend to oppose policies that legitimize group-based equality (e.g., affirmative action). Given that SDO is a measure of support for inequality, it is consistent with the assimilationist perspective that members of the minority group must relinquish their cultural heritage in favor of the majority group’s values. Indeed, correlational research has found that social dominance orientation is positively related to endorsement of assimilation, but negatively related to endorsement of multiculturalism. Moreover, majority group members express greater prejudice against minority group members who resist inequality and strive to maintain their cultural heritage. Interestingly, however, some research demonstrates that SDO is also associated with greater hostility toward minority group members who seem “overly” eager to assimilate to the majority group. According to this research, majority group members may fear that minority group members who are too eager to assimilate are untrustworthy and threaten their group’s cohesiveness.

Group Identification Majority group members who identify strongly with their ethnicity (i.e., who consider their ethnic group membership an important part of their self-definition) are more inclined to endorse assimilation than do those who identify less strongly with their ethnicity. Indeed, among White Americans, ethnic identification is positively correlated with endorsement of assimilation. In contrast,

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among minorities, ethnic identification is unrelated to endorsement of assimilation but is positively related to endorsement of multiculturalism. Together, these findings suggest that ethnic identification may encourage a preference for ideologies that are consistent with the best interests of one’s group (i.e., assimilation for the majority group, multiculturalism for minority groups). Related to the idea that ethnic identification predicts attitudes toward diversity-related policies, high levels of national identification (i.e., importance of one’s nationality to one’s self-definition) have similar effects. For example, in one study, Americans (both White and nonWhite) who read a short article that depicted a foreign (versus domestic) threat had higher subsequent levels of national identification. Importantly, national identification predicted the endorsement of assimilationist ­ideology as a foreign policy. In a related study, among participants who were high (rather than low) in national identification, assimilation endorsement reduced tolerance of minority groups who wished to maintain their cultural heritage. In other words, high national identification increased the desire to see minority groups assimilate to the status quo. Although ethnic and national identification produce generally similar effects on assimilation endorsement among White Americans, minorities appear more willing to endorse an assimilationist ideology when their national rather than ethnic identification is high. One possible explanation is that national identification is reflective of perceived membership in a superordinate, overarching category (i.e., one’s nation), which bands people together against a common threat irrespective of their ethnicity. In sum, there are several predictors of support for assimilationist ideology, including perceived threat, political conservatism, social dominance orientation, and group (ethnic and national) identification.

Current Perspectives on Assimilation Research Current perspectives on assimilation research continue to define and analyze factors that give rise to assimilationist ideologies, while simultaneously identifying possible solutions to the potential negative consequences of holding such beliefs. Following is a discussion of perspectives that inform the development of assimilationist ideology. Next, perspectives on alternative ideologies related to assimilation are described.

Fourfold Structure of Interethnic Ideology The Fourfold Structure of Interethnic Ideology introduces two orthogonal dimensions that predict diversity ideologies. The first dimension is the degree to which

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Assimilation Emphasis on group differences Low – differences should be overcome

High – differences should be emphasized

Positive

Colorblindness

Multiculturalism

Negative

Assimilation

Separatism/Segregation

Evaluation of the outgroup

Figure 1  The Fourfold Structure of Interethnic Ideology Source: Hahn, A., Judd, C. M., & Park, B. (2010). Thinking about group differences: Ideologies and national identities. Psychological Inquiry, 21, 120–126. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2010.483997/ Copyright © 2010 by Taylor and Francis. Reproduced by permission.

group differences are emphasized (e.g., “We’re all fundamentally the same.” versus “Each group is unique.”). The other dimension involves evaluations of out-group members (positive versus negative). Based on these dimensions, the researchers obtained evidence for four distinct interethnic ideologies: color blindness, multiculturalism, assimilation, and separatism/segregation (see Figure 1). In particular, this diversity ideology framework ­contends that multiculturalism and color blindness are associated with positive evaluations, whereas assimilation and separation/segregation are associated with negative evaluations of out-group members. Further, color blindness and assimilation are related to the belief that group differences should be overcome, whereas multiculturalism and separation/segregation uphold emphasis on group distinctiveness. Assimilation, then, promotes negative out-group evaluations as well as a reduced focus on group differences, in order to facilitate adherence to a majority group identity. To illustrate, when asked about possible means of increasing ethnic diversity, participants holding assimilationist beliefs endorsed statements such as “If minorities are coming to America, they should give up their ethnic identities and start acting American.”

Individualistic-Collectivistic Model An alternative framework aimed at understanding assimilation posits that the type of culture to which one assimilates can predict when and how assimilation will occur. Specifically, the present model makes a distinction between individualistic versus collectivistic home cultures (where immigrants originated) and host cultures (where immigrants move). Briefly, individualistic cultures are characterized by an emphasis on the individual over the group, whereby individuals are valued for being independent and acting

in the service of their personal interests. Collectivistic cultures, on the other hand, emphasize the group over the individual, whereby individuals are valued for being interdependent and acting to serve the needs of the collective group. The individualistic-collectivistic model contends that assimilation occurs as a result of degree of matching between the home and host cultures. According to this theory, collectivistic immigrants will assimilate more easily into a collectivistic host culture (as will individualistic immigrants into an individualistic host culture). Conversely, assimilation becomes more difficult to navigate when one is assimilating into a host culture with incongruent cultural values (i.e., individualistic immigrants assimilating into a collectivistic host culture and vice versa).

Alternatives to Assimilationist Beliefs Since the early 2000s, research on assimilation has increasingly identified ways to counteract negative evaluations of minority groups and instead promote more diversity-friendly beliefs and attitudes. One solution contends that positive intergroup relations can be achieved by emphasizing in-group–out-group commonalities while simultaneously affording in-group–out-group distinctiveness. Two models provide empirical support for this: the Common In-Group Identity Model and the In-Group Projection Model, both of which are discussed in the ­sections that follow. Common In-Group Identity Model The Common In-Group Identity Model (CIIM) posits that intergroup bias is reduced via “superordinate categories” of identification that encompass both majority and minority groups. For example, White Americans and African Americans share the superordinate category “American.” Focusing on what it means to be

Asymmetric Warfare

“American,” then, heightens commonalities between White Americans and African Americans while allowing the expression of each group’s distinct characteristics. Empirical findings show that when people are reminded of their membership in a superordinate (versus subordinate) group, they subsequently exhibit decreased racial bias and increased intergroup cooperation. Thus, the CIIM serves to promote more diversity-friendly attitudes by emphasizing similarities yet retaining differences between groups. The In-Group Projection Model The In-Group Projection Model is quite similar to the CIIM in its emphasis on superordinate category salience as a mechanism through which out-groups can be evaluated more positively. However, this model differs from the CIIM in how, specifically, these out-groups are evaluated. In particular, the In-Group Projection Model contends that when a superordinate category is made salient, people project the qualities and characteristics of the in-group onto the superordinate category, which includes both the in-group and out-group. Outgroup members, then, are evaluated using “in-group” criteria and standards of evaluation. If the out-group’s characteristics align with these in-group criteria, outgroup members are evaluated favorably. If not, outgroup members may be evaluated unfavorably. Under the In-Group Projection Model, then, the salience of a superordinate category still has the potential to evoke negative out-group evaluations. Interestingly, the in-group projection model offers an explanation for how assimilation and separation/ segregation ideologies (both of which, according to the fourfold structure of interethnic ideology, involve negative out-group evaluations) arise. Specifically, assimilation and separation/segregation may result from ethnic minorities being evaluated according to the standards and criteria of the ethnic majority. In other words, assimilation and separation/segregation may occur because ethnic majorities are “projecting” their in-group’s characteristics onto out-group members and demanding that the out-group adhere to these characteristics.

Conclusion In sum, assimilation, or the process by which ethnic minority groups adopt the values and customs of the majority, can take several different forms (e.g., it can occur as a result of the minorities’ choice, or as a result of pressure from the majority). Furthermore, endorsement of assimilationist ideology is correlated with a multitude of personality, political, and sociocultural

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variables among both ethnic majority and minority group members. Although endorsement of assimilation often predicts negative intergroup attitudes, such as majority group members’ prejudice against ethnic minorities, research on assimilation in the 21st century has focused on how the ideology may be modified to increase tolerance and acceptance of out-groups. Hannah Osborn, Nicholas Sosa, and Kimberly Rios See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Conservatism; Ethnicity; Group Ideologies; Immigration; Multiculturalism; Race and Ethnicity; Social Dominance Orientation

Further Readings Berry, J. W. (2001). A psychology of immigration. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 615–631. Davies, P. G., Steele, C. M., & Markus, H. R. (2008). A nation challenged: The impact of foreign threat on America’s tolerance for diversity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 308. Hahn, A., Banchefsky, S., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2015). Measuring intergroup ideologies: Positive and negative aspects of emphasizing versus looking beyond group differences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 1646–1664. Levin, S., Matthews, M., Guimond, S., Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., Kteily, N., . . . Dover, T. (2012). Assimilation, multiculturalism, and colorblindness: Mediated and moderated relationships between social dominance orientation and prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 207–212. Verkuyten, M. (2005). Ethnic group identification and group evaluation among minority and majority groups: Testing the multiculturalism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 121. Verkuyten, M. (2010). Assimilation ideology and situational well-being among ethnic minority members. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 269–275. Wolsko, C., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2006). Considering the tower of Babel: Correlates of assimilation and multiculturalism among ethnic minority and majority groups in the United States. Social Justice Research, 19, 277–306.

Asymmetric Warfare Asymmetric warfare describes armed conflict dynamics in which belligerents differ in their relative military power and capabilities, often significantly. Contemporary examples include modern professional armies arrayed against non-state actors, insurgencies fighting government regimes, and transnational armed groups

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Asymmetric Warfare

using terrorist tactics against “soft” (i.e., civilian) targets. The concept’s usage grew throughout the 1990s and especially after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States homeland. Increasingly, asymmetric warfare has evolved to describe not only mismatched capabilities among armed forces but also the complexity of power in war: namely, the idea that a militarily weaker actor can turn a stronger party’s strengths against it or exploit its unrecognized ­ vulnerabilities (e.g., abiding by the laws of war, open societies, technological sophistication) to achieve u ­ nexpected victories. As Ivan Arreguín-Toft notes, asymmetric warfare is “how the weak win wars.” Importantly, asymmetric tactics have long been a core element of warfare and military strategic theory well before their prevalent modern use. Whether the Greek phalanx, Odysseus’s “Trojan horse,” or American Minutemen harrying British redcoats, as Sun Tzu’s ancient Art of War emphasizes, “all warfare is based on deception.” Accordingly, Sun Tzu detailed guidelines for avoiding direct conflict by feigning weakness, by “holding out baits to entice the enemy,” by evading him “if he is superior in strength,” by attacking him where he is unprepared, and by pretending “to be weak, that he may grow arrogant” (1910, n.p.). Over the course of history, each new military tactic, technology, or invention—guns, air power, submarines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), human shields—likewise have spurred such asymmetries, thus changing the power of opponents over each other and creating new conditions for power projection, victory, and defeat. In this way, asymmetric warfare encompasses a broad range of unconventional and unorthodox tactics designed to achieve broad-based strategic effects under specific circumstances. Recent social science scholarship and strategic debate have revolved around whether asymmetric warfare signals a transformation in the nature and forms of warfare or, as Mary Kaldor notes, even the advent of “new wars.” As a species of nonconventional or irregular warfare, asymmetric approaches are often distinguished from 20th century state-centric models in which uniformed armies faced off against one another on defined battlefields, while civilians remained distant from the front lines. In the post–cold war period—with its often brutal proxy, guerrilla, and civil wars and liberation struggles, low-intensity conflicts, and insurgencies— postmodern conflict has changed: non-state actors outpace states, irregular forces replace professional armies, and combat operations move well beyond traditional battlespaces into cities, social media, civilian infrastructure, cyberspace, and economies. For John Kiszely (2006), postmodern warfare is not just new but d ­ ifferent, involving “challenges that are not primarily overcome with the tools of modernity: more advanced technology, firepower, lethality, speed, stealth, digitization, logistics,

network-centric warfare or hi-tech ‘shock and awe’” (p. 177). Likewise, the line between war and peace is eroded, enemies are not easily identifiable as their status and identity may fluctuate, and victory is achieved not on the traditional battlefield but in the public domain and by winning public support. In asymmetric conflict, the fight is not so much military as political, dependent upon winning the support of local populations and institutions of governance. In this respect, Carl von Clausewitz’s classic definition of the fundamental purpose of war—from On War, first published in 1832—remains, even while contemporary asymmetric warfare defies neat delineation: “War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.” In a 2001 U.S. Army War College report, Steven Metz and Douglas Johnson (2001) summarize asymmetric warfare by describing its strategic ends, as “acting, organizing, and thinking differently than opponents in order to maximize one’s own advantages, exploit an opponent’s weaknesses, attain the initiative, or gain greater freedom of action” (p. 5). These authors then echo Clausewitz’s classic definition of war—and acknowledge the “politics by other means” trope—by positing that asymmetric war can be “political-strategic, military-strategic, or a combination of these.” It should be noted that Metz’s and Johnson’s expanded definition of asymmetric warfare highlights both the vast terrain of strategies and tactics it covers, as well as the concomitant difficulties the massive, mostly traditional military force of a nation state can have in combatting it. Their analysis of asymmetric wars reveals varying combinations of length (“shortand long-term”); of planning (deliberate use of asymmetric ­tactics versus default use, or indeed versus use of traditional warfare); and of “psychological and physical dimensions.” Asymmetric warfare, in other words, “can entail different methods, technologies, values, organizations, time perspectives, or some combination of these.” Corri Zoli See also Civil Disobedience; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Dictatorship; Nonviolence; Social Revolts; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings Arreguín-Toft, I. (2005). How the weak win wars: A theory of asymmetric conflict. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kaldor, M. (2013). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. New York, NY: Wiley. Kiszely, J. (2008, December). Post-modern challenges for modern warriors (The Shrivenham Papers, No. 5). Australian Army Journal, 177.

Attitudes Mack, A. (1975, January). Why big nations lose small wars: The politics of asymmetric conflict. World Politics, 27(2), 175–200. Meigs, M. (2003). Unorthodox thoughts about asymmetric warfare. Parameters, 33(2), 4–18. Metz, S., & Johnson, D. V. (2001, January). Asymmetry and US military strategy: Definition, background, and strategic concepts. Strategic Studies Institute of the US War Army College Report. Sun Tzu. (1910/1994). The art of war (Lionel Giles, Trans.). Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/ 132.txt von Clausewitz, C. (1982). On war. New York, NY: Penguin.

Attitudes Attitudes are evaluations that include emotional and cognitive components. People can form an attitude about anything, including people, such as politicians, and issues, such as universal health care and global warming. This entry describes two major types of attitudes, how they form, and their relationship with behavior, and summarizes the ways in which attitudes are changed, whether by others or by the attitude holder himself or herself.

Attitude Types Humans occupy busy, complex social environments in which the brain constantly makes categories. Attitudes help make categories of “like” and “dislike” or “approve” and “disapprove.” Many people use the word attitude interchangeably with belief, but there are important distinctions. Beliefs are subject to change if sufficient evidence is presented. When Adam tells his friend that Governor X is going to declare herself a candidate in the next presidential election, he is stating a belief. Based on what Adam has read in the news, he believes this to be true. If Adam discovered evidence to the contrary, his belief could change. Attitudes are how people feel about a topic. If Adam tells his friend that he really likes Governor X and wants her to win the presidential election, he is expressing an attitude; this attitude may be based on some of his beliefs. For every attitude object, people have two types of attitudes. The first type is an automatic, or implicit, attitude. This is a quick, “gut level” evaluation. The second type is a deliberate, or explicit, attitude. This is the careful evaluation made after reflection. Often ­automatic and deliberate attitudes tell the same story, but sometimes they are surprisingly inconsistent. To measure a deliberate attitude, researchers typically use a self-report measure. For example, to identify a

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deliberate attitude toward the Democratic Party, Cindy could rate the degree to which she prefers the Democratic Party over the Republican Party: strongly prefer, moderately prefer, no preference. Measuring automatic attitudes is a more difficult process. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular tool for measuring automatic attitudes. Words or images are flashed in the center of a computer screen, and test takers have to press keys to sort the words or images into categories of “good” or “bad” as quickly as ­possible. Speed is important to avoid measuring the explicit attitudes. On the Project Implicit website, volunteers can take an IAT to measure their implicit attitude toward Barack Obama, as opposed to other recent U.S. presidents. In the first round of the test, images of President Obama are sorted into the good category whereas images of other recent presidents (e.g., Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan) are sorted into the bad category. In a later ­ round, this task is repeated with the reverse pairings (Obama with bad, other presidents with good). Attitude is measured as a function of reaction time. If Cindy has a stronger automatic association between President Obama and good, then she should be able to make those pairings more quickly than pairings of President Obama with bad. It is important to understand implicit attitudes because people are sometimes motivated to conceal their explicit attitudes about controversial attitude objects. For example, an individual who dislikes Hispanics may be reluctant to express that attitude on an explicit attitude measure because such views are considered inappropriate or anti-normative. For attitude objects in politics, such as presidential candidates, implicit attitudes tend to be consistent with explicit attitudes; therefore, public opinion polls that measure attitudes through self-reporting tend to be accurate,  particularly when the polls are conducted anonymously.

Attitude Formation There are several different explanations for how people form attitudes in the first place. In many cases, attitudes are learned through a combination of social learning and operant conditioning. Social learning refers to the human tendency to observe others and repeat what they do. Operant conditioning is a type of learning that occurs because people are more likely to replicate rewarded behaviors and less likely to replicate punished behaviors. In the case of political party affiliation, most people learn their attitudes from family members. They observe and model the allegiances of the family, which are typically rewarded through mechanisms such as praise. As a result of this learning, people rarely switch

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Attitudes

political parties after they reach middle age. By tracking the attitudes of American adults who participated in national elections between 1956 and 1980, researchers found that over a 4-year period, attitudes changed the most for the 18- to 25-year-olds but hardly any change occurred for the 34- to 86-year-olds. Another way to form attitudes is via the mere ­exposure effect. Imagine that Danette is asked about her attitude toward a candidate in a local election. She actually knows nothing about the candidate. She has never seen the candidate’s face and doesn’t know anything about the candidate’s positions on the key issues, but she has seen the candidate’s name over and over again because her neighbor has an election sign in his yard. Despite her lack of knowledge, Danette feels positively about the candidate. Through “mere exposure,” she has formed an implicit attitude toward the candidate. As long as an attitude toward an object, like a political candidate, is initially neutral or positive (rather than negative), more exposure can create more positivity. At first, Danette did not have any attitude toward that unfamiliar candidate; her attitude could be described as neutral. But after driving and walking past her neighbor’s sign over and over again, she feels some positivity when she sees or hears the name.

Attitude Change Once an attitude is formed, there is a strong motivation to maintain and justify it. People convince themselves, and others, that their attitudes are reasonable. But the complexity of life tends to create inconsistencies. When Bill learns that Candidate X (about whom he has a positive attitude) engaged in an extramarital affair (about which he has a negative attitude), the inconsistency between these two attitudes creates a tension. Psychologists call this tension cognitive dissonance and suggest that people are motivated to reduce or remove the tension. One way to remove cognitive dissonance is to change one of the incompatible attitudes. For example, Bill could remove the cognitive dissonance created by Candidate X’s extramarital affair by changing his attitude toward Candidate X (e.g., adopting a negative attitude toward Candidate X). Another option for reducing dissonance is to add a set of beliefs that can bridge the gap between attitudes. In the case of Candidate X and the extramarital affair, Bill could develop some new beliefs about the reasons for Candidate X’s affair that leave Bill with a more positive attitude toward the extramarital affair. Cognitive dissonance can be reduced by attitude change, as just described, but it can also be reduced by changes in behavior. A smoker may experience dissonance between the action of smoking and the belief that smoking is

undesirable for one’s health. The smoker could reduce dissonance by changing a behavior; he can quit smoking. Decision making often produces cognitive dissonance because a decision can be inconsistent with an attitude. In a classic study of this form of cognitive dissonance, female homemakers rated eight different household items, such as a toaster and coffeemaker. Then, they were offered two of the items and given the choice to keep one of them. After making their choice, the women rated all eight items a second time. Some of the women were given an easy choice; they had to decide between one item that they originally rated as desirable and one that they had rated as undesirable. The researchers expected that these women would not experience any dissonance and would give similar ratings before and after the choice. The other women were given a difficult choice; they had to decide between two items that they had previously rated as similarly desirable. The researchers expected that dissonance would occur in this hard choice condition because the women had positive attitudes toward both items. By choosing one product over the other, these women were making a choice that was inconsistent with one of their attitudes. The women who were forced to make this hard choice dealt with the dissonance in their post-choice ratings. They rated the chosen item as more desirable than before and the rejected item as less desirable than before. This strategy for dealing with postdecision dissonance is known as “spreading the alternatives.” In the case of the foregoing research study, a fairly simple decision was able to create dissonance and alter  attitudes toward a set of common objects. Elliot ­Aronson offers an example of how postdecision dissonance shaped societal attitudes toward a global event. As president, George W. Bush believed (based on his interpretation of reports from the U.S. intelligence ­community) that Saddam Hussein, then leader of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction. He held a negative attitude toward Hussein and Iraq; they posed a threat to the well-being of America. Based largely on this attitude, the United States launched an invasion of Iraq, but no weapons of mass destruction were found. For months, the American administration insisted weapons would be found and that the delay was due to the size of the country. Their insistence was one way to reduce dissonance. No weapons were ever found, so President Bush, and many others, had to find other ways to reduce the dissonance produced by the invasion’s high monetary and human costs. Ending the American presence in Iraq was one option for removing the dissonance, but this was, for many reasons, effectively impossible to do. Another option, and the one taken by President Bush, was to add new, or strengthen

Attitudes

existing, beliefs in support of the negative attitude toward Hussein and the action of invading Iraq. He may have then cultivated an alternative belief in the idea that the invasion would liberate the Iraqi people and bring democracy in place of dictatorship.

Attitudes and Behavior In the case of President Bush and the Iraq war, action followed attitude, but do attitudes reliably predict behaviors? In the 1930s, a time when prejudice against Asians and Asian Americans was high, Richard LaPiere traveled the country with a young Chinese couple. They drove more than 10,000 miles, stopping at more than 200 restaurants and accommodations along the way. At every place they stopped, LaPiere secretly recorded the behavior of the owners and staff. At most establishments, they were received and served in a friendly way; only one campsite owner refused to accommodate them. Months later, back at home, LaPiere wrote to each of the places they visited, plus many that they hadn’t. In the letter, he requested accommodation for himself and a Chinese couple. Of the dozens of places that replied to his letter, 92% said they would not accommodate Chinese guests. Assuming that these ­letters are a reasonable indication of the proprietors’ attitudes, why did their behavior differ so dramatically when the Chinese couple actually showed up? People tend to assume that behaviors follow attitudes because people like to be consistent. But research and personal experience reveal contradictions. Does this mean that the efforts of public opinion pollsters, who attempt to predict voting and other behaviors from measurements of attitudes, are inadequate or inaccurate? In fact, attitudes can reliably predict behavior under certain circumstances.

Attitude Accessibility First, highly accessible attitudes are more predictive of behavior. Although people can generally produce an attitude toward anything and everything, most attitudes are not readily accessible. In other words, they don’t come to mind without a very explicit prompt. Imagine that Meredith, a college student, is asked how she feels about the U.S. government’s policy of not paying ransom for hostages. Meredith has never thought about this issue before and no attitude comes readily to mind. No one will be surprised Meredith decides not to attend a campus demonstration on this issue. Now imagine that Meredith is asked how she feels about her university’s policy of requiring foreign language study. She quickly describes her hatred for this policy and dread of foreign language study. Because people are more likely

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to act in accordance with highly accessible attitudes, it is reasonable to expect that Meredith will act on her attitude. She may avoid the foreign language classes for as long as possible and try to find an “easy” way to meet the requirement. Knowledge of an attitude’s accessibility has been used to make predictions about voting. About five months before the presidential election of Ronald ­Reagan versus Walter Mondale, two researchers went to a shopping mall. They asked shoppers to give their opinions on different issues, including an evaluation of each of the two candidates. Using a microcomputer, they measured the speed with which individuals provided their evaluations. This is how the researchers measured attitude accessibility. After the presidential debates, the researchers followed up with the shoppers to see what they thought about the candidates. They followed up once more after the election, asking who they voted for. Individuals who had the fastest responses to the candidate evaluation questions back at the shopping mall were more likely to perceive their candidate’s debate positively and to have voted for their favored candidate. Attitude accessibility predicted behavior 5 months in advance.

Measurement Specificity A second important consideration for the prediction of behavior from attitudes is measurement specificity. Asking someone a general attitude question (e.g., How important do you think it is to reduce environmental pollution?) is not going to predict specific behaviors (e.g., Do you regularly recycle paper and glass at home?). But specific attitude questions (e.g., How important do you think it is to recycle at home?) have a much better chance of predicting specific behaviors. If the goal is to assess the relationship between a general attitude and behavior, it is better to ask about a range of behaviors. For example, responses to the question “How important do you think it is to reduce pollution?” are more likely to predict behavior when behavior is measured as recycling glass, watering the lawn, and using public transportation instead of driving a car.

Theory of Planned Behavior Finally, any prediction of behavior will always be insufficient if it only accounts for attitudes. According to Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior, attitudes are one of three factors that combine to predict a behavioral intention (the aim of acting in some specified way). The other two factors are social norms and control. Social norms are the values or rules, typically unwritten, of a social group. If friends or family members have certain norms

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Attitudes

for a behavior, those expectations can overcome an individual attitude. For example, Emily may have a neutral attitude toward the candidates in an upcoming presidential election. As such, she is unlikely to go out and vote. But if her family members expect political participation and her friends plan to vote, those norms could be strong enough to send her to the polls, despite the lack of strong attitudes. A behavior is also more likely when it is under a person’s control. Emily is more likely to cast her ballot if she has off from work on Election Day and can drive herself to the polling location. In summary, easily accessible attitudes are better predictors of behavior, especially when the behavior in question is easy to control and supported by social norms.

Persuasion Politics is full of attempts to persuade or change someone’s attitudes; research on persuasion has its roots in politics. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, American soldiers were unmotivated to fight Japan. The U.S. Army hired social psychologist Carl Hovland to conduct experiments on the ability of a series of films to persuade the soldiers; ultimately, the films were successful at relaying facts but motivationally ineffective. Hovland went on to develop a program of research on persuasion in messages. His program focused on three components: the source, the content, and the audience.

Source A credible message source is one that is both expert and trustworthy. Most politicians can demonstrate their expertise, but the public tends to believe that politicians are uniquely untrustworthy. To be effective persuaders, politicians need to be seen as trustworthy. Research suggests that trustworthiness can be enhanced by acting contrary to one’s self-interest. In one experiment, participants read about a political candidate who was attacked in an opponent’s advertisement. Participants then read one of three responses by the candidate: selfpraise, counterattack, or praising the opponent. When the candidate acted against self-interest by offering genuine praise for the opponent, he was considered more trustworthy. Participants even expressed more willingness to vote for the opponent-praising candidate, regardless of party affiliation.

Content On the campaign trail, politicians attempt persuasion with carefully rehearsed speeches and arguments, but most political advertising, particularly on television, appeals to the emotions of potential voters, rather than

their sense of reason. Researchers have found that feelings of anxiety can increase attention to campaigns and interest in the outcome of a race. In the 2004 U.S. presidential race, many advertisements used anxiety-­ provoking images, such as wolves, to focus attention on national security and the war in Iraq. Fear can also motivate people to support their leaders; increases in presidential approval ratings predictably follow increases in government-issued terror warnings. ­ Laboratory research suggests that the amount of fear generated matters. Both too little and too much fear can undermine persuasion. For a fear appeal to be optimally effective, it must contain a clear, reassuring message about how to cope with the threat.

Audience Many Americans dread election season for its abundance of campaign advertisements. Although the perception of political campaigns tends to be that they are more negative than in the past (and voters tend to disapprove of negative campaigning), the evidence may suggest otherwise. Statements made in newspapers by political candidates and major party spokespersons have not grown more negative in tone, nor has the rate of negative ads on television changed markedly. The rate has held constant at around 30% of ads. The public perception of increased negativity is likely due to the increase in reporting and research on negative campaigning; media outlets report on negative ads more regularly (which includes replaying them), leading to the perception that they are more common. In a laboratory study, participants who saw both sides in a ­campaign use negative ads ended up viewing both candidates more negatively. After hearing the negative ads, the participants even said they were less likely to vote, particularly if voting was inconvenient to do. Sarai Blincoe and Amanda Chappell See also Emotions and Political Decision Making; Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting; Political Campaigns; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Polling; Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral

Further Readings Ajzen, I. (2012). The theory of planned behavior. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 438–459). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Aronson, E. (2012). The social animal (11th ed.). New York, NY: Worth. Beasley, R. K., & Joslyn, M. R. (2001). Cognitive dissonance and post-decision attitude change in six presidential elections.

Attribution Theory Political Psychology, 22, 521–540. Retrieved from http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3792425 Combs, D. J. Y., & Keller, P. S. (2010). Politicians and trustworthiness: Acting contrary to self-interest enhances trustworthiness. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 32, 328–339. doi:10.1080/01973533.2010.519246 Lau, R. R., & Rovner, I. B. (2009). Negative campaigning. Annual Review of Political Science, 12, 285–306. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.071905.101448 Ridout, T. N., & Searles, K. (2011). It’s my campaign and I’ll cry if I want to: How and when campaigns use emotional appeals. Political Psychology, 32, 439–458. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-9221.2010.00819.x

Attribution Theory It is widely accepted that those differing in political ideology (e.g., liberals/left-wing supporters as opposed to conservatives/right-wing supporters) differ in their actions as well as disagree in their attitudes concerning what constitutes “correct” responses to a wide variety of social issues including poverty, abortion, rights for same-sex couples, crime, and welfare (public assistance). In this entry, attribution theory, which addresses perceptions of causality, is used to explain these disparities by identifying the processes that mediate the relations between political ideology and attitudes and behavior. It is reasonable to believe that attribution theory can shed light on these processes because beliefs about causation lie at the very heart of political ideologies. Attribution theory was introduced into psychology by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider in the 1950s and elaborated primarily by Edward Jones, Harold ­Kelley, and Bernard Weiner. The guiding principle of this framework is quite simple: Identification of the causes of events or outcomes influences emotional reactions and behavioral responses to those occurrences. For example, suppose that your car does not start. Negative events, particularly when unexpected, arouse “why” questions—one pauses to ask: “Why did the car fail to start?” Possible causes may come to mind, or information could be sought to determine the answer to this question. The fuel gauge provides some important evidence, as might inspection of the car’s battery, and so on. If the gauge indeed reads “empty,” then the ­behavioral response will be to put gasoline in the tank. This attribution-based motivation sequence can be represented as follows: Event (Car not starting)—Causal search (Fuel gauge) —Cause (No gasoline)—Action (Add gas)

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Attribution theorists have most studied these issues in the achievement domain where, for example, perceptions regarding the causes of failure (e.g., low ability, lack of effort, a biased teacher, etc.) influence self- and other-directed emotions, future achievement strivings, and interpersonal behavior. But differences in causal beliefs explain emotional and behavioral responses in a wide variety of contexts, including political behavior.

The Attribution Process The failed car scenario previously introduced provides a simple example of the attribution process. However, the causally instigated behavioral sequence is more complex within the context of human failures. In considering a social “failure” such as poverty, for example, a large number of causes have been proposed, including laziness and a lack of available jobs. Attribution ­theorists have noted that such causes not only differ qualitatively but also quantitatively on basic characteristics or properties. One such characteristic or so-called causal dimension is labeled locus—whether the cause lies within (internal to) or outside (external to) the ­person. In this example, laziness is a property of the person, whereas lack of jobs is located in the environment. A second characteristic of causes is labeled ­controllability, that is, whether the cause is subject to volitional change. Laziness, for example, is regarded as controllable (“It could have been otherwise.”), whereas this appears not to be true regarding job opportunities. A third fundamental property of causes is their stability, that is, whether they appear relatively permanent or changing. Causal controllability is of special importance in the political context because if the cause of a social failure, such as poverty, is perceived as controllable (e.g., lack of effort), then the lazy individual is held responsible for the problem. This is not the case if poverty is perceived as due to factors that are outside of personal control, such as an economic downturn. Consistent with emotion appraisal theory, which specifies that thoughts determine feelings, responsibility judgments given negative events arouse anger and annoyance—we are angry when our child does not study and fails a test and when an impoverished individual does not seek employment owing to laziness. Conversely, if our child fails because of illness or if a person is unemployed because of an economic downturn, then sympathy is experienced, which is a dominant emotional reaction to uncontrollable negative outcomes. These emotions, it is hypothesized, respectively give rise to antisocial (punishment or neglect) versus prosocial (help-giving) reactions. In sum, the attribution process in these examples regarding poverty may be depicted as follows:

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Attribution Theory

Event (Poverty)—Cause (Laziness)—Properties (Internal, controllable)—Personal inference (Responsible)—Emotional reaction (Annoyance, anger)—Action (Antisocial) Event (Poverty)—Cause (No available jobs)—Properties (External, uncontrollable)—Personal inference (Not responsible)—Emotional reaction (Sympathy) —Action (Prosocial)

Political Ideology and Causal Beliefs Political ideology may affect all the components in this behavioral sequence, particularly the perceived cause of an event, outcome, or state. There are various reasons why there might be a linkage between political ideology and perceptions of causality. Conservatives tend to resist social change and value the free market. Hence, they would not be expected to ascribe poverty to the existing system, which would indicate that modifications to that system are needed. Rather, conservatives most often believe that one gets ahead through hard work and that individuals are responsible for their life outcomes. They therefore are likely to place causality for poverty on the poor themselves. Conservatives also are relatively tolerant of inequality, and this causal ascription allows them to justify the disparity between the rich and the poor. Liberals, on the other hand, favor altering the existing system and place causality for poverty on society. This promotes social change and supports their contention that income inequalities are undeserved and not justified. Thus, just as is the case with conservatives, liberals endorse causes of poverty that preserve their pre-existing belief systems. These ideological disparities are illuminated by the metaphor of the father as a strict disciplinarian, which captures the ideology of conservatives. The father expects hard work and places responsibility for outcomes on the children themselves, rewarding high effort and punishing failure to try. In contrast, liberals are captured by the metaphor of the nurturing mother as a source of unconditional love and comfort. The mother offers solace when things go wrong and does not blame the child.

Elaborating Ideological Differences in Attributions for Poverty In the remainder of this entry, attribution theory is used to further explain the different responses of conservatives and liberals to poverty, followed by an examination of reactions to pregnancy abortion and lesbian/gay rights. Because the majority of research has addressed

differences in attributions for poverty, that will be the main focus of concern. A major strength of using attribution theory to explain ideological differences in response to poverty is that a large number of distinct causes can be reduced to subsets that share causal properties. Some research in this area classified explanations for poverty into three causal categories: individualistic causes (internal and controllable by the impoverished person), social causes (external to the poor and uncontrollable by them), and fate (uncontrollable by anyone). Individualistic causes, such as lack of financial management and laziness, are endorsed more by conservatives than by liberals to explain poverty. On the other hand, liberals are more likely than conservatives to attribute poverty to social causes such as discrimination in the job market, economic downturns, or an absence of educational opportunities. Fate-based explanations such as bad ­ luck, sickness, and genetic differences in ability are less marked by ideological differences than are the former two categories of attributions. Ideological differences in attributions for poverty are evident in various settings. Across multiple countries, those supporting right-wing parties blame the poor more for their destitution than those supporting leftwing parties. As a result, conservatives express less support than liberals for policies that provide governmental assistance to the poor (e.g., welfare assistance, foodstamp programs). This has been documented in ­countries including Australia, Canada, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While there are ideologically based differences in people’s willingness to help the poor, the manner in which social policies are described can also affect public support for programs aimed at assisting those in need. For example, individuals express less support for poverty assistance when the programs are described as aiding “welfare recipients” as opposed to “the poor.” This is due to the fact that stereotypes about welfare recipients evoke stronger perceptions of personal responsibility than do stereotypes about the poor. There are multiple individual differences and belief systems capturing core features of political ideologies that also influence attributions for poverty. For example, high endorsement on personality scales assessing the Protestant work ethic and the belief in a just world are positively associated with both conservatism and attributions that blame poverty on the poor. In contrast, support of egalitarianism and prodiversity beliefs are positively associated with liberal ideology and negatively with attributions for poverty that blame the poor. In turn, these profoundly shape the amount of support that individuals are willing to provide for the poor.

Authoritarian Personality

Abortion Research on abortion attitudes also indicates that an attribution perspective can explain ideologically driven differences in responses to this issue. Overall, conservatives are less supportive of abortion than are liberals, regardless of whether abortions are sought because of pregnancy caused by rape or because the mother/family does not want more children. But certain aspects of conservatism are stronger predictors of abortion attitudes than is overall political ideology. Moral traditionalism, a component of conservatism that captures beliefs in traditional family values and conventional gender roles, particularly relates to higher attributions of controllability, responsibility, and blame for unwanted pregnancy. These attributions elicit less sympathy and willingness to help pregnant women. In a similar manner, traditional gender role attitudes relate to conservatism and opposition to abortion. “Benevolent sexism” (positive views toward genderconforming women) is linked with greater opposition to abortion regardless of the reason for seeking to end the pregnancy. On the other hand, “hostile sexism” (negative attitudes toward women violating traditional ­gender roles) is only associated with opposition to abortions sought for reasons within the woman’s control, presumably because in these cases the woman is responsible for the pregnancy. Additionally, there are cross-cultural differences in the impact of ideology on abortion attitudes. People in the United States are more influenced by ideological factors such as conservatism and moral traditionalism, which are linked to causal beliefs, than are individuals in Japan, where abortion is not as strongly associated with religious and moral beliefs. Hence, abortion attitudes are more or less influenced by causal information, depending upon the cultural context of the evaluator.

Gay/Lesbian Rights Attributions of same-sex attraction to innate (uncontrollable) causes have increased over several decades. Attributions to genetic causes predict support for gay/ lesbian rights across a wide variety of issues (e.g., job opportunities, adoption rights). The recent global trend toward legalizing same-sex marriage may partly be a reflection of people’s changing beliefs about the causes of same-sex attraction. This attribution change may be due, in part, to decreases in the amount of influence people believe that parents have on the sexual ­orientation of their children. The connections between political ideology and attributions regarding gays and lesbians also have changed

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over time. Surveys conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s document that Democrats (i.e., liberal ­Americans) and Republicans (i.e., conservative ­ Americans) were equally likely to endorse innate causes of same-sex attraction. More recently, however, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to endorse less controllable causes. This, in turn, produces more favorable attitudes in regard to same-sex relationships. In sum, linkages between political ideology, causal beliefs, attributions of controllability, inferences of responsibility, and the emotions of sympathy and anger are consistent, pervasive, and central to understanding attitudes and actions regarding many social issues. Bernard Weiner, Danny Osborne, and Lisa Farwell See also Attitudes; Group Ideologies; Political Morality; Values

Further Readings Farwell, L., & Weiner, B. (2000). Bleeding hearts and the heartless: Popular perceptions of liberal and conservative ideologies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(7), 845–852. doi:10: 1177/0146167200269009 Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York, NY: Wiley. Osborne, D., & Davies, P. G. (2012). When benevolence backfires: Benevolent sexists’ opposition to elective and traumatic abortion. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42(2), 291–307. doi:10: 1111/j.1559-1816.2011 .00890.x Sahar, G. (2014). On the importance of attribution theory in political psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(5), 229–249. doi:10.1111/spc3.12102 Weiner, B. (2006). Social motivation, justice, and the moral emotions: An attributional approach. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Authoritarian Personality The authoritarian personality describes an individual who has a need for security and order. The authoritarian personality is characterized by adherence to a conventional set of values, rigidity, conformity, and ­ unquestioning obedience. This construct is clearly a highly relevant issue in prejudice and cross-cultural studies. This entry introduces the concept of the authoritarian personality and its characteristic elements, provides an overview of the history and d ­ evelopment of the construct, and outlines how the construct has been applied by reference to one of its core elements, intolerance of ambiguity.

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Authoritarian Personality

Understanding the Authoritarian Personality The authoritarian personality is a construct derived from a concatenation of personality traits that relate to a need for security and order. This construct describes an attitude or state of mind that is characterized by a conventional set of values, rigidity, unquestioning obedience and scapegoating, and a desire for structured lines of authority. The extreme expression of the authoritarian personality is found in individuals or systems that demand strict obedience or submission to their own authority and maintain this authority through the oppression of subordinates, which usually includes hostility toward minority or nontraditional groups and scapegoating of individuals from these groups.

Historical Development of the Concept The concept of the authoritarian personality developed from psychiatrist Erich Fromm’s work in the 1930s on the authoritarian character, and apparently the term authoritarian personality was first used in 1943 by Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist. Then, from 1943 until 1950, the scholar Theodor Adorno (well known for his contributions to the Frankfurt school of critical theory) and psychologists Else ­Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford conducted a long-term, anti-fascist research project, ­ examining the traits of the authoritarian personality. Their study involved the construction of a series of instruments to measure prejudice and included an “A-S [for anti-Semitism] Scale,” a “PEC [for political-­ economic conservatism] Scale,” and a ranking scale called the “F [for fascist, or for pre-fascist, or for potentially fascist] Scale,” which, for so-called politically correct reasons, later morphed into the “E [for ethnocentricity] Scale.” The findings from their search were published in 1950 in a monumental and now classic 990-page tome titled The Authoritarian Personality.

The Authoritarian Personality Type The findings that were presented by Adorno and his colleagues included a clear picture of the authoritarian personality type. The authoritarian personality •• gives blind allegiance to a particular set of accepted, conventional beliefs or cultural norms; •• sees right and wrong in black-and-white terms; •• has a preference for simplistic answers and sloganistic polemics; •• is resistant to creative and innovative ideas; •• has a need for strong, uncompromising leadership; •• shows respect for those who submit to acknowledged authority;

•• holds a negative view of people in general; •• acts aggressively toward people who do not hold conventional beliefs, or who think and act differently; •• projects feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anger onto a scapegoated individual or group; and •• has a preoccupation with violence and sex.

The extreme expression of the authoritarian personality reflects each of these elements to a high degree, and in particular shows prejudice and acts aggressively toward all minority groups, such as indigenous minorities, Jews, Blacks, gays, migrants, refugees, and people with disabilities.

Intolerance of Ambiguity Adorno and his colleagues also demonstrated, or at least strongly suggested, a close correlation between these deep-rooted traits of the authoritarian personality and ethnocentricity. Here, overt ethnic prejudice is set over against its supposed opposite, which was termed ethnic unprejudice. Central to this dichotomy, according to Frenkel-Brunswik, is the construct portrayed by the variable intolerance of ambiguity, set over against its supposed opposite, tolerance of ambiguity. She argued that the struggle between these two orientations is basic to our civilization. She found that the denial, avoidance, or elimination of ambiguities, often expressed as some kind of distortion of reality, could be understood in terms of a rigid adherence to a norm. No matter how misconceived, outlandish, and out of keeping with reality they are because of the neglect of relevant aspects, assumptions and beliefs, once made, are held and repeated over and over again and are not corrected in the face of new evidence.

Applications of the Authoritarian Personality The authoritarian personality construct is important in the field of psychology in general, and in the specific fields of cognitive, clinical, organizational, educational, occupational, and social psychology. It has many applications, such as in the study of ethnic cultures and national cultures (in particular, with respect to continually evolving understandings of ethnocentricity and ethnic prejudice); in the study of organizations, including business management and the armed forces; and in the study of personality. Specific correlates of the authoritarian personality have also been linked to a broad range of processes such as schizophrenia and creativity. For example, in 1953, and with all due deference given to Frenkel-Brunswik, Morris Stein applied elements of the authoritarian personality, or rather their

Authoritarianism

supposed converses, to understanding the creative personality. Central to Stein’s reworking of these concepts was the creative person’s capacity to tolerate ambiguity, which includes flexibility of thought; tolerance of, or toward, other people; and lack of ethnic prejudice. Sixty years later, tolerance of ambiguity is still cited as a trait of the adult creative personality, as well as a personality trait of both the creative child and the gifted child, even though the research support for each of these is quite weak. Since the 1980s, and following the work of Bob ­Altemeyer, research on authoritarianism has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. For example, the right-wing authoritarian follower has a personality that features a high degree of submission to established authority, high levels of aggression to support and maintain that authority, and a high level of conventionalism. The right-wing authoritarian leader, on the other hand, wants also to have power, to dominate, and to control others. Peter Merrotsy See also Anti-Semitism; Authoritarianism; Ethnocentrism; Fascism; F-Scale; Personality Traits; Prejudice; Tolerance for Ambiguity

Further Readings Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D., & Sanford, N. (1950). The authoritarian personality [Studies in prejudice series, Vol. 1]. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Retrieved from www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=6490 Altemeyer, B. (2006). The authoritarians. Retrieved from http:// members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1949). Intolerance of ambiguity as an emotional and perceptual personality variable. Journal of Personality, 18(1), 108–143. Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1951). Personality theory and perception. In R. R. Blake & G. V. Ramsey (Eds.), Perception: An approach to personality (pp. 356–419). New York, NY: Ronald. Furnham, A., & Ribchester, T. (1995). Tolerance of ambiguity: A review of the concept, its measurement and applications. Current Psychology, 14(3), 179–199. Merrotsy, P. (2013). Tolerance of ambiguity: A trait of the creative personality? Creativity Research Journal, 25(1), 232–237.

Authoritarianism Authoritarianism is a political and social system in which free thought and plurality are limited, sometimes severely so, for the sake of the survival of a rigid regime. Mass participation is coerced, and subservience to the

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regime’s authority is expected. Obedience of the people is held as a virtue, and dissension is not t­ olerated. Obedience and conformity are enforced particularly strongly among the ruling elite because authoritarian leaders recognize the grave danger of rebellion among the politically active elite. Political activities and participation among the masses is severely constrained and controlled. These conditions are most commonly met under totalitarian or dictatorial governments, such as 21stcentury China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. However, there can also be elements of authoritarianism in oligarchies, monarchies, or even democracies. The bureaucratization of societies, including democracies, can increase authoritarianism. For example, the enormous bureaucracy of the European Union government system has been criticized as moving Europe away from democracy and citizen participation in decision making. Except for brief periods, most empires and regimes prior to the 19th century were authoritarian. Exceptions include Greek democracy, which functioned at a limited level briefly about 2,500 years ago. The Roman Empire experienced more openness for brief periods, but was also authoritarian for most of the 500 years or so that it survived, particularly when the first emperors were taking power. In addition, the influence of the Catholic Church upheld authoritarian regimes in places like Spain, Italy, and France through the Middle Ages up to the Enlightenment. The divinely ordained right to rule was cited as the reason to keep certain monarchies in power. As it was God’s will that these families continue to rule, any rebellion against their law was not only treason, but elevated to blasphemy. Rather than categorize regimes as “authoritarian” or “democratic,” it is useful to conceptualize a continuum, with “Completely Authoritarian” at one extreme and “Completely Democratic” at the other extreme. Completely  Authoritarian

 Completely Democratic

There are no 21st-century societies located at either extreme; all societies are located somewhere in a middle ground, usually leaning more toward one direction than the other. Some societies, such as those of North ­America and the European Union, have made relatively more progress moving toward the “completely democratic” end, but are still far from reaching this ideal in practice. For example, in the United States, voting in political elections is considered a right (and even a privilege, by some), but even in the most important elections barely half the population take advantage of this right. Indeed, some elites are intent on preventing mass participation

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Authoritarianism

in elections by instituting laws—such as requiring photo ID to vote—that prevent marginalized groups from voting. Some other societies, such as China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, have made relatively less progress away from the “completely authoritarian” extreme, but they are some distance away from being absolutely authoritarian. Consequently, although for the sake of convenience we tend to describe societies in broad strokes as either authoritarian or democratic, we must keep in mind that these labels are to some degree misleading.

Emerging “Hybrid” Regimes Authoritarian regimes have been categorized as being of many different types, and there exist many different typologies of authoritarianism. Broad categories include populist authoritarianism, where a powerful, charismatic leader mobilizes the masses for support, such as Khomeini in Iran and Chavez in Venezuela; and personalistic authoritarianism, where rule is through informal relationships and bonds of patronage. This is often found in tribal, multiethnic societies. Scholars have also differentiated between non-electoral regimes, which can be militaristic or monarchical (or theocratic), and electoral regimes, which can be multipartisan, monopartisan, or without political parties. Efforts have also been made to recognize regimes that are a blend of one or more types. However, because of the rapid changes currently taking place across the world, the traditional ways of categorizing authoritarian regimes are not very useful. This is particularly because of the emergence of “hybrid” regimes, which attempt to maintain rigid political control in the hands of a small, unelected leadership, while at the same time adopting the rhetoric and some of the façade of democracy. Examples of this are Russia and Iran, which have been referred to as “democratic dictatorships.” These have been termed competitive authoritarianism, where the powerful unfairly use democratic processes to stay in power. They may leverage strategies such as electoral manipulation, extremely biased media access, and harassment by security forces. Of course, to some extent such manipulations happen even in Western democracies, suggesting that governments, even the most “democratic,” are emerging out of a background of authoritarianism. In both Russia and Iran, the leadership works within the existing constitution to enforce authoritarian rule. Vladimir Putin has shifted back and forth from being prime minister to being president, to enable him to continuously maintain control of the reins of power since the end of the 20th century. Each time he reaches a term limit as president, he can simply shift to being prime

minister—while maintaining absolute power in his own hands by placing one of his subservient followers as president. These “constitutional” maneuvers have enabled him to maintain absolute control and squash political opposition in Russia, imprisoning and outlawing viable opposition leaders. Putin also maintains tight control of the media in Russia. The outcome is that when elections are held, Putin and those who follow him are more likely to be “voted” into office. Similarly, in Iran, the ruling mullahs and their tightly knit band of supporters have worked within the constitution to maintain absolute political control. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran stipulates that the ultimate decider in all matters is a so-called Supreme Leader. This Supreme Leader is not elected by the people, but basically emerges from the political wrangling of the regime’s inner circle. The people do get to vote for candidates for political positions, such as president and members of Majlis (Parliament), but these candidates are heavily vetted, so that only those within the regime’s inner circle have any chance of being allowed to run for political office. Thus, on the one hand, Iranian citizens are severely pressured to participate in elections, but on the other hand the candidates they can vote for are all stooges of the regime. Also, even if “elected officials” decide to go in a different direction, according to the current constitution their decisions can be vetoed by the Supreme Leader. The examples of Russia and Iran demonstrate how even regimes that are clearly authoritarian see the need to try to legitimize themselves as in some ways democratic and inclusive of the wishes of the people. Even the brutal regime of North Korea includes democracy in its title: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Ideology and Authoritarianism The role of ideology in maintaining authoritarian regimes is complex. There are two key issues we need to consider: First, what is the role of ideology in the functioning of authoritarian regimes? Second, what is the relationship between rhetoric and practice, between what is said about an ideology and how it is actually put into practice? The traditional view has been that ideology functions to legitimize an authoritarian system and ensure its continuation. Under this view, capitalist ideology supports the political system in the United States, Marxism/Maoism supports the political system in ­ China, and Islam supports the political systems in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The masses in each of these societies are supposed to adopt the appropriate ideology, and this (supposedly) leads the people to perceive the regime as legitimate and worthy of their support. There is no

Authoritarianism

doubt that for brief periods this scenario may play out, but in practice authoritarian regimes become corrupt and ideology fails to cover up the inefficiency and double standards that arise. Because it is extremely difficult and dangerous for ordinary people to criticize officials in authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China, corruption and inefficiency increase. Ordinary people learn that there is a rift between the ideology of the regime and the ideals it is putting forward (on the basis of Marx and Islam, for example), and they become dismissive of the ideology. However, ideology does play an important role in authoritarian societies by making the ruling elite more cohesive and providing a justification for the leadership to use violence to repress political opposition and control the masses. In authoritarian regimes, conformity and obedience are most rigidly enforced among the elite with respect to political orientation. This is because the leadership knows that the regime will be threatened if the masses recognize there is conflict within the ruling elite. The research by Stanley Milgram and others demonstrates that obedience declines when there is disagreement between authority figures. Authoritarian leaders often instinctively sense this and react extremely harshly against subgroups within the elite who might want to march to a different drum. The harsh treatment of a long list of elite dissidents, from Leon Trotsky in the Soviet Union under Stalin to Mousavi in 21st-century Iran, demonstrates this trend. Thus, in authoritarian societies, a rift opens up between the rhetoric of ideology and the practice of ideology. For example, in 21st-century China there is a growing rift between the rhetoric of Marxism and ­Maoism, and the practice of an increasing concentration of wealth in a small number of hands. Though Mao advocated the importance of the peasantry, today’s Chinese elite collect an enormous amount of wealth ­ while exerting a great amount of governing force on the personal and economic lives of Chinese citizens. Famous modern examples are Internet censorship laws and the recently relaxed birth limits.

Plato and Popper Before democracy became the ideal, authoritarian rule was often taken as a matter of fact. In ancient Greece, when Plato described his version of the ideal society in his Republic, he emphasized the necessity of a single, powerful leader, assumed to be omniscient. At the head of both the culture and the government is this “philosopher king,” who will take the lead because of his virtue, nobility of mind, and facility at grasping the truth in all things. This philosopher king is the linchpin of the

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s­ociety, acting as the guiding conscience and ultimate authority. All others in the society fall into a hierarchy below this king, and all participants have a certain role to play. Karl Popper’s In Defense of an Open Society engages with Plato’s model in detail—the entire first volume is devoted to critiquing it. It fosters what he calls a “closed” society, in which an individual’s function is preordained. “True happiness, Plato insists, is achieved only by justice, i.e., by keeping one’s place,” Popper writes. “The ruler must find happiness in ruling, the warrior in warring; and, we may infer, the slave in slaving.” Popper overlooks the fact that Plato believed that social mobility is essential for the survival of a society, and insisted that the perfect society must allow for individual aptitudes to be recognized. Plato pointed out that parents who are “gold” can have “copper” children, and parents who are “copper” can have “gold” children. If gold children born to copper parents are not allowed to rise in society, and if copper children born to gold parents are not permitted to fall in social standing, then society will eventually collapse. Popper overlooks this aspect of Plato’s Republic; he describes the closed society as an organism; functioning, yes, but unable to be anything more than what it already is. Popper describes a closed society for the sake of promoting its alternative, the open society. Such an arrangement has inherent advantages, he says. Firstly, it is freer by nature. Because a closed society imposes constraints on class and duty, there is a sociological necessity of entering into some tasks or agreements. In the perfect open society, all relationships and agreements are entered into only by choice. This is echoed in a view falsely attributed to feminist scholars Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon; both were accused of claiming that all heterosexual sex is rape, as the oppressiveness of the patriarchy undercuts a woman’s ability to consent. Popper’s work is written to defend the view that an open society is inherently better than a closed, authoritarian one. However, authoritarian governments do have some attractive benefits. Many cultures flourished under authoritarian governments, if only for a time: consider the Renaissance art funded by the Medicis, for example. Authoritarian governments can often act much more efficiently than unwieldy democratic governments. For the Romans, the recognition of this efficiency led to the creation of dictatorships. As originally conceived, a dictator was elected by the republic for a 6-month term, and only in emergencies. Great pains were taken to appoint a man who would not seek power beyond that period. This way, the Roman government could default to the efficiency of single leader when the clumsiness of the Senate would be a liability to whatever crisis was at hand.

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Authoritarianism

Human Nature and Authoritarianism Authoritarian regimes and all-powerful governments now feel backward to the Western world and other democratic areas, despite the relative newness of widespread democracy. This attitude took over the West ­during the Enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th centuries. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans are intrinsically free, and to unduly limit this freedom with unbounded authority is a perversion of the natural order. This thinking was cited during the American and French Revolutions and continues to be a major influence in today’s democracies. Rousseau’s The Social Contract, for instance, states that a government’s ­legitimacy comes not from power or ideology but from the consent of its people. Likewise, Locke writes of one’s duty to rebel against an oppressive government, and Kant’s entire metaphysics and meta-ethics are based on the idea that maximizing freedom is humankind’s primary motivation. These Enlightenment thinkers, and many others, brought personal liberty to the forefront of human experience. They captured the overall tone of a world moving more toward democracy and away from restrictive governments. All rely on liberty being a ­fundamental human characteristic, a moral imperative, or something in between. This line of thought makes authoritarianism both immoral and unnatural, and something to be abolished. It still has strong echoes. Modern American foreign policy, for instance, still reflects this view, and it was given as a motivation for every war and conflict in the 20th century. However, this is also a good illustration of the authoritarian continuum: Much as the United States proclaimed moral causes for waging war in areas like Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, these acts were also an attempt to retain America’s influence over various parts of the globe. Human behavior and human history have a different story to tell. As noted, the move away from authoritarian governments is a recent one, relative to all the societies of the past. If personal freedom is such a powerful and natural motivator in humans, how did authoritarian regimes survive for so long despite the wishes of the people? It may be that, rather than seeking freedom, we naturally seek authority to make some of our difficult decisions for us, freeing up time and energy to focus on smaller matters. This may be as simple as letting monarchies fight over succession because one ruler or another does not greatly impact people’s everyday lives. Alternately, it may be as sinister as condoning morally outrageous actions out of a perceived lack of influence. Particularly after the Holocaust, psychologists became interested in how—yet

again—a citizenry could be complicit in a government’s heinous acts without rebelling. The question of “human nature” and authoritarianism is highlighted by a number of now classic psychological studies. Foremost among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram on Obedience to Authority, the title of his most famous book. Milgram demonstrated that under certain conditions, people with normal psychological profiles will obey authority figures to inflict (what they believe to be) serious and even lethal electric shocks on others. The prison simulation study of Philip Zimbardo demonstrates a similar tendency for ordinary people to inflict severe harm on others, in line with what they believe to be the norms and rules of the authorities. These studies, as well as historic cases of genocide, raise questions about how “natural” it is for at least some part of the human population to follow authoritarian dictates.

Globalization and Authoritarianism Perhaps the most important challenge of the 21st century is to safeguard and strengthen democracies, and prevent the growth of authoritarian rule. This is going to be a major challenge in the context of accelerating globalization. On the surface, globalization is leading to more open borders and increased international communications. Electronic communications and globalization are assumed to lead to more openness around the world. However, in practice, there are two factors that might result in the growth of authoritarianism in the present century. First, authoritarian regimes have been very quick at adopting advanced electronic technologies to further control their populations and strengthen their regimes. Surveillance is now much more sophisticated, and new methods and equipment (such as facial ­recognition programs) are allowing security forces to identify, track, and capture “dissidents” of all kinds. Authoritarian regimes are filtering and controlling communications for the masses and using these same communications systems to strengthen the regime. Second, globalization is taking place in a way that increases security threats. This arises from mass movements of refugees, terrorist attacks, and various security threats that have increased a sense of collective identity threat in Western societies. The result is that Western governments are moving, sometimes intentionally, to limit freedoms and curtail civil liberties. Some research shows that perceived threat magnifies authoritarian dispositions and motivates them toward intolerance or aggression. The presence of an external threat does not immediately correlate with governments passing more restrictive laws; rather, it brings out the worst in those already predisposed to authoritarian attitudes.

Authoritarianism

This is a more subtle way in which authoritarianism is increasing in the 21st century. Lauren Covalucci and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Authoritarian Personality; Civil Engagement; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Conformity; Groupthink; Obedience; Social Revolts; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Casper, G. (1995). Fragile democracies: The legacies of author­ itarian rule. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the cold war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Moghaddam, F. M. (2016). The psychology of democracy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Popper, K. S. (2012). The open society and its enemies. London, England: Routledge. Wahman, M., Teorell, J., & Hadenius, A. (2013). Authoritarian regime types revisited: Updated data in comparative perspective. Contemporary Politics, 19(1), 19–34.

B Stephen Walt, another key neorealist thinker who studied the diplomatic history of the Middle East between 1955 and 1979, believes it is important for a state whose power is on the rise not to appear threatening to weaker states. Walt also believes that states tend to balance rather than bandwagon. However, Walt argues that in some cases a state may choose to bandwagon. This can happen when a state is threatened by another state that is much stronger, when no other allies are available and when an armed conflict is already in progress.

Bandwagoning State In international relations, bandwagoning takes place when one state or a group of states ally with a more powerful state or group of states. Bandwagoning can happen when a state seeks to join an alliance as well as when a state relies on a more powerful partner within an existing alliance for its security. This entry provides an overview of three possible forms of bandwagoning and concludes with a discussion of the possible ways to further the study of bandwagoning.

Bandwagoning for Profit

Bandwagoning as Giving In to Threats

Walt’s theory, according to which states balance against threatening ones, opened up space for a discussion regarding weaker states’ tendency to bandwagon in international relations. Despite the fact that the ­majority of scholars of international relations argue that bandwagoning is a rare event, there is a tendency to understand bandwagoning as giving in to threats instead of countering them. Randall Schweller made an important contribution to seeing bandwagoning in a different light. In Schweller’s view, bandwagoning is not just the opposite of balancing but a strategy that a state can adopt in order to gain profit. Schweller’s research suggested that bandwagoning for profit is far more widespread than Walt suggested. A state chooses to bandwagon even in the absence of a threat to its security and with the hope of obtaining material rewards. As evidence of bandwagoning for profit, Schweller made reference to the Italian Wars from 1494 to 1517, the wars of Louis XIV from 1667 to 1679, and the Napoleonic Wars from 1806 to 1813. In these cases, bandwagoning was not only a strategy to

Kenneth Waltz, a key neorealist thinker, made a distinction between balancing and bandwagoning. Both ­balancing and bandwagoning share the same goal: to achieve security in a situation of potential or ongoing conflict. Balancing occurs when a state or a group of states seeks to curb the rise of a potential hegemon, whereas bandwagoning takes place as a state or a group of states allies with a stronger state. In Waltz’s view, ­balancing is more likely than bandwagoning to happen in international relations. In international history, each global empire has ultimately been balanced by rising powers. According to Waltz, this is because states tend to balance and not bandwagon. Therefore, balancing and bandwagoning offer two distinctive pictures of international relations. In the balancing picture, states whose power rises will attract opposition and prompt other states to coalesce in an effort to contain them. In the bandwagoning picture, states that bid for hegemony will be seen as potential allies by weaker states, as the latter may obtain benefits from them.

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Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character

avoid capitulation but a behavior aimed at reaping the benefits of joining a stronger governing entity.

Bandwagoning as Intra-Alliance Behavior Schweller’s theory underlined states’ tendency to bandwagon in terms of alliance formation. After the end of the cold war, and with the demise of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991, the United States of America emerged as the single most powerful state in international politics. More than 20 years later, we have still not witnessed a balancing effort against the United States, although transnational terrorist organizations have emerged. The majority of states in international politics, particularly in the Western hemisphere, have tended to bandwagon with the United States in the post–cold war period. European states have especially sought to maintain their alliance with the United States even in the absence of a common and overriding threat to their security. This has prompted scholars to study bandwagoning as intra-alliance behavior. Lorenzo Cladi and Andrea Locatelli have analyzed European states’ post–cold war defense policies and found no evidence of balancing against the United States in the post–cold war period. Rather, European states have sought to stay as close as possible to their more powerful Americanally. This behavior was defined as bandwag­oning in terms of intra-alliance behavior. European states have bandwagoned and will most likely continue to bandwagon with the United States for two reasons. First, balancing against the United States has no purpose from an economic point of view and second, it is in the European states’ interest to behave as status quo powers, that is to maintain the existing conditions of the international system as they are. This form of bandwagoning should not be understood as mere free riding. In this situation, European states would benefit from U.S. resources without paying for them. Bandwagoning as intra-alliance behavior implies that weaker states contribute to the functioning of the alliance by, for instance, specializing in low-intensity security scenarios and leaving high-intensity military operations to the stronger state. Current studies on bandwagoning indicate that a state or a group of states can decide to bandwagon on the basis of their willingness to maintain an alliance with a more powerful state. A study of bandwagoning as intra-alliance behavior is relatively recent and deserves further attention. In fact, it represents a possible way to explain how states behave within important alliances in contemporary international relations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Lorenzo Cladi

See also Allegiances; Ecopolitics; European Union; Globalization; International Security; Nationalism; Realism; United Nations

Further Readings Cladi, L., & Locatelli, A. (2012). Bandwagoning, not balancing: Why Europe confounds realism. Contemporary Security Policy, 33(2), 264–288. Schweller, R. (1994). Bandwagoning for profit: Bringing the revisionist state back. International Security, 19(1), 72–107. Walt, S. (1987). The origins of alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character James David Barber is, perhaps, the best known p ­ olitical scientist to have published in the area of the p ­ sychological makeup of presidents and presidential candidates. Barber’s renown no doubt stems from his prediction prior to the inauguration of Richard Nixon that Nixon would be inclined to become defensive and cover up any major threat to his presidency (and self-esteem) stemming from a scandal. This prediction turned out to be spot on and focused the media spotlight on Barber and his work. His publication of the first edition of The Presidential Character in 1972 brought his earlier prediction into the larger context of his studies on personality and political behavior, a field dating back at least as far as the work of Harold Lasswell in the 1930s and 1940s.

Affect, Activity, and Self-Esteem Typically, voters think of character as roughly equivalent to honesty, integrity, ethics, or morality. Barber took a very different view of character. For him, character derives from two behavioral dimensions: affect and activity. Both of these are, to a certain extent, a function of an individual’s self-esteem. That is, some office ­seekers may engage in political activity to compensate for low self-esteem. Once established in politics, other politicians may avoid challenges to their self-esteem, especially by staff and advisers. These patterns, argued Barber, are developed very early in life and can be observed in an individual’s interactions with family, friends, and authority figures. In other words, how a child gets and keeps the attention of

Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character

his or her parents or teachers may demonstrate for us how that child will eventually attempt to get our attention or that of other political actors. Thus, if bullying on the playground was successful for them, then they may well turn to bullying in political settings. Such early behavior may also be a reflection of how the child is compensating for threats to his or her conception of self. Is the bullying behavior a mask or facade covering up for a child who lacks the ability to accept loss? Similarly, has the child retreated from unnecessary interactions because he or she deems himself or herself to be unworthy of the attention of others? Either scenario could have significant consequences for the behavior of that individual should he or she attain elected office.

Four Categories of Character The two dimensions Barber used to create his categories of character—affect and activity—intersect to create four different character types, usually described in a 2 3  2 matrix. The affect dimension describes the individual’s emotional approach to the job. More simply, does he or she like the work? Activity is a description of how the individual chooses to respond to his or her like or dislike of the job. Or does the individual engage physically in the job, is there an ambitious policy agenda, have the parameters of the office been expanded, or has the spotlight been sought out to make the officeholder’s case? The intersection of these two dimensions creates the four categories of active-positive, active-negative, passivepositive, and passive-negative. Barber’s intent, in part, was to provide a predictive tool to allow us to select that person best qualified (by his or her character) to serve as president. The four categories then could be used to determine which of the candidates seeking the presidency would be best suited to serve. The active-positive category is the “most desirable” category, in that an individual in this category of character would provide the best chance of a successful presidency and provide the appropriate exercise of power to achieve his or her goals. Individuals in this category have high self-esteem, are flexible, and easily admit to and correct their mistakes. As John F. Kennedy was able to accept responsibility for his administration’s mistakes in the Bay of Pigs invasion and later make adjustments to group decision-making processes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he serves as the ideal activepositive president. The active-negative category is the “least desirable” character type. This is the category epitomized by ­Richard Nixon, in Barber’s analysis. It is this placement of Nixon in this category that garnered Barber his greatest criticism, for being partisan in his assessment. Active-negatives suffer from low self-esteem and may

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compensate by working hard and striving for perfection. However, they get little psychological or emotional reward for that work. Barber argued that this extra effort may be an attempt at escaping from anxiety caused by that lack of self-esteem. The passive-positive character, like William H. Taft, tends not to be personally assertive and can be an affection seeker. Individuals in this category may compensate for their lack of self-esteem with “a superficial optimism.” Voters may find that optimism and an ­ apparent ability to be agreeable and cooperative to be attractive political qualities. Politically speaking, other politicians may learn to take advantage of such qualities, setting these presidents up for failure and voters for disappointment. Officeholders like Dwight Eisenhower fit, according to Barber, into the last category, the passive-negative. Eisenhower is, perhaps, the epitome of this category. As a military officer, Eisenhower could easily have seen politics and the presidency as “dutiful service” and thus compensation for otherwise low self-esteem. Certainly, Eisenhower’s warnings of the dangers stemming from the “military-industrial complex” would fit with B ­ arber’s assertion that these individuals would make statements inclining toward injunctions. Certainly, it has been argued that individuals in the two active categories are more likely to seek out their party’s nomination and the office. Of the more passive character types, the passive-positive is more likely to appear active by virtue of his or her agreeable nature. It is also logical to assume that under our current system of selection, the passive-negative individual would have a hard time first choosing to run for president, and second, convincing voters to support him or her. That is not to say that a passive negative could not attain the office; it is possible he or she could ascend to the office to fill a vacancy. Barber argued that the first four presidents each fit one of his categories. He compared George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower as a passive-negative since they were both sought out by others to serve. The reaction of John Adams to his defeat at the hands of Thomas ­Jefferson, Barber argued, was an indication of his lack of self-esteem, thus placing Adams in the active-negative category. Jefferson, on the other hand, being one of the first presidents to expand the government and the powers of the president, belonged in the active-positive category. Barber saw James Madison as a “constitutional philosopher” thrust into public service who allowed the country to “drift” into armed conflict with Britain, making Madison a passive-positive. Contemporary conservatives likely bristle at the idea that Barber had predicted Ronald Reagan would be a passive-positive president, but that was Barber’s

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Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character

prediction in the Washington Post on January 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s first inauguration. Barber noted that Reagan, having sought the office twice and waged a vigorous campaign each time, only appeared to be active. Barber argued that passive-positives, because of their agreeable nature, can often appear to be something they are not. Barber noted that as early as the summer of 1987 he was predicting George H. W. Bush to be an active-positive. Jimmy Carter certainly looked, to Barber, as though he would quite clearly be an active-­ positive, but by the 1992 edition of The Presidential Character Barber uses hindsight to hedge his bets a bit. Using the affect dimension as more of a scale than a dichotomy, Barber suggested that while on the whole still positive, Carter may not have thought of his term in as pleasurable a manner as other active-positives. Carter’s categorization, both the prediction and ­Barber’s review of it, provides insight into some of the inherent problems with Barber’s work. Carter himself admitted to being influenced by Barber’s first edition. Since the publication of the first edition of Barber’s book, presidents and presidential candidates have all wanted to try to at least appear to be active-positives. While this might not pose a problem for a determined researcher, it could certainly hinder the use of Barber’s methodology as a tool for making vote choices. So too, the case of Carter points to the related problems of the relative aspects of both activity and affect, or how active one president is versus another (or how positive one is versus another) and what Barber himself points to as the potential for circumstances helping to reshape a president’s character.

Responses by Other Scholars While many scholars praise Barber’s engaging style and presentation, they also note the difficulty with availability of appropriate data. One scholar, Ruth Morgan, has questioned the validity of using the “retrodiction” of past presidents to predict the behavior of future presidents. Barber’s work, while not perfect and subject to valid criticism, can be useful in helping to understand why presidents behave the way they do. Using ­biographical and other historical data to make comparisons of presidents on this basis can be effective in ­helping students understand the larger context in which presidential decision making and action take place. James David Barber is just one of many noted ­scholars to have tackled the psychology and style of presidents and the impacts of those factors on their behavior. The work of Alexander and Juliette George is frequently cited by those doing further research in this area. Dean Simonton has published in this field as well, but among the most prolific scholars working in this

field of study are Nelson Hargrove and Michael Nelson, who have also employed 2 3 2 matrices to help categorize and understand presidential personality. James Pfiffner has explored the relationship between presidential behavior and “sexual probity.” Among those who have attempted to apply other measures of personality to the study of presidential behavior are Ray Choiniere and David Keirsey, who endeavor to employ the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test to understand presidential behavior. There are no doubt many more scholars working in this area, and although the data are not always the easiest to obtain and the analysis may be free of bias for one president over another, it is an interesting and enjoyable subject—there is a certain “fun” involved in the attempt to psychoanalyze our leaders. Jim Twombly See also Authoritarian Personality; Bully Pulpit; Charisma; First Ladies; Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of; Self-Esteem

Further Readings Barber, J. D. (1992). The presidential character (4th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Choiniere, R., & Keirsey, D. (1992). Presidential temperament: The unfolding of character in the forty presidents of the United States. Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis. George, A., & George, J. (1988). Presidential personality and performance. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hargrove, E. (1966). Presidential leadership: Personality and political style. New York, NY: Macmillan. Hargrove, E. (1974). The power of the modern presidency. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hargrove, E. (1993). Presidential personality and leadership style. In G. Edwards, J. Kessel, & B. Rockman (Eds.), Researching the presidency: Vital questions, new approaches. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hargrove, E., & Nelson, M. (1984). Presidents, politics, and policy. New York, NY: Knopf. Lasswell, H. (1930). Psychopathology and politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lasswell, H. (1948). Personality and politics. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Morgan, R. (1975, February). Review of The presidential character: Predicting performance in the White House by James David Barber. The Journal of Politics, 37(1). Nelson, M. (2003). The psychological presidency. In M. Nelson (Ed.), The presidency and the political system (7th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Pfiffner, J. (1998). Sexual probity and presidential character. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 28, 4. Simonton, D. K. (1987). Why presidents succeed: A political psychology of leadership. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bellicism

Bellicism Bellicism refers to a war-centric approach to the state formation process, statecraft, and social change. The bellicist theory emphasizes a nonlinear process of political development and state formation. A prominent exponent of this theoretical orientation, Charles Tilly, wrote: “War made the state and the state made war.” In his 1990 book, Coercion, Capital, and European States: A.D. 990 to 1990, he advanced a war-centric military, political and social argument for state formation and evolution of state institutions. English historian Sir John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) and German historian Otto Hintze (1861–1940) noted that political development cannot be the result of solely internal dynamics. They referenced the external milieu and contextualized how “intense government” developed in “intense pressure.” Seeley explained the expansion of the British Empire and the struggle among the European powers for ­conquest for new territories. Hintze studied Prussian history and examined the development of Prussian political institutions. He, too, contextualized the exogenous factors and indigenous sociopolitical dynamics in the process of Prussian political structure and institutions. Subsequently, Jeffrey Herbst, Robert Bates, Miguel Centeno, and Cameron Thies have examined relations between external conflict and state building. The bellicist approach argues that states acquired territory, resources, arms, and men to wage wars. War making leads to evolution of the institutional apparatus of the modern state, which grew out of this war-making function. Cycles of extraction and coercion facilitated each other. Extraction refers to the extractive power of the state, such as collection of revenue, resources, and so on; coercion refers to the use of force. In war making, states may apply extractive power through coercive means. Bellicist theoreticians believe that states offer citizenship, and other civil and political rights such as universal suffrage, and parliamentary representation, as incentives to win popular support. Similarly, government welfare and social services are provided to extend the state’s capacity and to secure social legitimacy. The state monopolizes or acquires a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence through “war fighting” capacity. Finally, state military power evolves into civilian institutions, the army is institutionalized for fighting external war, and the police are responsible for maintaining law and order. From the bellicist perspective, the administrative structure is considered to be a by-­ product of making or preparation for war. The bellicist approach was developed on the premodern and modern European state system. It is primarily a Eurocentric account of the making of the

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modern state system. After the feudal system broke down and the monarchic system gradually declined in Europe, the modern European nation-state system emerged through war and territorial acquisition. ­Conquest and annexation of neighboring territory was the norm. Lord Curzon reflected in his Frontiers (1905) that “the majority of the most important wars of the century have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandizement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition . . . tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e., wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms” (quoted in Atzili, 2012, p. 28). ­European countries extracted resources to build the armies to wage war against each other. The evolution of modern state institutions was facilitated by the development of capitalism, modern technology, and the legitimacy of state coercion. Bellicist theory has been further elaborated in explanations of state formation in other continents; however, such applications have been contested. In some cases, war making leads to the development of strong institutions and enhanced state capacity. Elsewhere, it has had only limited success. In the case of Vietnam, scholars have found that war making has enhanced the capacity of state institutions, though only in limited terms. By contrast, war and persisting conflict, for instance, in Afghanistan, has destroyed state institutions. Cameron Thies demonstrated that both intrastate (internal) conflict and interstate rivalry affected the state in Latin America. The bellicist approach imagines a military-centric worldview. It primarily stresses the internal coercive power and hostile external environment. The relevance of bellicist theory in the contemporary world order is highly debatable. Europe itself has evolved into a supranational sui generis political system that was envisioned as leading to lasting peace and prosperity. Regional integration makes interstate military rivalry almost obsolete in Europe. In broader terms, the process of globalization, increasingly growing interdependence, proliferation of technology, and movement of people have gradually negated the boundaries created by states and impacted the concept of the war-centric approach to the institution of the state. As recent electoral trends indicate that far-right parties are gaining political momentum, however, it remains to be seen to what extent emerging antiglobalization sentiments will shape future policy. Dinoj K. Upadhyay Further Readings Atzili, B. (2012). Good fences, bad neighbors: Border fixity and international conflict. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Bicameralism

Taylor, B. D., & Botea, R. (2008). Tilly tally: War-making and state-making in the contemporary Third World. International Studies Review, 10(1), 27–56. Thies, C. G. (2005). War, rivalry, and state building in Latin America. American Journal of Political Science, 49(3), 451–465. Thies, C. G., & Sobek, D. (2010). War, economic development, and political development in the contemporary international system. International Studies Quarterly, 54(1), 267–287. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.

Bicameralism Bicameralism is a political system in which the legislative branch is composed of two chambers, ­ ­usually known as the first and second chambers (or lower and upper houses). More than one third of all national p ­ arliaments are bicameral. It is a system that is ­ common in both presidential and parliamentary democracies, and it is particularly prevalent in federal countries. Where second chambers exist, they vary greatly in terms of powers and composition, and these two ­factors together shape the impact that they have on legislation. This entry provides an overview of the main characteristics and forms of bicameralism and concludes by discussing the main arguments regarding its merits.

Powers Bicameral systems are often classified as “strong” or “weak” depending on the powers of the second chamber. While the powers of second chambers vary along a number of dimensions, the most important distinction is between those that can veto legislation and those that cannot. Strong upper houses are particularly common in federal systems. Examples include the Swiss Council of States, which has a veto over all legislation, and the German Bundesrat, which has a veto on legislation that affects the interests of the federal states. Weak second chambers can only delay the passage of legislation and can ultimately be overruled by the first chamber. Examples include the British House of Lords and the Japanese House of Councillors. Many second chambers (including chambers that are weak in terms of their legislative powers) also have a role in protecting the constitution, and in several cases, constitutional amendments must be passed by a majority of both houses. Other important functions of second chambers include scrutinizing the government and providing advice on legislation.

Composition The impact that second chambers have on legislation is shaped not only by their formal powers but also by the nature of their composition. When second chambers are composed along similar lines to the first (sometimes referred to as “congruent bicameralism”), they are less likely to use their powers to veto or delay legislation. Usually, the two chambers of a bicameral system are designed to represent distinct sets of interests. While the principle of equal representation for all citizens in the first chamber is firmly established in all democratic ­systems, representation in second chambers can take many forms. Some second chambers were originally designed to represent a particular social class, such as the representation of the nobility in the British House of Lords. Others include seats that are allocated to particular groups in society, such as vocational groups ­(Ireland), linguistic communities (Belgium), or indigenous groups (Colombia). By far, the most common principle of representation in second chambers today is territorial. Under this system, seats in the second chamber are divided among subnational units. Following the original model of the United States Senate, some upper houses allocate an equal number of seats to each territorial unit, regardless of population. In other cases, such as Germany and Canada, more populous states are given greater weight, but smaller states are still better represented than they would be under a strictly proportional system. Territorial representation in the upper house is most common among federal countries and countries with strong regional or local government. Second chambers also vary in terms of how their members are selected. The most common method of selection is direct elections. However, in some cases, members of second chambers are appointed by state governments (for example, the German Bundesrat) or by an important officeholder such as the prime minister, governor-general, or president (e.g., the Senate of ­Canada). In yet other cases, members of second chambers are elected by members of local or state assemblies (e.g., the Austrian Bundesrat).

Merits and Effects of Bicameralism The merits of bicameralism have been debated for centuries. It has been argued that second chambers that depart from the principle of equal representation for all citizens are undemocratic, while second chambers that are based on this principle of representation are redundant as they replicate the first chamber. This argument was expressed by the 18th-century political writer Abbé Sieyès as follows: “If a second chamber dissents from the first it is mischievous; if it agrees it is superfluous.”

Biopolitics

Proponents of bicameralism tend to focus on the quality of legislation produced under the system. ­Bicameralism can prevent the problem of the “tyranny of the majority” (whereby the interests of the majority of the population are pursued by the government to the detriment of the minority), particularly if the second ­ ­chamber has veto power and represents interests distinct from those of the first. The need for concurrent majorities in two chambers also makes decision making more stable and less prone to radical changes in policy. The flip side of this is that decision making can be slowed down to the point of gridlock, particularly when the party or coalition that holds a majority in the lower house does not control the upper house. Procedures usually exist to resolve disagreements between chambers so as to reduce the potential for gridlock. One common procedure is the conference committee, where delegates from each chamber meet to negotiate a compromise agreement. Some countries have abolished their upper house on the grounds of its being undemocratic or ineffectual, including New Zealand (1950), Denmark (1953), and Sweden (1970), while in some other countries (including Britain and Ireland) there have been ongoing calls for abolition or reform. However, where second chambers are based on the representation of territorial units, questions regarding their democratic merits are not as common. On the contrary, territorial representation is often viewed as a necessary counterbalance to the popular will represented in the first chamber, particularly in federal countries where there are significant regional imbalances in population. Rory Costello See also Decision Making; Parliamentarism; Political Deliberation; Representative Democracy; Unicameralism

Further Readings Heller, W. B. (2007). Divided politics: Bicameralism, parties, and policy in democratic legislatures. Annual Review of Political Science, 10, 245–269. Russell, M. (2001). What are second chambers for? Parliamentary Affairs, 54(3), 442–458. Shell, D. (2001). The history of bicameralism. Journal of Legislative Studies, 7(1), 5–18. Tsebelis, G., & Money, J. (1997). Bicameralism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Biopolitics The term biopolitics was first used by Rudolf Kjellén, a Swedish political scientist working at the University of

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Uppsala. As a student of Friedrich Ratzel, a German geographer, he developed organic state theory, suggesting the state to be an organic, living form. His 1916 book outlined the field of geopolitics, with Volk as a racial or ethnic conception of the state based on autarky or self-sufficiency. Adolf Hitler adopted policies based on Kjellén’s key principles. Biopolitics in its first generation of use refers to the intersection of two fields, as well as organicist and biologically based conceptions of the nation and state, and was part of Kjellén’s broader project of “geopolitics” concerning natural and border territories. French theorist Michel Foucault uses the term in his lecture series “Society Must Be Defended,” held at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1976. Foucault charts the shift from the power of sovereignty to power over life: “Make live and let die” represents the shift from human as body to human as species, marking the beginning of the birth of biopower. Biopower’s fields of application include control over population and the ­ regulation of death that illustrate articulations of discipline and regulation. In a concrete example, ­ ­Foucault refers to workers’ housing and sexuality and discusses relations between biopower and racism, especially with Nazism (see Lecture 11). In the Course Summary, Foucault writes: In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects. ­ Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. And, finally, rather than privileging the law as manifestation of power, we would do better to try to identify the different techniques of constraint that it implements. (pp. 265–266)

Contrasting it to political power in the Middle Ages, Foucault gives the examples of “ratio of births to

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Blaming the Victim

deaths,” “the rate of reproduction,” and patterns of fertility. Biopower and biopolitics refer to a new technology of state power that extends over the physical and political bodies of a population considered as a global mass. Foucault first used the term biopower in The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of the History of ­Sexuality (1978), to refer to the emerging techniques for subjugating the body and controlling the population, and he used the term in relation to practices of public health. Biopower seen as the prerogative of the state defined a new technology of the power over life and death for the control of entire populations. In the lectures Security, Territory, Population (delivered at the Collège de France in 1978), Foucault (2009) refers to “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy” (p. 1). Foucault charts the emergence of the human sciences within disciplinary institutions and the transition from an anatomo-politics of the human body and the juridical form of sovereign power to a new set of regulatory techniques of the “scientific” state addressed to biopolitics of the population that made use of statistics as a stochastic power to “massify” the population. These new techniques reflect the growing maturity of the founding disciplines of life ­ sciences, biology, mathematics, political economy, ­ demography, and statistics, and their newfound applications for administering and controlling the life and health of a population. Since the 1970s, the concept and approach has grown very rapidly, with nearly 10,000 references in a database search on a huge variety of topics: biopolitics in Putin’s Russia, ecology, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, race, children’s bodies, information, data consumption and surveillance, property rights, terrorism, capital, urban planning, colonialism, health protection, international relations, immunity, globalization, and more. In the period since Foucault first used the concept in 1975, the twin concepts biopower and biopolitics have become used across the disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. In addition, major theorists like Giorgio Agamben (1998), Antonio Negri (Hardt & Negri, 2000), and Roberto Esposito (2008) have addressed these concepts. Agamben views the Holocaust as the ultimate exemplar of biopower; Negri and Hardt understand biopower as the extraction of some kind of value or surplus from that life, regulating all social life; Esposito focuses on the centerpiece of the “paradigm of immunization.” Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Ecopolitics; Group Ideologies; Nationalism; Partisanship; Race and Ethnicity; Sociobiology

Further Readings Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Esposito, R. (2008). Bíos: Biopolitics and philosophy (T. Campbell, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Foucault, M. (1978). Introduction. In History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Pantheon. [Reprinted as The will to knowledge. (1998). London, England: Penguin.] Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population. New York, NY: Picador. Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79 (M. Senellart, F. Ewald, & A. Fontana, Eds., & G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blaming

the

Victim

Victim blaming holds victims responsible, in some way, for their own misfortune. One might assume a natural sympathy for victims of crime or injustice, but that is not the case for many victim blamers. Victims can elicit a variety of negative social responses. People often derogate the poor and unfortunate due to deeply rooted myths about justice, innocence and guilt, defensive attitudes, and denial of unpleasant historical realities. Victim blaming can occur in a variety of contexts but has been ­increasingly linked to the criminal justice system and controversial political debates about health care reform, gender equality, the welfare state, and the “war on terror.” The term was coined by William Ryan in his book Blaming the Victim (1976). Ryan sought to discredit long-standing stereotypes in American society about race, gender, and class. He chastised the tendency of Americans to link poverty, illness, and underachievement in minority communities to ignorance and a ­ general lack of motivation. Victim blaming is grounded in an ­individualist culture that sees “sinking or s­ wimming”—­ failing or succeeding—as based entirely on one’s own efforts. By this definition, minority children are often accused of being genetically and culturally programmed to fail; their parents are admonished for neglect and underachievement. Their unemployment and poverty are linked to family and culture. Victim blaming identifies personality traits, behaviors, or risk factors exhibited by victims as having ­contributed in some way to their plight. Victim blaming can result in focusing attention away from the perpetrators and the deplorability of their act, toward those who

Blaming the Victim

have experienced the harm. This may give agency to those previously silenced but it can cause other problems. The victim’s history often becomes a point of contention in determinations of blame and responsibility. A focus on the victim’s identity and behavior may illuminate facets of the crime but can also decrease its seriousness and call into question compensations the victim would otherwise have been due. Victims whose moral stock has been compromised in some way are apt to be discredited and denied. In all cases of victim blaming, victims are censured, dismissed, and portrayed in unsympathetic ways, r­ esulting in their further disempowerment. Blaming the victim tends to conceal the role that broader social structures play in systemic forms of oppression, discrimination, and violence. For example, laws, customs, practices, and institutions may perpetuate exclusionary boundaries based on race, class, or gender and thus absolve individuals who would otherwise be held personally accountable for ­discrimination. For example, seeing famine as an inevitable result of drought or other natural causes obfuscates the responsibilities that leaders have in promoting conflicts and inequitable policies that remove people’s ­ capacity to mitigate famine’s harmful effects.

Victimology and the “Culpable Victim” Blaming the victim has a long history. However, it only recently entered the social scientific lexicon through academic studies of criminology. The subfield of victimology emerged as a study of the victim, the offender, and society as a whole in the 1940s and 1950s. The practice of victim blaming was present in research into victims from the very start. Some of the original pioneers focused on the interactions between victims and offenders in criminal justice cases. Benjamin M ­ endelsohn suggested that many criminal incidents involved people who knew each other previously and even had strong interpersonal relationships. As a result, the victim was already implicated in some way in the crime. Mendelsohn’s notion of a “culpable victim” was introduced in a typology that measured the victim’s degree of innocence or guilt. Six categories of victims are (1) completely innocent victims, (2) victims with minor guilt, (3) voluntary victims, (4) victims more guilty than the offender, (5) victims who alone are guilty, and (6) the imaginary victims. Classifying victim types in this way accounts for the relative liability of victims in different circumstances. Through this framework, cases abound in which victims are perceived as careless, negligent, or  provocative or as having exercised poor judgment. Hans von Hentig’s concept of “victim precipitation” also positioned the victim as a causal factor in the criminal act, particularly in cases of homicide. For example,

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in gang violence, a “hit” is often perpetrated against a gang—or rival gang—member who owed money. Implication of the victim in criminal activities can serve to reduce empathy that society would otherwise have toward a typically “innocent” or noncriminal victim.

Victim Blaming and Just World Theory Victim blaming was reintroduced by psychologists in the context of just world theory in the 1960s. Social psychologist Melvin Lerner studied why societies accept as valid social norms that perpetuate suffering. On the basis of extensive research, Lerner discovered that people blame victims for their suffering because they believe in justice. This belief is expressed by such platitudes as “what goes around comes around” or “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.” Innocent victims threaten this view and make the world seem a more random place. Belief in justice restores our sense of control and is thus found to promote greater happiness overall. At the same time, however, belief in a just world may reduce empathy for those who suffer. It is tempting to think that victims must somehow be responsible for defying the laws of justice. Lerner’s experiments involved administering electric shocks to participants. These experiments showed that subjects commonly denigrated victims whom they could not help or when they persisted in the experiment despite suffering inflicted upon them. In other words, suffering and situations of helplessness in this research generated disdain rather than empathy.

Contemporary Politics of Victim Blaming Victim blaming resurfaced after the Second World War with the convergence of key political trends that brought victims prominently into view. A growing international human rights regime promoted concepts of human security, humanitarian intervention, and Responsibility to Protect (R2P). These discourses rendered victims around the world the responsibility of us all. New kinds of victims were thus recognized as new kinds of offenders of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide came to be prosecuted. The host of new laws and institutions prompted many more victims than ever before to claim their rights. With new victims came new forms of victim blaming in contemporary debates about identity politics, sexual violence, the welfare state, and the “war on terror.”

Identity Politics and the Welfare State Victim blaming surfaced in response to the identity politics of the 1990s in Western industrialized countries.

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Blaming the Victim

Identity politics describes new forms of political activism that first appeared at the margins of liberal democracies with their growing recognition of human rights. Identity groups coalesce around shared experiences of injustice rather than fundamental belief systems, political ideologies, or party platforms. Struggles for ­ recognition of race, religion, gender, class, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and so on, bound people together by instilling pride and gaining social recognition for their plight. Feminists decried sexism and misogyny. African Americans denounced racism. And a host of others including—but not limited to—LGBT rights groups, the disabled, indigenous peoples, linguistic minorities, and religious groups appeared on the political agenda. The rise of identity politics prompted a virulent ­reaction from the majority, particularly as the world economy underwent recession in the 1970s and welfare states were faced with significant cutbacks. Victims were accused of inflating perceptions of harm in order to gain access to ever scarcer social resources. Critics pointed to the emergence of a “victim complex” by which the aggrieved were accused of exaggerating the negative intentions of others, refusing to take responsibility for their own actions, and even gaining short-term pleasures from self-pity. The broader accusation is that a “politics of trauma” has pervaded liberal democracies, wherein victimized groups must compete for recognition in a kind of “Victimhood Olympics.” So it goes, the greater the victimhood, the greater the recognition and benefits accrued to victim claimants. In her 2006 book, The Cult of True Victimhood, Alyson M. Cole argues that this coherent campaign against victims has propelled the backlash against affirmative action, multiculturalism, and the welfare state. This campaign curiously defines victimhood as weak, passive, and dependent on the one hand, and aggressive and criminal on the other hand. As the victim label generates increased criticism, terms like hero and survivor have gained traction. However, victim blaming has become a central tool in justifying racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, structural violence, and other discriminatory attitudes toward minorities. Victim blaming has been central to controversial debates about welfare reform and affirmative action programs. The motivation behind these programs was to “level the playing field” by giving preference to previously marginalized groups in college admissions, employment, and distribution of benefits. However, their legacy prompted widespread accusations of reverse discrimination: that is, the unfair treatment of majority groups resulting from such preferential policies being overused and manipulated. Many typically conservative White men complained that their ambitions were

obstructed by practices that favored a women or racial minorities. The enduring legacy of this perceived sense of entitlement, articulated from small-town America to White supremacist groups, was portrayed in Michael Kimmel’s 2013 book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Victims were accused of taking “more than their share” and, as television personality Bill O’Reilly put it, destroying the foundations of “traditional America.” In the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan blamed “welfare queens” for collecting excessive benefits and manipulating the system at the taxpayer’s expense. This accusation has been increasingly waged against political and legal systems that defend litigious clients. Consider, for example, the controversial case of Rose Cipollone, who blamed the tobacco industry for the fatal lung cancer she developed after smoking for 40 years. Cipollone sued and won damages to be paid by the cigarette manufacturer in the amount of $400,000.

Criminal Justice and Rape Victims have become a central focus in the criminal justice system due to growth of the victims’ rights movement since the 1970s and the law-and-order movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Both trends resulted from increased concern about crime and the need for restitution to the victim in criminal proceedings. However, many criminal cases have actually worked against the dignity of the victim, particularly in relation to rape and sexual assault where focus often rests on the victim’s morality (not the perpetrator’s). In such cases, rape victims are incriminated for having abetted victimization. Women are blamed for dressing provocatively, walking alone at night, and thus “asking for it.” This recriminating attitude was evident in the infamous case of the Central Park Jogger in New York in 1990–1991. It was also blatantly expressed in the 2011 Cleveland, Texas, rape case in which the defense attorney described the preteen gang rape victim as a seductress. Crossexaminations of rape victims can often replicate the original suffering, leading many to accuse the system of perpetrating a second victimization or “raping the victim” a second time over.

“War on Terror” The war on terror has also brought about new understandings of what it means to be a victim in the international arena, prompting new forms of victim blaming. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, served to legitimize a host of punitive actions that minimized and even ignored the plight of the thousands of casualties— men, women, and children—who suffered at the hands of American and allied military power and sanctions abroad.

Blue-Dog Democrats

The many compromises made in pursuit of American and European security were defined as necessary to fight terrorism. With American patriotism at an all-time high and widespread belief in its democratizing mission, otherwise  unjustifiable actions were justified. Perception of ­America’s enemies in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as less than human led to new classifications of “enemy combatants” (as opposed to “prisoners of war”) and their egregious treatment at the hands of American military personnel and CIA interrogators at Guantánamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The rise of Islamist movements worldwide served to further exacerbate victim blaming practices. This was evident when the aspirations of the Arab Spring turned sour in around 2011–2012. That Islamist groups gained power through the very structures intended to promote liberal democracy—as the 2012 presidential elections in Egypt confirmed—Middle Eastern peoples were blamed for rejecting progressive values and thus held responsible for their own plight. The lack of democracy in Middle Eastern societies continues to be attributed to “backward cultures” and the persistence of traditional norms and customs.

Conclusions It is unsettling for people to think they might play a part in broader systems of oppression and injustice. However, we are often complicit in victimizing processes. Blaming victims only serves to perpetuate suffering and deepens underlying systems of depravity and abuse. Victim blaming has been identified as a serious problem worldwide, particularly in cases of sexual violence and the persistence of rape culture. For this reason, an international day against victim blaming was established with the first “slut walk” in Toronto, Canada, on April 3, 2011. Since then, this day has been devoted to campaigning against victim blaming in all aspects of its practice and in support of victims and their plight. Obviously the blame approach is ineffective in resolving problems of violence and terminating cycles of abuse. As many scholars and advocates have noted, the only way forward is to substitute victim blaming with meaningful efforts toward empowerment and healing. Tami Amanda Jacoby See also Affirmative Action; Discrimination; Human Rights; Identity Politics; Race and Ethnicity

Further Readings Brown, W. (1993). Wounded attachments. Political Theory, 21(3), 390–410. doi:10.1177/0090591793021003003

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Cole, A. M. (2006). The cult of true victimhood: From the war on welfare to the war on terror. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Jacoby, T. (2015). A theory of victimhood: Politics, conflict and the construction of victim-based identity. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43(2), 1–20. Kimmel, M. S. (2013). Angry White men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York, NY: Nation Books. Lerner, M. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York, NY: Plenum. Meister, R. (2002). Human rights and the politics of victimhood. Ethics and International Affairs, 16(2), 91–108. Ryan, W. (1976). Blaming the victim. New York, NY: Random House. Wolfgang, M. E., & Singer, S. I. (1978, Fall). Victim categories of crime. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 69(3), 379–394.

Blue-Dog Democrats The Blue-Dog Democrats are a coalition of fiscal conservatives in the United States House of Representatives who advocate, among other things, a balanced federal budget and paying down the nation’s debt. Since the group’s inception in 1995, its positions on many issues have bridged the gap between the more ideologically extreme positions held by leaders of the two major political parties. When trying to understand the intersection of political science and other social sci­ ences, the rise of Blue-Dog Democrats is significant because it suggests the value of embracing a collective ideology to differentiate oneself for political purposes. What follows is a brief history of the Blue-Dog ­Coalition, a discussion of some of their early successes, and a narrative that elaborates some of the challenges the group faces in the second decade of the 21st century.

History In its brief history, the Blue-Dog Coalition has built a positive reputation as important actors in the policymaking process; however, their ability to broker compromise has waxed and waned over time. The group first formed in the 104th Congress (1995–1996) in an attempt to give a voice to conservative and moderate Democrats in the aftermath of large Republican ­electoral gains in the November 1994 congressional elections. The group’s colorful name is a spinoff from an earlier euphemism for Democratic Party stalwarts. The early terminology referred to loyal Southern Democrats as “yellow dogs.” In 1928, Senator Tom Heflin (D-AL)

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Blue-Dog Democrats

broke with his party and supported Herbert Hoover for president, over Al Smith. In response to Heflin’s disloyalty, party members from the South chastised him, maintaining they would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. The moniker Yellow Dog Democrat has alternatively been used in a positive light to distinguish party loyalty, and negatively, to denote a person who is loyal to a fault, one who fails to consult his or her conscience when determining his or her policy positions. Late in 1994, Representative Pete Geren (D-TX) allegedly used the label blue when he claimed ­moderate Democrats in the House had been choked blue or silenced by liberals within the Party. The new caucus combined Geren’s comment with the earlier moniker to name the group and distinguish itself as an independent voting bloc representing fiscally conservative policy positions. The contemporary group has Southern roots, which can also be traced to a group known as the Boll Weevils. The Boll Weevil label, however, is often rejected by members of the Blue-Dog Coalition because it is linked to the anticivil rights positions of White Southern Democrats. Importantly, over the past 2 decades, Blue-Dogs have been drawn from all regions of the country, albeit principally rural districts.

Early Successes In the 104th Congress (1995–1997), Blue-Dog Democrats played an important role in brokering a deal that produced an overhaul of the country’s welfare system. In the 107th Congress (2001–2003), Blue-Dogs helped to orchestrate passage of campaign finance reform legislation. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the group worked to inform the public about what they perceived to be the fiscally irresponsible tax policies of the George W. Bush Administration. Their argument was that tax cuts had gone too far and resulted in deficit spending and an accumulation of debt. In the 2006 midterm elections, the group led by Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) scoured rural areas of the country for electoral opportunities for fiscally conservative Democrats. The group was often successful, helping the Democratic Party regain majority status in the lower chamber in 2007. In the 111th Congress (2009–2011), the first Congress of the Barack Obama administration, the caucus had more than 50 members in the House and the group’s considerable influence was seen in the successful passage of health-care and Wall Street reform legislation. Many times their influence has pulled their more liberal party colleagues toward a more centrist policy position.

Blue-Dogs in the Second Decade of the New Millennium The electoral success of the Blue-Dogs was not sustained in the second decade of the 21st century. The group suffered electorally, particularly in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. In the 114th Congress (2015–2016) there were only 15 House members still recognized as part of the Blue-Dog Coalition. The drop in numbers came about as the result of electoral defeat and redistricting, which led to strategic early retirements. ­ Republicans often targeted Blue-Dog Democrats because they guessed the more conservative-leaning districts, represented by Blue-Dog members, afforded electoral opportunity for Republican Party candidates. Though small in number, the caucus continues to tout its relevance by framing the group as a moderate voice capable of bridging the considerable ideological divisions that exist between mainstream Democrats and Republicans. Many who closely watch the legislative process believe the group represents an important opportunity for bipartisan compromise if, or when, the intense party polarization that exists in Congress subsides. Last, it should be noted that some Democratic Party leaders continue to criticize the Blue-Dog Coalition for ignoring the well-being of low-income Americans. They believe the group’s conservative economic positions ignore the needs of many poorer citizens in need of government services. Others argue the move to the right by these Democrats has cost the party the support of key constituencies. Scot Schraufnagel See also Conservatism; Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Group Ideologies; Identity Politics; Partisanship; Political Deliberation

Further Readings Carmines, E. G., & Berkman, M. (1994). Ethos, ideology, and partisanship: Exploring the paradox of conservative Democrats. Political Behavior, 16, 203–218. Fleicher, R., & Bond, J. R. (2004). The shrinking middle in the U.S. Congress. British Journal of Political Science, 34, 429–451. Forster, M. D., & Rehner, T. (2011). The White male Southern Democrat: Endangered species or already extinct? Race, Gender & Class, 18, 230–237. Lublin, D., & Voss, D. S. (2003). The missing middle: Why median-voter theory can’t save Democrats from singing the boll-weevil blues. The Journal of Politics, 65, 227–237. Schiffer, A. J. (2000). I’m not that liberal: Explaining conservative Democratic identification. Political Behavior, 22, 293–310.

Brand Identity and Loyalty Thomsen, D. M. (2014). Ideological moderates won’t run: How party fit matters for partisan polarization in Congress. The Journal of Politics, 76, 786–797.

Brand Identity

and

Loyalty

The field of brand studies suffers from relative conceptual fuzziness. There is no consensus on a definition of brand and several related terms, which are often used interchangeably. A brand can be defined as the ensemble of visual elements, histories, expectations, experiences, and practices that are associated with a given organization and differentiate it from competitors. It is an ­intangible asset of the organization that can have a major effect in activating a target audience. Therefore, organizations often invest heavily to build their brand identity. Brand identity refers to the way in which an organization wants a given target audience to perceive its brand, as the fundamental attributes of the organization. Therefore, brand identity refers specifically to an analysis internal to the organization. Sometimes brand identity is taken to refer only to the graphic-design solutions supporting the visual identity of the organization. This interpretation is too limited, as brand management requires instead a comprehensive understanding not only of visual communication but more broadly of how the organization presents itself to its members or employees as well as its various audiences. Brand identity needs to be distinguished from brand value and the related notion of brand reputation, which are concepts external to the organization as they refer to how an audience views and values the organization. If an actor (e.g., a consumer, voter, donor, institution) is willing to pay a premium or similarly promote the organization, then the organization enjoys positive brand reputation and value with that actor. Brand loyalty is related to reputation and refers to the degree to which the actor repeatedly chooses to pay a premium or support the organization in the face of competition by alternative organizations. The remainder of this entry examines the evolution of brand identity and loyalty studies, tracing how they expanded in focus from firms to political organizations. It concludes with a brief note on measurement.

Early Brand Management Theories Brand identity and loyalty generated a large body of research, starting in the late 1970s in the field of business and marketing. Studies were initially driven by management needs, rather than academic inquiry. From

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early on, a critical idea behind brand studies was that consumers identify themselves through their purchases. In other words, price and performance are not the only considerations in the acquisition of a product. Rather, purchases help consumers define the narrative and image they seek to project to the outside and to ­themselves—acquisitions thus become an integral part of how people understand who they are. The literature on brand identity and brand loyalty surged in the 1980s, as the field acquired a more complex and multifaceted understanding of the phenomenon, and the need to coordinate multiple fields such as overall vision, marketing communications, and organizational design. The field thereby abandoned the assumption that brand investments necessarily lead to positive returns, requiring instead empirical inquiry into the conditions that link investment and returns. Consequently, over the same period, scholars developed measures for brand identity and loyalty.

Brand Management Theories Adopted Beyond Firms In the 1980s, brand management was increasingly adopted by nonmarket organizations. A major constituency seeking the returns of brand identity was that of political leaders and political parties. With the rise of television and other forms of mass communication in electoral campaigns, political actors turned to investing in the expertise of marketing agencies and thus imported, adapted, and applied theories originally developed in the marketing and management literatures with the intention of maximizing firm equity and consumer purchases. In addition to the increased role of mass ­ communication, the shift was imposed by a crisis of mass ideologies, an associated fall in traditional forms of mobilization and party membership, and a rise in voter volatility. Two major institutional groups joined politicians in pursuing brand management. Government organizations (e.g., departments, authorities) invested in b ­ randing to reverse a broad and steady decrease in institutional trust and legitimacy. “Places” such as states, regions, and cities became particularly focused on building and projecting brand identity, which was considered a key tool in public diplomacy and in the regional and international competition that characterizes the post-Fordist and neoliberal environments. An important effect of this dramatic expansion in the deployment of brand identity was that citizens, workers, and voters became increasingly seen through the lenses of consumption. In this light, the goal of attracting support in the form of investment, votes, and approval

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Bully Pulpit

became understood through the same p ­ arameters that firms deploy to attract purchases. This refocusing of political behavior in terms of consumption often limited the depth, breadth, and time horizon of political discourse. However, it also offered citizens new tools to exercise pressure on both the political and the corporate establishment, as consumption became an expression of social and political preferences and emerged as a key field in which political ideology is constructed and manifested. This phenomenon developed both at the domestic and at the international level, as global social justice networks learned to encourage shoppers to ­consider the political implications of their choices and pressure corporations to take responsibility for the social consequences of their policies. Brand management, with its focus on identity and loyalty, was adopted also by civil society actors (particularly in the nonprofit sector). In the largest ­ ­organizations, the effort is recognizable through formal contracting with marketing experts, while smaller organizations, also attuned to the challenges and rewards of brand management, tend to shape their brands in-house.

Measuring Brand Identity and Brand Loyalty The study of brand identity and brand loyalty thus started in the fields of management, marketing, and consumer behavior but spread to architecture, arts, communication, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies. Scholars have taken different approaches to measuring brand identification and loyalty. The dominant method is the survey of the target audience, whether consumers, voters, or donors. Interviews and focus groups are also deployed. Experimental approaches are increasingly common. In each case, researchers ask questions to help them identify the attitudes or behaviors that reveal loyalty and brand strength in a specific industry or sphere of activity, as well as their determinants. Eleonora Pasotti See also Art in Political Campaigns; Framing Effects; Party Identification; Political Campaigns; Propaganda

Further Readings Dinnie, K. (2010). Nation branding. New York, NY: Routledge. Lock, A., & Harris, P. (1996). Political marketing—vive la difference! European Journal of Marketing, 30(10/11), 14–24. Micheletti, M., & Stolle, D. (2008). Fashioning social justice through political consumerism, capitalism, and the Internet. Cultural Studies, 22(5), 749–769.

Pasotti, E. (2010). Political branding in cities: The decline of machine politics in Bogotá, Naples, and Chicago. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bully Pulpit The term bully pulpit refers to the platform enjoyed by an elected official, especially the president of the United States, to communicate his or her views. This entry discusses the history of the term, the perceived power of the platform, its modern use by U.S. presidents, and the limitations of the bully pulpit.

History of the Term Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt famously declared the platform that the president of the United States commands to be a “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt did not intend for the phrase to contain diabolical implications; in the vernacular of his day, bully meant excellent, reflecting Roosevelt’s estimation that with the office came an opportunity to reach a wide audience, which was advantageous.

Power of the Bully Pulpit Perhaps no one on Earth occupies a more prominent position than the president of the United States. Today, the bully pulpit is widely held to equip U.S. presidents with a powerful megaphone to advance their messages and persuade the American people, lawmakers, and other actors in support of their positions. As Richard Neustadt argued, since U.S. leaders share authority but do not have influence over whether other officials hold their jobs, the only way for the president to convince others to do what the president desires is to persuade them. Therefore, Neustadt argued that the fundamental power wielded by the president is the “power to persuade.” The bully pulpit helps presidents harness this power by amplifying their messages.

Modern Use of the Bully Pulpit by U.S. Presidents Modern presidents are availing themselves of the bully pulpit more than ever. Jeffrey Tulis noted that the practice of contemporary presidents to constantly communicate with the American people is a radical divergence from the custom of chief executives before Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson. While 19th-century presidents had significant opportunities to speak to the

Bully Pulpit

people, Tulis found that they largely declined to do so, instead electing to communicate in written form to Congress. Tulis found that, in the 19th century, less than 1% of presidential communications were delivered via the spoken word; in the 20th century, 42% of presidential communications were delivered orally. Furthermore, Tulis calculated that 19th-century presidents delivered a total of about 1,000 speeches—an average of 10 per year. By contrast, George C. Edwards III noted that, on average, President Clinton spoke in public 550 times per year. This has ushered in an era that Tulis referred to as the “rhetorical presidency.” The expectation that the president will regularly communicate with the American people is so widely held today that it has essentially become part of the job description.

Limitations of the Bully Pulpit The U.S. president rarely speaks directly, however, to the American people. Edwards noted that the only circumstances in which the president is likely to do so are during the annual State of the Union address and during scandals or military actions. While presidents were previously able to command network television coverage when they wished to address the American people, Edwards noted that a “network rebellion” began in the 1960s. Since then, it has become difficult for the White House to convince television networks to interrupt programming in order to broadcast presidential addresses. As a result, rather than hearing from the president directly, the American people more often come to learn about the president’s messages through the filter of the journalists who report and pundits who comment on them. The modern rise in punditry has coincided with heightened investigation into and criticism of presidential claims. Whereas through the 1960s many reporters saw their jobs as being to convey the words of the president, numerous scholars have noted that the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War ushered in a new era of media scrutiny. Presidential statements no longer go uncontested; rather, a cadre of political and investigative journalists intensively fact-check and challenge official presidential communications. While the growth of technology and mass media is often portrayed as creating more opportunities for communication, they have also created more distractions— such as cable television shows that compete with the broadcast networks for viewers’ attention. Edwards noted that a popular program on one television network can command a greater share of viewers than when the president speaks on all three major networks simultaneously. Sebastian Mallaby argued that while

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new technology initially magnified the power of the presidential bully pulpit—for example, radio broadcast President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats into American living rooms, television allowed President John F. Kennedy to “charm the nation,” and advances in air transport allowed presidents to travel to speak directly to new audiences with greater frequency— today, the proliferation of new technology is having the opposite effect, by distracting the American people. Edwards found that, when presidents do speak directly to the American people in televised addresses, their approval ratings rarely increase. His studies of presidents who were widely considered to be skilled communicators, such as Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton, found that even these gifted leaders could not create public moods to their liking; they could only contribute to and benefit from the mood that already existed in the nation. Furthermore, the bully pulpit may hinder the president’s ability to achieve goals in Congress. A variety of scholars have noted that the modern practice of debating every issue in the press forces politicians to take positions early—perhaps before facts are fully established. This can make it more difficult to back down from the positions they have staked out later on in order to accept reasonable compromises. Furthermore, Fred Greenstein noted that debating in public may preclude the candid behind-the-scenes discussions and deal ­making that facilitate compromise. Although modern presidents have increasingly u ­ tilized the bully pulpit, they have been unsuccessful in sustaining high approval ratings or achieving key goals. Rather, Greenstein noted that modern presidencies have been characterized by declining public support and an inability to convince Congress to act on major priorities. Kara S. Alaimo See also Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership; Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Public Opinion

Further Readings Edwards, G. C., III. (2003). On deaf ears: The limits of the bully pulpit. Chelsea, MI: Sheridan Books. Greenstein, F. I. (Ed). (1995). Leadership in the modern presidency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mallaby, S. (2000). The bullied pulpit: A weak chief executive makes worse foreign policy. Foreign Affairs, 79, 2–8. Neustadt, R. (1990). Presidential power and the modern presidents. New York, NY: Free Press. Tulis, J. K. (1987). The rhetorical presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Bureaucratic Politics

In particular, Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of administrative science and 28th president of the United States, argued for a clear distinction between bureaucracy and politics. According to this view, the operative part of the government works only as an agent for the concrete application of constitutional law. On the one hand, the administration is expected to keep out of all political conflicts associated with the basic decisions of lawmakers and the authoritative instructions of the responsible ministers. On the other hand, politicians are not allowed to personally infiltrate the administrative bodies and to manipulate the civil service. The motives of officials and the standards in administrative decision making should therefore be purely bureaucratic and only influenced by public spirit. In an ideal-typical analysis, pioneering sociologist Max Weber described the nature of bureaucracy as an “iron cage” of rationality. This metaphor at least partially corresponds to Wilson’s dichotomy of bureaucracy and politics. According to Weber, modern officialdom concentrates on highly formalized proceedings in hierarchical structures to achieve organizational purposes without genuine self-determination.

politics unfolds. Daniel Carpenter, for example, comprehensively explains how different agencies in the United States gained their autonomy during the period between the American Civil War and the Great Depression. In his study, he identifies some reasons for this development, which include unique goals of the bureaucracy, reputational advantages, and coalitions with interest groups. David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran go a step further and ask the question why the legislature in the United States delegates executive discretion despite of the risk of bureaucratic drift. Applying transaction cost and principal–agent theory, the authors find effects of united party government, legislative organization, and issue-area characteristics. In a more comparative study, John Huber and Charles Shipan address a similar question on the basis of the principal–agent theory. They explain how the policy conflict between the legislature and the implementer, the legislative capacity, the bicameral agreement, and the absence of nonstatutory controls influence the probability of detailed legislation and the establishment of ­safeguards against bureaucratic politics. Apart from the principal–agent literature, George Tsebelis uses the vetoplayers theory to examine bureaucratic discretion in the European Union (EU). According to him, the autonomy of the bureaucracy is positively correlated with the number of veto players in the legislature and the distances between them: The larger the conflict among legislative actors that have to agree to policy change, the more room for bureaucratic maneuver exists. Research that draws on veto-players theory and empirically investigates the extent of bureaucratic politics in the EU reveals a clear dominance of tertiary compared with secondary legislation (80% versus 20%). While tertiary acts are solely enacted by the bureaucracy (European Commission), secondary legislation is adopted by the representatives of the Member States in the Council, sometimes in conjunction with the European Parliament. Therefore, critics sometimes ­ describe the EU bureaucracy as a prime example of overregulation that may intrude into the private lives of citizens. When bureaucratic politics increases in time of legislative gridlock, the machinery at least ensures the functional reliability of public policy. However, the dominance of bureaucratic activities creates a democratic deficit and may lower the reputation of the entire political system. Another potential problem is the ­ ­budget-maximizing bureau as exemplified in William Niskanen’s public choice theory.

Bureaucratic Discretion

Government Bargaining Model

When administrative bodies deviate from the objectives set by political leaders or basically act on their own initiative, a so-called drift exists and bureaucratic

In foreign policy analysis, the bureaucratic politics approach also refers to a government bargaining model introduced by Graham Allison and complemented by

Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic politics results from the self-determination and self-interest of administrative bodies. Rational principles like hierarchical structures, strict rules of law, high division of labor, and detailed record-keeping typically indicate their bureaucratic activities. These ­ machineries, operated by nonelected officials, are actually separated from political powers exercised by elected leaders. However, agency discretion and bureaucratic drift can arise from technical expertise, in particular when the uncertainty about implementation ­pathways is high and the policy conflict between legislators increases. After describing the classical dichotomy of bureaucracy and politics, this entry introduces research on bureaucratic politics that explains the autonomy of administrative bodies, quantifies its importance, and raises questions about democratic or economic drawbacks. Moreover, this entry outlines the more specific meaning of the bureaucratic politics approach in the area of foreign policy analysis, where a government bargaining model has been developed.

Classical Dichotomy of Bureaucracy and Politics

Bureaucratic Structure

Morton Halperin. This model does not assume a unified national government as sole player in international relations, but many actors that are hierarchically positioned. These bureaucrats represent different organizations within government and regularly perform bargaining to shape government decisions in foreign policy. They ­prefer policy solutions that are primarily of organizational, rather than national, interest. In addition to the selfseeking preferences of the bureaucrats, the n ­ ontransparent bargaining process itself negatively affects the accountability of decisions and seriously undermines the democratic nature of foreign policy in general. Bernd Luig See also Bureaucratic Structure; Collective Action; Decision Making; Legitimacy, Forms of; Rational Choice; RentSeeking Behavior; Rule of Law

Further Readings Allison, G. T., & Halperin, M. H. (1972). Bureaucratic politics: A paradigm and some policy implications. World Politics, 24, 40–79. doi:10.2307/2010559 Carpenter, D. P. (2001). The forging of bureaucratic autonomy: Reputations, networks, and policy innovation in executive agencies, 1862–1928. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Huber, J. D., & Shipan, C. R. (2002). Deliberate discretion? The institutional foundations of bureaucratic autonomy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bureaucratic Structure A bureaucratic structure is an “ideal typical” form of administrative organization that is characterized by legal authority and rational principles such as hierarchical structures, strict rules of law, and high division of labor as well as detailed record-keeping. Administrative ­organization with a bureaucratic structure can exist in both the public and private sector. On the one hand, bureaucracy is classically associated with precision, unambiguity, continuity, and efficiency. On the other hand, bureaucracy has nowadays a pejorative meaning as a synonym for technocracy, impersonality, sluggishness, and red tape. After describing the historical ­emergence of the bureaucratic structure, this entry provides a detailed overview of its characteristics. The entry concludes with a general discussion of bureaucracy’s advantages and disadvantages.

Historical Emergence Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and the development of the constitutional state, modern

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bureaucracy was established in most countries in the 19th century. The growth of population, the creation of a money-based economy, and the expansion of governmental responsibilities required a new, more efficient structure for organizing administrative activities. Max Weber, one of the foremost theorists of bureaucracy, pointed out that traditional and charismatic authority were superseded by rational-legal authority. This type of authority was related to the common belief in the ­legality of the established order and the rule of law. Therefore, professional accountability, formal rules and procedures, and fixed salaries took the place of benefices and fiefs that formerly characterized the feudal, status-based systems. This process of rationalization and depersonalization concerned not only public administration but also private sector management, in particular in large companies.

Characteristics of the Ideal Type Weber applies the concept of an “ideal type” (or “pure type”) to abstractly model a particular phenomenon in social science. However, each empirical case does not necessarily have all the features of the respective phenomenon. In order to introduce the ideal type of a bureaucratic structure, Weber concisely describes 10 characteristics of the conduct of offices and officials. The first characteristic refers to impersonal obligations. Accordingly, officials are strictly bound to their objective duty and separated from all political affairs. The second characteristic is a fixed hierarchical structure of offices. This means both top-down control and centralized decision making in a cascading system of many management layers. The third feature of the bureaucratic structure focuses on jurisdictional competencies of the officials that are clearly defined and ordered by rules. Thus, administrative organization is characterized by jurisdictional responsibility and accountability, functional specialty, and a high division of labor. Fourth, contracts are used to fill the posts of modern officialdom. Personnel selection should therefore not depend on privilege, parentage, or relatedness. Following up on this, the fifth point requires appointments of officials based on technical qualifications that are recorded by exams or certificates. This also means, in Weber’s ideal type, that officials are not elected, in contrast to politicians. The sixth feature concerns fixed monetary salaries of the officials that correspond to their rank in hierarchy and their responsibility, pension entitlements of the officials, and (at least in public administration) the permanency of their appointment. This kind of remuneration is in contradiction with irregular and occasional income from estates, fees, or cronyism. Seventh, and closely related to the sixth point, each office should be the sole

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or main profession of the incumbent. Full-time officials that concentrate on specific administrative tasks ensure professionalization and technical expertise. The eighth characteristic of bureaucracy refers to the career prospects of the officials. Depending on seniority and proven professional competence, the superior should select officials for promotion. This contrasts a career development based on personal or political relations. Ninth, officials do not possess their offices and administrative resources. Rather, they are subject to strict rules, categorization, and formal procedures under rational-legal authority. Lastly, Weber points to an effective system of command and control that applies uniformly to all officials. This also includes detailed record-keeping by means of written documents (files) concerning their administrative activities. In conclusion, the bureaucratic structure appears to be an “iron cage” of rationality. Officials act with formalistic impersonality and utilitarian adherence to implementing rules and routines.

Advantages and Disadvantages According to Weber, bureaucracy marks a turn away from feudalism and solely traditional or charismatic authority. The advantages of the “rationalized cage” therefore include the rule of law, clearly defined activities, continuity, precision, and reliability. Weber even views the bureaucracy as the most efficient structure for administrative behavior. In contrast, Robert Merton, one of the first critics of bureaucratic structure, points to its negative consequences for the personality of the officials. In his opinion, attitudes and sentiments may correspond to the army-like discipline and pressure in the bureaucracy. Merton is afraid not only of strict adherence, timidity, and conservatism, but also of extreme stereotypical behavior that results in external conflicts. The officials could be superordinate instead of being servants of the people. Herbert Simon fundamentally questions the rationalism in administrative behavior. He argues that cognitive limits due to bounded rationality exist. Because the bureaucracy does not meet the reality of their social lives, officials would show divergent behavior with insufficient results. Other critics refer to the rigidity of rules and too little opportunity to develop creativity and innovation. These deficiencies can lead to sluggishness and red tape. Apart from that, the technocratic expertise and bureaucratic power in government administration may blur the political responsibility in democratic systems. Bernd Luig See also Bureaucratic Politics; Collective Action; Decision Making; Legitimacy, Forms of; Rational Choice; Rule of Law

Further Readings Merton, R. K. (1940). Bureaucratic structure and personality. Social Forces, 18, 560–568. doi:10.2307/2570634 Simon, H. A. (1997). Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations (4th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. Waters, T., & Waters, D. (Eds.). (2015). Weber’s rationalism and modern society: New translations on politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification (pp. 73–127). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Business

in

Politics

The question of how political organizations behave toward business firms has become increasingly prominent because people demand that politicians undertake measures toward the solution of problems like economic crises and the unethical behavior of some corporations. Business firms have to operate according to the political rules determined by local and national governments and international political organizations. This relationship raises various issues such as how governments make political decisions and the effects of lobbying and corruption, as discussed in the sections that follow.

An Overview Debates on how political decisions impact business firms have been extensive among political interest groups, business firms, and the media, as well as in ­society in general. It is well known that political organizations decide the political rules and business firms make decisions in response to them. In recent decades, business firms have had to manage not only the decisions made by local and national governments, but also those made by international political organizations. Internationalization of markets has also brought in the role of multinational political agents like the European Union (EU), with a duty to control the behavior of firms. Within the context of how political organizations impact business and how business firms respond, there are two perspectives. In one, firms employ responses such as adaptation; that is, political organizations decide the rules and the firms have to obey. The decisions are necessary because politicians have to deal with often urgent socioeconomic problems, such as workforce employment levels and national development. Political decisions sometimes concern all businesses and sometimes concern a specific industry or firm. Democratic

Business in Politics

states as well as international political organizations, such as the EU, gain their power from the people and have to demonstrate that their decisions are responsive to the needs of the people. Otherwise, voters will lose their trust in the political organization, and this failure can lead to loss of office in the next election, as voters turn to other parties for leadership. According to an alternative perspective, political organizations do not have such a power. It is true that sometimes governments can employ forcible actions toward business firms, but for their longtime survival, they need to consider the will of business firms because they are in part also dependent on business firms. A large political organization like the EU cannot easily make the decision to force local and international firms to follow political rules. Different business and social groups can exert pressure and influence EU politicians. Political organizations are best equipped to tackle political issues; that is, they have knowledge about the governing rules and regulations. However, political organizations also need information about markets, technologies, and social processes. For example, political organizations do not know exactly what the consumers’ needs are and how and with what means or technology these needs can be fulfilled. Business firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs, such as environmental organizations) have more knowledge about such issues. This makes the political organizations dependent on firms and NGOs. With respect to the relationships between states and business firms, the firms are dependent on the government because government regulations can give support, for example, by sustaining market stability that affects firms’ businesses. The governments are dependent on firms because firms make investments that, in turn, affect economic development and thereby the society and people on which the government depends. Political decisions may be categorized according to two types. Some are general; for example, governmental or EU decisions on environmental pollution, which all firms must follow. Others can be specific; for example, when the United States government decides to punish a specific bank for not following a specific political rule. A political rule can also be supportive; for example, firms developing new technology for the benefit of medical or environmental issues gain subsidies from the local government or from the EU. If a specific firm gets support, this is welcomed because it strengthens a firm’s competitive position in the market. Therefore, firms, especially large multinational corporations, establish units for lobbying governments. In some cases, especially in developing countries, this behavior can go too far and lead to corruption.

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Lobbying, Corruption Nowadays it has become normal that the corridors in EU buildings (for example in Brussels) or state organization buildings are full of lobbyists trying to influence political units and gain support. Lobbying has become more widespread in recent decades and is well accepted. The campaign ads of firms in the United States during election periods are well known. Lobbying does not necessarily aim to gain direct financial support but can strive to gain influence, which will ultimately support the firms’ business activities. Lobbying aims to persuade another party and influence their decisions in a particular direction. Lobbying strategies could involve presentation of new technology and showing how it fulfills the demands of the people; it is done, for example, by negotiation, recruiting former politicians and campaign contributions. Since the goal of business firms in lobbying is to gain support, situations arise wherein firms have gained benefit by means of unethical behavior, called corruptive actions. It can involve members of political organizations or agents connected to those organizations. Corruption is an illegitimate action against existing ­ economic, political, and social values. It is the abuse of power for private benefit in contradiction of the existing rules. This problem does not concern the firm-state relationship only in developing countries. Recently, a previous Portuguese prime minister was accused of bribery for giving special privileges to some firms in exchange for money. Additionally, some EU politicians in the agricultural units were accused of getting financial resources from business firms. But this problem is much more widespread in developing and emerging countries. Corruption is expected to bring punishment when and if information about it is revealed. An example is  when TeliaSonera, a Swedish telecommunications company, signed a contract with the government in ­ Uzbekistan for 1.5 billion dollars. After 3 years, the ­ media disclosed that TeliaSonera had paid several hundred million dollars to an agent whose boss was the prime minister’s daughter. This behavior was recognized as a case of bribery in Swedish and international media. TeliaSonera has now been made to pay several hundred million dollars in penalties and accused of corruptive behavior. The interesting issue is that while this behavior was recognized as unethical in Sweden, the government, society, and media in Uzbekistan had a completely different view. In Uzbekistan, the daughter of the president, the boss of the agency, stated that they were ­following the existing political values accepted by their own society. Thus, internationalization includes the issue of differences in the ethical values in political

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rules; that is, an action can be recognized as unethical in one country but ethical in another country. Amjad Hadjikhani and Gozde Yilmaz See also Capitalism; Clientelism; Corporatism; Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Economics and Political Behavior; Elite Theory (Pareto); Social Class; Values

Further Readings Amsterdam Research Colloquium. (2006, February 17–18). Corporate political activities in an internationalizing economy. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Author. Boddewyn, J. J., & Brewer, T. L. (1994). International-business political behavior: New theoretical directions. Academy of Management Review, 19(1), 119–143.

Cave, T., & Rowell, A. (2014, March 12). The truth about lobbying: 10 ways big business controls government. Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2014/mar/12/lobbying-10-ways-corporationsinfluence-government Drutman, L. (2015). The business of America is lobbying: How corporations became politicized and politics became more corporate. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hadjikhani, A., & Ghauri, P. (2001). The behaviour of international firms in socio-political environments in the European Union. Journal of Business Research, 52(3), 263–275.  Transparency International. (2009). Controlling corporate lobbying and financing of political activities (Policy Position 6/2009). Retrieved from http://issuu.com/transparency international/docs/2009_6_pp_corporatelobbying_en?e= 2496456/3241158

C Calculus

of

commit themselves to accept any outcome coming from drawing lots without any recourse to force. This kind of result finds an explanation in an agreement based on the acceptance of the drawing-lots procedure when all players have the same probability to see their preferred political choices drawn. The specific character of the drawing-lots expedient leads us to describe this procedure as totally alien to a contractarian-based democracy because the emerging result entails one individual’s monopoly. Nevertheless, the individual knows that neither his own choice nor that of anybody else will have any chance to prevail in the public-good market. The underlying assumption is that each decision maker can be thought of as being overinformed rather than underinformed about results. Looked at from the perspective of a contractarian constitutional political economist, the decision maker seems to decide beyond a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, in which choices are of the marginal, not total, kind and have an equal weight for each individual in the polity. As a consequence, choices are mutually exclusive simply because they are at once equally weighing and diverging, choosing individuals being morally equal but with conflicting preferences. This analytical setting ensures that there is not any logical inconsistency in extending the contractual logic to the dissent case, where individuals precommit themselves to abide by the rule that will be drawn by lots. For example, consider a political setting of three voters—three equally weighing parties. If everyone ­ votes for his own option in all the possible pairwise voting, every choice—apart from the voting sequence—will have one vote in favor by the proponent and two votes against by the nonproponents. The emerging solution, in which all alternatives get an equal number of votes in their favor, may be paradoxically labeled “the contractarian calculus of dissent” because the contractarian

Dissent

This entry is concerned with the specific problem of decision making in a contractarian constitutional democracy—based on unanimous consent over the rules—where all individuals have different preferences on matters of public goods. Fundamental to this predicament is the presumption that conflicts arise from the very circumstance that choice is public and decision makers’ preferences are unable to generate either consensual choices or majoritarian choices, which may be called the premise of democracy. When differences in preferences cannot be aggregated through voting, it is evident that the result is not consent over public goods but dissent even in the simplest three-individual setting. One might think that with heterogeneous preferences, there is no room for democracy. This is a simple but fallacious conclusion that would not withstand critical scrutiny. In fact, dissent can be overcome (calculated), provided that a significant change is introduced in the logical foundation of the contract, by shifting from a process-oriented contract to an outcome-­oriented contract. Technically speaking, the latter type of contract requires the introduction of a spurious element that originates a methodological gap in the logical construction. In spite of the criticism that can be made of this idea, the spurious element is a useful expedient for making dissent consistent with the contractarian logic. This is because it allows an extension of the logic of consent over the process to the logic of consent over the outcome resulting from drawing lots. Yet though the two consents are different on methodological grounds, the consent over the outcome—where two out of the three individuals unavoidably suffer a loss—can pass a rationality test on the condition that the three of them 73

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Capitalism

component remains in the precommitment stage, and the procedural choice implies that all individuals in conflict refrain from using force. While the dissent problem can be solved at a ­precommitment stage, the results that the metarule gives rise to may turn out to be unfair ex post. Namely, results will be optimal for the individual whose choice has been drawn, while the other two individuals may find themselves, more or less, in an equally bad position if the choice drawn is the median one. If instead the alternative drawn is one of the extremes, the worst position is that of the individual who is positioned at the opposite extreme, while the position of the individual whose most preferred alternative is the intermediate one is worse but better than that of the opposite extreme. Contrary to the alleged equivalence deployed in contractarian literature, the calculus of dissent provides a very good example for holding that the concept of ­contract is wider than that of consent. This nonequivalence is of great heuristic value, for it allows the incorporation of the calculus of dissent into the contract. This prevents the residuum of consent from blocking democratic d ­ ecisions and from falling back either to chaos or to dictatorship. A second sense of the calculus of dissent is external to contractarian democracy and does not call for an ex ante or prior acceptance of equiprobable results for the parties but for an imposition of results by one of the parties by using force. The two scenarios set forth here represent radical alternatives in the calculus of dissent both in terms of political values and in terms of moral values (individual freedom) as opposed to objective absolute values that can be imposed through the exercise of force. The two senses of the calculus of dissent broached here are irreconcilable radical alternatives, on the one hand an insurer of conflict resolutions (democracy), and on the other an explosion of conflicts (dictatorship and terrorism). Giuseppe Eusepi See also Decision Making; Dictatorship; Public Goods; Terrorism, Theories and Models; Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory; Voting Behavior

Further Readings Buchanan, J. M., & Yoon, Y. J. (2001). The efficacy of arbitrary rules. In R. Mudambi, P. Navarra, & G. Sobbrio (Eds.), Rules and reason: Perspectives on constitutional political economy (pp. 56–68). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Eusepi, G. (2002). The calculus of dissent: Constitutional completion and public goods. In G. Brennan, H. Kliemt, &

R. T. Tollison (Eds.), Method and morals in constitutional economics: Essays in honor of James M. Buchanan (pp. 213–236). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag. Eusepi, G. (2012). From the calculus of consent to the calculus of dissent: A personal promenade in the constitutional square. Public Choice, 1, 279–283. doi:10.1007/s11127012-9969-1. Sandler, T., & Lapan, H. (1988). The calculus of dissent: An analysis of terrorists’ choice of targets. Synthese, 76, 245–261.

Capitalism Capitalism is now the dominant way of organizing economic life. That was not always the case, however; so in order to understand capitalism’s contemporary dominance and current potential, it is necessary to know something of its history and core characteristics. It is also necessary to understand capitalism’s various ­contemporary forms and the debates surrounding the strengths and weaknesses of each. This entry is organized sequentially to cover that agenda.

Origins The word capitalism has been around in English for rather less time than the thing itself. The term was certainly in use by the end of the 18th century—Arthur Young used it in his Travels in France (1792)—and the notion of something called “capital” was well known to Adam Smith as he prepared The Wealth of Nations two decades earlier. But language invariably follows practice, of course, and the practice of organizing economic life on capitalist lines is of much longer duration. What brought the terminology into line with the practice from the end of the 18th century was the increasing ubiquity of capitalist ways of organizing economic life in Great Britain, in which both Smith and Young found themselves, respectively, before and after the French Revolution. At the core of a capitalist way of organizing economic activity is the buying and selling of things, and such commercial activity has been known and practiced ever since societies emerged with significant degrees of urbanization. For as soon as at least some people left the land, they needed to trade what they produced in the towns with food producers in the countryside, if only to ensure their own capacity to survive. At times in the distant past, indeed, such capitalist practices came to constitute a significant part of the overall economic activity of leading ancient societies—Rome at the height of its empire at the end of the second century CE being

Capitalism

a case in point—but even then the vast majority of economic activity was not organized in such a fashion. For capitalism is simply one way of organizing an economy. There are others in which the exchange of goods and services in return for money is not so central. As the Western Roman Empire declined, the scale of capitalist activity within it declined also, leaving western Europe for the next thousand years broadly organized on ­feudal, not capitalist, lines. In feudal economies, a peasantry tied in various ways to the land directly produced both the means of its own subsistence and a small agrarian surplus used to sustain a landowning aristocratic class and their military and spiritual supporters. Lords, soldiers, and priests did not labor in the fields. Most everyone else did, however; and only as towns and cities began to reconstitute themselves on any scale—primarily from the 11th century—were they then joined in any numbers by artisans and merchants making and trading manufactured goods and services. It was as the numbers of such nonagricultural producers grew, and as agricultural production was increasingly reset—moving from subsistence agriculture to one producing agrarian products for sale—that Western ­ European economies eventually began to shift away from a feudal to a more capitalist way of organizing economic life. That shift was most developed initially in the independent cities of the Italian peninsula from the late medieval period before moving up the Rhine into northern Germany and the Low Countries and, by the 18th century, quintessentially into Great Britain. It was a move that brought new social actors into play in those countries: initially a class of merchants moving limited agrarian surpluses and simple manufactures between town and country and between towns themselves (some of whom began to focus on the financing of that trade through the development of primitive forms of banking and credit); a growing class of artisans developing skills and generating products for sale that were initially based primarily on the reworking of wool, leather, and simple metals; a new breed of commercial farmer, growing crops or rearing animals for transmission to first local and then more distant markets; a new labor force engaged in the business of moving both agrarian and urban-produced goods; and eventually—right at the end of the sequence—a class of men (it was normally men) owning factories in which manufactured goods were made, and a much larger class of both men and women (and indeed initially children) who actually did the making of the goods in return for an extremely modest wage. The sequence of development here is clear—merchant capitalism, agrarian capitalism, and finally industrial capitalism—all lubricated by an

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underlying system of financial capitalism whose importance in each capitalist economy grew steadily over time. As capitalist forms of economic life emerged in Western Europe from the late medieval period, they ­ transformed the social structure surrounding economic activity in the societies in which these new forms appeared. Social formations anchored in feudal forms of economic life (broadly, peasantries tied to the land and aristocratic classes claiming ownership of that land) found themselves transformed into (or displaced by) social formations whose ability to survive and prosper depended on the making and sale of goods and services. For that transition to occur, even deeper social and political changes had to occur too, not least the development of a stable and reliable system of money; clearly specified property rights, and sustained levels of law and order; and—most important of all—the separation of many agrarian workers from any ties to the land on which they labored. Not all western European societies (and certainly no Asian ones except for Japan) made that transition between the 14th and 19th centuries, and those that did made it to differing degrees and at different speeds. The first to become “fully capitalist” in the modern sense were the British and the Dutch, followed quickly by the North Americans (who had no feudal past to shed) and by the French (who shed it rather brutally in the years of terror following the French Revolution). The Germans and the Italians only fully consolidated the capitalist transformation of their domestic economies after political unification in/around 1870, the very time at which a political revolution in Japan (the Meiji Restoration) triggered parallel changes there. And the Russians really only got their capitalist transformation under way after the abolition of serfdom in 1861—too late in the event to prevent their defeat later by first Japan and then Germany—defeats by more fully militarized capitalist economies that triggered not a capitalist revolution in Russia in 1917 but a state socialist one.

Definitions Understanding the emergence of capitalism as described in the previous sections enables us to define its core features by pointing out both what it is and what it is not. Capitalism is a way of organizing economic activity that is neither feudal nor state socialist. It is not ­feudal—in that what was produced in a purely feudal society were things that were almost exclusively consumed by those who actually made them, the vast majority of whom were agricultural workers tied to the land as a producing class denied the right to live and

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work elsewhere. Capitalism is also not state socialism— in that the things produced in socialist societies are indeed goods and services consumed by people other than those who actually make/provide them but producers who nonetheless do not own either the means of ­production with which they work or the products they themselves generate. Feudal societies do not produce things that are bought and sold. They are not commodity-producing economies. State-socialist ones ­ do produce commodities, but those commodities are not the private property of either those managing or those laboring in the factories and offices from which they actually emerge. So capitalism is not feudalism: in capitalist economies, what are produced are things to be bought and sold. Nor is capitalism state socialism: instead, ­everything that is bought and sold in capitalist economies is the private property of those doing the buying and selling; and the force compelling economic activity is the pursuit of personal/corporate profit, not the meeting of state-specified output targets. Capitalism ­ combines commodity production and private ownership; and because it does, it remains a far more dynamic form of economic organization than either the feudalism that preceded it or the state socialism with which it competed for most of the 20th century. In a capitalist economy, things are made in order to be sold. Most of what any one worker makes he or she does not personally consume. Instead, the things produced go off to market to be bought by others; and they start that journey as the private property of the class of men (and occasionally women) who both own the factories/fields/offices in which the goods and services are first created and the raw materials consumed in their production. But most of the people active in those factories/fields/offices do not own the buildings, the land, or the raw materials with which they labor. What they do own is their labor power, which they sell (as simply another commodity) to their employer in return for a money wage—a wage they then spend buying the products and services made by others. Survival in a feudal economy ultimately required access to land. Survival in a capitalist one ultimately requires access either to property or to employment. Those who lacked access in a feudal society invariably died. Lacking access to property or employment in a capitalist society, people once died but now more likely will be sustained by modest levels of social welfare. Either way, what surrounded the person in a feudal economy was the political structure of aristocratic landownership. What surrounds the person in a capitalist one is the political underpinnings of a more extensive system of private ownership. Feudal aristocrats grew more powerful by capturing land and resources from

aristocratic enemies, normally by mobilizing peasant armies to fight each other. Capitalists prosper by outcompeting each other in stable markets that occasionally benefit from wars but more normally flourish without them and by holding wages down relative to profits. Capitalism and feudalism occupy entirely different worlds.

Varieties of Capitalism For most of the last century, the bulk of the available scholarship on capitalism treated the private ownership of the means of production, the existence of labor and commodity markets, and the pursuit of profitability and greater market share as the defining features of a capitalist way of organizing economic life. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the recent move of the Chinese economy toward private ownership—both of which effectively removed the notion of state socialism as a major ideological alternative to capitalism—the space has recently opened up for a greater sensibility to the various ways in which those defining elements can be and historically have been combined. Recent scholarship has therefore become more attentive to how ­capitalism itself has altered over time and how different forms/models of capitalism have emerged in different periods. To round out our definition of capitalism, we too need to develop that sensitivity. The changes in capitalism over time are reasonably easy to spot. All capitalist economies began initially with some degree of commercialization of agriculture and some limited manufacturing sector in which the competing firms were tiny by modern standards (employing few people and modest amounts of what are, in modern terms, primitive technologies). They also emerged with a very limited banking sector and with trade flows that were normally rather limited and local, though invariably they also emerged with some statesponsored longer-term trade routes as shipping developed and the oceans were explored. But by the end of the 19th century, many of these early institutional forms had already changed in the most developed and successful capitalist economies. Each major economic sector by then had several large companies as well as many small ones. The size of individual factories was often larger and the number of people employed significantly greater. And with size had come new needs—for professional management, more extensive banking support, and access to larger and larger markets. Small-scale liberal capitalism, that is, was progressively giving way by the end of the Victorian period to large-scale, more organized capitalism—one moreover in which the state itself was coming to play an increasingly important and major role.

Capitalism

Of course, political support for small-scale capitalism was vital from the outset. Even Adam Smith had the state providing defense, law and order, and a set of public goods (ones that private enterprise found it difficult to sustain)—in his case, primarily publicly provided education. But then, as the size of major capitalist units grew, new political needs arose as well: new social policies to offset the industrial unrest of large employed labor forces and new economic policies to guarantee the larger scale of purchasing power required in commodity markets if the goods produced by these companies were fully to be sold. The modern state developed, that is, both a welfare role and a role as economic manager that were missing from early capitalism so that in the modern era a capitalist way of organizing an economy has come to require the maintenance of a delicate balance between the needs and interests of those who own and manage the economy, those who lack that ownership credential and have only their labor power to sell, and those who—for whatever reason—neither own capital nor are able to participate in paid labor. Maintaining that balance is a key role for the modern state. How that balance is struck varies both over time and between national economies. In advanced industrial economies, capitalism had its fully developed welfare phase from 1945 to at least the 1980s and has been in a more neoliberal condition (with less active state management and more limited welfare provision) in many of them since. But now, as before, these economies remain organized on national lines. They each have their own state and their own culture, and each in that sense has settled into a slightly different form/model of what is basically still the same thing—capitalism. Some of those differences stretch back deep into the 19th century. Early capitalist industrializing economies like the British and the American were galvanized by strong and independent middle classes, requiring little state help beyond legislation to limit the economic power of the emerging working class. Later industrializers—­Germany and Japan are particularly relevant here—began as “catch-up economies” led by aristocratic classes worried about colonization by more developed systems; and in those, from the beginning, the state management of the economy was greater, bigger companies were encouraged to operate more like cartels than competitors, and military spending was initially a greater ­fraction of the whole. Those later industrializers had a more traumatic route to contemporary modernity—passing through global military defeat and externally imposed reconstruction either side of 1945—and they now have a more managed form of capitalism than do their American and British counterparts. In Germany in ­ particular, labor rights are stronger, trade union ­

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membership is higher, and levels of industrial concentration are greater than in the United States; and yet it is Germany and Japan, not the United States or the United Kingdom, that currently run the larger trade surpluses and the ­bigger manufacturing sectors. Capitalism began as a system of economic activity driven by unregulated competition. It has come down to us now as a system of competing models/types, a system in which the degree of public regulation and state activity necessary to longterm success is itself a matter of very deep disagreement and ongoing contention—contention about how to manage advanced capitalisms and contention about how to design emerging ones.

Debates There is nothing particularly new, however, about the existence of contention. For people have been debating capitalism ever since it arrived; and indeed there is an important sense in which disagreements on the character and consequences of capitalist ways of organizing economic life actually triggered the 19th-century ­emergence of social science as we now know it. Such disagreements certainly stood at the heart of the 20thcentury political debate on how best to organize advanced industrial societies; and they remain key elements dividing modern electorates in those societies, in former communist societies, and across the underdeveloped world. In a very real sense, the basic choices in play here remain what they have always been: to ­celebrate capitalism, to reform it, or to replace it with something better. Those who celebrate capitalism in its unregulated form are these days known as neoliberals. They see capitalism’s great strength to be its release of market forces and explain any pattern of economic underperformance primarily in terms of blockages on the free interplay of supply and demand. For neoliberals, the public regulation of businesses can easily become excessive, and the proper workings of labor markets can easily become distorted by overly generous welfare payments or by overly powerful trade unions. Neoliberal policy tends to be directed, therefore, against all three and, in doing so, invariably clashes with public policy designed by those less convinced that the free play of market forces is the best guarantee of individual freedom and the optimum allocation of resources. Neoliberalism is still challenged today by a social reformist strand of thought and politics that treats unregulated markets as creators of economic and social inequality and that accordingly advocates the democratic management of markets to ensure stability of demand and employment in the short term and a level playing field for all participants over the long run.

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Social reformers at least believe that capitalism can be properly managed in this fashion. To their left—fewer in number these days—are more radical thinkers who do not. Many of these more radical critics of capitalism trace their intellectual origins back to the writings of Karl Marx. Accordingly, they remain convinced that the contradictions between capital and labor in capitalist economies are ultimately irresolvable and ­ that, in consequence, the best solution to the instabilities c­ reated by capitalist ways of organizing economic life is to replace those ways entirely by their socialist alternative. Capitalism is, in all its essentials, a way of organizing economic life based on choice: the choice of employer, the choice of commodity, and the choice of market. It is also, in all its essentials, a way of organizing economic life that invites choice of an intellectual and political kind. The best way to pursue that final kind of choice is to read on; see the recommendations that follow. David Coates See also Business in Politics; Civil-Military Relations; Conservatism; Development, Theories of; Elite Theory (Pareto); False Consciousness; Hegemony; Keynesian Economics; New Left; Procedural Justice; Social Class; Social Welfare; Socialism and Communism; Tokenism; Weber’s Protestant Ethic

Further Readings Coates, D. (2015). Capitalism: The basics. New York, NY: Routledge. Fulcher, J. (2015). Capitalism: A very short introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Ingham, G. (2008). Capitalism. Cambridge, England: Polity. Saunders, P. (1995). Capitalism: A social audit. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.

Caste System The caste system divides society in the Indian subcontinent into mutually exclusive, hereditary groups called castes, ranked by ritual status. Traditionally, South Asians believed that a man’s social capacities were known from the caste into which he was born, and his caste prescribed the occupations that he could enter. The most distinctive features of caste ideology are the emphasis on the innately unclean state of the lowest-ranked castes, formerly known as untouchables, and the strict exclusiveness of the so-called clean castes in relation to marriage. There is virtually no mobility of individuals

across different caste groups. Nothing quite like the caste system has evolved in other parts of the world. When India became independent in 1947, a political goal was to create a “modern,” casteless India. India abolished caste and created for the formerly untouchable castes a system of quotas (“reservations”) in university admissions, government jobs, and political ­ posts. Since 2007, the poorest state of India (Bihar) has identified the worst-off castes and targeted initiatives to them. The reservations have helped keep the concept of caste very prominent in politics. The gap in average socioeconomic status between high and low castes remains large. This entry emphasizes the economic impact of the caste system. The word caste corresponds to two distinct concepts: jati (community) and varna (archetype). The jati is the community within which one is required to be married and which forms social identity. Dwellings in villages are usually clustered by jati. In contrast to the vast number of jatis, varna is a scheme with only four divisions, which are symbolic types: first, priests; ­second, warriors; third, merchants and agriculturalists; and fourth, laborers and servants. The formerly untouchable jatis occupy a place outside the varna scheme (they are “outcastes”), whereas all other jatis are within it. The usual name for the formerly untouchable castes is Dalits, which means oppressed in Sanskrit. The official name is Scheduled Castes. The name comes from the schedule made by the British colonial government in 1932.

Discrimination In standard economics, individuals are rational actors, and economic forces undermine institutions that impose large costs on them. In this view, discrimination in competitive markets will not persist, since the discriminators will have higher costs than the nondiscriminators. Behavioral economics, with the first papers appearing in the 1970s (most of them written by psychologists), has a different model of the individual: he is a “quasi-rational actor” influenced by seemingly irrelevant features of context, as emphasized in Strand I of behavioral ­economics, and an “enculturated actor” concerned with cultural meanings, as emphasized in Strand II. Behavioral economics helps explain the persistence of the caste system in South Asia. Discrimination is common in the workplace in India in part because employers value “family background,” a proxy for caste. In the rural sector, the “pollution barrier” between former untouchable castes and all others remains strong. A study of 565 villages in 11 Indian states found that despite legal bans, “untouchability” continues to be practiced in almost 80% of the villages.

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The following percentages indicate the proportion of villages in which each kind of discrimination was observed: restrictions barring Dalits from selling milk (47%); restrictions barring Dalits from selling any goods in local markets (35%); separate utensils in ­restaurants and hotels for Dalits and non-Dalits (32%); and denial to Dalits of access to water for irrigating their fields (33%). For the last example of discrimination, Siwan ­Anderson estimates the cost in north India. This study compares two types of villages: in the first type, the majority of the land is owned by higher castes; in the second type, the majority of the land is owned by lower castes. Since the origins of the distribution of land by caste groups go back hundreds of years, the distribution can be viewed as a “natural experiment,” and its causal impact can be identified. This natural experiment finds extensive and costly discrimination against Dalits by higher-caste owners in markets for groundwater for irrigation. In villages where lower castes own most of the land, they own the majority of the private groundwater extraction mechanisms and rent them to the lower-caste tenants. But in villages where higher castes own most of the land, it is they who own the majority of the private groundwater extraction mechanisms, and they rarely trade with lower-caste water buyers: a severe breakdown of groundwater ­markets occurs. Comparing the two types of villages, holding all else equal, lower-caste water buyers have agricultural yields 45% higher if they reside in a village where the majority of water sellers are of lower caste.

Stereotype Threat Standard economics proposes that the individual is autonomous. His preferences and traits do not have social influences. In contrast, psychology, sociology, and anthropology recognize that one’s sense of self and ­preferences are constituted through concepts and practices and social interactions that society makes available. Individuals have many social identities (that is, groups relevant to their sense of self): a person may, for example, think of himself as a parent, spouse, landowner, Hindu, member of a particular caste, and member of many other groups. Changes in context that change which identity is cued affect how the individual behaves. An experiment by Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey assessed the effect of the salience of caste on boys’ intellectual performance in classrooms. The students in a group, who did not know each other, were rewarded financially and in private for the number of mazes that they solved (which was never publicly revealed). The control condition, in which each student’s caste was not revealed, demonstrated that boys of

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former untouchable castes solve mazes just as well as high-caste boys. However, publicly revealing caste identities reduced the performance of the low-caste boys. Holding all else equal, low-caste boys solved 23% fewer mazes than high-caste boys if they were in a mixed-caste setting where caste was made salient by revealing caste identities. This is an example of stereotype threat: cueing a social identity stereotyped as mentally deficient actually impairs the performance of members of the group. Stereotype threat applies widely, for example, in the United States to women and African Americans, in China to rural household status categories (hukou), and in Slovakia to Romas (gypsies). The persistence of stereotypes of mental inferiority, even when they are pure fictions, can be explained with a simple model in which confidence boosts performance. The stereotype may cause stigmatized individuals to comparatively underrate their achievements, which undermines their self-confidence. With lower self-confidence, they underperform. The result is that there can be what Hoff and Joseph Stiglitz call “equilibrium fictions”: stereotypes that rank groups by intelligence actually create productivity gaps between groups that sustain the stereotypes. This is the point of the philosopher Ian Hacking about “making up people”: the creation of ways to categorize people produces behavior that would not occur in the absence of the labels. Psychologists have shown that categories have broad influences on behavior. For example, an experiment in the United States establishes the almost immediate and dramatic effects of gender salience in the classroom. The experiment manipulated the salience of gender in kindergartens over a two-week period. In the low-salience condition, children continued to experience a preschool environment in which the teacher did not make gender explicit. In the high-salience condition, the children experienced a preschool environment in which the teacher labeled individuals with gender terms (for example, the teacher said “Good morning, boys and girls,” instead of “Good morning, children”) and used gender-based organization (for example, assigning boys and girls to separate bulletin boards). This mild treatment made the children less likely to play with children of the other sex. Unlike the caste system, the treatment did not impose any prohibitions on interactions between the categories (boys and girls), yet the salience of the categories caused the children to segregate themselves by gender in free play.

How Did the Caste System Emerge? Whereas ideas of caste can be traced back to Hindu texts dated thousands of years ago, caste-like society

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began to take shape in South Asia as a rigid system of division in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ruling groups in the 18th century found that they could increase their legitimacy and consolidate their power by projecting themselves as heirs of a known heroic tradition, the warrior kings, and by naming and ranking classes of their subjects in a caste-like way. Sustained interaction between Muslim and Hindu dominion builders increased the significance of jati titles. In the 19th century, landowners in India faced volatile markets and greater revenue demands from the ­British East India Company. The landowners responded by turning ever-larger groups of tenants and laborers into “impure” menials defined by the criteria that had earlier applied only to the groups in ritually unclean occupations, such as waste removal and leatherwork. Being “unclean” meant that the groups’ caste status was to be defined as an inherited quality of servitude. Formerly open-ended labor and tenancy relationships were thus turned into caste-based service bonds. This sometimes occurred for casual labor in factories as well. The caste system is the product of the historical encounter between Indian and colonial rule. The 19th century represented a shift in the language and reality of social life. Caste became capable of expressing, organizing, and systematizing what had been diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization across India.

Why Caste Reproduces Itself Why does caste persist? Although the caste system lowers market efficiency and causes suffering, no one by acting alone has the power to abolish it. Given that it is in place, individuals have opportunities to use it as a resource. If everyone else is in a network, an individual normally wants to be in a network, too. Historically, most South Asians have not embraced castelessness but tried to use the caste system as a toolkit of concepts, shared community, narratives, and worldviews that could give them access to social insurance and to jobs and dominance over individuals in lower-ranked castes. Beliefs about the superiority of upper castes are held by almost everyone in the Indian subcontinent, and social structures support these beliefs. Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig provide a startling example of the persistence of networks based on caste. In Bombay, networks of lower-caste men have controlled particular occupations for generations and do not admit outsiders. Women do not participate in these networks. When the Indian economy opened itself up to the world market in 1991, returns to Englishlanguage schooling in Bombay (Mumbai) rose steeply for both boys and girls. English education increased the likelihood of obtaining a white-collar job, whereas

education in the local language channeled students into working-class jobs. However, the proportion of lowercaste boys schooled in English grew relatively slowly in the postreform 1990s (from about 20% to 35%), whereas the proportion of lower-caste girls sent to English-language schools almost quadrupled (from about 10% to almost 40%). The gender difference may reflect both a positive externality associated with men’s participation in the networks and also tacit restrictions on occupational mobility for the sake of preserving the networks in the working class. The long-run stability of the caste system requires caste endogamy. In an analysis of urban, well-off, highly educated Indians, Abhijit Banerjee and colleagues showed that 70% of people married within their caste. The authors argue that caste-based preferences in ­marriage are likely to persist because the cost to an individual is typically low: the observed matching is close to being what most individuals would have wanted on the basis of characteristics other than caste. In a survey, three fourths of Indians state that they are opposed to marriage of individuals from different jatis. An individual is never fully aware of his culture, since it shapes how he processes information. Culture is a social construction with public good (or public bad) properties in the sense that it affects everyone in the group. The influence of culture on cognition and its public good properties make it difficult to end the caste system despite its high social cost. In summary, the broadly accepted defining features of the caste system are hierarchy and difference, giving rise to “pollution,” endogamy, and occupational differentiation. Karla Hoff See also Discrimination; Stereotypes

Further Readings Akerlof, G. (1976). The economics of caste and of the rat race and other woeful tales. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90(4), 599–617. Anderson, S. (2011). Caste as an impediment to trade. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3, 239–263. doi:=10.1257/app.3.1.239 Banerjee, A., Duflo, E., Ghatak, M., & LaFortune, J. (2013). Marry for what? Caste and mate selection in modern India. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 5(2), 33–72. doi:10.1257/mic.5.2.33 Deshpande, A. (2011). The grammar of caste. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Dirks, N. B. (2001). Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University  Press.

Charisma Hilliard, L. J., & Liben, L. S. (2010). Salience in preschool classrooms: Effects on children’s gender attitudes and intergroup bias. Child Development, 81(6), 1787–1798. Hoff, K., Kshetramade, M., & Fehr, E. (2011). Caste and punishment—the legacy of caste culture in norm enforcement. Economic Journal, 121, F449–F475. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011.02476 Hoff, K., & Pandey, P. (2014). Making up people: The effect of identity on performance in a modernizing society. Journal of Development Economics, 106, 118–131. http://dx.doi .org/10.1016/j.jdevec0.2013.08.009 Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2010). Equilibrium fictions: A cognitive approach to societal rigidity. American Economic Review, 100, 141–146. doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.141 Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2016). Striving for balance in economics: Towards a theory of the social determination of behavior. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 126 B, 25–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeb0.2016.01.005 Kumar, H., & Somanathan, R. (2016). Caste connections and government transfers: The Mahadalits of Bihar. Delhi: Delhi School of Economics. Munshi, K., & Rosenzweig, M. (2006). Traditional institutions meet the modern world: Caste, gender, and schooling choice in a globalizing economy. American Economic Review, 96, 1225–1252. doi:10.1257/aer.96.4.1225 Shah, G., Mander, H., Thorat, S., Deshpande, S., & Baviskar, A. (2006). Untouchability in rural India. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications.

Charisma Charisma is a quality that may be attributed to an individual based on that individual’s behavior and the situation that the individual is in. This entry provides an overview of charisma, describes conceptualizations of charisma, explains to whom and when charisma is attributed, clarifies the importance of charisma, elaborates on how charisma works, and concludes with some trends in charisma research.

Overview Charisma is not a quality inherent to an individual; rather, it is those around who recognize and confer ­charisma upon that individual and who can withdraw this attribution if that individual is no longer seen as deserving. To elicit charisma attribution, individuals can engage in distinct behaviors. Such behaviors include crafting a compelling vision, giving stirring speeches, exuding optimism even in the face of adversity, showing self-sacrifice, and engaging in courageous symbolic acts that exemplify espoused values. The chances of being recognized as charismatic are further enhanced in

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situations that are conducive to the emergence of a charismatic leader—such as real or apparent crises. Once individuals enjoy the glow of charisma, they hold great sway over the thoughts and actions of others and, as such, seem destined to be leaders.

Conceptualizations of Charisma Despite the ease with which people use and understand the term, there is no consensual definition of charisma. In 2016, John Antonakis and his colleagues conducted an accounting of definitions of charisma and found that they feature more than 13 different elements. The term charisma first appeared in ancient Greek texts, in which it referred to a “gift,” often a spiritual one, that distinguished individuals who were believed to have a transcendental connection. For centuries, the usage of the term was confined to religious settings. In the 1920s, however, the German sociologist Max Weber transformed the understanding of charisma by establishing the idea of charismatic authority as an antidote to traditional authority and legal authority. Charismatic authority gave power to those who were able to appeal to others emotionally and influence them by way of values and beliefs rather than by exerting coercion based on a hereditary position or a bureaucratic mandate. Weber described charisma as an extraordinary quality that sets an individual apart while yet drawing others toward that individual. Charismatic leadership, Weber suggested, is evident in organizations and socie­ ties, particularly during times of change, potential danger, and turnaround. Weber’s work eventually led, in the 1970s and 1980s, to the beginnings of charisma being more widely used as a term and investigated in organization science, political science, sociology, and psychology. At the time, scholars such as Bernhard Bass, James MacGregor Burns, Jay Conger, James Downton, Robert House, and Ann Willner suggested that charisma was at the heart of successful leadership. In their respective writings, they proposed, in one form or another, a model of leadership that consisted of two approaches: a rational transactional approach, which describes leadership as an economic exchange process between leaders and followers, and an emotional transformational approach, which sees leadership as a relational process by which leaders draw upon charisma to inspire and empower followers to join in the pursuit of a collective goal. The combination of the two approaches, rather than one or the other, was thought to make leaders effective and successful. Charisma, thus, was captured in terms of leaders’ behaviors and traits as well as in terms of outcomes. The problems with these accounts have been twofold: first, these accounts mixed up

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charisma as a specific quality with an array of other beneficial leadership qualities; second, these accounts confused charisma with success, thus confounding charisma with its outcome. Despite such problems, these accounts referred to as new-genre leadership theories marked the start of an exciting era of charisma research. Although this research has not yielded a consensual definition of charisma, it has shown that charisma is an attribute that followers ascribe to their leader, depending on the leader’s behavior and the situation in which these behaviors are displayed. Essentially, charisma is in the eye of the beholder; it is not a quality or trait that a person naturally possesses.

Charisma Attributions The process by which followers attribute charisma to a leader involves a cognitive matching between the followers’ (culturally influenced) expectations concerning a charismatic leader and their perceptions of the leader’s actual characteristics and behaviors. To the extent that the expectations match reality, followers confer charisma upon their leader. Theory and research primarily conducted by Jay Conger and Rabindra Kanungo show that some behaviors are particularly conducive to charisma attributions. These include articulating a compelling vision that breaks with the status quo and offers a perspective for a brighter future; appealing emotionally to values, often during passionate speeches; remaining confident and optimistic even when facing great challenges; making self-sacrifices and risking personal losses for the benefit of the followers; and showing unconventional, courageous behavior that conveys the values for which the leader stands. To the extent that they display these behaviors, leaders enhance the chances of meeting followers’ expectations concerning charisma. The most common setting in which people attribute charisma to a leader occurs when the leader gives a speech. Patricia Wasielewski examined patterns of charismatic speeches and found that they generally follow three consecutive steps. In step 1, the leader evokes the emotions that are expected in the given situation and that are already shared by the audience. Because the leader seems to feel the same as the listeners, a community of shared feeling emerges that gives legitimacy to the leader and unites him or her with his or her listeners. In step 2, the leader revokes the emotions by questioning whether the communally shared emotions were appropriate to the situation. This introduces confusion among listeners and opens up the possibility for the leader to exert influence. In step 3, the leader reframes the ­emotions by explaining the appropriate emotions to be displayed and the action that listeners should engage in.

The delivery of the speech is important as well. Antonakis and colleagues identified a set of verbal and nonverbal influence tactics that enhance the speaker’s chance of being seen as charismatic. The verbal tactics include the usage of metaphors, stories, and anecdotes and of contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions; the articulation of high expectations paired with messages that strengthen the collective confidence that the ­expectations can be met; the display of strong moral conviction; and the expression of the sentiments held by the listeners. The nonverbal tactics include the usage of body gestures, facial expressions, and animated voice, usually in the service of conveying passion and emotion. Importantly, followers’ expectations concerning charisma are not fixed but change according to the situation or the context in which followers witness the leader in action. Weber and others pointed out that a real or apparent crisis is conducive to the emergence of a ­charismatic leader, as in such situations, people long for a courageous, optimistic leader with a vision. Furthermore, in the context of successful teams and organizations, leaders are more likely to be seen as charismatic. Interestingly, peripheral cues with little relevance to leadership can affect attributions of charisma, too. Juan Carlos Pastor and his colleagues found that when people are aroused (e.g., after having engaged in sport), they tend to attribute more charisma to leaders than when they are not aroused. Raina Brands and her ­colleagues found that male leaders are seen as more charismatic than female leaders when they are embedded in a centralized, hierarchical social network and that female leaders are seen as more charismatic than male leaders when they are embedded in a dense, egalitarian social network. Thus the chances of leaders being recognized as charismatic are not only dependent on the behaviors that the leaders display but also shaped by the situation or context in which the leaders find themselves.

The Importance of Charisma Charismatic leaders have been credited with changing the world, for better and for worse. Several meta-­ analyses, which examined the effects of charisma across many studies, empirically support the assumption that charisma adds to leaders’ effectiveness. Findings show that charismatic leaders achieve superior levels of performance, are remarkably persuasive and influential, transform followers’ values and aspirations, and motivate followers to exert extra work effort. Although charismatic leadership can inspire high performance and success, there is also evidence that charisma can come to depend on high performance and success. In a study of chief executive officers (CEOs) of major U.S.

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corporations, Bradley Agle and his colleagues found that organizational performance related to attributions of charisma to the CEO, but CEO charisma did not relate to subsequent organizational performance. Charisma is mostly described as a desirable quality, but research and history suggest that charisma can have a dark side. To differentiate between moral and immoral charismatic leaders, scholars including Robert House and Jane Howell have pointed to leaders’ motives. Those who pursue a personalized motive exude charisma to enrich and aggrandize themselves. They foster followers’ personal identification with the leader, which causes followers to become dependent on the leader. In contrast, charismatic leaders with a socialized motive tend to empower followers to seek benefits for a collective cause. Such leaders help followers reach higher levels of development and foster followers’ social identification with the cause or the organization that the leader serves. To avoid the dark side of charismatic leadership, Jane Howell and Bruce Avolio have offered a set of behaviors that leaders should engage in to offset negative consequences. These behaviors include, for example, engaging in open two-way communication, encouraging followers to think independently, and constructively considering and learning from criticism.

The Workings of Charisma Charisma has profound effects on followers. Boas Shamir and his colleagues argued that these effects are due to followers’ identification with the leader, internalization of leaders’ values, and strengthened efficacy beliefs and self-esteem. First, to the extent that followers identify with a leader, they seek to imitate the leader’s behavior and wish to please the leader. If they also identify with the group headed by the leader and with the social cause of the leader, they are likely to subordinate their own needs to those of the group and to be willing to exert extra effort in pursuit of the group’s collective goals. Second, internalization refers to the extent to which followers endorse the leader’s values and incorporate these values into their own self-concept. By internalizing these values, followers begin to strive for higher performance and see themselves as serving a common cause. Third, charismatic leaders strengthen followers’ beliefs in their own self-efficacy and the efficacy of the group by referencing past successes of the group, emphasizing the collective identity of the group, and raising followers’ self-esteem and self-worth. When followers believe that they collectively can actually achieve the leader’s vision, they are likely to set out to work toward the vision. Other scholars point out that a crucial element in the process of charismatic influence is emotion. Amir Erez

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and his colleagues argued that because charismatic ­leaders stir the hearts of followers, usually by communicating positive emotions, followers want to be around these leaders and open themselves up to their influence. Joyce Bono and Remus Illies found that charismatic leaders infuse followers with positive emotions by way of emotion contagion: charismatic leaders express strong emotions, and followers tend to mimic these emotions. Because positive emotions, in turn, facilitate performance, it has become a common explanation that the powerful effects of charismatic leadership on performance are due to the positive emotions that charismatic leaders evoke. Jochen Menges and his colleagues took this idea a step further by arguing that charismatic ­leaders’ emotional intensity, paired with their heightened social status, can leave followers “awestruck.” The psychological processes that kick in to deal with the emotions evoked by the leader are likely to absorb cognitive capacity, thus making followers vulnerable to the influence of the charismatic leader.

Trends in Charisma Research Because charisma is difficult to define and capture, charisma research has faced numerous challenges. Scholars such as Antonakis, Daan van Knippenberg, and Sim Sitikin have pointed out that further work is necessary to fully understand the causes and consequences of charismatic leadership. A specific focus in current research is on charisma attributions and the question of when and why charisma is attributed to a person. The downstream effects of such attributions, for both the leader on the receiving end and the followers who make the attribution, are under scrutiny. Temporal patterns are being explored, with a particular emphasis on the question of why and when charisma fades and whether it can be restored. Although the understanding of charisma is thus likely to evolve further in coming years, one insight has held true since Weber brought charisma to the attention of scholars. This insight is that charisma matters greatly and that those who come to be seen as charismatic hold a key in their hand to unlock the future. Jochen I. Menges See also Collective Action; Crisis Decision Making and Management; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Political Morality; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Women and Leadership

Further Readings Agle, B. R., Nagarajan, N. J., Sonnenfeld, J. A., & Srinivasan, D. (2006). Does CEO charisma matter? An empirical analysis of

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the relationships among organizational performance, environmental uncertainty, and top management team perceptions of CEO charisma. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 161–174. Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 293–319. Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. U. E. (2011). Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10(3), 374–396. Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1987). Toward a behavioral theory of charismatic leadership in organizational settings. Academy of Management Review, 12(4), 637–647. Howell, J. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1992). The ethics of charismatic leadership: Submission or liberation? Academy of Management Executive, 6(2), 43–54. Menges, J. I., Kilduff, M., Kern, S., & Bruch, H. (2015). The awestruck effect: Followers suppress emotion expression in response to charismatic but not individually considerate leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 26(4), 626–640. Shamir, B., House, R. J., & Arthur, M. B. (1993). The motivational effects of charismatic leadership: A self-concept based theory. Organization Science, 4(4), 577–594. Van Knippenberg, D., & Sitkin, S. B. (2013). A critical assessment of charismatic-transformational leadership research: Back to the drawing board? Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 1–60. Wasielewski, P. L. (1985). The emotional basis of charisma. Symbolic Interaction, 8(2), 207–222. Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization (Talcott Parsons, ed. and trans). New York, NY: Free Press.

Citizenship Citizenship refers to the legal status of membership of a political state. A citizen is an individual recognized in law as enjoying certain rights and possessing certain, limited responsibilities (obeying the law and paying taxes, for example). In political theory, citizenship is often understood in wider terms to invoke not only legal membership of a political state but also active engagement within one’s communities. Recent work on citizenship— centered on the notion of multiple citizenships—has sought to emphasize the complex and multilayered nature of citizenship in contemporary societies. This entry provides an overview of core elements of citizenship, a summary of conceptions of citizenship, and a synopsis of ways in which citizenship may be learned.

Overview Citizenship is a legal status, but it is also much more than this. To assert that “I am a citizen” of a given

jurisdiction (of this or that town or city, of this or that nation-state, of this or that community) is generally to claim membership in that entity, and all that it entails. It is also often to proclaim a particular identity, providing citizenship with an accompanying emotional bond or tie (usually in a way that is proud, though sometimes in a way that includes shame or regret). For these reasons, citizenship can be an inclusionary force—as, for example, when citizenship of a nation-state is granted to those seeking a new home—or it can serve to exclude— as for example when full citizenship rights are denied to particular individuals or groups. Reminding us that ideas of citizenship are intimately connected to principles of liberty, the Swiss-born French politician Benjamin Constant in 1816 distinguished between the “liberty of the ancients,” in which citizenship was essential in sharing collective governance, and the “liberty of the moderns,” in which citizenship serves to protect one’s private interests. This change is in line with increasing individualism. The way citizenship is understood is often affected by the size of a given political polity. In ancient times, citizenship was largely conceived as membership in a city-state and, where ­ democratic structures were in place, could be enacted through direct involvement in political life (though the status of the citizen was heavily restricted to the few). From the early Enlightenment period, larger nationstates developed. Within these, the legal basis of citizenship came to the fore, with citizens being holders of certain rights (often prescribed within a codified constitution), subject to the laws of the nation-state, and participating through representative systems of government, though of course who was a citizen and how this was enacted remained heavily contested. Since the 1990s, there has been a surge of interest in the concept of citizenship as an important adjunct to wider debates on theories of justice and in particular in how a reinvoking of ancient notions of citizenship—which places an emphasis on individual character and service to one’s communities—may promote social capital in contemporary societies. Over the last 30 years, a body of evidence has developed across a number of nations to suggest that there has been a decline in “social capital,” with citizens tending to withdraw from public life in favor of pursuing their private interests. In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in Public Life, Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues (1985) identified a decline in local political affiliations and relationships across American society, while in his seminal text Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam (2000) pointed to a similar falling off of communal associations. To a large extent, the resurgence of interest in active conceptions of citizenship over the

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recent years can be seen as a response to this deterioration of citizenship within public life. That is, the thesis has developed that by focusing on active forms of citizenship and their associated responsibilities, more ­ developed and sustained forms of democratic ­citizenship might be strengthened. This reaction and commitment to citizenship as a mechanism for reengaging political participation has found expression in the political discourse of many leading politicians—including Bill ­ Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, José ­ Zapatero, Barack Obama, and David Cameron—highlighting both the prominence and fluidity of the concept. However, critics of the “bowling alone” thesis have argued that although traditional community networks have declined, new electronic communities have emerged, often moving across traditional local and national boundaries. According to this argument, social capital has not so much declined as transformed.

Conceptualizing Citizenship All theories of citizenship posit the centrality of the concept of the “citizen” as providing a meaningful frame for understanding the normative and empirical nature of political behavior in contemporary societies. Where theories of citizenship differ is with regard to (1) the relationship between individual rights and the common good and (2) the recognition of multiple and sometimes competing levels of citizenship. Important to both of these are the extent of the level of expectation of political participation.

Individual Rights and the Common Good A standard refrain concerning notions of citizenship is that to understand what being a citizen entails, one must understand the nature of and relationship between rights and responsibilities. In classical liberal conceptions, citizens were holders of certain political and social rights that protected them from undue interference from either the state or their fellow citizens and enabled them to pursue their own private interests (or conceptions of the good life). The responsibilities of citizenship were limited—typically to obeying laws, ­ paying taxes, perhaps some form of military service, and (for those entitled) to vote in periodic political elections. In his influential liberal interpretation of ­ citizenship in the 1950s, T. H. Marshall understood ­ citizenship as developing through rights, namely ­ ­political, civil, and social. More recent theories of citizenship, while accepting the importance of rights, tend to reject this narrow interpretation of responsibilities and seek to place greater emphasis on the necessary and valuable political

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participation of citizens within their communities. For this reason, writers from a range of different perspectives—liberals, communitarians, and civic ­ republicans—have extolled the importance of active ­ notions of citizenship, that is, citizens playing a participatory role within their democratic, political communities. In this way, citizen responsibilities are widened from their n ­ arrow remit in classical liberal formulations. A key question here, and one that separates different theorists, is the reason active citizenship ­ is valued. For most ­liberals, political participation is important in allowing individuals to share their own interests, to monitor those of others, and to ensure that one’s right to pursue one’s own conception of the good life is not unfairly interfered with. In contrast, for most communitarian and civic republican theorists, democratic engagement is essential for human flourishing, either as the highest form of the good life (as in ­Aristotle’s classical ­formulation) or as a form of the good life that can be legitimately encouraged by the state. Of course, citizens can enact active citizenship in a number of ways. One way of framing different avenues of political participation is to differentiate between those actions that involve citizens engaging directly with the political decision-making processes (voting, interest/lobby group participation, standing for office) and those that occur between citizens as part of functioning communities (charitable work, membership of sports teams, taking care of one’s neighbors). These forums of action are not mutually exclusive and, indeed, often serve to mutually reinforce the others. For example, in the last two decades, a number of scholars (e.g., James Fishkin and Peter Laslett; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson) interested in the idea of citizenship have argued that political participation should be based on deliberation—the give and take of free, unforced, and informed political discussion—across a range of political and social forums, as it is through deliberation that citizens share their own interests while hearing those of others.

Multiple Citizenship A common criticism of the theories of citizenship that developed during the 1980s and 1990s was that they remained framed within the Enlightenment construct of the nation-state as the key organizing entity of citizenship. Scholars wishing to present an understanding of citizenship that reflected people’s complex range of associations identified two processes as particularly important to understanding citizenship in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: first, that many nation-states had become and were becoming increasingly diverse and heterogeneous; and second, that peoples around the

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world were becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent as a result of the extensive and ­widespread processes of globalization. There are a number of ways of conceptualizing multiple citizenship, including dual citizenship, multicultural citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, global citizenship, transpolitical citizenship, and postcolonial citizenship. In his work on multicultural citizenship, Will Kymlicka uses the distinction between (1) national ­ minorities in multination states and (2) ethnic groups in polyethnic states to explore the nature of multicultural citizenship in modern societies. For Kymlicka, the former are groups that have a shared cultural and ­ ­communal history, which usually includes a common language or languages and, crucially, have ownership rights over particular territories. A key challenge for modern nations is to recognize the specific citizenship rights of national minorities within or alongside the broader sense of national citizenship, for example through land treaties. The latter refers to groups of immigrants who possess a shared culture but do not hold any rights to land or territories and who are seeking to balance a commitment to national citizenship alongside the retention of core elements of their own cultures. A range of policies and mechanisms can support these ends, including freedom of religious expression and antidiscrimination laws. A different approach to conceiving multiple citizenship is provided by cosmopolitanism. Although a complex term, cosmopolitanism can be broadly understood as embodying the ideas that the world is a global community, that we share a common humanity, and that as such, obligations and political participation cannot be constrained by national forms of citizenship. This cosmopolitan ethic has ancient roots in the Cynic Diogenes’s assertion, when asked from where he came, that “I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês].” For cosmopolitans, such as Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, the communal attachments that underpin our different citizenship attachments can be considered as a set of concentric circles emanating from the individual (and including the family, the local community, the national community, and the global c­ ommunity) to the world. A further important aspect of this approach is its understanding of engagement in cosmopolitan communities as an increasing factor in our everyday lived experiences.

Learning Citizenship If citizenship and political participation are understood to be essential concepts in contemporary life, it is important to ask how best a commitment to participatory forms of citizenship can be cultivated. To this, there

are two common responses. First, the very process of participation is understood to be educative. Put simply, the more citizens engage, the more they learn how to engage and are encouraged to engage further. Not only this, but others come to respect this engagement and will be prompted to engage themselves. In this way, participation within one’s communities cultivates and breeds further participation, with learning citizenship being a lifelong process. Second, the education and schooling systems can act as key mechanisms for socialization into participatory forms of citizenship. Most jurisdictions around the world cite the goal of educating active, informed, and responsible citizens as one of the central aims underpinning their curricular arrangements. This goal is shaped by a host of processes and mechanisms that exist within schools, including student representative councils, extracurricular activities, servicelearning programs, and community initiatives. In ­addition, many nations include some form of civic education within their curriculum, either as a stand-alone subject or within wider humanities/social studies courses. Although ancient in origin, citizenship remains a central concept in understanding political behavior today. Though it permits different—often contested— interpretations, citizenship’s importance lies not just in political theory and public life but also in how we understand ourselves and our relationships to others within the various communities of which we are members. Andrew Peterson and Cindy Brock See also Activism; Civic Engagement; Civilian Intervention; Dictatorship; Direct Versus Indirect Democracy; Equality of Opportunity; Party Systems; Social Capital; Voting, History of

Further Readings Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London, England: Penguin. Barber, B. (2003). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (20th Anniversary Edition). Berkeley: University of California Press. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (Eds.). (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Constant, B. (1988). Constant: Political writings (B. Fontana, Ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Fishkin, J., & Laslett, P. (Eds.). (2003). Debating deliberative democracy. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Gutman, A., & Thompson, D. (2004). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Heater, D. (2004). Citizenship: The civic ideal in world history, politics and education. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1996). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Macedo, S., et al. (2005). Democracy at risk: How political choices undermine citizen participation, and what we can do about it. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and social class and other essays. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1996). Cosmopolitanism and patriotism. In J. Cohen (Ed.), For love of country (pp. 3–17). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Civic and Political Knowledge  and Skills Possessing political and civic knowledge is widely believed to be an important, even essential component of good citizenship. Although political and civic knowledge are similar, there are some differences. Civic knowledge is generally thought of as foundational information about the political, social, and economic system in which one lives (for example, the names of the three branches of the federal government in the United States) and often includes understanding the function of certain institutions (e.g., why civil liberties or access to multiple sources of news are important in democracies). This has been of long-standing interest but has intensified with recent concerns about low voting rates, ­especially among young people. As civic education has expanded in the recent past, increasing attention has been paid to developing high-quality test instruments in this area, composed of multiple-choice questions with keyed correct answers. These assessments are usually designed for the age-group from early adolescence through young adulthood and often include a section measuring civic skills as well. Examples of civic knowledge and skills tests are the National Assessment of Educational Progress for Civics (NAEP) and the series of cross-national studies of civic education conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA, discussed later in this entry). In contrast, measures of political knowledge are usually designed for adults and ask them to identify the names of political leaders or to demonstrate awareness of current political issues or the stands taken by

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political parties. The next three sections deal with assumptions and evidence about both civic and political knowledge and skills and also consider recent changes in the nature and acquisition of civic and political knowledge brought about by the Internet and social media. A subsequent section compares U.S. adolescents’ civic knowledge and skills with those in other countries and describes associations among the cognitive dimensions, attitudes of political trust, and expected participation.

Assumptions and Evidence About Political Knowledge and Its Value Many scholars and opinion leaders identify a book written in 1996 by the political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter as providing the basic foundation for this topic. That classic volume, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, defined political knowledge as consisting of factual knowledge about current issues or about political parties and leaders; these questions had been asked to adults in ­ telephone surveys. It is usually assumed that political information is useful to citizens, as it allows them to live their lives in conformity with the law. Furthermore, if voters know how to get information about candidates before an election, this political knowledge will allow them to support candidates who are likely to promote policies that will benefit them or their communities. One of the most quoted findings from this book focuses on individuals of lower socioeconomic status, a group that obtains low scores on these measures of political knowledge. The irony, the authors argue, is that these are the very individuals who could benefit from electing officials who hold positive views about concrete economic programs such as support for low-income housing or a higher minimum wage. Citizens in these groups are particularly likely to be disadvantaged by their lack of political knowledge. Henry Milner (a Canadian who worked extensively in Sweden) extended Delli Carpini and Keeter’s work. He argued that enhancing citizens’ political and civic knowledge, particularly about the issues and the positions of particular candidates, is a vital route ­ toward greater participation in politics. Furthermore, he argued that when citizens are knowledgeable and display their knowledge in the choices they make in voting and advocacy, governments are more likely to be circumspect in their actions. These assumptions about the primacy of citizens’ knowledge over more emotional factors in making political choices and about governmental responsiveness represents an ideal for which there are historical and recent counterexamples, however.

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Until about a decade ago, it was assumed that the majority of up-to-date political knowledge would be acquired by reading a newspaper (or watching television) or by talking with friends, neighbors, family, or coworkers face to face. Now the variety of media by which such information is available has changed rather abruptly. As Sarah Soberierja and Jeffrey Berry (2011) noted in their article titled “From Incivility to ­Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News,” political information is currently disseminated, received, and assimilated in a wide variety of ways. These include talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere, and social media. The information from these sources, according to Soberierja and Berry, is often composed of facts that have not been checked for ­accuracy and of unedited opinion. It can be argued that factually verifiable information is playing less and less of a role in candidate choice and other aspects of ­politics. This may be especially consequential in certain age-groups. A survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2012 concluded that social ­ networking sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) are an ­important component of political and civic engagement for Americans with 66% of social media users posting their views on issues, responding to others’ views, or encouraging others to act. The respondents between 18 and 29 years of age (the youngest group surveyed) were the most likely to use social media for civic or political activities. For example, the Pew researchers found that 42% of the 18- to 29-year-old respondents posted “thoughts on issues” whereas only 20% of the 65 and older respondents did so. The younger respondents were also more likely than any of the other age-groups to “follow o ­ fficials/candidates on social media” (Pew Research Center, 2012, p. 5). Finally, in an analysis of Internet use of upper secondary students in Chile, Denmark, and England, Amadeo (2007) found a positive association between Internet use and civic knowledge and between Internet use and respondents’ expectations for future civic and political activities. In short, there is ongoing debate about whether the increasing political use of the Internet and social media is positive or negative for gaining political knowledge and fostering informed political participation.

Assumptions and Evidence About Civic Knowledge and Its Value In contrast to political knowledge, which is largely acquired during late adolescence or adulthood, many are convinced that civic knowledge should be transmitted during students’ compulsory education. This means requiring courses in government and American history

and civics that do not emphasize partisan political information or partisan choices. Textbooks, often packed with factual knowledge about governmental leaders and events, along with lectures, recitations, or testing, are the vehicles expected to transmit civic knowledge. Some assume that learning facts about the history and founding of American political institutions creates citizens who throughout their lives will experience deep respect for the heritage and traditions of the country (as David Lowenthal argues in his 1998 book The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History). It is assumed that knowledge of the names and functions of the three branches of the federal government (including the circumstances in which they were established) and the principles of checks and balances established in the Constitution (and other facets of American exceptionalism) will promote respect for the actions of elected political leaders and their decisions. Many who accept these premises become concerned when students are encouraged to debate issues such as the current struggles toward achievement of equality rather than being required to learn facts about what the U.S. ­Constitution contains.

Evidence About Political and Civic Skills A number of individuals and groups suggest that political and civic skills and the willingness to practice them are as essential as content knowledge for effective citizenship. One example of this is Michael Burowoy’s call for a public sociology, made during his address as president of the American Sociological Association and followed with handbooks and materials on curricular approaches. In his view, education should equip students with knowledge and also the participatory and cognitive skills necessary for improving their communities. This includes, for example, the ability to identify major social problems about which there are dis­ agreements and skills to judge the extent to which journalists and other media sources are providing accurate and actionable information about pressing issues ­or potential solutions. Fathali Moghaddam, in a book titled The Psychology of Democracy, has taken a  more psychological approach, proposing a set of ­ 10 convictions citizens in democracies should possess. His list includes a number of civic and political skills. For example, the democratic citizen must “critically question everything . . . , revise opinions as the evidence requires, and seek information and opinions from ­different sources” (2016, p. 51). Many authors distinguish between cognitive or analytic skills like these and participatory skills, which include being able to collaborate and cooperate with others who hold different opinions, as well as the skill

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to speak in an articulate way in contexts of public advocacy. In their well-known 1995 book Voice and E ­ quality, Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady argued that civic skills often develop during adolescence. Of even greater importance is their conclusion that individuals who possess civic skills are likely to participate in civic life and to be effective. In the tests that compose the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the U.S. Department of Education makes a distinction between civic cognitive or intellectual skills and civic participatory skills when they measure students’ academic progress in the “civics” subject area (Amadeo, 2016). The intellectual or cognitive skills are described as the students’ ability to describe, explain, interpret, and analyze. The participatory skills assessed include “interacting, monitoring, and influencing” (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011, pp. 4–5). The NAEP tests are administered to students during Grades 4, 8, and 12. A 2015 review paper by Judith Torney-Purta and colleagues, which lays out a framework suitable for assessing college students, also distinguishes between cognitive and participatory skills.

Civic Knowledge and Skills of U.S. Adolescents Compared With Those in Other Countries Americans have become accustomed to hearing about the poor performance of their students in international tests of knowledge in fields such as science and mathematics conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the ­International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). In contrast, when nationally representative samples of young people (aged 14) in 28 countries were tested using a 38-item assessment in the IEA CIVED Study, the U.S. sample achieved the highest score on the civic skills component (see TorneyPurta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001). This measure included, for example, the ability to comprehend a mock election leaflet and to tell the difference between statements of fact and statements of opinion. Scores on the test’s civic knowledge component for students in the United States were also above the international mean. Students from homes with low literacy backgrounds and who did not aspire to college education had substantially lower civic knowledge and skills scores, however. In fact, the distribution of civic knowledge scores in the United States was bimodal. In other words, there was a substantial group of respondents with nearly perfect scores and a substantial group answering at little better than a chance level. The IEA CIVED Study identified several schoolrelated correlates of high knowledge and skills scores,

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which suggest the kind of civic education that is likely to be effective. Students who reported classroom study of four specific U.S. political institutions had higher overall knowledge scores than those who did not report such instruction (Torney-Purta & Barber, 2004). These educational researchers as well as David Campbell and other political scientists have shown that an open and respectful climate for classroom discussion and deliberation is associated with higher civic competence and participation. What might be the mechanism here? Christopher Karpowitz and Chad Raphael in ­their 2014 book titled Deliberation, Democracy and Civic Forums reported a study of adults’ discussions in o ­rganized civic or public forums and concluded that “through exposure to the argument of others, deliberative talk can help participants . . . enlarge their knowledge of issues and perspectives, . . . correct false beliefs . . . and arrive at more sophisticated views” (p. 69). The congruence of research findings about the importance of open and respectful discussion for developing civic knowledge is striking, whether adolescents or adults are considered. Analyses of the IEA CIVED Study also found that students who possessed more civic knowledge and skills were more likely to expect to vote as adults and to obtain information about candidates before voting, a significant predictor in all 28 countries (Torney-Purta et al., 2001). More knowledgeable students in the United States also held more positive beliefs about the overall importance of citizens’ conventional civic participation (voting, keeping up with political affairs). Civic knowledge was less substantially associated with the expected likelihood of volunteering, contributing to charity, or planning to engage in political activism (Torney-Purta & Barber, 2004). The IEA CIVED Study (2001) and the subsequent International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) (2010), from which these findings come, also included assessments of attitudes (e.g., sense of political efficacy, trust in political institutions). In a 2015 review of ­publications based on these studies, Ryan Knowles and Marialuisa Di Stefano found that few scholars appear to have examined civic knowledge in isolation. Most analyses relate knowledge to attitudes and participation. To give just two examples, looking across countries, Torney-Purta, Barber, and Richardson (2004) reported that trust in government was positively ­associated with civic knowledge in many democracies. However, in some postcommunist and Latin American countries, there was either no association, or higher knowledge scores were associated with less trust. Jon Lauglo (2013) confirmed these findings about trust and also found a significant association between civic knowledge and support for women’s political rights

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(which he presented as an example of a rationally based civic attitude). However, it is important to recognize that the extent of political participation in adulthood or the choice of a particular candidate in an election depends only partially on political or civic knowledge. Possessing knowledge could allow a voter to obtain and comprehend information about which candidate most closely matches his or her own position on issues, but the choice of whether to vote and for whom depends on many other attitudinal and motivational factors.

Conclusion The formation of political and civic knowledge and skills is essential for informed and active participation in democratic life. This has become especially important in the context of a proliferation of new ways in which citizens are acquiring news and information about political issues, candidates, and events. Many researchers argue that knowledge and skills (in particular civic knowledge and skills) develop during adolescence. And most agree that those individuals with well-developed civic skills are more likely to be effective in participating in their communities. Therefore, assessing political and civic knowledge and skills is important, as well as attending to ways to increase effective classroom approaches such as open and respectful discussion of issues on which there are differing opinions. Judith Torney-Purta and Jo-Ann Amadeo See also Citizenship; Civic Engagement; Democracy; Political Participation; Social Networking; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Amadeo, J. (2007). Patterns of Internet use and political engagement among youth. In P. Dahlgren (Ed.), Young citizens and new media: Learning for democratic participation (pp. 125–146). London, England: Routledge. Amadeo, J. (2016). Civic skills. In S. L. Schechter (Ed.), American governance ( Vol. 1, pp. 273–276). New York, NY: Macmillan Baum, M. A., & Groeling, T. (2008). New media and the polarization of American political discourse. Political Communication, 25(4), 345–365. Campbell, D. E. (2008). Voice in the classroom: How an open classroom climate fosters political engagement among adolescents. Political Behavior, 30(4), 437–454. Delli Carpini, M. X., & Keeter, S. (1996). What Americans know about politics and why it matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jeffries, V. (Ed.). (2009). Handbook of public sociology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Karpovitz, C. F., & Raphael, C. (2014). Deliberation, democracy and civic forums: Improving equality and publicity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, R., & Di Stefano, M. (2015). International citizenship education research: An annotated bibliography of research using the IEA ICCS and IEA CIVED datasets. Journal of International Social Studies, 5(2), 86–118. Lauglo, J. (2013). Do more knowledgeable adolescents have more rationally based civic attitudes: Analysis of 38 countries. Educational Psychology, 33(3), 252–282. Lowenthal, D. (1998). The heritage crusade and the spoils of history. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Milner, H. (2002). Civic literacy: How informed citizens make democracy work. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press. Moghaddam, F. (2016). The psychology of democracy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. National Center for Education Statistics. (2011). The nation’s report card civics 2010 (NCES 2011-466). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Pew Internet and American Life Project. (2012). Social media and political engagement. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Soberierja, S., & Berry, J. M. (2011). From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news. Political Communication, 28, 19–41. Torney-Purta, J., & Barber, C. (2004). Strengths and weaknesses in U.S. students’ knowledge and skills: Analysis of data from the IEA Civic Education Study. College Park, MD: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Torney-Purta, J., Barber, C., & Richardson, W. K. (2004). Trust in government related institutions and political engagement among adolescents in six countries. Acta Politica, 380–406. Torney-Purta, J., Cabrera, J. C., Roohr, K. C., Liu, O. L., & Rios, J. A. (2015). Assessing civic competency and engagement in higher education (Research Report No. RR-12-34). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Torney-Purta, J., Lehmann, R., Oswald, H., & Schulz, W. (2001). Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries: Civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~jtpurta Verba, S., Schlozman, K., & Brady. H. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic volunteerism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Civic Engagement Civic engagement consists of the expression of ideas, interests, feelings, knowledge, opinions, and attitudes toward the life of a given civic community. This can be articulated in different forms that can be of an individual

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or a collective nature. This entry provides insights into the different issues concerned with the definition of civic engagement and also the controversies surrounding its usage for conducting empirical research. It provides some examples of the implications of civic engagement as well as an overview of the ambiguities that are emerging regarding its usage in the current literature and also in policy practice. It also compares some indicators for measuring civic engagement with indicators traditionally used to measure cognate concepts, such as political engagement, civic participation, and political participation.

Overview In a historical period widely marked by an apparent decay in citizens’ interest in political and civic matters, civic engagement has become a key issue that is considered central at various levels. For example, policymakers consider civic engagement as indispensable in order to stimulate participatory behaviors; non-state actors—and the so-called civil society—refer to civic engagement as a crucial component for their everyday activities, which can include, for example, volunteering, lobbying, and fundraising; academics have considered civic engagement as a critical component for the fostering of social capital and to favor the reach of a common good for the community. Overall, there seems to be agreement on the idea that civic engagement is essential for establishing collective bases of participation in a given community, enhancing social solidarity, but at the same time for guaranteeing mutual respect and understanding between various social groups. In a seminal work published in 2000, Robert Putnam noted, for example, that social capital was declining in the United States. In his view, this reflected a growing and alarming lack of civic engagement and a dissolution in the social ties that brought together American citizens to engage in common activities in their communities. This, according to Putnam, was manifested in the ever-decreasing membership of individuals in civic organizations and in the relative decline in social interaction. This is a trend that is currently characterizing many consolidated and emerging democracies. However, other authors have argued that new forms of electronic networks and communities are emerging, replacing traditional ones. Civic engagement is often considered as a policy response to various social and public problems and is part of public policies aiming at stimulating active citizenship. The rationale is that civic engagement is central for community building and for the enhancement of social capital. Communitarian intervention, for instance, or community engagement, has been considered strategic by governments and by supranational organizations

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for favoring the fostering of forms of civic ownership in the community, whereby there is a lack of integration and solidarity between ethnic and social groups or generations. In research terms, the operationalization of civic engagement has attracted the interest of many scholars throughout the world who have been using indicators such as participation in volunteering groups, voting in elections, and personal interest in politics, among others, to measure levels of civic engagement in a given community. This unpacks the discussion relative to the ambiguities and controversies existing in finding a ­common denominator and definition of civic engagement. The concept is in fact a highly contested one. This is due to the multifaceted forms that it can take and to the various possible uses and operationalizations that can be made with it. It is important to note that in most cases, “civic engagement” is used interchangeably—and often mistakenly—with cognate but distinct terms such as “civic participation,” “civic activism,” “political engagement,” “political participation,” and, more broadly speaking, “active citizenship.” In this overview of the concept, the distinction is drawn between engagement and participation. Civic engagement is then compared with the associated—but dissimilar—concepts of political engagement, civic ­participation, and political participation. Last but not least, the importance of civic engagement as an essential element of active citizenship is noted.

Distinguishing Participation From Engagement In order to highlight the deep substance of civic engagement, it is essential to distinguish between engagement and participation. Martyn Barrett and Bruna Zani argued that engagement is more specifically based on the holding of interests, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes toward civic or political issues. Having an interest, a feeling, or an idea toward something, be it a civic or a political matter, does not necessarily imply assuming a participatory behavior. In a nutshell, an interest in a civic or political matter does not directly correspond to open participation in the polity or the community and does not necessarily lead to active forms of civic and political participation. For instance, someone could be interested in who is running for elections in a particular community, believing that, according to her or his opinion, a specific candidate should win, therefore following political blogs or TV shows where political issues are discussed but without participating in any campaigning for the support of such ­a candidate. Or, to draw another example, someone could have an interest in the well-being of everyone

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in the community and acknowledge the fact that there should be safety nets and mutual support for those who are poorer without actively participating in any volunteer activity or being part of an organization providing mutual help or lobbying policy-makers to introduce specific policies targeting such groups. The central issue here is therefore the level of distinction existing between cognitive and behavioral engagement, with the latter implying the assumption of participatory attitudes that may result in active involvement. In short, by referring to the first example, the support for a candidate at election time might result in either individual or collective efforts to support her or him: writing blogs or tweeting during the political campaign; supporting his or her political party by donating money; participating in public events in support of the candidate; and so on. With reference to the second example, having an interest in the more disadvantaged in the community might result in the individual joining a specific volunteer organization and actively participating in activities aimed at supporting and improving their life conditions; donating money to charity; or actively participating in a social movement that advocates for better living conditions. The distinction between individual and collective engagement and participation is also rather central in this context. Reading news, having personal feelings about a civic matter, and knowing about civic institutions are examples of individual forms of engagement, whereas the adoption of a certain lifestyle or the identification with a specific collective ideology have collective dimensions. Thus, an example of engagement in civic and political matters, at the individual level, could be considered as reflecting a personal interest in the life of the community. An example of individual participation in civic and political matters could be for instance adopting environmentally sustainable behaviors, such as for example recycling or donating money to a green organization or a charity, thereby supporting their initiatives. Last but not least, engagement is to be understood in light of its counterpart, which is disengagement. Again, the work of Putnam is essential in this sense, with a specific reference to his writings published in the second half of the 1990s that culminate with the publication of the book Bowling Alone. Disengagement can be described as, for instance, the lack of interest, knowledge, or emotional attachment to civic and political institutions and/or the refusal to recognize certain dominating ideologies or lifestyles. This results in a lack of behavioral and participatory attitudes toward the life of the community or polity. Different categories can be thought of in order to describe disengagement: ­apolitical, antipolitical, acivic, and anticivic. Each of them

indicates, for instance, a refusal, a lack of interest, and, in some cases, the expression of explicit forms of antagonism toward the existing civic and political institutions.

Civic Engagement: Three Perspectives The difficulty of providing a precise definition of civic engagement is due to the fact that this term is often used to refer to different forms of individual and/or collective involvement in the community and, more broadly speaking, in the polity of belonging. Three perspectives can be found in the literature:

1. a perspective inclusive of both community and political activities;



2. a perspective arguing for the replacement of civic engagement with alternative and more precise terminology; and



3. a perspective calling for a clear distinction between civic and political activities.

The first perspective takes into account a broad definition of civic engagement that includes both civic and political dimensions. Richard Adler and Judy Goggin argued—in their review of the literature on civic engagement—that definitions vary according to the different points of view and types of activity that are under consideration. In this regard, they claim that the existing literature can be summarized into four types that mix both civic and political elements and that entail forms of civic engagement such as community service, collective action, political involvement, and social change. However, approaches of this kind to the definition of civic engagement have been heavily criticized, with authors such as Ben Berger even calling for the necessity to find alternatives to replace a term considered ready for the dustbin. This second perspective points to various ambiguities, arguing that “civic engagement” is an overstretched term that has been used and operationalized with indicators associated with a variety of activities that assume both civic and political meanings and include volunteering in the civic community, following political programs, participating in interest groups, voting, and protesting, among others. The critique by Berger is important because it raises concerns about the exact meaning of the civic component of engagement, calling for a clear distinction from the political component. The third perspective, instead of refusing the usage of the term civic engagement, draws a separate line

Civic Engagement

between these two components. Civic engagement consists of the expression of communitarian attitudes that are central in determining the social capital of a given social setting. In this regard, Barrett and Zani, in underlining that “civic engagement” is a term used to denote an interest in the common good of a community, draw on examples such as having interests, feelings, and ideas that are exclusively referred to as civic dimensions. At the same time, they argue that political engagement clearly refers to holding an interest in a specific system of governance—be this local, national or ­supranational—and to public policy. Examples of these can be found in the expression of interest in political matters by following news regarding specific events but also in identifying with a particular political ideology. According to this perspective, holding awareness of the importance of civic institutions and gathering, for instance, information in order to acquire more knowledge about their functioning are considered important indicators in measuring civic engagement. On the other hand, following political affairs or events, having an interest in the working of political institutions, and acquiring further knowledge about their functioning are considered important indicators for measuring political engagement.

Prepolitical Elements of Civic Engagement Another question is that of how forms of civic engagement that are prepolitical can be accounted for. Berger’s criticism is illuminating, in the sense that much of the confusion in the literature regarding civic engagement has to do with the fact that most authors draw a link with formal and informal dimensions of political action and participation, attaching a strong political meaning to its definition. Joakim Ekman and Erik Amnå argue that this confusion has been created because civic engagement can be seen, in some cases, as a latent form of political participation insofar as it implies forms of engagement that might actually be of great significance for future political activities. The identification with a specific civic movement or ideology or the assumption of a specific lifestyle can in some cases result in the assumption of active political behaviors and in political participation. In short, showing an interest in crucial matters regarding a given community can eventually lead to forms of political engagement and political activism within the community. For example, showing an interest toward environmental matters and gathering information about this on the Internet can potentially lead to specific behaviors that could entail political activism, such as supporting a political party that ­advocates for a better environment or joining a protest organized in order to raise consciousness about

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environmental risk. In short, civic engagement can in some cases lead to political engagement and political participation.

Distinguishing Civic Engagement From Civic and Political Participation Engagement, either civic or political, can obviously but not necessarily subsume participation or lead to the activation of individual or collective participatory behaviors. Some of the literature on civic engagement includes in its measurement the use of indicators that are actually meant to be applied to cognate concepts, such as civic and political participation. Examples include enrolling in nongovernmental organizations that promote healthy living; voting in local or national elections; or rallying against a government to stop the implementation of a bill. All these cases count as examples of civic engagement, especially according to the first perspective introduced above. In light of the ­definitions and the discussion addressed by the third perspective on civic engagement, however, it is appropriate to argue that they are different. More precisely, they can be defined as examples of civic participation (participation in a group of interest focused on health), conventional political participation (exercising the right to vote), and nonconventional political participation (protesting outside formal channels of participation). Civic participation refers to the set of voluntary activities that are meant to provide, for example, mutual help or that try to face social and public problems emerging in the community. This of course implies a form of civic activism that is oriented toward the improvement of a particular society. Arguably, many activities of voluntary organizations are behavioral in the sense that they have the scope of promoting forms of mutual help and are based on the fostering of social solidarity. On the other side—and the seminal work of Sidney Verba is inspiring in this sense—political participation encompasses various modalities through which the influence on the political system and on public policy can be exercised, examples being voting, campaigning, protesting, expressing opinions or dissent through the use of social media, and actively joining a political movement. In short, it encompasses both conventional and nonconventional forms of political participation. The former include dimensions that are directly linked with the political arena and associated with electoral processes and therefore crucial for the survival of representative democracy. The latter instead involve a variety of actions that are usually not taking place in the normal channels of political representation and therefore can be located outside electoral processes.

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Civic Engagement and Active Citizenship Civic engagement is in most cases considered a prerequisite for active citizenship. This is a powerful concept used to denote all the processes through which citizens assume ownership of the community they live in by taking the responsibility to have a say in the elaboration of civic and political matters. On the one side, active citizenship can be thought of as a practice stimulated by public institutions through public policy with the aim of promoting civic and political engagement in order to shape participatory processes and ultimately improving the democratic bases of policymaking. From this perspective, active citizenship is an institutionally driven process aimed at favoring participatory behaviors with the purpose of facilitating access to the political system, to share responsibilities with the broad polity in determining public policies and also in promoting democratization. This is essential in neoliberal settings, where the aim is to enlarge the basis of democracy via the promotion of input legitimacy and to facilitate participation in governance, as well as to solve emerging social and public problems. Channels for participation can be different, but all serve the purpose of providing feedback and input to public institutions in planning specific policy interventions. Citizens, for example, will participate in the community in order to provide reciprocal assistance through volunteering, be actively involved in processes of deliberation regarding certain public policies by communicating with policy-makers about their preferences, join different organized interest groups in order to participate in community life, and express dissent from the making of a given policy by referring to the right to protest. On the other side, active citizenship can be thought of as a demand, which becomes particularly important whenever certain competing claims are made in civil society through different means by using both traditional and alternative channels of mobilization. This form of active citizenship is expressed outside formal channels of political participation—such as electoral politics—and takes expression thanks to the implementation of various forms of deliberation. At the same time, it takes place when public policy is insufficient or nonexistent, and individuals mobilize in collective action in order to solve a particular problem, therefore acting apart from—or in some cases replacing—public intervention. From this perspective, for example, c­ itizens will attempt to gain ownership of the social and political settings by trying to subvert the existing order (in the case of protests against an authoritarian government); self-mobilizing for the purpose of guaranteeing the wellbeing of the community, replacing the functions of

policy-makers when there is a lack of intervention; occupying and using abandoned public spaces for the organization of cultural and/or social activities, such as providing help for immigrants or acting as a meeting point for the support of disadvantaged people in a particular community. In both cases, Delli Carpini puts it very well: deliberation is a key component through which ideas, beliefs, and points of view are exchanged with the ­purpose of promoting the common good of the community. The centrality of civic engagement relies upon the activation of the cognitive understanding and the awareness of belonging to such a community. In short, it is an essential layer in the development of civic consciousness, both at the individual and at the collective level. This makes possible the recognition and acknowledgment of different values, orientations, and aims. Civic engagement is therefore at the basis of the adoption of participatory behaviors that make active citizenship possible. Cristiano Bee See also Activism; Citizenship; Democracy; Disengagement; Political Deliberation; Political Participation; Social Capital; Social Movements

Further Readings Adler, R. P., & Goggin, J. (2005). What do we mean by “civic engagement”? Journal of Transformative Education, 3(3), 236–253. Barrett, M., & Brunton-Smith, I. (2014). Political and civic engagement and participation: Towards an integrative perspective. Journal of Civil Society, 10(1), 5–28. Barrett, M., & Zani, B. (Eds.). (2015). Political and civic engagement: Multidisciplinary perspectives. London, England: Routledge. Bee, C., & Guerrina, R. (2014). Participation, dialogue, and civic engagement: Understanding the role of organized civil society in promoting active citizenship in the European Union. Journal of Civil Society, 10(1), 29–50. Berger, B. (2009). Political theory, political science and the end of civic engagement. Perspectives on Politics, 7, 335–350. Delli Carpini, M. X., Cook, F. L., & Jacobs, L. R. (2004). Public deliberations, discursive participation and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature. Annual Review of Political Science, 7(1), 315–344. Ekman, J., & Amnå, E. (2012). Political participation and civic engagement: Towards a new typology. Human Affairs, 22(3), 283–300. Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Civil Disobedience Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady. H. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic volunteerism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Civil Disobedience Civil disobedience is a political protest that is carried out in open defiance of legal or political authority. It necessarily involves a violation of law, such that its practitioners often anticipate that their protest will culminate in arrest and potential prosecution. The law that is violated is sometimes the focus of the protest, as was the case on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a White passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. It can alternatively be the case that uncontested laws are violated as a means of drawing attention to an unrelated set of grievances, as occurred throughout the autumn of 2014 when protesters in Hong Kong violated public order and traffic ordinances to demonstrate against the slow pace of democratic reform in the territory. Civil disobedience can be viewed as transgressive behavior due to its illegality, but it can also be situated on the outer edges of acceptable civic conduct. This is because civil disobedience is often characterized by an ethos of restraint and respect for others, not to mention a historical association with socially beneficial reforms in many democratic or democratizing societies. This entry surveys the tactics, rationale, conduct, and morality of civil disobedience before concluding with a brief discussion of its prospects.

Repertoires The repertoire of contention is a conceptual tool used in social movement studies to chart the range of tactics that are available to spatially and temporally embedded protest movements. Civil disobedience has become associated with a repertoire that includes but is not limited to sit-ins, occupations, trespassing, blockades, lock-downs, banner drops, tax resistance, illegal street theater, and jail solidarity. These tactics or similar ones have been deployed in various ways by a range of social movements, including the U.S. civil rights movement, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, the environmental movement, the feminist movement, gay-rights and disability-rights activists, the antiabortion movement, the Tea Party, and the antiglobalization and antiausterity movements. The repertoire of civilly disobedient tactics is not fixed but evolves over time to reflect activist innovation and

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technological progress. There is, for instance, an ongoing debate about the extent to which emergent online protest tactics, such as distributed denial-of-service attacks, should be characterized as an innovative form of electronic or digital civil disobedience. This debate touches upon the difficulty of determining whether a particular protest tactic or campaign should be categorized as an instance of civil disobedience. Once we move beyond the core idea of defiance to political or legal authority, it has proven to be surprisingly difficult to identify shared characteristics of civilly disobedient protest.

The Communication Thesis There have thus been extensive efforts to clarify the concept of civil disobedience by identifying its underlying rationale. The contemporary theoretical literature is, as Tony Milligan notes, dominated by a communication thesis, which states that the rationale for civil disobedience is to express opposition to contentious laws, policies, or practices and cultivate support for reform. The communication thesis is associated with the influential liberal philosopher John Rawls, who characterizes it as an appeal to the sense of justice of a particular audience. The thesis is also associated with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who characterizes civil disobedience as a means of pushing issues into the center of the public sphere. The thesis can differentiate civil disobedience from other forms of political or legal disobedience, such as conscientious objection and direct action. Unlike civil disobedience, neither of these protests is guided by the aim of expressing opposition; the aim of conscientious objection is to avoid enrollment in contentious practices, and the aim of direct action is to obstruct and prevent contentious practices. Civil disobedience entails significant risks for those who practice it, such that political theorists have paid considerable attention to the reasons for its use. The communication thesis identifies two considerations that lead agents to favor civil disobedience over less risky forms of expression. The first is that the risks associated with civil disobedience render it an effective means of expressing the depth and sincerity of agents’ opposition. The decision to communicate opposition through civil disobedience rather than lawful forms of expression demonstrates that agents care so deeply about their cause that they are willing to risk the possibility of arrest and prosecution. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that civil disobedience is thus a good means of testing the convictions of a potentially apathetic ­majority, which might revise its views when faced with opposition from a minority that cares deeply about a particular issue.

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The second is that civil disobedience can be more efficacious as a means of generating publicity than l­awful protest, as media outlets are often more likely to give coverage to protests that culminate in disruption to daily routines or confrontation with police. The ­ possibility that civil disobedience will be prosecuted opens up further opportunities for publicity, as defendants and their associates or sympathizers might exploit the proceedings to gain further exposure for their views. The publicitygenerating potential of civil disobedience is hampered by the danger that media outlets may focus on the attendant disruption at the expense of the underlying issues, but this is a risk often judged to be worth taking given the obstacles that confront resource-poor agents in gaining access to and influence over the public sphere. The communication thesis is not universally accepted as an account of the rationale for civil disobedience. The appeal of the thesis is that it captures an important dynamic of some prominent historical campaigns. The activists associated with the U.S. civil rights movement, for instance, framed their campaign as a moral protest against the injustice of racial segregation, with civil disobedience used as a means of dramatizing their critique of an unjust system. The problem, though, is that the rationale for protest acts that are often seen as civilly disobedient is not always best captured by the aim of communicating opposition. Civil disobedience is often used not merely to communicate but also to exert pressure on political opponents. There was, for instance, a coercive aspect to U.S. civil rights protest, which can be seen in the efforts of some activists to drain the resources of the criminal justice system through filling jail cells and refusing to cooperate with officials. This challenges the communication thesis, because civil disobedience does not in this instance appear to be an effort to persuade opponents of the merits of a cause. This attempt to persuade through reason requires a long-term shift in the values and opinions of one’s opponents, which is unlikely to be achieved through the exercise of force or the imposition of costs. The use of coercion might be compatible with the communication thesis if it is presented as a temporary measure to compel recalcitrant opponents to enter a dialogue with protesters. This is, in fact, a theme that figures in Martin Luther King Jr.’s defense of civil disobedience against racial segregation. Coercion is harder to reconcile with communication, though, if it constitutes an attempt to impose a political outcome without the intermediary stage of a dialogic process. This kind of coercive protest calls upon us either to revise the dominant communicative paradigm or to insist that such protest should be categorized as direct action, or some other mode of contention, rather than civil disobedience.

Nonviolence The issue of whether civil disobedience should be seen as an essentially communicative act will influence our account of the conduct that is compatible with it. This can be illustrated through considering the issue of nonviolence. There is no agreement among scholars over whether civil disobedience should be defined as nonviolent, but as a practice it certainly has a strong association with the tradition of nonviolent resistance. This is perhaps a reflection of the role that figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. play in shaping popular perceptions about civil disobedience. A commitment to nonviolence is, furthermore, an intuitive way in which “civil” disobedience might be distinguished from “uncivil” disobedience, such as riots, terrorism, or guerrilla warfare. If we conceptualize civil disobedience as a mode of address, this can furnish further reasons for limiting civil disobedience to nonviolent acts. The thought that there is a tension between the goal of communication and the use of violence is an important aspect of the theories of civil disobedience developed by Rawls and Habermas. Their accounts affirm nonviolence for three reasons. The first is that civil disobedience is seen as a means of expressing disobedience to law within the limits of a general respect for the rule of law. The avoidance of violence expresses the intent of protesters not to invite a state of lawless anarchy through their actions but to bring about improvements to the constitutional order through nonviolent and discriminating acts of unlawful dissent. The case for expressing respect for the rule of law is, in fact, sometimes taken as a basis for further requirements on civilly disobedient conduct, such as acting in public and accepting the legal consequences of one’s actions. The second reason is that civil disobedience is seen as a means of reaching out to members of the public in a way that respects their rational agency. The thought here is that the intent to communicate entails a certain attitude toward our audience such that we recognize their capacity and right to engage with our arguments. This respect is difficult to reconcile with modes of action that have the intended or unintended effect of limiting their rational capacities, particularly violence associated with physical or emotional harm. The third consideration is that violence can often detract from the intended message of the protest, for instance, through giving opponents an opportunity to discredit protesters as extremists and thus avoid a meaningful engagement with their grievances. The association between civil disobedience and nonviolence is not universally accepted. In part, this reflects disagreement over whether civil disobedience should be

Civil Disobedience

conceptualized as a communicative act. If we contend that civil disobedience is often coercive rather than communicative, it is more likely that we will see at least certain forms of violence as compatible with its rationale. Even if we accept the communication thesis, it is not immediately obvious that we should insist that civil disobedience should be nonviolent. This is because, as Kimberley Brownlee has argued, although the intent to communicate is incompatible with the threat or use of egregious forms of physical and emotional violence, it may not be incompatible with all forms of conduct that could plausibly be categorized as violent. This has been illustrated through the case of violence against property, which is defined—following the philosopher Robert Audi—as vigorous, malicious, or incendiary damage or destruction. The use of property destruction has been embraced by radical elements of the antiglobalization movement, particularly by anarchists who deploy “black-bloc” ­tactics—wearing black clothing, ski masks, motorcycle helmets, and other face-concealing and protective gear—at large-scale demonstrations. The damaging of commercial property, such as smashing windows of Starbucks cafes or McDonald’s restaurants, can ­certainly be presented as a noncommunicative attempt to impose modest costs on corporate targets. It is, though, possible to read such acts in a different way, as part of a ­symbolic and performative critique of capitalist i­nstitutions that contains an important expressive dimension. These acts can be seen as dramatized expressions of opposition to corporate power; for instance, black-bloc activists have spoken about using property destruction as a means of shattering popular perceptions about the inevitability of globalization. If we suppose that black-bloc violence is limited and discriminate and respectful of the physical and emotional integrity of persons, some scholars would situate it within the communicative approach to civil disobedience.

Justification and Rights The communication thesis might be thought to support the belief that civil disobedience should be treated as a routine means of political participation within democratic societies. It might, on this view, be treated as a form of political speech that should be accorded the same kind of recognition as other modes of political expression. In fact, political theorists—not to mention political actors—tend not to converge on this view of civil disobedience. The reason is that civil disobedience differs from other forms of expression in being an unlawful act, thus conflicting with commonsense ­intuitions about the duty to comply with democratic decisions. Even if we doubt the existence of such a duty,

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civil disobedience is a mode of contention that can cause significant disruption, impose societal costs, and exacerbate political conflicts. This is the case even if protesters adhere to a strict code of nonviolence. There is thus a lively theoretical debate about how civil disobedience can be defended in light of these concerns. The literature on the justification of civil disobedience has been dominated by two influential perspectives, which derive respectively from the liberal and radical democratic traditions. These perspectives ­converge on the view that there is a presumption against civil disobedience in a democratic society but suggest that countervailing considerations can override this presumption. The idea is that civil disobedience can be justified insofar as it functions as a corrective to a certain kind of malfunction in the institutional or cultural fabric of a democratic society, with each perspective offering a contrasting account of those malfunctions. The liberal account focuses on the case for civil disobedience in circumstances where the government has enacted legislation or tolerated societal practices that amount to infringements of the rights and freedoms of citizens. This is the case if, for instance, a government enacts legislation that violates the religious freedoms of a minority or fails to guarantee equal treatment for all before the law. The liberal approach is thus particularly well suited to the appraisal of protest movements that coalesce around calls for equal rights, such as campaigns against racial segregation or in favor of same-sex marriage. The radical democratic approach, by contrast, focuses on the case for civil disobedience in circumstances in which government has enacted legislation or reached collective decisions in an insufficiently democratic fashion. This would be the case if, for ­ instance, decisions are not preceded by sufficiently inclusive and robust public deliberation or if entrenched interests exert a disproportionate influence on proceedings. The radical democratic perspective is thus particularly well suited to the appraisal of protest campaigns in support of issues that are alleged to receive insufficient or partial consideration in policy-making, such as environmental concerns or the regulation of global ­ capital. The debate about the justification of civil disobedience has, in recent years, been augmented by a discussion about the moral right to civil disobedience. This may, at first glance, appear to be essentially the same kind of discussion, at least insofar as we think that having a moral justification to carry out civil disobedience is the same as having a moral right to this activity. There is, in fact, a distinction to be drawn here, as can be seen through recognizing that justifications refer to the strength of the reasons that we have for our action, while

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rights refer to the claims to noninterference or assistance that we have against others in relation to our actions. It is possible to contend that civil disobedience can be justified without committing to any arguments about how others should treat the actors that engage in it. The philosopher David Lefkowitz has offered an argument in support of a moral right to civil disobedience in democratic societies, which entitles those who engage in it to certain kinds of fair treatment by public authorities. The right should be seen as an extension of our general right to political participation, such that citizens can engage in a suitably constrained unlawful protest as a means of appealing to the broader public. The right bestows a moral claim against legal punishment for civil disobedience, but it does not grant a claim against arrest, temporary incarceration, or the imposition of penalties. This argument is thus sensitive to concerns about a thoroughgoing routinization of civil disobedience, through using these potential costs as disincentives for engaging in frivolous or frequent unlawful protests. This rights-based argument is nonetheless useful for guiding moral criticism of the harsh and punitive sanctions that public authorities sometimes seek to impose on civilly disobedient citizens.

Prospects The mantle of civil disobedience is one that protest movements often seek to claim because of its historical association with democratic progress and self-­ constrained forms of conduct. There is, furthermore, a booming cottage industry offering “training” in nonviolent protest for activists, while the topic continues to generate significant scholarly and popular debate. The prospects for civil disobedience, however, are rather more unclear than one might think. On the one hand, despite the arguments for tolerant treatment, public authorities often adopt an aggressive stance toward civil disobedience. A recent report by the International ­Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, for instance, documents a pervasive pattern of escalating police repression against nonviolent political protesters in both democratic and nondemocratic societies. On the other hand, despite its historical status, some protesters have expressed a certain degree of hostility toward civil disobedience. Anarchists associated with the antiglobalization movement, for instance, have occasionally favored the label of direct action over civil disobedience, because the latter is perceived as too deferential to power. The long-term prospects for civil disobedience thus depend upon retaining its ambivalent status between tolerance and transgression. William Smith

See also Activism; Democracy; Human Rights; Nonviolence; Obedience; Political Deliberation; Political Morality; Rule of Law; Social Movements; Social Revolts

Further Readings Audi, R. (2009). On the meaning and justification of violence. In V. Bufacchi (Ed.), Violence: A philosophical anthology (pp. 136–167). Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Bedau, H. A. (Ed.). (1991). Civil disobedience in focus. London, England: Routledge. [Of particular note are the readings by Martin Luther King, John Rawls, and Peter Singer.] Brownlee, K. (2012). Conscience and conviction: The case for civil disobedience. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1985). Civil disobedience: Litmus test for the democratic constitutional state. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 30, 95–116. International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations. (2014). “Take back the streets”: Repression and criminalization of protest around the world. Available at https://www.aclu.org/ files/assets/global_protest_suppression_report_inclo.pdf Lefkowitz, D. (2007). On a moral right to civil disobedience. Ethics, 117, 202–233. Milligan, T. (2013). Civil disobedience: Protest, justification, and the law. London, England: Bloomsbury. Sauter, M. (2014). The coming swarm: DDOS actions, hacktivism, and civil disobedience on the Internet. London, England: Bloomsbury. Smith, W. (2013). Civil disobedience and deliberative democracy. London, England: Routledge.

Civil Wars A civil war is an armed conflict that concerns government or territory in which at least two parties of citizens of the same state use armed force to combat each other, one of them being the government. This entry discusses the genesis of civil wars, their causes, and prevention mechanisms.

The Genesis of Civil Wars The Copenhagen Consensus project, a nonprofit organization that uses cost-benefit analysis in considering possible solutions to global problems, identified civil conflicts as one of the basic priorities, or global challenges, for development. The experts of the panel noted that measures to reduce the number, duration, and severity of civil wars would rank very high among ­priorities for development if such measures could be expected with any confidence to succeed.

Civil Wars

Paul Collier and colleagues (2003) cover many aspects of the relationship between civil wars and development policy. As they note, since World War II, more than 80 million people have been killed in civil wars. As a matter of comparison, there were 71 million tobacco-related deaths between 1930 and 1999. Therefore, if we could find measures to prevent internal conflicts, we would have a serious impact on reducing the number of human losses. Moreover, conflict also generates mass displacements of people, which help the spread of infectious diseases like malaria and AIDS. Therefore, the impact of finding measures to prevent conflict should, without a doubt, be a priority for societal development. The Armed Conflict Dataset, a joint project of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies (Uppsala

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University) and the Center for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute (Oslo), uses an operational definition of armed conflict as a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory in which the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths. ­Figure 1 shows the evolution of conflicts since 1946 by type. The figure shows that the number of conflicts increased substantially until 1991, mostly due to the increase in civil wars. The number of conflicts decreased until 2004 to peak again in 2014. The increase in armed conflicts since 1946 is basically due to the civil wars in Africa. Asia is also a large contributor to civil wars, but its contribution has been mostly stable over time.

Armed Conflict by Type, 1946–2014 60 Extrastate Interstate

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Figure 1  Evolution of Conflicts by Type Since 1946 Source: Pettersson and Wallensteen (2015), p. 539.

Table 1  Transition Probabilities From Conflict to Peace and Vice Versa Conflict at Period t − 1

Peace at Period t − 1

Conflict at t

14.36%

4.17%

Peace at t

3.87%

77.6%

Source: Authors’ calculations using data from the Armed Conflict Database (ACD) of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London.

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In addition, civil wars are persistent processes, as shown in Table 1. Of the countries with a conflict in a particular year, 78.8% will continue to be in conflict the following year. Conflicts and fragility are intimately related, and although not all fragile countries end up in a civil war, a latent conflict increases the risk of violence. Many definitions of fragility concerning the security and violence dimension are based on actual rather than ­ potential violence. This is why not all fragile countries are conflict countries. However, they are all potential conflict countries; many fragile countries are at high risk of violence. A consensus exists that conflict is the ultimate manifestation of fragility and, therefore, the analysis of the main causes of fragility are closely linked with the analysis of the main causes of conflict. To describe the main drivers of fragility and civil wars, we can use the analogy of fire. In many situations of state fragility, civil wars are started by an exogenous or random factor that acts like a match, touching off a conflict that, given a propagation mechanism (analogous to oxygen), ignites into a full civil war. Countries that have these propagation mechanisms (potential for conflict) are fragile countries. In other words, fragile countries are those that, with the presence of shocks, are at high risk of a civil war.

The Causes of Civil Wars The timing of the outbreak of a civil war is extremely unpredictable. Hence, in order to understand the causes of civil wars, we need to identify the characteristics that make countries erupt into conflict in the presence of any shocks if we want to design appropriate long-term policies to prevent future conflicts. Therefore, we need to identify fragile countries and the presence of the propagation factors discussed in the previous section. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (2004) argue that political scientists tend to think about grievances as the main determinant of civil wars, while economists discuss this issue in terms of greed and opportunities. The greed-versus-grievances dichotomy can be investigated using proxies to identify these motives. For instance, poverty reduces the cost of enlisting as a rebel and provides an underlying reason for rebellion. Therefore, rebellions can occur when the amount of income rebels are sacrificing is negligible. In addition, if natural resources are plentiful, then rebels can anticipate appropriating those resources if they win the war. ­ Social f­ractionalization can be interpreted in terms of economics (competition for opportunities) or as grievances (if a particular social/ethnic group is discriminated against). Other grievances are related to high inequality or lack of representation in the political process (bad institutions).

Poverty The World Bank report Investing in Development— Practical Plans to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, published by the UN Millennium Project in 2005, argues that “poor and hungry societies are much more likely than high-income societies to fall into conflict over scarce vital resources, such as watering holes and arable land [ . . . ] poverty increases the risks of conflict through multiple paths” (pp. 8–9). This understanding of the root causes of conflicts implies that “investing in development is especially important to reduce the probabilities of conflict” (p. 9). These prescriptions have been basically driven by two influential academic papers, namely the aforementioned 2004 paper by Collier and Hoeffler and one by James D. Fearon and David Laitin (2003). Collier and Hoeffler find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power with respect to the outbreak of a conflict. Conversely, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are more closely related to the viability of rebellion, have considerable explanatory power. Fearon and Laitin also find that lower per-­ capita gross domestic product has a significant and negative effect on the onset of a civil war; they argue that the factors that explain which countries have been at risk of the outbreak of a civil war are the conditions that favor insurgency. These include the incidence of poverty, political instability, rough terrain, and a large population size; income per capita is their proxy for the state’s overall financial, administrative, and police and military capabilities; once a government is weak, rebels can reasonably expect a higher probability of success. Although there is a strong correlation between poverty and civil war, the direction of causality is not clear. Though seemingly plausible and intuitive, the argument that poverty is the main cause of instability is based on weak empirical grounds because of the possibility that conflict also causes bad economic conditions. Simeon Djankov and Marta Reynal-Querol (2009) address the relationship between poverty and civil wars. They find that their correlation is spurious, and it is accounted for by historical phenomena that jointly determine income evolution and conflict in the post–World War II era. In particular, the statistical association between poverty (as proxied by income per capita) and civil wars disappears once they include country variables that are invariant over time. This means that the incidence of civil wars and poverty may be driven by the same determinants, some of which are often not included in the empirical analysis. The fact that poor countries suffer more conflicts than rich countries do seems to be the result of a spurious correlation.

Civil Wars

Inequality Inequality could potentially be another important determinant for conflict. Cross-country evidence on the relationship between inequality and conflict is weak due to the lack of reliable data on inequality measures, in particular for fragile countries. Most of the literature finds no consistent effect of inequality on the likelihood of civil wars.

Quality of Institutions There are very few studies that analyze the relationship between institutions and civil wars. Existing measures of the quality of institutions only capture ­ some dimensions of what we mean by the institutional development of countries. For example, some studies use democracy as a proxy for institutions in order to capture constraints on the executive and political ­ competition. Other studies work with measures that ­ capture what researchers commonly name “quality of institutions.” That concept includes security of property rights or the rule of law of the country. The studies that focus on democracy, like those of Håvard Hegre and colleagues (2001) and Reynal-Querol (2002), find that partly democratic countries are more prone to civil war than are full democracies and full autocracies. This means that democratic and authoritarian states have fewer civil wars than intermediate regimes, which are the most conflict prone. This U-shaped relationship between democracy and conflicts can be interpreted if we consider the need of some degree of freedom for people to organize and start a civil war. Therefore, it seems that freedom is not a sufficient condition to prevent civil wars. Collier, Hoeffler, and Dominic Rhoner (2009) find that, although the net effect of democracy is ambiguous, whereas in rich countries democracy makes countries safer, in poorer countries, democracy increases proneness to political violence. Finally, some studies ­analyze the role of the democratic environment of neighboring countries and find that countries in regions with more democracies are less likely to experience conflict. Djankov and Reynal-Querol (2007) investigate empirically whether the quality of economic institutions has played a role in sustaining peace. In particular, they test the hypothesis that when governments cannot enforce the law and protect property rights, conflict emerges. The results indicate that a lack of secure property rights and law enforcement is an important cause of civil war.

Ethnic Heterogeneity and Polarization Most of the literature finds no relationship between ethnic diversity and civil wars. However, the relationship between social heterogeneity and civil wars is a complex

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one. Initially, one might suppose that the increase in diversity increases the likelihood of social conflicts. However, this does not have to be the case. In fact, many researchers agree that an increase in ethnic heterogeneity initially increases potential conflict, but, after some point, more diversity implies less potential conflict. Donald L. Horowitz argues that the relationship between ethnic diversity and civil wars is not monotonic: there is less violence in highly homogeneous and highly heterogeneous societies and more conflicts in societies in which a large ethnic minority faces an ethnic majority. If this is so, then an index of polarization should better capture the likelihood of conflict, or the intensity of potential conflict, than an index of heterogeneity. José G. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) argue that one possible reason for the lack of explanatory power of ethnic heterogeneity on the probability of armed conflicts and civil wars is the measurement of heterogeneity. In empirical applications, they propose, researchers should consider a measure of ethnic polarization instead of an index of ethnic fractionalization. The polarization index captures how far the d ­ istribution of ethnic groups deviates from a bipolar distribution (for instance, the maximum level of ethnic polarization will happen when 50% of the population belongs to one ethnic group while the other 50% of the population belongs to another ethnic group), which represents the highest level of polarization. ­Collier and Hoeffler (1998) note that coordination costs would be at their lowest when the population is polarized between an ethnic group identified with the government and a second, similarly sized ethnic group identified with the rebels. Collier (2001) also emphasizes that the relationship between ethnic diversity and the risk of violent conflicts is not monotonic. Highly heterogeneous societies have even a lower probability of civil wars than do homogeneous societies. The h ­ ighest risk is associated with the middle range of ­ethnic diversity. The polarization index satisfies this condition. All these arguments indicate that measures of polarization should better capture the potential for conflict than measures of h ­ eterogeneity. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol find that ethnic polarization is an important determinant of the incidence of civil war. Having a polarized society is an important propagation mechanism for conflict. Jose G. Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol See also Civil Disobedience; Collective Action; Ethnicity; Pluralism; Resource Mobilization; Social Contract; Social Revolts

Further Readings Collier, P. (2001). Ethnic diversity: An economic analysis of its implications. Economic Policy, 32, 129–166.

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Collier, P., Elliott, L., Hegre, H., Hoeffler, A., Reynol-Querol, A., & Sambanis, N. (2003). Breaking the conflict trap: Civil war and development policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (1998). On the economic causes of civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 50, 563–573. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievances in civil wars. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4), 563–595. Collier, P., Hoeffler, A., & Rohner, D. (2009). Beyond greed and grievance: Feasibility and civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 61(4), 651–674. Djankov, S., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2007). The causes of civil war. CEPR working paper. Available at http://documents .worldbank.org/curated/en/791491468141578331/pdf/ wps4254.pdf Djankov, S., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2009). Poverty and civil war: Revisiting the evidence. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(4), 1035–1041. Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political Science Review, 97, 75–90. Hegre, H., Ellingsen, T., Gates, S., & Gledish, N. P. (2001). Towards a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992. American Political Science Review, 95, 33–48. Horowitz, D. (1985). Ethnic groups in conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press. International Institute for Strategic Studies. (2016). Armed Conflict Database. Available at https://acd.iiss.org/ Montalvo, J. G., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2005). Ethnic polarization, potential conflict, and civil wars. American Economic Review, 95(3), 796–816. Pettersson, T., & Wallensteen, P. (2015). Armed conflicts, 1946–2014. Journal of Peace Research, 52(4). doi: 10.1177/0022343315595927 Reynal-Querol, M. (2002). Ethnicity, political systems and civil war. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46(1), 29–54.

Civilian Intervention Civilian intervention refers to the efforts taken by members of the international community—states, intergovernmental organizations, and/or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—to address the human rights concerns of local populations affected by conflict and/ or natural disasters. These efforts apply to any military, diplomatic, and/or economic action taken by an actor to improve the security and well-being of civilians. When the government of a population is unable or unwilling to protect it, interveners respond to such issues in order to protect civilians and prevent future attacks against them. This entry provides a brief overview of the main theoretical approaches used to explain civilian interventions, major debates on the topic, and the effects of such interventions.

Theories of Civilian Intervention While neither the concept nor the practice of civilian interventions is a recent development, the post–cold war period has witnessed an increase in the number of interventions carried out in the name of human rights. As shown by interventions in Kosovo, Libya, and Sudan, the international community has demonstrated a responsibility to support and protect civilians from harm and contain the negative consequences that can emerge from threats against humanity. However, not every human rights situation has received an immediate or effective response (e.g., Angola, Chile, Guatemala, and Rwanda). This raises the question, Why does the international community react to some acts of civilian victimization and not others? In the field of international relations, three theoretical approaches are used to explain the motivations behind civilian interventions: realism, (neo)liberalism, and constructivism. Realism argues that the primary actors in the international system are states and that they are motivated by self-interest. With the absence of a world government to monitor state behavior, states must act in a manner to ensure their survival and sovereignty. Often using the 2001 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan as an example, realists point out that states intervene only in events that help them achieve their political objectives. Liberals and neoliberals claim that while states are key actors in the international system, international institutions and international law also matter. International actors have a responsibility to protect individuals victimized by state and/or nonstate actors. However, the motivation to intervene in such situations is driven by an interest to achieve long-term benefits (i.e., social and economic interests). The third approach, constructivism, emphasizes the role of norms to explain civilian interventions. The proliferation since World War II of human rights declarations (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the 2001 “Responsibility to Protect” report), as well as the activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC), signals the growing development of human rights norms. In effect, these norms influence actors to provide assistance to civilians whose security and rights are threatened. According to constructivists, self-interests and norms are not mutually exclusive. Rather, norms shape the interests of actors.

Major Debates State Sovereignty Versus Individual Sovereignty Traditionally, the term sovereignty has been reserved for states in synonymous identification of independence/ autonomy. As evinced by Articles 2.4 (principle of

Civil-Military Relations

nonaggression) and 2.7 (principle of nonintervention) of the United Nations (UN) Charter, a state is prohibited from interfering in any matter that falls under the jurisdiction of another sovereign state unless the state is acting in self-defense. However, the term is no longer exclusive to states but applies also to individual human beings. As conveyed by the concept of “individual sovereignty,” discussed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the 2001 Responsibility to Protect report, the issue of civilian protection has become one of the primary concerns of the international community. Despite the recent shifts in the concept of sovereignty, realists continue to stress the notion of state sovereignty and question the legality of interventions based on humanitarian issues.

Who Should Intervene and When? The question of who should launch a civilian intervention has become a major issue of debate for academics and policy-makers. Should an intervention be unilateral, in other words launched by only one actor, or multilateral? Supporters of multilateral interventions claim that multilateralism increases legitimacy as a result of the consensus needed by a number of actors to participate in an intervention. Moreover, such interventions allow for actors to contribute fewer resources (i.e., personnel and financial) than those required if they were to individually launch an intervention. Advocates of unilateral interventions claim that although one actor is responsible for carrying the responsibilities of an intervention, leaders are able to engage in quick decision making when faced with a civilian crisis. The issue of when to launch an intervention has also attracted discussion. Should interveners wait until a certain number of civilians have been subject to abuse before participating in an intervention, or should they react to early signs of instability? Scholars often point to the case of Rwanda to illustrate the disastrous outcomes that can occur when actors are slow to respond to such a humanitarian crisis. However, a quick response can also yield a number of dilemmas, including the level of resources to invest to deter widespread victimization, the risk of starting a conflict, and the difficulty in obtaining international approval if there is little to no evidence of crimes against human rights.

The Effects of Civilian Intervention Literature on civilian intervention has focused on different types of civilian victimization, including intentional and targeted killings, sexual violence, and political violence. While some research finds that interventions can reduce civilian victimization, other research shows that interventions only constrain the behavior of government forces and can increase opportunities for rebel groups to

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engage in violence. The neutrality of an intervention can also affect the severity of civilian victimization. In the case of conflict, interventions that support one warring party can result in an increase in the use of civilian violence by an unsupported faction due to a loss of resources and civilian support. Additionally, civilian interventions can prolong conflict. Longer conflicts can lead to an increase in civilians becoming refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). This not only affects the lives of the civilians themselves but can also weaken the security and development of the locations to which they relocate. While extant research on civilian interventions has yielded interesting theoretical and empirical findings, there is still much work to be done on the topic. Mehwish Sarwari and Jacob Kathman See also Civil Wars; Genocide; Human Rights; International Humanitarian Law; International Security; Third Party

Further Readings Finnemore, M. (1996). Constructing norms of humanitarian intervention. In P. Katzenstein (Ed.), The culture of national security (pp. 309–321). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Holzgrefe, J. L., & Keohane, R. O. (2003). Humanitarian intervention: Ethical, legal, and political dilemmas. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Krieg, A. (2013). Motivations for humanitarian intervention: Theoretical and empirical considerations. New York, NY: Springer. Nardin, T., & Williams, V. (2006). Humanitarian intervention. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Civil-Military Relations The phrase civil-military relations refers to interactions between armed forces and civilians, especially the relations between military and political leadership. At its heart are such problems as defense and foreign policies that go awry due to tensions between the two sectors; difficulties in obtaining military compliance with government wishes; and, at the furthest extreme, militaries that directly rebel against civilian authorities, oust political leaders from power, and govern directly, often employing brutal force against those they seek to dominate.

Patterns of Civil-Military Relations Organizationally, the military constitutes a state institution, like any other part of state bureaucracy. Yet

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militaries differ from other state institutions because of their function and histories. As the body charged with defending a country against attackers, military forces are necessarily well armed and therefore more powerful than other bureaucratic organizations. Furthermore, the practice of separating the military from ­politics while subordinating it to civilian command is a relatively modern one. For example, under feudalism, the nobility also served as the military leadership. Even in the last few centuries, militaries have led independence movements and launched revolutionary movements, political roles that have been lauded and celebrated as key foundational moments in their ­ nations’ histories. Despite this, modern civilian leaders would ­generally prefer that they rather than military officers govern their countries. This essential goal—ensuring civilian autonomy from military intrusion—remains the first priority in civil-military relations, followed closely by ensuring that militaries respond to civilian orders and building the collaboration necessary for good defense policies. These multiple dimensions of civilian control remain the central challenge of civil-military relations. This entry first looks at interventionist militaries and the fusion of civil and military authority before turning to the challenges of democracies, new and established.

Militaries in Politics In less economically developed countries, militaries often reside on the perimeter of power. Eric Nordlinger referred to these as praetorian militaries. In these socie­ ties, the armed forces alternately oversee civilian ­leaders, intervene to remove governments they find unacceptable, and often rule for prolonged periods of time. Long-term military rule has even occurred in countries that seemed to be well along the path toward modernization. Guillermo O’Donnell thus identified several military regimes that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as characterized by “bureaucratic authoritarianism” in reference to the military’s institutional and technocratic approach to governing. Yet politicized militaries may also partner with ­civilian leaders, especially in revolutionary regimes such as Communist China or Cuba. Here, revolutionary militaries helped found the new political order and ­ transform the country. Political and military roles in these systems are thus fused rather than separate. Late-20th-century populist democracies, such as Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, also sought political-military fusion, bringing military officers into administrative roles and pursuing a shared ideology.

Building Civilian Control in New Democracies In most new, postauthoritarian democracies, the government’s overriding goal is to ensure that elected civilians can make policy without being threatened by the military. Samuel Huntington’s landmark 1957 analysis describes two ways in which civilians might control the armed forces: objective and subjective control. “Objective” control is a model based on an ideal of military professionalism and the separation between civilian policy-making and the military’s execution of those policies. “Subjective” control more closely resembles the fused model described earlier, with civilian elites seeking military leaders that share their political vision. ­Huntington associated objective control with modern, democratic states and professionalized militaries. Given their distrust of the armed forces, most new democratic governments have pursued objective civilian control. Anxious to extricate the military from governance and internal security, governments sought to redirect their armed forces toward external security and create civilian oversight of military affairs. These were challenging tasks. The new democracies lacked civilian experts in defense and faced “new” security threats, such as transnational crime, that made it difficult to direct militaries outward. Meanwhile, scholars debated such issues as whether domestic roles would damage civilian control or whether it mattered more who— civilians or military—decided on these policies. Yet the greatest assist to new, late-20th-century democracies was the end of the cold war. This momentous international shift drained international support from both guerrilla movements and potential military regimes, bolstering the fledgling democracies. Militaries continued to play political roles but became much less inclined to rule.

Civil-Military Relations in Stable Democracies In stable democracies, civilians rarely face coup threats from the armed forces. Nonetheless, here too, civilians have difficulty ensuring that the military follows orders. Ideally, governments seek a productive collaboration between civilian policy-makers and the military’s experts in warfare. But civil-military relations have evolved, making Huntington’s notion of an apolitical body of military professionals ever more elusive. For example, modern militaries include many specializations that parallel civilian careers, such as medical doctors, engineers, and computer scientists, while modern generals are administrators more than soldiers. This shift

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civilianizes the military, blurring the distinction between military and civilian experts. Contemporary threats such as terrorism also muddle the distinction between politics and the military. Despite this, other trends have led to a greater divergence between civilian and military values. In the United States, the lack of an active military draft since the early 1970s means that relatively fewer adults have served in the military than in previous generations, and they tend to come from a narrower sector of the population. A decade earlier, Morris Janowitz had encouraged retaining universal military service to facilitate shared values, but the subsequent unpopularity of the Vietnam War and mass protests against the draft argued for an end to conscription. Declining numbers of veterans could also contribute to a lack of civilian defense expertise, the same problem faced by newer democracies. From a principal–agent perspective, the values differences between the principals (civilian leaders) and the agent (military) could lead to tensions. Peter Feaver’s agency theory sees these relationships as a series of interactions shaped not only by differing values but also by the military’s desire for autonomy and civilians’ need to monitor their subordinates. Overly invasive ­management techniques could provoke a backlash from the armed forces, but lax monitoring could allow the military to avoid complying with civilian orders. This analysis thus suggests that military professionalism and autonomy do not guarantee compliance. Civil-military relations thus remain a challenge for policy-makers and scholars, even in stable democracies. It is a complex relationship shaped not only by professional roles and institutions but also by the ­ ­societies in which these institutions exist and by the interactions between the relevant actors. Deborah L. Norden See also Asymmetric Warfare; Civic Engagement; Dominant Power Politics; Indoctrination; Moral Hazard; Nonviolence; Political Morality; Rule of Law; Social Revolts

Further Readings Feaver, P. (2003). Armed servants: Agency, oversight and ­ civil-military relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huntingon, S. (1957). The soldier and the state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Janowitz, M. (1960). The professional soldier: A social and political portrait. New York, NY: Free Press. Nordlinger, E. (1977). Soldiers in politics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is the title of an influential foreign policy volume published in 1993 by Samuel P. Huntington, a professor at Harvard University and chair of the Harvard ­Academy for International and Area Studies. Prior to his post at Harvard, Huntington served as director of security planning for the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. He is considered a major architect of United States foreign policy. His thoughts, ­presented in lectures and his iconic book, became the foundation for alternative visions of a “new world order,” rooted within the interactions of diverse “civilizations” governed by beliefs, identities, and social formations alien or even antagonistic to other “civilizations.” While other scholars occupy major positions in shaping U.S. foreign policy (e.g., Francis Fukuyama, John Mearsheimer, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry ­Rosovsky), perhaps none has had the enduring impact of Samuel Huntington and his original work. Huntington’s penetrating analysis and prediction of forthcoming struggles for world dominance, based on cultural deconstructions of those economic systems, political forces, religions, and historical roots shaping nonnegotiable values and identities, enabled him to persuasively portray a fixed future. Huntington published a follow-up to his initial ­publication, titled Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), offering certain caveats, but the die was cast. Huntington’s two volumes and competing volumes by two other eminent political theorists, Francis Fukuyama (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago), became the foundations for American foreign policy, each contributing positional insights into the nature and consequences of events and forces in our times and each reaching different conclusions regarding our future. The original volumes and their subsequent versions, replete with more details and time-tested “apologias,” constitute the sources of neoconservative American foreign policy. In this respect, we should be reminded of the deliberate hand of individuals in shaping what often appears to most as evolving and unpredictable historic waves of human destiny.

Controversy: Criticism and Support for Clash of Civilizations Huntington’s first book was considered controversial because it proposed that differences among nations, cast within conflicting commitments to historic and cultural

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traditions labeled as “civilizations,” constituted potential sources of predictable global conflict. Some political scholars and theorists argued the use of “civilization” as the unit of analysis is too broad for understanding the more micro variations in political, economic, and ­ideological arenas needed for accurate foreign policy analyses. Those disagreeing with the use of “civilizations” as the unit of analysis suggested that other ­factors, including national histories, government structures, geographical regions, population diversity, religion, and economic and financial systems, were more meaningful explanatory sources for recommending foreign policies. Critics also suggested Huntington’s perspective undermined peaceful efforts accommodating diversity, because Huntington considered differences to be sources of struggle and conflict. In the emerging era of respect and tolerance for diversity, Huntington’s labeling of “differences” as the causes of problems ­provoked immediate antagonism. Huntington’s initial publication in 1993 of an article titled “Clash of Civilizations,” in the summer issue of the influential publication Foreign Affairs (1993), ensured his reputation as the premier U.S. foreign policy maven. At this point, Huntington was considered to be one of the most important thinkers and advisers on foreign policy. He was positioned as the prestigious Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the John Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His prominence, however, was assured when he proposed the controversial but catchy term “clash,” eliciting an immediate image of international struggle and conflict. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order would become the defining work in political thought and action for ­foreign policy in the United States and other nations (see Council on Foreign Relations, 2013, for an updated discussion of Huntington’s work and enduring impact).

The 1980s: Conflicting Ideological Tensions in Europe The putative cold war ideological struggles of the 1980s between the Soviet Union and the West were showing signs of widespread political instability and upheaval across the European Continent, with the potential for war. Competition for ideological domination and hegemony between the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States of America were being played out in a score of smaller nations amid exorbitant military and development expenses and costs to human lives and well-being. Scores of nations around the world had become proxy sites of struggle for influence, control, and dominance as the world’s two most powerful nations pursued control. The fears of nuclear war had

emerged as victory-and-loss assessments were tabulated in Moscow and Washington, DC, revealing growing resistance among other nations to the alien determination of their survival and fate. Amid this decade of upheaval rooted in competing ideological and political-economic differences, the Soviet Union’s general secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed startling and unexpected progressive reformist policies of perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness) in an effort to calm anxieties. Gorbachev also was seeking to appeal to the global community to sustain Soviet status as a major power. Gorbachev’s policies offered an opportunity for rapprochement and a mutually beneficial end to continued ideological conflicts. However, these reformist ­policies served to inspire new visions among nations seeking to escape Soviet control. Events unfolded rapidly, eluding control and mastery by either side. Within days, the famed Berlin Wall, a source of extensive repression and isolation in East Germany, was breached and toppled on November 9, 1989. This watershed moment represented a worldwide revolutionary change as the two Germanys moved toward unification and Soviet-controlled Eastern ­European bloc nations collapsed into a disparate collection of nations in search of a future. A “new world order” was at hand, awaiting a talented master architect to capture the dynamics of the time and to offer an understanding of the future. For political theorists, it was a carpe diem moment, and many stepped forward with interpretations, seeking prized position and status as dominant figures in the determination of new American foreign policy.

The End of History, or . . . Continued World Conflict? Among the talented aspiring political theorists, Francis Fukuyama, Huntington’s student at Harvard, attracted considerable attention with a book arguing—however prematurely—that history was over. In his book with the captivating title The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama contended that ideological wars were now ended—the West had won! According to ­Fukuyama, the struggles of modern history embodied in the ideological “cold” and “hot” wars of Fascism, Communism, and Marxism (e.g., Fukuyama, 1989, 1992) were over. For Fukuyama, Western “liberal democracy” and “economic capitalism” could now be assumed to be the final forms of global government and political economy, needing only polishing and refinement. This was, however, a precipitous conclusion from Huntington’s point of view. Mearsheimer also disagreed. His “realistic

Clash of Civilizations

theory” view concluded a future of endless wars, the only consolation being their diminished size and consequence, but not his conclusion: “War is inevitable.” The assumption of an end to human history attributable to powerful ideological struggles was not unique to Fukuyama. He appears to have been influenced by similar notions advanced before in Marxism/Hegelian thought and also by the writings of the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Kojève proposed the course of human history would come to an end with a unified homogenized state of “shared morality” (e.g., Kojève, 1940; 1980 version). In brief, at the time of Huntington’s opus work, there was a swirling belief that a “new world order” was upon us. The future could be reshaped according to moral and economic principles consistent with “democracy” and “capitalism.” Huntington, however, concluded that such optimism was premature. There remained inherent conflicts because of different traditions of civilization. Imperialistic invasions and occupations of nations had bred instability, and impulses to establish their unique identity (i.e., identity politics), shaped within their own history and values, rather than those imposed by the West or the Soviet Union. How dare U.S. scholars call for homogenized versions of nations consistent with their perceived values! There were worldwide variations in culture, history, and religion. Many resented Western interference. There was fertile ground for new ideological conflicts and wars. The end of history had not arrived and perhaps never would. Although I could find no acknowledgment, Huntington seems to owe a debt of gratitude to the paradigmatic breakthrough of Peter Berger and Thomas ­Luckmann’s Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge (1966). Berger and Luckmann theorized that human beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the “social” context of their acquired knowledge. They argued that a person’s or group’s social ­interactions create and sustain mental concepts, representations, and constructions of reality. Over time, these constructions become “habitualized” into roles, and the roles eventually become “institutionalized” in cultures and nations. Berger and Luckmann’s work became the foundation for cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous studies in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Subsequent contributions by other social science theorists in the areas of “symbolic interactionism” and “social constructivism” added to the validity and acceptance of Huntington’s essential assumptions. Huntington’s clashof-civilizations thesis became the conventional wisdom increasingly supported across the social sciences. For many political theorists, it was an indisputable

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foundation for foreign policy, assuring its acceptance across intelligence and security groups.

Consequences of Clash of Civilizations Fukuyama’s 1989 article “The End of History,” published in the journal National Interest, precipitated a wave of neoconservative thought and policy. This journal, affiliated with the “realist” school of foreign policy thought, was looking for a justification for the notion that conflict among nations and ideologies was inevitable and that it must be stopped immediately by attacks on potential rivals and enemies. National Interest was founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol, one of the most visible, strident, and powerful neoconservatives favoring aggressive military intervention as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. The neoconservatives were influenced by Leo Strauss, a distinguished sociology professor at the University of Chicago. The same university was also the location of Milton Friedman, a political economist, whose policies influenced numerous politicians on the right (e.g., ­Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher). Later, the University of Chicago became the home for John Mearsheimer, who contested Huntington’s conclusions, arguing that struggles and wars would continue endlessly. Neoconservatives welcomed this view. The intellectual dominance of Leo Strauss and ­Milton Friedman’s thought for U.S. foreign policy and economic policy circles helped shape the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), led by Richard Cheney. The PNAC supported establishing the United States as the world’s dominant superpower, responsible for supporting and protecting other nations, including ­ Israel, because of their shared values and traditions. The PNAC called for a homogenized global culture.

Support and Contention Huntington’s conclusion of inevitable clashes among Asian, Arab/Islamic, and Western civilizations, rooted in differences in religion, ontological assumptions, and historical memories and inscriptions, served the hegemonic interests of United States and Western ­ foreign policy and military scholars and authorities. ­ While ­differences, codified by the term diversity, were advocated and praised to mollify critics, differences were simultaneously concluded to be major sources of conflict to be erased. The situation was set for an epic ideological global struggle between homogenization and multiculturalism (Marsella, 2014). Decades after Huntington, ­conflicts associated with “differences” assumed to be national gained prominence across many social protest

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movements, including (1) Black Lives Matter, (2) LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), (3) immigration reform and secure border policies, and (4) wealth disparity abuses. These social movements contest Huntington’s conclusion that differences are an inevitable source of conflict, violence, and war. In ­contrast, social movement leaders claim that the issue is actually one of exploitation, inequity, and abuse associated with power asymmetries. Diversity (differences) conflicts are also now endemic in Europe amid the chaos and confusion of massive migration waves of Middle Eastern refugees escaping wars and destruction. The sheer numbers of refugees, their contrasting religious and cultural heritages, and their extensive human needs have led to cries for assimilation and homogenization of migrants seeking refuge or for their rejection of asylum. Finally, as some observers have noted, life is, by its very nature, diverse. It seeks and supports variations as sources of survival. From this perspective, it may be legitimate to ask whether any effort to impose “homogenized” biological, cultural, and moral constraints by force places life in jeopardy. Anthony J. Marsella See also al Qaeda; Civil Wars; End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Globalization; Imagined Contact; Multiculturalism; Omniculturalism

Further Readings Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise on the sociology of knowledge. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Council on Foreign Relations. (2013). The clash of civilizations? The debate: Twentieth anniversary edition. New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history. The National Interest, Summer Issue. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York, NY: Free Press. Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72, 22–50. [First delivered as an address at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC. Subsequently circulated as an occasional paper for the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies, Harvard University.] Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, S. P. (2004). Who are we? The challenges to America’s national identity. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Kojève, A. (1969). Introduction to the readings of Hegel (Ed. James Nichols). New York, NY: Basic Books. (Originally published 1933)

Marsella, A. J. (2014, December). The epic struggle of our global era: Homogenization versus multiculturalism. Transcultural Media Service: https://www.transcend.org/tms/ search/?q=anthony+j.+marsella Mearsheimer, J., & Walt, S. (2007). The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Clientelism Clientelism is a selective, particularistic, and hierarchical mutual support system in which politicians and political parties offer material favors (such as jobs and goods) to electors in exchange for political support (usually in the form of votes). It is selective and particularistic because it is targeted toward an exclusive group of voters based on their political preferences, thereby discriminating against the remainder of the society. This entry provides a brief overview of clientelism by ­highlighting why we study clientelism and the conceptualization, determinants, and varieties of clientelism and concludes with a brief discussion of the political effects of clientelism.

Why Study Clientelism? Understanding the main linkages, determinants, and repercussions of clientelism is helpful to grasp the ­political realities and power dynamics of many countries throughout the world. Even the most centralized governments utilize an intertwined web of clientelistic relationships as they delegate power to notables in the periphery so as to continue and, if possible, strengthen their political clout at the center. To this end, clientelism enables politicians and political parties to minimize their electoral risk via ensuring political support from a wider group of the constituency. Clientelism is illuminating for some of the cases throughout the world, which could otherwise have been perceived as “irrational.” The compliance of low-status actors with a higher political authority and the reluctance of these actors to form horizontal alliances with their peers can only be grasped through the prism of clientelism. Clientelism exists in both developing and developed countries. Contrary to the predictions of the earlier works on clientelism around the 1960s and 1970s, ­clientelism does not simply wither away with economic affluence or socioeconomic and political development. Clientelism usually evolves into new forms in affluent, urban settings, which is the case in many industrialized nations such as Italy, Japan, and Belgium. There is a clear linkage between economic development and

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clientelism in which poorer localities and nations are more likely to possess clientelistic networks. Yet it would be inaccurate to assume that clientelism would simply be eradicated with increased levels of industrialization and modernization. There has been a surge of interest in clientelism in scholarly works since the start of the new millennium, as clientelism has increasingly become relevant in many political settings throughout the world. Major puzzles in the clientelism literature as of the 2000s revolve around three major questions: (1) How does clientelism work? (2) What causes or prevents shifts away from clientelism? (3) Is clientelism consistent with the norms of democracy; why or why not? (see, e.g., Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007; Stokes et al., 2013). Recent scholarship on clientelism has produced works that have shed light on these puzzles and continue to do so. The following sections address these major puzzles in the study of clientelism.

Conceptualization of Clientelism As noted earlier, clientelism is an exclusive mutual support system between politicians and voters. Conceptually, it can take the forms of patronage and vote buying. Patronage entails the distribution of public resources (most typically public employment) by office holders in return for electoral support. In patronage, the political leader and party need to hold the political office (be it at the local or national level) to ensure patronage networks for their supporters. On the other hand, vote buying entails politicians’ provision of goods, services, and other material benefits in exchange for electors’ votes. Unlike patronage, any political party (assuming that it has the necessary material resources) can engage in vote buying, whether it is in office or not. Overall, clientelism incorporates both patronage and vote buying. Clientelistic exchanges differ from programmatic appeals of political parties. On the one hand, programmatic policies cover salient issues in a country, such as improving education, lowering the rate of unemployment, or curbing inflation. These policies are targeted toward an entire nation, which would benefit from them. Moreover, the criteria of distribution in programmatic policies are formalized and public. On the other hand, clientelistic relations are based on extending material benefits to certain groups of citizens in exchange for their political support. Programmatic party competition does not require direct individual contact with voters, whereas clientelistic exchanges include direct interaction between politicians (or their mediators) and citizens. Clientelism by its nature is based on exclusion of certain groups of individuals solely depending on their

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political preferences. Hence, it involves not only a rewarding mechanism for the supporters of a political party but also punishing those voters who do not vote for that particular party. Examples around the world, including Argentina and Italy, show us that political leaders openly threaten citizens who may vote against them to fire them from their jobs, obstruct their business contracts, and so on. Based on its level of analysis, clientelism differs from what is known as “pork barrel politics,” which entails preferential treatment of certain localities solely based on election results. Owing to pork barrel politics, public resources are allocated to certain localities that support the governing party and are withdrawn from those that oppose it. By its nature, pork barrel politics implies that all residents of localities would benefit from the provision of public services (or fail to benefit for certain cases), regardless of their political preferences. On the other hand, clientelistic exchanges are realized either at the individual level or in small groups. Only a select, small collection of citizens benefits from clientelistic relations contingent upon their continued political support for certain political parties. All in all, pork barrel politics discriminates across localities, whereas clientelism discriminates among individuals. Despite the fact that clientelism entails a corrupt, undemocratic network of relations, the concept should also be differentiated from that of corruption with regard to the flow of benefits. In clientelism, material benefits are provided by politicians to citizens, who are then expected to support them at the ballot box. In contrast, corruption in its general sense necessitates material benefits from citizens to politicians (additionally to bureaucrats in some cases) to ensure preferential treatment in acquiring public contracts, circumventing necessary bureaucratic procedures, and so on. Thus, the flow of material benefits runs in opposite directions in the cases of clientelism versus corruption.

Determinants of Clientelism Clientelism exists in many countries, both developing and developed. However, certain socioeconomic and political conditions increase the probability of clientelism. To begin with, many experts agree that clientelism is prevalent in societies with widespread poverty and with a relatively weak and ineffective state apparatus. In societies in which the state fails to provide basic services (such as security, infrastructure, and health), people seek alternative ways to satisfy these primary human needs. This is especially the case for poor citizens who cannot afford these services on their own and people who live in secluded localities beyond the state’s full coverage of basic public goods. To this end, clientelism stands as a

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substitute for these citizens, whereby they can acquire material benefits from their political patrons in exchange for their political support. In the case of more affluent citizens and societies, votes become exponentially more expensive to purchase. In these cases, clientelism becomes a rarer phenomenon. Another crucial determinant of clientelism is electoral institutions. Specifically, ballot types stand as a primary determinant of clientelism. Ballots that enable easier monitoring of voters’ choices clearly facilitate clientelism. For instance, some countries, including Argentina, Panama, and Uruguay, permit “party ballots,” which are produced by political parties. Similarly, other countries such as Spain allow political parties to use “ticket ballots,” which contain only the name(s) of candidates from one party’s list. Both practices enable political parties to have higher control over voters, as they can monitor who will vote for them or not. On the other side, “Australian (secret) ballots” are usually the norm in the new millennium. About 85% of countries today use Australian ballots, which are produced and distributed by public agencies. The Australian ballot permits the secrecy of the vote cast. However, despite the global predominance of the Australian ballot system, many political parties still try to monitor voters via alternative techniques, such as door-to-door canvassing by party workers or by providing voters with party badges to wear and party colors and signs for display. Parties’ monitoring of voters under the Australian (secret) ballot is of course an imperfect one. Hence, according to some experts, instead of “vote buying,” parties can be said to be conducting “turnout buying” by mobilizing supporters to show up at the polls. The clientelism literature is divided on the topic of the recipients of clientelism, that is, who benefits from clientelistic exchanges. Some experts assert that political parties target their core constituencies to engage in clientelistic exchanges. On the other hand, some scholars argue that, since the votes of the strong supporters of a political party are almost certain, political parties do not bother to attract their core supporters, and instead they try to lure weak opponents to their political camp by offering material, clientelistic inducements. Among experts there is no consensus on aspects of clientelism. Another determinant of clientelism is the nature of party competition. In competitive party systems in which elections are close between rival blocs of parties and there is a significant bloc of undecided voters, programmatic appeals prevail over clientelistic appeals. This is especially the case for democratic competition in more affluent societies, where it is very costly to buy off citizens via clientelistic appeals. On the other hand, conditions of low/medium economic development and/ or high income inequality may tilt the balance toward

clientelistic appeals over programmatic ones as political parties find it financially and politically feasible to attract voters to their parties. Overall, there are several determinants of clientelism, and these may interact with each other (as is the case for party competition and economic development) to define the extensiveness and limits of clientelism in a country.

Varieties of Clientelism: The Rural–Urban Divide Clientelistic relations can be found under many conditions. However, a distinction between rural and urban modes of clientelism can be helpful to grasp this sociopolitical phenomenon even better. To begin with, we observe normative bonds of deference and loyalty in rural clientelism, whereas urban clientelism is clearly linked with political competition between different providers of particularistic incentives by multiple political parties. Rural clientelism is usually observed in underdeveloped and secluded localities, such as Andalucía and Galicia in Spain and Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia in Turkey. On the other hand, urban clientelism is typically found in the peripheral areas of urban centers, such as shantytowns. Latin American urban centers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico provide us with abundant examples of urban clientelism in shantytowns (see, e.g., Stokes, 2005). Rural clientelism operates by way of highly hierarchical relationships between voters and local politicians, who act as the mediators (usually the only mediator) between the constituency and the central government. To this end, rural clientelism bears notions of Weberian traditional authority, in which the local leaders act as chiefs of the people in their locality. In rural clientelism, we observe affective ties between political patrons and the commoners. These ties are supported by ritual gift exchanges, which strengthen the feelings of obligation among the recipients (i.e., voters) and lower defection. The moral aspect of rural clientelism is emphasized heavily by local patrons so as to achieve the highest ­levels of adherence and commitment by the rural population. For instance, Allen D. Hicken reports that a ­Buddhist monk in rural Thailand declared that it was immoral to take money from one political candidate and vote for another. Intrinsic reciprocity rather than instrumental reciprocity is more central in rural clientelism. Due to the nature of rural clientelism, it yields intrinsic reciprocity in the eyes of the voters, in which voters are more willing to sacrifice their own material well-being in order to increase the payoffs for their political patrons who have been kind to them. This is contrasted with instrumental reciprocity, which is motivated by forwardlooking self-interest (see Finan & Schechter, 2012).

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Table 1  Differences Between Rural and Urban Modes of Clientelism Rural Clientelism

Urban Clientelism

Normative bonds of deference and loyalty

Competition between different providers of selective and particularistic incentives

Weberian traditional authority

Downsian motivations for political power

Affective ties between patrons and clients (ritual gift exchanges; moral obligation)

Political machines (more material inducements such as jobs)

Intrinsic reciprocity

Instrumental reciprocity

Underdeveloped and/or secluded regions

Usually in urban periphery (shantytowns)

On the other hand, urban forms of clientelism bear a Downsian framework, in which political leaders and parties are motivated by desire for power, income, and prestige. Political machines are central to urban clientelism. “Machine politics,” which is related to ­ mobilizing supporters and demobilizing opposition for the purpose of winning elections and the spoils of office, clearly defines urban modes of clientelism. Material incentives such as jobs are exchanged for the votes of low-skilled, poorly educated citizens, and lucrative ­contracts for projects are exchanged for financial support from the entrepreneurial class. Table 1 shows an overall comparison of rural versus urban modes of clientelism. Surely, it would be misleading to assume that these rural versus urban forms of clientelism are strictly separated from each other. It is evident that increased institutionalization of party organization enables political parties to reach out to citizens in many rural areas in various nations. Alternatively, urban modes of clientelism in some shantytowns bear resemblances to certain notions of rural clientelism (such as affective ties between patrons and clients) due to geographical seclusion in metropolitan centers. To this end, the rural–urban divide in clientelism should be seen as a continuum rather than as two separate pockets of political vacuum. However, understanding the division and the underlying reasons behind rural and urban forms of clientelism is still very fruitful to comprehend the nature of political contestation in many countries at both the local and national levels.

Political Effects of Clientelism There are very important political indications of clientelism. To begin with, clientelism hinders economic development by favoring certain groups of individuals

in a society solely based on their political preferences and excluding others. Many people that would have benefited from public goods provision based on either need or merit are clearly discriminated against due to clientelistic relationships. To this end, clientelism harms not only these excluded segments of the society but also the society at large, since it downplays the full potential of the society that would have otherwise been fulfilled via meritocratic relationships. Clientelism also damages democracy by distorting people’s political preferences and skewing the equality of the ballot. Political preferences of certain groups of voters become distorted in exchange for side payments such as goodies, jobs, and contracts. Voters who may otherwise vote for other political parties end up ­supporting a political party just because they receive material benefits. Furthermore, clientelism vitiates ­ ­democracy, as political parties with broad networks of clientelism gain an upper hand over other political parties. This clearly results in an undemocratic situation in which political parties do not compete on an equal footing. Besides its deleterious effect on democracies, clientelism is also used by dictators to hold onto power. Clientelistic relationships are widely utilized in autocratic regimes to ensure ongoing political support for suppressive leaders by rewarding the supporters of the regime and punishing the opponents. All in all, with its relevance and extensiveness in developing and developed nations, poor and affluent localities, and democratic and autocratic regimes, clientelism continues to be a central concept of the politics and political science of our age. Kursat Cinar See also Democracy; Electoral Systems; Party Identification; Political Participation; Rural Voters; Urban Voters; Voting Behavior, Theories of

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Further Readings Cinar, K. (2016). A comparative analysis of clientelism in Greece, Spain, and Turkey: The rural–urban divide. Contemporary Politics, 22(1), 77–94. Finan, F., & Schechter, L. (2012). Vote-buying and reciprocity. Econometrica, 80, 863–881. Hicken, A. (2007). How effective are institutional reforms? In F. C. Schaffer (Ed.), Elections for sale: The causes and consequences of vote buying (pp. 45–160). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Keiser, R. A. (2001). Political machine. In J. Krieger (Ed.), The Oxford companion to politics of the world (2nd ed., pp. 666–667). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kitschelt, H. (2000). Linkages between citizens and politicians in democratic polities. Comparative Political Studies, 33(6/7), 845–879. Kitschelt, H., & Wilkinson, S. (2007). Patrons, clients, and policies: Patterns of democratic accountability and political competition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Magaloni, B. (2006). Voting for autocracy: Hegemonic party survival and its demise in Mexico. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Nichter, S. (2008). Vote buying or turn-out buying? Machine politics and the secret ballot. American Political Science Review, 102(1), 19–31. Stokes, S. C. (2005). Perverse accountability: A formal model of machine politics with evidence from Argentina. American Political Science Review, 99(3), 315–325. Stokes, S. C. (2009). Political clientelism. In C. Boix and S. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative politics (pp. 604–627). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Stokes, S. C., Dunning, T., Nazareno, M., & Busco, V. (2013). Brokers, voters, and clientelism: The puzzle of distributive politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Closure, Need

for

Consider a candidate who suddenly drops out of a presidential race. If you are an expert in U.S. politics, you are probably quite capable of explaining why this might be the case (poor party support, potential scandal in the making if elected, will be named vice president, etc.). While being capable of providing explanations as to why a candidate dropped out of the race is one thing, it is quite another to have an interest in doing so. While a certain amount of motivation may be needed to generate hypotheses (or reasons) as to why a candidate suddenly dropped out of a presidential race, it is also important to distinguish between two dimensions that can explain an individual’s motivation for such an action. The first dimension refers to an individual’s desire to seek closure (closing one’s mind) or avoid cognitive closure (keeping

an open mind) on this particular topic. The type of motivating closure, the second dimension, can be nonspecific (any answer is better than nothing) or of a specific kind (a particular answer). When both dimensions are combined, four motivational orientations are produced to explain why the candidate dropped out of the presidential race: namely, the need for nonspecific closure, the need for specific closure, the need to avoid nonspecific closure, and the need to avoid specific closure. The need for nonspecific closure (also known as the need for closure) is defined as an individual’s desire for a quick answer. Also, a quick, firm answer is believed to be better than ambiguity or being confused. For example, an individual would have a need for nonspecific closure if she wanted to know which of two reasons explaining the departure of the candidate was the most pertinent regardless of political ideology. The need for closure is thus characterized by a person who closes her mind with the aid of a rapid answer. In contrast, the need for specific closure is biased in that the individual is seeking a particular answer. In this particular case, the person is closing her mind but will do so once she finds the quick answer that suits her. For example, a college student interested in becoming a politician later on in life is likely to care about this issue to a greater extent than he is in the grade obtained on an exam in his pottery class. Individuals can also be motivated to avoid nonspecific closure. When motivated in such a manner, individuals remain open-minded and keep their options open, and “judgmental noncommitment” is deemed important. An individual who is afraid that she might judge the departing candidate incorrectly and has much time to gather information about the reasons the candidate left the presidential race can be seen as having a need to avoid nonspecific closure. Finally, an individual may be motivated to avoid specific reasons the candidate left because the reasons are threatening. The person’s mind is open. Yet it is also frozen. For instance, for an individual who favored the departing candidate, the need to avoid knowing the reasons the political candidate left may be identical to her desire to know the reasons the candidate left. Being fatigued and feeling time pressure are factors that can influence an individual’s need to find a quick, firm answer. While such situational factors can affect an individual’s need for closure, researchers have shown that individuals vary in a stable manner with respect to their motivation to open or close their mind. To measure such individual differences, Donna Webster and Arie W. Kruglanski developed the Need for Closure Scale. The scale has been translated into more than 10  languages, and it has led to a better cross-cultural understanding of open- and closed-mindedness. A high score on the Need for Closure Scale indicates that an individual prefers order and predictability, is

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intolerant of ambiguity, is quick to decide, and is closedminded. In the realm of political psychology, a high score on this scale has been found to be associated with a greater amount of authoritarianism, negative stereotyping, greater political conservatism, a more favorable attitude toward the death penalty, the endorsement of tougher counterterrorism tactics, and a right-wing orientation. When compared with individuals with a low need for closure, individuals with a high need for c­ ontrol have also been shown to hold strong anti-immigrant attitudes, to be less supportive of multiculturalism, to be more nationalistic, and to prefer a centralized form of political power. In the case of a political conflict, a high need for closure has been found to be related to more competitive approaches to dealing with conflict. This finding is especially true for political actors whose identity makes sharp friend–foe distinctions or who are aggressive in their conflict-­resolution style. However, this tendency to prefer competition in intergroup conflict can be neutralized by having negotiating parties focus on a ­ cooperative approach to conflict resolution. Thus, the relationship between need for closure and being aggressive in a conflict-­resolution situation depends on whether the context is competitive or cooperative. While the evidence points to a link between need for closure and variables associated with a conservative orientation, it is important to note that this association needs to be qualified. Need for closure is indeed positively related to a traditional view of the world. That is, the greater the need for closure, the more an individual values both the past and religion. However, a high need for closure is also positively related to a modern view of the world, which focuses on progress and the importance of scientific reasoning. Finally, the need for closure is negatively correlated with a postmodern view of the world, which entails acceptance of some degree of cultural and moral relativism and the notion that individuals largely create themselves. This is an interesting finding because it supports the idea that individuals with a high need for closure seek predictable views of the world and reject uncertain worldviews. Moreover, both right- and left-wing political orientations can serve to create a stable and secure framework. Stéphane Perreault See also Cognitive Dissonance; Confirmation Bias; Framing Effects; Heuristics; Indoctrination; Irrationality; Optimal Distinctiveness Theory

Further Readings Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Sulloway, F., & Kruglanski, A. W. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.

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Kruglanski, A. W. (1989). Lay epistemics and human knowledge: Cognitive and motivational bases. New York, NY: Plenum Press. Kruglanski, A. W. (2004). The psychology of closed mindedness. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 1049–1062.

Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance can be defined as the inconsistency between pairs of related cognitions or between related cognitions and actions. In order to better understand this definition, it is essential to specify the meaning of the term cognition as well as the relationship that exists between pairs of cognitions, as well as cognitions and actions. Within the framework of cognitive dissonance theory, cognitions refer to the knowledge that an individual possesses about objects (e.g., I know that dollar bills are green), oneself (e.g., I know that I am a liberal), and the environment (e.g., I know that it is cold today). Furthermore, pairs of cognitions, as well as cognitions and actions, can be unrelated or related consistently or inconsistently with each other. In keeping with this proposition, there is no apparent relationship between knowing what color a dollar bill is and knowing how cold it is today. These two “knowledges” can thus be thought of as being unrelated. A consonant relationship exists between pairs of cognitions, or cognitions and actions, that are consistent with each other. For example, if an individual views herself as a liberal, then that person should vote (action) for a liberal candidate in an election. Notice that voting for a liberal candidate follows seeing oneself as a liberal (the action is in line with the cognition). In short, voting is consonant with the political preference of the voter. However, if a liberal votes for a conservative-party candidate, a dissonant relationship between pairs of cognitions and actions is believed to exist, because voting for (i.e., taking action in support of) a conservative candidate does not follow from perceiving oneself as a liberal.

A Brief Overview of Cognitive Dissonance Theory Leon Festinger, the founder of cognitive dissonance theory, proposed in 1957 that changes in the environment and interactions with others generate new information which, in turn, may become dissonant with existing knowledge. Stated another way, exposure to new knowledge creates pairs of cognitions that are unrelated, consonant, and, more central to cognitive

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dissonance theory, dissonant to varying degrees. Furthermore, individuals experiencing cognitive dissonance feel psychologically uncomfortable, and feeling this way motivates them to reduce the inconsistency between pairs of related cognitions and between cognitions and actions. More importantly, these individuals attempt to eliminate their cognitive dissonance in hopes of achieving harmony between pairs of related cognitions and cognitions and actions. The magnitude of the inconsistency between two related cognitions or cognitions and actions depends on how these are valued by a person. For instance, if being a liberal is very important for an individual, then voting for (taking action in support of) a conservative-party candidate should elicit an important amount of cognitive dissonance. The magnitude of cognitive dissonance is also influenced by the number of elements linking the two related cognitions. In keeping with our political example, if all of the cognitive elements (I like the candidate’s position on the environment, the fact that the candidate is a woman, and that she has a great deal of experience in politics) are in accordance with voting for a given political candidate for a potential voter, no cognitive dissonance should be experienced by this person. However, voting for a male candidate with a questionable environmental policy and very little experience in politics should elicit an important amount of cognitive dissonance for the individual who believes that all three of these elements are important when voting for a candidate. Thus, the number of consonant and dissonant cognitive elements associated with voting is an important factor to consider when estimating the magnitude of cognitive dissonance. To reduce the dissonance that an individual feels and achieve consonance between pairs of related cognitions or cognitions and actions, an individual can avoid situations and information that elicit cognitive dissonance. Moreover, Festinger argued that people can reduce their cognitive dissonance by changing their behavior or by changing the cognitions associated with this behavior. For example, if a person smokes and learns that it is unhealthy to do so, by quitting smoking, that person automatically eliminates the cognitive dissonance he or she feels. Nevertheless, smokers don’t always change their behavior in response to new information. Rather, they rationalize their smoking behavior by denying the validity of the information (“There is no clear link between chronic bronchitis and smoking”). A smoker’s cognitive dissonance can also be alleviated by adding new elements to the newly discovered information, such as that the death rate is higher in automobile accidents than for smoking, or by modifying the newly presented information by arguing that “life is too short to worry about such things.”

Eliciting Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance can be elicited in adults, children, and university students in both natural and experimental settings. In line with this idea, a high level of cognitive dissonance is expected to occur when individuals are exposed to information that is not consistent with their beliefs. Consider the members of a group who are expecting that the world is about to come to an end. When faced with the reality that it hasn’t, they should experience a significant amount of cognitive dissonance. The same can be said for pledges who are attempting to join a prestigious fraternity. Fraternity initiations are renowned for having pledges perform activities that are boring, unpleasant, and, at times, even dangerous. Note that in everyday life, pledges have no interest in taking part in such activities. Yet they do so, thus creating a natural setting in which cognitive dissonance is created. Completing boring tasks in a laboratory setting has also been used by researchers in order to foster cognitive dissonance within students. In addition, rewards of varying sizes are sometimes promised to students by researchers in order to justify their taking part in such unpleasant activities. Theoretically, offering a large reward reduces the cognitive dissonance felt by participants because they can justify their behavior with the reward received, thus leaving their belief system intact. However, providing a small reward provides an insufficient justification for performing the unpleasant task. This situation leaves room for an individual to change his or her attitude toward the boring activity, thus reducing the cognitive dissonance being felt. Another strategy that has been used by researchers to create cognitive dissonance is to have individuals publicly commit to a particular behavior, such as the importance of regular physical exercise, and reminding them that they do not. Decision-making tasks have also been utilized by researchers to evoke cognitive dissonance. For example, imagine that a person has to decide which political candidate he or she likes best. More precisely, this person is asked by the researchers to rank a series of 10 political candidates according to how much he or she would vote for them. After ranking the candidates, the person is then asked to pick one candidate. Which decision would be more difficult for the person to make: making a choice between two closely ranked candidates or choosing between candidates who are ranked farther apart? The answer is the former. By asking people to choose between two alternatives that are desirable, cognitive dissonance is elicited, because choosing a candidate is tied to the idea they are rejecting a candidate they also like. Such a choice generates much more cognitive dissonance than choosing a candidate from a pair that is ranked farther apart. Finally, cognitive dissonance has

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also been induced by researchers by having individuals watch a fellow group member behave inconsistently with their values. To highlight this last point, consider a political candidate who is expressing enthusiasm for a new social policy even though you have heard him, in the past, argue against it. Moreover, you realize that he is discussing the policy with its promoter. Although you understand that it is important to be polite in such a situation, you are, nevertheless, quite surprised. You start to feel uncomfortable (feel cognitive dissonance) from imagining yourself in the candidate’s position.

Reducing Cognitive Dissonance Over the past 60 years, researchers have utilized natural and experimental settings to examine how individuals whose beliefs are challenged or who act inconsistently with their values make efforts to restore consonance. Theoretically, information that completely contradicts an individual’s political stance can lead to proselytizing (i.e., an attempt to persuade others that one’s beliefs are correct). Furthermore, information about a politician should be selected according to one’s political preference because it is consonant. From an environmental point of view, reducing the discomfort felt between dissonant cognitions can account for water conservation and for why people (who experience dissonance vicariously) will become passionate defenders of sunscreen usage. Finally, politically speaking, restoring consonance can help explain why voters, as compared with nonvoters, change their evaluation of presidential candidates after an election. It would seem that the reduction of cognitive dissonance can lead to changes in people’s attitudes as well as in their behavior. However, some qualifications need to be made with respect to the information presented earlier. The first qualification has to do with the duration of a change in attitude. Evidence suggests that it can persist for up to a month. The second qualification is that not everybody experiences cognitive dissonance in the same manner. To illustrate this point, individuals who are highly dogmatic (rigid, defensive, and biased in their thinking) experience greater mental discomfort when placed in a dissonance-provoking experiment. The final qualification deals with the link between cognitive dissonance and culture. Dissonance can be induced in both individualistic and collectivistic cultures. However, in collectivistic cultures, a social referent such as a friend or a group member needs to be present to elicit cognitive dissonance within a fellow group member.

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examined the assumptions of cognitive dissonance theory. In essence, the meaning of cognitive dissonance has changed from being one that emphasizes inconsistency between two related cognitions to a definition that incorporates the idea that it is discomforting. Researchers who have studied dissonance using the perspective that it is discomforting have defined the concept as an aversive state, a bad mood, feeling guilty, or the psychological distress or an uncomfortable arousal that results from a cognitive discrepancy between two related cognitions or related cognitions and actions. Furthermore, defining dissonance in this manner has led researchers to evaluate its presence with physiological measures such as skin conductance and neural activity.

The Legacy of Cognitive Dissonance In the late 1950s, the counterintuitive hypothesis associated with the reduction of cognitive dissonance stimulated much research. However, the change in attitudes witnessed in cognitive dissonance experiments was challenged in the 1960s by self-perception theorists as not being the result of cognitive dissonance reduction but by the idea that people infer their attitudes from their behavior. Creating favorable impressions was also proposed to explain why people modified their attitudes in cognitive dissonance experiments in the early 1970s. Research attention for cognitive dissonance then waned after 1976 but was rekindled slightly by theorists who suggested a radical version of cognitive dissonance theory in the 1980s. A shift in the meaning of cognitive dissonance also sparked interest for cognitive dissonance research. Cognitive dissonance, in the 1980s, was not the result of an inconsistency between a pair of related cognitions but, rather, aroused by the perception that a person is responsible for bringing about a negative event. Finally, in the early 1990s, the suggestions that dissonance is the result of acting inconsistently with one’s self-concept and that it is equivalent to psychological discomfort vaulted the study of cognitive ­dissonance back to where it was in the 1960s. The legacy of cognitive dissonance as well as cognitive dissonance theory is impressive in that it has generated a considerable amount of research and various theoretical ­challenges and revisions as well as fostered many mini-theories of human behavior. Stéphane Perreault

The Meaning of Cognitive Dissonance The meaning of the term cognitive dissonance has changed over the years because various theorists have

See also Closure, Need for; Discrimination; Justice Motive; Moral Dilemmas; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Positioning Theory; Risky Shift; Source Bias

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Further Readings Aronson, E. (1992). The return of the repressed: Dissonance theory makes a comeback. Psychological Inquiry, 3, 303–311. Beasley, R. K., & Joslyn, M. R. (2001). Cognitive dissonance and post-decision attitude change in six presidential elections. Political Psychology, 22, 521–540. Cooper, J. (2012). Cognitive dissonance theory. In Paul A. M. Van Lange, Arie W. Kruglanski, & E. Tory Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 377–397). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson. Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (Eds.). (1999). Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Collective Action Collective action pertains to synchronized actions done by a plurality of individuals primarily to improve the conditions or promote the interests of one’s in-group. This entry provides a discussion of the features, production, and goals of collective action; the determinants and social psychological theories that explain the factors leading to collective action; a brief introduction to the different forms it may take; and the outcome and effectiveness of collective action.

Features of Collective Action Sociological perspectives equate collective action with mass behaviors of group members acting in concert. In this view, the smallest sociological unit is a collective such as a protest movement, a political party, or a labor union. Their collective actions are understood as singular acts of groups rather than synchronized multiple acts of different individuals. Such singular group acts move toward a shared goal but do not require group members to be physically together while engaging in group-serving behaviors, nor do unified members need to act at the same point in time. Social psychological researchers conceptualize collective action as actions marked by an individual’s psychological features such as in-group social identity and group-enhancement intent. Hence, from a psychological standpoint, collective action becomes possible only when a person identifies with a group and acts with the intention to improve the group’s situation or advance its goals. Collective action may rest on the individual’s level of self-categorization and progroup intentions. It

may include behaviors done by individuals acting alone, such as writing a letter, signing a petition, or staging an individual hunger strike, as Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi had done in protest against British colonizers in the early to mid-1900s. Group members who engage in collective action often come from low-status or disadvantaged groups that experience injustice and inequality. Collective action becomes a means for them to challenge the social structure. For example, through collective protest actions, prodemocracy movements challenge an authoritarian regime and its centralized political structures. However, members of high-status or advantaged groups also engage in collective action, often in response to threat and with the intention of maintaining the existing social structure. For example, extended family members of a dictator can consolidate their clan ties within military institutions to squelch any mass-based uprisings. There are also cases wherein advantaged members engage in collective action on behalf of disadvantaged out-groups (i.e., males supporting females; Whites supporting African-American racial issues). In such cases, self-categorization may be based not on groups that are formed around socially constructed categories (e.g., men or women; Whites or African-Americans) but on groups formed around common interests or ideology (e.g., feminism; racial equality). The concept of belief-based groups explains how individuals from different social categories come together for a common cause. When collectives are formed on the basis of opinion or around issues, groups are defined not by demographic categories but by idea sharing or the common stance they take regarding an idea. In belief-based groups, advantaged group members engage in collective action on behalf of disadvantaged groups due to moral imperatives, or strongly held beliefs about right and wrong. On the emotional plane, empathy, guilt, or shame may lead advantaged members to act on behalf of disadvantaged groups. A number of theories, including classic elite theory and the modern Five-Stage Model, highlight the role of talented counter-elites in the mobilization of disadvantaged groups. The central idea here is that if talented individuals are not allowed to rise in the hierarchy, they will eventually mobilize the nonelite to rebel against the elite. High social mobility is seen as a way to ensure that people will give priority to individual rather than collective action. Social scientists have specified two particular forms of collective action: normative and nonnormative action. Normative action pertains to behaviors that conform to existing social norms, whereas nonnormative action pertains to behaviors that violate these social norms. Whether an action is normative or nonnormative may vary across different social contexts

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and even across time. Social norms are based not on the rules of the in-group but on the rules of the social system to which both in-group and out-group members belong. In many cases, normative action pertains to more common activities such as petition signing, peaceful demonstrations, or political participation. Since normative strategies often involve less risk, group members are likely to consider these first. If there are no avenues in which normative action can be exercised or if normative actions prove to be unsuccessful, nonnormative actions could be considered. These are often more disruptive. Actions that are extraconstitutional, violent, or radical often fall under nonnormative action. Unlike normative action, which recognizes and procedurally abides by the rules of the social system, nonnormative action directly challenges the social system. It is explained to be more effective in provoking target out-groups to respond. Nonnormative, disruptive strategies may more ­effectively challenge the social system than normative strategies do. Nonnormative strategies exert more leverage, unlike normative strategies, which tacitly support the social system by recognizing and procedurally abiding by its rules. But exaggerated disruptive mass actions may likewise create backlash against the in-group’s goals, threatening and building resistance among outgroups and the third-party public. For example, street graffiti that invites passersby to join the armed struggle against an authoritarian regime may increase fear and anger among passersby. Group members may sometimes use both forms of collective action either simultaneously or sequentially. One sequential example of normative and nonnormative actions can be gleaned from Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. Local prodemocracy protests started with normative street protests that followed social norms of legitimate complaints. However, as conflicts intensified and governments turned more repressive, antigovernment collective actions likewise broke conventional boundaries, and legitimate protest movements transformed themselves into heavily armed liberation armies. Normative or nonnormative actions cannot be equated with nonviolent and violent actions, respectively. In some social contexts, violent behavior can be considered normative behavior (e.g., conflict between gangs or rebel groups) and nonviolent behavior can be considered nonnormative (e.g., nonviolent civil disobedience).

Producing Collective Action: Networking, Mobilizing, Conscientizing How do marginalized groups produce collective action, especially if they have no access to conventional sources

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of social force like arms, military and paramilitary forces, and money—or, as the Filipino expression goes—guns, goons, and gold? The power of collective action emanates from huge numbers of people mobilized into a synchronized social force and purposefully group-directed toward a single goal of challenging the status quo. To produce such collective actions entails three concrete tasks: networking, mobilizing, and conscientizing. Networking involves building operational links with like-minded individuals and groups in order to create an interlocking web of individuals and groups, ready to move together against the status quo. For example, prodemocracy movements in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Arab Spring countries established antidictatorship united fronts by networking and linking together an extensive web of sympathizers among religious leaders, students, laborers, and business managers, and even within the ranks of military institutions, albeit discreetly. However, unless such social webs are mobilized, networks remain static and not dynamic collective action. Mobilization transforms collective inertia or readiness into dynamic collective action, as networked individuals and groups operate in unison during episodic actions that confront the status quo. For example, among prodemocracy activists, mobilization would occur during street rallies; with labor unions, mobilizations take the form of collective bargaining or workers’ strikes. Networking and mobilization operate in political space, while conscientization is a liberating kind of education process that produces alterations in a group’s shared cognitions about the status quo and the group’s ability to transform its relationship with the status quo Other. We can refer to such shared cognitions as a collective action frame, or a way of seeing things in a similar way, so large groups of people can move in a singular direction to try to change the status quo. The pedagogical style of conscientization promotes equality to avoid the rise of a new vertical culture of intellectual domination alongside the intensification of collective actions.

Goals of Collective Action Collective actions are primarily group serving. Various researchers have classified collective goals according to scope (incidental or structural), target of action (outgroup, in-group, or public-at-large), and nature of intergroup engagement (competitive or conversionary). These goal categories are not mutually exclusive and can coexist with each other during the implementation of collective action. Oftentimes, collective actions confront incidental or structural disadvantages in society. Incidental

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disadvantage pertains to episodes that produce unfavorable situations such as the approval of open-pit mining, an increase in public train fares, or the burning of a mosque. Structural disadvantages, on the other hand, are based on the sociostructural order in society in which injustices or inequalities are more deep-rooted. Discrimination based on social class, gender, race, or religion exemplifies structural disadvantage. Collective action may likewise advocate an ideology or crusade for moral convictions such as environmentalism, human rights, or respect for religious identities. Episodic group protests are often utilized as a first stage to mobilize individuals for larger mass actions aimed at structural change and ideological goals. For example, as protests mobilize against a local open-pit mine, organizers escalate and enlarge their networks and reach out to international nongovernment organizations. Such a move is carried out by shifting the protest narrative and enlarging their protest network to target global capitalist ventures that are destructive to the world’s environment. Collective actions aim to effect changes among the out-group, the in-group, and the third party party-­ at-large. Such mass actions are mobilized to influence out-group members in an attempt to persuade or convert them to concede to, recognize, or adopt the perspective or goals of the in-group. Joint action likewise influences fellow in-group members to participate in communal activities. Further, such actions may be done as a form of psychological coping, especially among victimized collectives. It enables groups to find mental strength in numbers and deal with the psychological stress that comes with the experience of injustice. An example of this would be the prayer or peace rallies organized by Pakistani Christians after the Peshawar school massacre in December 2014. Collective actions can likewise aim to influence the public-at-large to ally with or support the protest activities. For example, South Africa’s antiapartheid street protests in the 1980s not only aimed to consolidate Black political force or threaten the White regime but also intended to win over worldwide sympathy through international media coverage. Successful collective actions throughout the country resulted in Nelson Mandela’s ascent to power as the leader of a new nonapartheid South African government in 1994. Most studies have focused on collective action as competitive. When group members perceive the social order to be illegitimate and capable of being changed, they engage in competitive action to improve their status. Often, this also involves negative attributions of the out-group. However, not all communal actions are combative; some are conversionary.

Conversionary collective action aims at converting nonmembers (e.g., out-group, general public) to recognize and embrace the in-group’s worldview. The goal here is in-group migration, or to get other people to be part of the group. Out-group members are perceived as misguided and in need of education. Some environmental movements and religious conversions are examples of conversionary action. However, when conversionary strategies prove unsuccessful, competitive collective actions may be considered.

Determinants of Collective Action Social psychologists have underlined the significance of group identification and self-categorization to collective action. For an individual to undertake actions that promote group interests, one must consider oneself a member of that group, and this membership becomes the basis for one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Intergroup comparison is perceived as fundamental to motivate an individual toward collective action. Intergroup comparisons happen in contexts in which intergroup relationships are salient and where there is a clear us and them. However, mere identification and self-categorization may not be sufficient to propel an individual toward collective action. Identifying oneself as a woman, for example, does not necessarily result in feminist collective action. Researchers have introduced the concept of a politicized collective identity. Through group comparison, an individual gains awareness of the in-group’s disadvantaged position and subsequently regards this disadvantaged position as unacceptable. Identifying with a ­ specific group likewise develops an action-oriented identity such as social movement organizations or activist groups. A politicized collective identity is much more likely to inspire collective action than is a nonpoliticized collective identity. Collective actions that highlight a superordinate identity (e.g., American identity of Black and White Americans) between the in-group and out-group is seen to be another way to obtain effective collective action. This may reduce negative attitudes between groups and may challenge perceptions about the legitimacy of intergroup inequalities, thus motivating action to remedy this illegitimacy. However, it was also noted that salience of a superordinate identity may blur perceptions of inequality and illegitimacy among both advantaged and disadvantaged members such that reparatory actions may no longer be considered. Social psychological concepts have been used to explain how self-categorization and social comparison lead to collective action among disadvantaged groups. Both relative deprivation theory and social

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identity theory identify motivational forces behind group actions.

Relative Deprivation Theory and Group-Based Emotions Relative deprivation theory postulates that group members are motivated toward collective action due to perceptions and feelings of deprivation that arise when comparing their group with other groups. It is not the objective experience of injustice or inequality, per se, that leads to collective action but the subjective interpretation of the group’s experience of disadvantage. Furthermore, for collective action to ensue, relative deprivation should be interpreted as a group rather than a personal experience. This deprivation is also blamed on an out-group or illegitimate social structures. Relative deprivation theory also clarifies how emotional responses such as anger, resentment, outrage, and a feeling of entitlement often accompany perceptions of disadvantage. Such group-based emotions are stronger predictors of collective action than subjective perceptions alone. Apart from anger and resentment, feelings of contempt are often associated with radical forms of collective action. During conscientizing processes against an abusive government, prodemocracy forces can use relative deprivation effects to persuade more members of the public-at-large to join collective mobilizations. One common strategy propagandizes the wealth of those in power, displaying their lavish drinking parties, mistresses and mansions, and luxurious jewelry. Such images intensify perceptions of relative deprivation among populations marked by desperate poverty and persuade more members of the public to participate in collective street protests.

Social Identity Theory Social identity theory maintains that group members engage in collective action to improve the position and esteem of the in-group, and respond to the threat against their social identity. A person’s participation in collective action depends on whether that person perceives his or her in-group as capable of executing the necessary actions to achieve the desired change. This sense of collective agency is also termed collective efficacy or the extent to which an individual perceives the group as capable of achieving its goals. A group member’s propensity to engage in collective action also depends on whether his or her perception of the social context favors successful group actions. More specifically, collective action is more likely if one searches and finds favorable cues that

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mark existing social conditions as impermeable, illegitimate, and unstable.  Permeability pertains to intergroup boundaries and the extent to which group members can move from a low-status group to a higher-status group. When boundaries are perceived to be impermeable or where individuals are hindered from obtaining an advantaged position regardless of effort or merit, group members may consider collective action to challenge this. If, however, boundaries are perceived to be permeable, ­ individuals would likely pursue individual action over collective action to obtain an advantaged position. Legitimacy refers to the extent to which disparities between groups or conditions within the social system are seen as acceptable, fair, or just. Similar to relative deprivation theory, perceptions and feelings of injustice or illegitimacy motivate participation in collective action.  Stability, on the other hand, pertains to how much group members perceive the status quo to be changeable. When group members are able to envision a society in which the status of their in-group can be ­ improved, collective action will likely develop. If, however, group members perceive their situation as unchangeable, interest in collective action will be weak.

Consequences of Collective Action Participation in collective action has been linked to a number of psychological outcomes. Collective action often affects identity, emotions, and well-being. Participation in collective action allows one to express emotions such as anger against out-groups. Joint actions enhance one’s social identity with a sense of satisfaction and happiness. Such participation may also bring about a sense of joy and empowerment, which motivates further engagement in collective action. Effectiveness of collective action is seen to depend on the target out-group’s responsiveness to change as well as its vulnerability to disruptive collective action. ­Sociological studies show conflicting evidence for the effectiveness of collective action in promoting social change. Some research indicates that policy change, for example, is influenced by public opinion rather than by collective action. Other sociological and political studies provide evidence that collective action is in fact effective for policy change. Social psychologists, on the other hand, suggest an indirect effect between collective action and policy change, proposing that the success of mass action may be measured by the extent to which it is able to influence public opinion, which would then lead to policy change. Cristina Jayme Montiel and Daniel J. Christie

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See also Activism; Calculus of Dissent; Civil Disobedience; CounterElite; Elite Theory (Pareto); Ethnic Revival; Insurgency; Political Socialization; Poverty Trap; Powerlessness; Radicalization; Resource Mobilization; Social Class; Social Revolts

Further Readings Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. J. (2011). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Duncan, L. E. (2012). The psychology of collective action. In K. Deaux & M. Snyder, The Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology (pp. 781–803). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Louis, W. R. (2009). Collective action—and then what? Journal of Social Issues, 65(4), 727–748. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560 .2009.01623.x McGarty, C., Bliuc, A., Thomas, E. F., & Bongiorno, R. (2009). Collective action as the material expression of opinion-based group membership. Journal of Social Issues, 65(4), 839–857. Montiel, C. (2001). Toward a psychology of structural peacebuilding. In D. Christie, R. Wagner, & D. Winter (Eds.), Peace, conflict and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century (pp. 282–294). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tausch, N., Spears, R., Saab, R., Siddiqui, R. N., Becker, J. C., Christ, O., & Purnima, S. (2011). Explaining radical group behavior: Developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action. Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 101(1), 129–148. doi:10.1037/a0022728 Thomas, E. F., & Louis, W. R. (2013a). Doing democracy: The social psychological mobilization and consequences of collective action. Social Issues and Policy Review, 7(1), 173–200. Thomas, E. F., & Louis, W. R. (2013b). When will collective action be effective? Violent and non-violent protests differentially influence perceptions of legitimacy and efficacy among sympathizers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(2), 263–276. doi:10.1177/0146167213510525 Wright, S. C. (2001). Strategic collective action: Social psychology and social change. In R. Brown & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes (pp. 414–430). Oxford, England: Blackwell. Wright, S. C. (2009). The next generation of collective action research. Journal of Social Issues, 65(4), 859–879. doi:10.11 11/j.1540-4560.2009.01628. Van Zomeren, M. (2013). Four core social-psychological motivations to undertake collective action. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(6), 378–388. doi:10.1111/spc3.12031

Command

of the

Commons

In an influential 2003 article, political scientist Barry Posen invoked the phrase “command of the commons” to explain the foundations of American military

­egemony. The concept borrows from an economics h literature that treats the “commons” as a rival but nonexcludable good. In the context of the international system, however, the domains of air, sea, and space are less rivalrous because many actors can use them without depletion, but these domains are more prone to exclusion through deliberate denial of access. Defining the commons as “areas that belong to no one state and that provide access to much of the globe,” Posen argues that through a preponderance of economic and military capabilities, mastery of the commons affords a military a unique ability to freely access and leverage the domains of air, sea, and space for purposes of transit, information, and denial. Command of the commons is itself built on a foundation of significant economic resources, a scientific research and industrial development base, a highly skilled workforce, and a well-trained professional military. Command is routinely executed through global infrastructure of logistics capabilities, military bases, prepositioned matériel, and a unified command plan. Only the United States possesses this mastery at present because its disproportionate influence over air and sea can credibly threaten to deny others access to these commons. For example, no other navy can deny or disrupt access of the American navy through international waters without the high risk of destruction, but the United States can credibly threaten just such an action to other potential adversaries. For its part, dominance of space can be leveraged for information and communications to facilitate commercial activity or military operations anywhere, anytime, or to deny other domains. In sum, command of the commons not only affords the United States the ability to deploy its military superiority anywhere for a decisive outcome but also the time to gradually build up localized capacity, study an adversary for vulnerabilities, and interdict and isolate an adversary to weaken it. The concept is not complete without an understanding of what Posen terms the “contested zone,” where operational freedom exercised in the commons can face significant constraints. Specifically, contested zones are areas closer to the territory of an adversary where familiarity of terrain, an asymmetry of stake, manpower advantages, and the ubiquity of cheap close-range combat and denial technologies enable a local adversary to raise the costs of a conflict. Thus, adversaries in contested zones can potentially deter or defeat a state with mastery of the commons by raising financial or manpower costs to an unacceptably high level.

New Developments in the Commons It is worth noting two new developments in the international security environment since Posen’s initial

Command of the Commons

c­onceptualization of “command of the commons”: the cybercommons and advanced military denial technologies. The emergence of cyberspace as a new domain of the global commons constitutes the first major development. Much like air, sea, and space, cyberspace is a common-use realm of communication and movement, which has become a pillar of both the global economy and major power military operations. For example, global stock markets, heavily reliant upon open cyberspace for transactions, process tens of trillions of dollars of transactions annually. As major powers, most notably the United States, have turned to network-centric warfare and electronic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for operations, they have become increasingly dependent on the cybercommons for data transmissions as well. The cybercommons is unique in that it remains relatively ungoverned by global regimes and predominantly owned and operated by the private sector, though it is increasingly being treated like a national asset. Unlike the other three realms, no power, including the United States, possesses dominant control of cyberspace. The near-universal access, the ease of anonymity by both state and nonstate actors, and the absence of control allow for ample disruptions. Although the United States remains the most technologically advanced country to leverage the cybercommons for information, coordination, and even disruption of other activities, it has struggled to deny actors in China, Russia, and North Korea from using the cybercommons to negatively impact other states and private entities. The United States has established U.S. Cyber Command and taken other actions to deal with the growing threats in this space, but it still retains no decisive eminence in the cybercommons. The second major development is that rising access to advanced military technologies enables state and nonstate actors to project greater power beyond the littorals into international waters. Some fear that sophisticated antiaccess and area denial (A2/AD) weapons can target ships at much longer ranges and horizontally expand the contested zones to threaten the maritime commons. These developments reflect the increasing multipolarity of the international system due to shifts in the global distribution of economic and military power. The growing trend toward multipolarity is significant because rising powers may expand their interests, further exploit the commons for military activity, and even attempt to disrupt or deny American command. China’s development of A2/AD capabilities most typically reflects these concerns. In particular, China is feared to pose a threat to freedom of navigation, particularly in the East China and South China Seas, and to significantly raise the costs of military action in that

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theater. Although American military spending and capabilities continue to dwarf those of other countries, some scholars contend the degree of U.S. superiority is slowly eroding. Nevertheless, the threat posed to the commons is likely not one of the present but of the future, based on projections of growth in technology, acquisitions, and doctrinal integration, which would take decades for a potential adversary to develop. Even if a credible challenge to the United States were to emerge, some scholars argue that contestation would not actually threaten American access to the maritime commons. This is because for the foreseeable future, the limitations of military technologies render the successful denial extremely difficult, except within an adversary’s own territory or immediate sphere of influence.

Competing Interpretations of Command Policy-makers and analysts have articulated two types of command to safeguard the commons—seen as the connective tissue of the international system itself— from rising challenges. One variant of command involving “control of the commons” demands a more activist, preemptive, and dominant approach to defend the entirety of the commons. In contrast, a second variant of command involving “security of the commons” affords a more relaxed posture that relies on the inherent resilience of the commons alongside heightened contributions of other states toward collective goods. Both concepts share the core assumption that the United States must retain access to the commons and must be able to deter/defeat challengers to American command. However, they differ significantly on the urgency of the threats to American command, the resilience of the commons, cost sensitivity, the incentives of other states, and prescriptions for sustaining command of the commons. Control of the commons, closely associated with the assumptions of primacy, perceives disruptions and rising challengers as immediate threats to American ­ economic and military interests in a highly fragile commons. The approach fears the psychological impact and contagion effects of any challenge to the commons. Unrest can yield disorder and even closure of the commons, with disastrous implications for the United States and others. This approach then charges the United States, as the keystone defender of the commons, to take preemptive, costly actions to dissuade, outcompete, and possibly even disarm potential challengers to American dominance of the commons. In contrast, security of the commons is a variant of command more closely aligned with grand strategies of selective engagement or restraint. It conceives of the commons as highly resilient because of numerous workaround mechanisms and capable parties interested in

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dampening disruptions. Since nearly all states view openness of the commons as in their best interests, especially economically, the credibility of threats to the commons or a serious challenge to American command remains low. In contrast to the control perspective, the impacts of nonstate disruptions to the commons are viewed as much less destructive because of workarounds and substitutes available to the United States. Consequently, the security approach emphasizes a more hands-off policy that relies on regional actors to counter potential disruptions to the commons based on their own incentives to retain market access and balance against regional threats. This approach accepts higher near-term risk, but in doing so, it seeks to reduce freeriding by other actors, avoid entrapment in regional disputes, conserve finite economic resources to prevent overextension, and reinvest in the foundations of state power, such as domestic economic growth. In many ways, command of the commons remains similar to what Posen articulated more than a decade ago. The United States possesses a preponderance of economic and military power to retain its dominance in air, sea, and space. However, the emergence of the cybercommons and new military technologies for denial constitute significant developments in the international security environment that could alter the future of the global commons. Two perspectives—control of the commons and security of the commons—offer two competing assessments of these developments and the threat to American command. Especially with the rise of China as a global economic and military power potentially posing a challenge to American hegemony, command of the commons will remain an important topic of debate for the foreseeable future. Sameer P. Lalwani and Vinod Kannuthurai See also American Exceptionalism; Civil-Military Relations; Cyberwar; Deterrence and International Relations; Drones; International Security; Military Action; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Saber Rattling; Stability-Instability Paradox; United Nations

Further Readings Biddle, S., & Oelrich, I. (2016). Future warfare in the western Pacific: Chinese antiaccess/area denial, U.S. airsea battle, and command of the commons in East Asia. International Security, 41(1), 7–48. Denmark, A. M. (2010). Managing the global commons. The Washington Quarterly, 33(3), 165–182. Denmark, A. M., & Mulvenon, J. (Eds.). (2010). Contested commons: The future of American power in a multipolar world. Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security.

Friedberg, A. L. (2014). Beyond air sea battle: The debate over U.S. military strategy in Asia. London, England: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Itzkowitz-Shifrinson, J. R., & Lalwani, S. (2014). “It’s a commons misunderstanding: The limited threat to American command of the commons.” In Christopher A. Preble & John Mueller (Eds.), A dangerous world? Threat perception and U.S. national security (pp. 223–244). Washington, DC: Cato Institute. Murphy, T. (2010). Security challenges in the 21st century global commons. Yale Journal of International Affairs, 5(2), 28–43. Posen, B. R. (2003). Command of the commons: The military foundation of U.S. hegemony. International Security, 28(1), 5–46. Posen, B. R. (2014). Restraint: A new foundation for U.S. grand strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Raymond, M. (2014). Puncturing the myth of the Internet as a commons. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 57–68. Scheinmann, G. M., & Cohen, R. S. (2012). The myth of “securing the commons.” Washington Quarterly, 35(1), 115–128. U.S. Department of Defense. (2010). 2010 quadrennial defense review. Washington, DC: Department of Defense. Watts, B. D. (2011). The maturing revolution in military affairs. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Communism See Socialism and Communism

Competitive Authoritarianism Competitive authoritarianism is a kind of hybrid regime, or a political regime that combines elements of both democracy and authoritarianism. In competitive authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held regularly and are hard-fought affairs. However, the “playing field” is uneven: control of the media, abuse of state resources, coercion, and/or limited fraud give incumbents an unfair advantage over the opposition. Because elections are not free and fair, these regimes are not democratic. Yet neither are they fully authoritarian. Although unfair, they are not totally meaningless. In competitive authoritarian regimes, there is real competition and some uncertainty regarding the outcome of elections.

Hybrid Regimes The concept of competitive authoritarianism was developed by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way to describe a

Competitive Authoritarianism

kind of hybrid regime that became increasingly common after the cold war. To be considered a democracy, a regime must possess four key attributes: free and fair elections, full adult suffrage, protection of a broad range of civil liberties, and the absence of unelected “tutelary” bodies that restrict elected governments’ ability to govern. This is called the “procedural minimum definition of democracy.” Some regimes possess most of these attributes but not all; these are “hybrid regimes,” of which there are various kinds. For example, an otherwise-democratic regime in which there is not full adult suffrage is a constitutional oligarchy. An otherwise democratic regime in which the military restricts the ability of elected governments to govern is a tutelary regime. According to Levitsky and Way, it is necessary to add a fifth attribute to the procedural minimum definition of democracy: the existence of a reasonably level playing field between incumbents and opposition. An otherwise-democratic regime in which the playing field is uneven is a competitive authoritarian regime. There are various tools that incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes can use to tilt the playing field in their favor. One common tool is control of the media, especially television. Another is abuse of state resources: incumbents may use public finances to fund their campaigns, deploy the machinery of the state (buildings, vehicles, public employees, etc.) on their behalf, or use the state’s distributive and regulatory powers to reward supporters and punish opponents. A third common tool is coercion, ranging from the ­selective use of “legal” repression, such as libel laws, to threats and physical violence. Finally, incumbents may use limited fraud. While Levitsky and Way specify that fraud cannot be so massive as to make elections meaningless (when this occurs, the regime is fully ­ authoritarian, not competitive authoritarian), incumbents may use limited to fraud to secure victory.

Competitive Authoritarianism After the Cold War The post–cold war period saw a proliferation of competitive authoritarian regimes. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower, political elites in developing and postcommunist countries faced pressure to adopt the outward forms of democracy. Yet adopting the forms was not the same as adopting the substance: many countries began to hold multiparty elections, but these were not free and fair. While observers noted the shortcomings of these regimes, they often described them optimistically as being in the midst of prolonged transitions to democracy.

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Levitsky and Way challenged this “democratizing bias.” They argued that it was time to stop thinking of these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking about the specific types of regimes they actually were. These were not diminished subtypes of democracy or regimes on the inevitable path to democracy; they were competitive authoritarian. And they were widespread. By Levitsky and Way’s count, 35 countries in the world had competitive authoritarian regimes in the 1990 to 1995 period. These could be found in postcommunist Europe (e.g., Belarus, Ukraine), Africa (e.g., Ghana, Kenya), Latin America (e.g., Peru, Mexico), and Asia (e.g., Taiwan, Malaysia). They were particularly common in Africa and the former Soviet Union, where they outnumbered democracies.

Divergent Trajectories The competitive authoritarian regimes that emerged after the cold war followed three different trajectories. Some democratized. Others remained stably c­ ompetitive authoritarian (or even became fully authoritarian). And others were cases of unstable competitive authoritarianism: incumbents were defeated, but the governments that replaced them also governed in a nondemocratic manner. According to Levitsky and Way, two major variables determined whether regimes democratized or not. The first was “linkage to the West.” Linkage refers to the density of economic, political, social, and organizational ties, as well as cross-border flows of capital, goods, people, and information. In cases of high linkage, instances of autocratic abuse (e.g., fraudulent elections, acts of repression) were likely to receive greater attention in Western countries, resulting in pressure on the abusing regime. Similarly, linkage created domestic ­ constituencies interested in democracy, whether out of conviction or in order to bolster the country’s reputation. Finally, high linkage strengthened domestic democratic actors by giving them powerful international allies, whether in the form of Western governments, parties, international agencies, or nongovernmental organizations. The second variable was incumbents’ “organizational power.” This refers to the state’s coercive capacity and the strength of the ruling party. Regimes that could draw on strong states and ruling parties were better equipped to withstand democratic challenges. Strong states allowed them to spy on and intimidate the opposition more effectively and meant they could rely on state agents to carry out controversial orders, such as to kill protesters or engage in fraud. Strong parties made it easier to mobilize voters at election time and decreased the likelihood of defections by party leaders.

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Confirmation Bias

According to Levitsky and Way, international linkage was the more important of these two variables: of their 35 cases, every one of the high-linkage cases had democratized by 2008. In cases of lower linkage, incumbents’ organizational power was the crucial factor, since it affected the opposition’s ability to mount a serious challenge and the likelihood of a defection-fueled regime collapse. James Loxton See also Authoritarian Personality; Authoritarianism; Dictatorship; Tolerance for Ambiguity

Further Readings Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2002). The rise of competitive authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the cold war. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Confirmation Bias Confirmation bias describes a preference of individuals for information that confirms their existing expectations and beliefs. It has been widely studied in political contexts to explore the effects of citizens’ political attitudes on media use, political deliberation, and political participation. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that affects the way people deal with information in several aspects: It impacts how people decide which information they approach or avoid, how people process and interpret information, and how they recall it from memory. In the 21st century, the concept is often used to explain the development of so-called echo chambers— that is, ideologically homogeneous (online) information environments that reinforce the belief systems of their users while suppressing contrary viewpoints. This entry gives an overview of confirmation biases in information selection, processing, and retention and discusses their underlying mechanisms. Human strategies to preserve existing beliefs have been examined since the 1940s, stimulated by research on persuasion during World War II, and have attracted reinvigorated scholarly interest in the wake of increasingly complex information environments in the Internet era. Most scholarly attention has been devoted to confirmation biases that emerge during selective exposure to information. Selectivity biases play a key role in the study of human communication in general and political

communication in particular, as only information that we turn our attention to has a chance to impact our cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. In political contexts, selectivity bias is reflected in a preference for information that complies with a person’s political ideology, partisan stance, or attitudes toward specific issues. For example, a person who ­supports the implementation of minimum wages will more likely read an article that emphasizes positive outcomes of minimum wages. By reaffirming the need for minimum wages, the article adds further evidence to a person’s existing beliefs that minimum wages are necessary. Accordingly, the person is less inclined to pay attention to an article that points out the downsides of minimum wages, because it would disconfirm prior beliefs. Although there is little doubt that beliefs and expectations have an impact on selectivity patterns, selective exposure depends on a wide variety of circumstances. For instance, selectivity bias is stronger for closed-minded individuals and people with dogmatic belief systems. It is also contingent on the perceived relevance of the attitude being attended to, with selective exposure being weaker if the information addresses opinions with little importance to the person. A similar effect occurs for negative information. Owing to an automatic propensity for negative messages, individuals tend to overcome confirmation biases in order to satisfy more universal needs of surveillance. Further, the search for attitude-consistent messages was shown to be stronger than the actual avoidance of attitude-discrepant information. As a result, most individuals—despite their psychological preference for congenial information—are unlikely to entirely disregard viewpoints that contradict their existing beliefs. The media system in the United States may illustrate this pattern. Although U.S. media are known for increasingly tailoring their news products to niche audiences with specific political ideologies, even the most biased programs (e.g., Fox News or MSNBC) still attract a substantive share of viewers with contrary political viewpoints. If a person is not able or willing to avoid an incongruent message in the first place, the person can still prevent discrepant information from being integrated into his or her cognitive system during information processing and interpretation. Once a message has been approached, it undergoes significant alterations and reductions based on a person’s existing beliefs. These beliefs are protected by various cognitive defense mechanisms. One of these defense mechanisms is the process of motivated reasoning. It builds on counterarguments that individuals generate in order to reject opinionchallenging content and to reinforce previously held attitudes. Another mechanism is biased assimilation, by

Conflict Theory, Realistic

which individuals discount the overall informational value of incongruent content without necessarily elaborating on specific lines of argumentation. For instance, people tend to (mis-)perceive congruent messages as being of generally higher importance and quality (e.g., in terms of their objectivity or credibility) in comparison with messages that do not support their hypotheses about reality. The perceived superiority of information complying with established arguments becomes stronger with every new piece of information that is added to corroborate prior beliefs. People thus integrate belief-­ congruent information more readily into their existing cognitive structures, while noncompliant messages are more likely to be discarded in the wake of information processing. Accordingly, attitude-consistent content is also better remembered than incongruent content during information recall. Research shows that individuals exhibit confirmation biases in information retention even if they do not prefer belief-compliant messages during information exposure. Various theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain the human tendency to protect established cognitive structures. Cognitive theories, on the one hand, explain confirmation biases mainly by a limited capacity of human beings to process information. Cognitive theories suggest that messages challenging prior beliefs do not readily fit into existing cognitive structures, thereby requiring more time and resources to understand their contribution to a person’s existing assumptions about reality. From a cognitive perspective, people thus prefer congruent information to inconsistent messages mainly because they deploy their limited resources available for information processing in parsimonious ways. Motivational theories, on the other hand, explain confirmation biases by a human desire to reduce or avoid psychological discomfort. Motivational theories assert that individuals aspire to a state of cognitive harmony. This harmony will be threatened if individuals notice that their behaviors contradict their beliefs or— in more general terms—encounter information that proves their attitudes wrong, thereby implying behavioral consequences that would contrast with their existing beliefs. This disturbance of cognitive harmony translates into increased psychological arousal and aversive emotional reactions that motivate a person either to restore harmony by dissolving inconsistencies or to avoid anticipated disturbances in the first place. Cornelia Mothes See also Assimilation; Attitudes; Closure, Need for; Cognitive Dissonance; Heuristics; Motivated Reasoning; Political Ideology; Stereotypes

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Further Readings Hart, W., Albarracín, D., Eagly, A. H., Brechan, I., Lindberg, M. J., & Merrill, L. (2009). Feeling validated versus being correct: A meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 555–588. doi:10.1037/a0015701 Meffert, M. F., Chung, S., Joiner, A. J., Waks, L., & Garst, J. (2006). The effects of negativity and motivated information processing during a political campaign. Journal of Communication, 56, 27–51. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466 .2006.00003.x Stroud, N. J. (2011). Niche news: The politics of news choice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50, 755–769. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006 .00214.x

Conflict Theory See Conflict Theory, Realistic; Social Dominance Theory; Social Identity Theory

Conflict Theory, Realistic Realistic conflict theory, sometimes also known as realistic group conflict theory, concerns how different groups interact, come into conflict, form in-group solidarity, and exercise out-group cooperation under different levels of resource competition. This theory grew out of social psychology but has important applications to any study of how groups of people interact. Simply stated, realistic conflict theory asserts that when groups come into competition over scarce resources, hostility ensues, but that when a common goal exists, they can work together successfully. The scarcer the resources, the greater the competition; the resulting escalation in ­intergroup tension can lead directly to violent conflict. Whether these resources are material or symbolic, ­perceived or real, it is the reality or the perception that their appropriation by one group or another is zero sum—if one group gains, the other group loses—that causes conflict. This winner/loser process creates conflict between and among groups who all want the same resources. Increased competition also increases in-group identification and solidarity while also increasing denigration of out-groups. Members of the same group develop and value common symbols and markers of group membership and in the process devalue markers of nonmembership.

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Realistic conflict theory has an important role to play in both research and practice, because it can help us better understand racism, ethnic conflict, prejudice, and discrimination. According to realistic conflict theory, these negative social phenomena are products of competition and hostility and not inevitable or immutable results of interactions in diverse societies. Consequently, this theoretical perspective envisages ­ psychological experiences (hatred, shame, need for revenge, and so on) as determined by competition over resources. In traditional experimental terms, the psychological experiences become dependent variables. The following discussion outlines the history of the theory’s development, offers some further clarification and examples of how the theory applies, presents some critiques of the theory, and concludes with a brief explanation of its relationship to the literature of international conflict theory.

History Realistic conflict theory came out of the observation in psychology research that individual-level psychology functions differently from group-level psychology and that theories applied at the individual level seem oversimplified when applied to the group level. In 1965, Donald Campbell coined the phrase realistic group conflict theory and defined the concept. However, Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues in the Robbers Cave Experiment provide some of the most famous evidence and support of the theory. Their experiment in 1954 brought together two groups of 12-year-old boys with similar backgrounds, none of whom knew each other before the experiment. The two groups were brought to a Boy Scout camp in Robbers Cave State Park in ­Oklahoma. The groups were kept separate from each other initially but were encouraged to bond within their groups through pursuit of common goals. Each of the groups chose names for their groups and symbols representing them. After one week, the two groups were brought into competition. They played a series of sporting contests in which the winners were rewarded and losers received nothing, and the overall winners with the highest accumulated group score would win a trophy. Other situations were devised to induce competition between the groups over scarce resources, such as one group being delayed in arriving at a picnic and finding that the other group had eaten all of the food. The expression of tension between the two groups began as verbal taunting and name-calling but escalated to property destruction and physical aggression by the end of the second week. The boys tended to attribute positive qualities to their own group and negative ones to the other group when asked

to characterize them. In the third week, the two groups were brought together and required to resolve a problem with the drinking water in the camp and were able to work together successfully toward this “superordinate” goal, defined as a goal that both groups want to achieve but neither can achieve without the help of the other. The researchers intended to test theories of in-group formation, intergroup competition and hostility, and intergroup cooperation integration toward a common goal. They found that introducing even small amounts of competition between the groups of boys created hostility between the newly formed groups, as well as increasing camaraderie within them. Other research has found that relations between groups tend to be more competitive than relations between individuals. Although the speed and degree to which the intergroup conflict escalated is alarming, the relatively quick resolution of the conflict through intergroup socialization and cooperation in pursuit of a common goal is a positive sign that these cleavages can be overcome.

Application and Examples This theory is useful in understanding relationships between groups, such as ethnic or racial groups, based on resource competition rather than on preconceived animosities arising from some ancient fear, incompatibility, or hatred. For instance, some theories suggest that some groups simply have ancient antagonisms based on incompatibility or perceived incompatibility of cultural norms and ways of life. Samuel Huntington articulated a form of this argument as a “clash of civilizations.” However, realistic conflict theory asserts that the content of the group identification is less important than the level of competition for resources between and among groups, regardless of differences in religion, culture, language, and so on. Groups that are very similar, such as the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, can have very high levels of violent intergroup conflict, while culturally very different groups in other places are able to cooperate. Some observers point to the struggle for independence in many European colonies as a process that united diverse populations, but that once this common goal had been achieved, the competition for political power and distribution of resources created cleavages between groups, which has subsequently led to violent conflict. As another example, groups in the United States may resist the equality of minority populations if they fear that such equality will lead to increased competition for jobs. Under this theory, opposition to immigration from other countries also stems from a fear of job or wage competition rather than some inherent dislike for the immigrant population. As competition, perceived competition, or fear of growing future competition increases, in-group

Conflict Theory, Realistic

identification and solidarity will increase, and out-group devaluation and factionalism will also increase. Realistic conflict theory helps to explain why communities that have more diversity, and therefore more opportunity for competition for resources between groups, can exhibit more intergroup conflict. It also suggests that reducing this fear of competition may alleviate this conflict without having to alter other less malleable social constructs. If we think of political power as the ultimate resource that controls the distribution of all other resources, this theory also can explain why electoral violence is not uncommon in diverse societies, especially those that do not have a history of peaceful democratic transitions between leaders. If the norm in a given country is that once a group comes to power, it takes as much as it can for the group and stays in power by all means necessary, who comes to power can be seen as an existential matter for groups in competition. Additionally, unscrupulous leaders wishing to consolidate ­support from their in-group constituencies may instrumentalize and emphasize intergroup competition for their own purposes. By stoking out-group animosity and promoting in-group solidarity, they attempt to gain political support necessary to gain political power, electorally or otherwise. While the competition may be a real one, its salience has been artificially increased. The implications of realistic conflict theory for conflict prevention and resolution indicate that reducing competition between groups, or more realistically regulating it, could be effective in reducing intergroup conflict. For instance, promoting inclusive political systems that guarantee or strongly support inclusion of all groups in governing such as proportional representation systems might be better for conflict mitigation than a winner-take-all system in which one group can dominate the political system. If competition is the driving force in intergroup conflicts, thinking of ways to reduce this competition and encourage cooperative problem solving of benefit to both or all groups could potentially be a powerful conflict-resolution tool.

Critique The Robbers Cave experiment has been criticized on multiple grounds. Ethically, the boys were not informed of their participation in an experiment and did not consent to it. Of course, being informed of the purpose ahead of time would likely have biased the results, but nevertheless, more should have been done to protect the boys from psychological and physical harm. Additionally, many have claimed that the sample was biased, in that 12-year-old American, White, Protestant boys at camp are not representative of the global population and that sporting competitions do not provide realistic

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analogies for competition over essential resources between population groups. However, the uniform characteristics of the boys ensured that only the divisions introduced by the researchers impacted the intergroup relationships in the experimental context. With regard to realistic conflict theory more generally, less a critique than an omission is that it does not explain why groups form in the first place and why people belong to them. Because this would seem an important element of explaining how groups come into conflict, realistic conflict theory is often paired with social identity theory (see entry in this volume). Explaining why groups exist and why people adhere to them is essential for explaining why they compete as groups with one another and why they tend to endure.

Realist Conflict Theory The social psychology theory already described is not to be confused with the realist theory of conflict that has grown out of the international relations conflict literature. When applied to the international system, it makes four assertions: (1) states are the central actors in the system; (2) the system is anarchic with no supranational entity governing states; (3) states (or their leaders) act rationally to maximize self-interest; and (4) all states want power for self-preservation. It has also been applied to internal wars and armed conflicts, particularly in failed states in which there is no government with a legitimate monopoly over the use of force and in which there are powerful armed groups, approximating a state of anarchy in which armed groups are the highest level of governance. Realist theory has its roots in the work of Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, but Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980) developed and studied the modern version of the theory and its implications in the international relations field of political science. For instance, according to the concept of the security dilemma, one state’s actions to increase its security can cause other states to fear that such measures will increase that state’s military capabilities, thus encouraging those other states to take similar actions, resulting in increased international tensions and making conflict more likely. Molly Inman See also Dominant Power Politics; Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives; Oligarchy; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution; Social Identity Theory

Further Readings Campbell, D. T. (1965). Ethnocentrism and other altruistic motives. In David Levine (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on

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motivation, (Vol. 13, pp. 283–311). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Insko, C. A., Schopler, J., Kennedy, J. F., Dahl, K. R., Graetz, K. A., & Drigotas, S. M. (1992). Individual–group discontinuity from the differing perspectives of Campbell’s realistic group conflict theory and Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 55(3), 272–291. Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The Robbers Cave experiment (Vol. 10). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. The social psychology of intergroup relations, 33(47), 74.

Conflicts, Protracted Despite its being widely discussed in academia and the policy world, there is no consensus about the definition of protracted conflicts. There are two primary approaches to understanding and classifying protracted conflicts. One focuses on the conflict issues and the other focuses on conflict dynamics.

Rationalist Approach to Protracted Conflicts The rationalist approach to understanding protracted or intractable conflicts, as they are often termed, is squarely entrenched in the international relations and comparative politics fields and focuses primarily on the issues of the conflict. Rationalist approaches generally assert that individuals, groups, and countries make decisions in their own rational self-interest based on the information available to them, considering both the costs and benefits of decisions and actions. What constitutes the content of that self-interest is often interpreted in material terms. However, some thinkers loosen this restriction, allowing self-interest to include social and symbolic interests. In the context of conflict, when individuals, groups, or countries want something another has or have something another wants, they consider whether costs of fighting for it outweigh the costs of not having or losing it. They also consider the likelihood that they will win based on the information available about their own capabilities and those of their adversaries. If a party thinks that the probability of winning is high and that the costs are acceptable, then it is likely that it will choose to fight. The adversary must consider its own probability of winning or not losing and the costs associated with conflict and either making concessions to avoid fighting or engaging in the fighting.

One interesting part of the rationalist theory of protracted conflict is that it asserts there is always a point at which both parties would do better not initiating fighting or not continuing fighting but that this point is unknown to those in the dispute. The parties each have private information about their own relative capabilities and about their own resolve to fight that their adversary does not know. They also have an incentive to misrepresent this information to their adversary to be able to bluff the other into making concessions rather than fighting if the adversary is led to believe that the party is stronger or more resolved than it is in reality. For instance, a rebel group may try to convince the central government that it has the capability and resolve to defend territory successfully after secession even if it cannot do so in order to push the central government into some sort of autonomy arrangement. However, the central government may believe the rebel signals but refuse to cede any power for fear of developing a reputation for being soft on rebels and encouraging other groups to follow suit. In such a situation, a conflict might ensue even though both would be better off with a negotiated settlement. The rebels successfully bluffed that they were more capable than they are, but this backfired because the government did not believe they would accept an agreement short of independence given this inflated capability. Because of this private information as well as the incentive to bluff, parties often do not find the mutually preferable negotiated settlement short of conflict initiation or continuation. James Fearon has powerfully articulated this argument, although it was already a prominent theory prior to his work. Parties are also concerned about their adversaries reneging on negotiated settlements if they agree not to fight or to stop fighting, putting them at a disadvantage. For instance, if the government does not believe that the rebels can credibly commit to laying down their arms as part of an agreement to end the conflict, then the conflict will continue even though both sides would like to stop fighting. One proposal to address the concern of reneging is to have a very slow and incremental approach to implementation of peace agreements in which each step in and of itself would not severely disadvantage a party if the adversary reneged and can be verified before taking the next step. Another prominent approach in this tradition to ending protracted conflict is to have a third-party enforcement-of-peace agreement implementation. Barbara Walter has outlined and tested this part of the theory in detail. Empirically, the majority of violent protracted conflicts since the end of World War II have been internal conflicts between groups within countries rather than international conflicts between countries. While much of the rationalist protracted conflict theory developed

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out of the international relations literature, the growth in the study of civil wars and other internal armed conflict has employed it in domestic settings. Starting in the early 2000s, the debate over whether greed or grievances caused armed conflict to begin and to be sustained as protracted conflict gained prominence, and the prominence of this debate is attributed to Paul ­Collier and Anke Hoeffler.

Protracted Social Conflict The protracted social conflict approach focuses on internal conflict, particularly in the developing world, but it is in direct contrast to rationalism. It points out that so much of the post–World War II conflict research focused on understanding interstate war but that, as noted, the majority of conflict has occurred within states. This theory asserts that protracted social conflict occurs when basic needs such as security, recognition and acceptance, access to political institutions, and economic participation are not satisfied based on communal identity. It also emphasizes that the actors are internal and external to the state and that the causes and dynamics of the conflict are multiple and change over the course of the conflict, in part because the interpretations and motives of the groups change over time. The goals of the actors involved can also change during the conflict, as can the actors themselves. For instance, a group may start a conflict with the goal of secession but then continue the conflict in pursuit of material spoils. Additionally, groups themselves may splinter, giving rise to new actors, or new combatant groups may form. Additionally, protracted social conflict theory acknowledges that there is often no clear beginning or end of these conflicts but that they wax and wane over long periods of time as conditions and actors change. Protracted social conflict theory contains four categories of preconditions that can lead to intensified conflict. The first is a strained relationship between ­ ­communal/identity groups and the state. While in an ideal case, the government of a country has the responsibility to ensure the welfare of all the people within its jurisdiction, many governments discriminate against segments of society or allow such discrimination if not actively involved. An extreme example would be apartheid South Africa, which enshrined a complex system of legal discrimination against the non-White population, but many countries have more subtle policies that privilege some identity groups and disadvantage others. The second precondition for protracted social conflict under the theory is deprivation of group needs. This precondition differs from the first in that it goes beyond the merely strained relationship between the government and a group to the point of denying needs, which can

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include disenfranchising a group and therefore denying a group’s need for representation or denying economic opportunities and therefore the need for access to livelihoods. This deprivation can also be manifested in banning the use of a group’s language and/or refusing to allow it to be taught in schools or preventing a group from constructing houses of worship or worshiping in those places freely. Third, low state capacity and/or desire to meet all citizens’ and groups’ needs are a precondition for protracted social conflict. The theory has the underlying assumption that these preconditions are likely to exist in multiethnic states that tend to be dominated by one majority group. If that majority group and the leaders in charge do not actively deprive other groups of their needs but do nothing to ensure they are met, then this precondition is met. With limited resources available, the state leaders may decide to distribute them among the people in their group who support them and keep them in power and not to other groups that may not support the government or would have little political impact even if they did. The last precondition is international economic, political, and military linkages in the form of clientelism and dependency. These external conditions may allow or force the state to operate in a fashion that adversely affects a particular group. One such example might be allowing a multinational corporation to exploit natural resources in a region that impacts one particular group adversely. The state may callously sacrifice that group’s welfare for personal or national gain or might not have a choice given the power and historical presence of some industries. Whether any of these preconditions leads to conflict depends on the strategies and actions of both the group and the state. If there is an event that acts as a trigger igniting latent group conflict, then violence is likely. How the government responds to group grievances, whether through repression or attempted cooption, also impacts the conflict process. Another process element that the theory incorporates is that of the view of the other by all sides in the conflict. Once violent conflict begins, long-lasting social conflict is likely to lead to increasingly negative perceptions of the other and contribute to violent behavior among belligerents. These negative perceptions of other groups also become entrenched and make conceiving of a solution among participants in the conflict extremely difficult. The theory assumes that these conditions are more likely to exist and lead to conflict in multicommunal countries. Edward Azar and John Burton are the primary founders and proponents of protracted social conflict theory. Once conflict begins, the protracted social conflict explanations for continuation and state collapse approach those articulated in rationalism, invoking the

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language of interests and private information. Wars have their own private winners as the war economy unfolds, often drawing on and strengthening criminal networks that benefit from the chaos and new demands caused by war. Additionally, because of the private information that groups have about their capabilities and resolve, even actions intended to be defensive may be misinterpreted as offensive. Arming all of the ­members in a community might allow them to defend themselves from attack, but it could also be interpreted as planning for attack, creating what rationalists call a security dilemma. Unlike the rationalist approaches, however, protracted social conflict theory does come explicitly from a conflict resolution tradition and thus has prescriptive elements as well for preventing and ending it. For Azar, the main way of resolving protracted social conflict is by development or through the reduction of underdevelopment, particularly inequality in the levels of development within a society. Others have noted that ­material solutions such as development alone will not address social elements of protracted social conflict and propose focusing on resolving identity-based conflict through a four-stage approach. The first stage focuses on breaking down antagonism among the groups and understanding its content. The second phase focuses on why the conflict exists and who is involved in a process called resonance. The third phase focuses on how the groups might resolve the conflict together through invention. Finally, the fourth phase focuses on plans for action from the process. Together these steps are known as the ARIA approach as an acronym for the steps; Jay Rothman and Marie Olson are its main proponents. Molly Inman See also Civil Wars; Counterinsurgency; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Ethnocentrism; Greed Versus Grievance; International Criminal Court; International Humanitarian Law; International Security; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution

Further Readings Azar, E. E. (1990). The management of protracted social conflict: Theory and cases. Brookfield, VT: Gower. Burton, J. W. (1987). Resolving deep-rooted conflict: A handbook. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4), 563–595. Fearon, J. (1995). Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414. Rothman, J., & Olson, M. L. (2001). From interests to identities: Towards a new emphasis in interactive conflict resolution. Journal of Peace Research, 38(3), 289–305.

Walter, B. F. (2002). Committing to peace: The successful settlement of civil wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Conformity Conformity is the convergence of one or more individuals’ thoughts, feelings, or behavior toward an explicit, implied, or imagined social norm. The speculations of early political theorists have been borne out in decades of empirical work: political beliefs, allegiances, and behavior are significantly affected by conformity.

Definitions and Processes A social norm is a generally accepted way of thinking, feeling, or behaving that most people in a group or social network agree on, follow, and endorse. The social norms that people conform to can be descriptive, representing what other people think, feel, and do, or they can be injunctive, representing what thoughts, feelings, and behaviors other people approve of. “Citizens vote” is a descriptive norm if it is true that most people cast ballots in elections, whereas “Citizens vote” is an injunctive norm when it embodies the idea that good citizens should enact the rights and responsibilities of citizenship by casting ballots in elections. Conformity can occur to descriptive or injunctive norms that are explicitly stated (“Most University of California, Santa Barbara students say ‘No’ to hooking up,” “All rise for the playing of the national anthem”). Norms can also be represented by the actions of directly observed others (as when an individual adopts the speech cadence or stride rhythm of another individual he or she is speaking to or walking with or when an individual joins a protest in the presence of others who are protesting). Norms can even be imagined or implied (as when an individual thinks about his or her parents’ political preferences and casts a ballot for a conservative candidate in line with these imagined preferences or is reminded of membership in a particular group and takes political action associated with that group). Since norms can be transmitted in a number of different ways, including being psychologically recalled, deduced, or constructed, conformity can occur even when other group members are not physically present. In addition, since norms that are recalled, deduced, or assumed can be objectively incorrect, people can sometimes conform to norms that don’t actually exist. This situation—when people perceive a norm incorrectly but nevertheless follow or endorse it—is referred to as pluralistic ignorance. In fact, people often overestimate the

Conformity

support a group has for a particular thought, feeling, or behavior. As a result, conformity (to the incorrectly extremitized) norm outperforms the existing norm and leads to further extremitization of norms. Social norms campaigns use conformity to change behavior by providing objective norm information designed to correct misperceived norms.

Why Do People Conform? Conformity offers multiple adaptive benefits. First, following the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors favored by multiple others increases the likelihood of successful interaction with the environment. Such responses have been used and tested by many individuals and thus carry the presumption of being efficient and valid (if everyone goes back for seconds on the peach pie but not the apple pie, it’s reasonable to assume that the peach pie is objectively better than the apple). The “more heads are better than one” homily is empirically correct across a wide variety of domains. Simulations have shown that agents conforming to the behavior of others are more likely to solve adaptive problems than are agents who repeatedly try individual idiosyncratic solutions. This is at least partially because information filtered through many others increasingly represents behaviors that are more successful and reliable than any strategy based on limited personal experience. Such findings explain why people are even more likely to conform to others’ responses when the stakes are high—hence the number of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants who use the “Poll the audience” option later in the show. Second, conformity fulfills connectedness needs, binding individuals to groups and group members to one another. Conformity (thinking, feeling, saying, or doing the same thing as others) increases intragroup attachment, cooperation, and cohesion, sometimes to the point that an individual cannot cognitively distinguish his or her own actions in the group from those of other group members. Conformity increases individual self-esteem and well-being, and individuals who endorse norms are accorded more respect and authority in a group. Marginal members of a group—those whose group belonging has been called into question or who are threatened with ostracism—are more likely to conform when given the opportunity. Conformity to norms is associated with feelings of pride and satisfaction about the group and about membership in the group, and failure to conform—deviance—with shame and embarrassment. Deviance results first in attention from the group focused on rehabilitating the rogue group member, followed by isolation, derogation, and potentially expulsion.

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Third, conformity of thought and action increases coordination of interaction and thus solves recurring coordination problems (evaluating options using the same criteria; driving on one side of the street), improving group outcomes as well as individual ones. Such powerful immediate benefits of widespread conformity sometimes make changing group outputs and behavior difficult, even when a less widely shared evaluation and behavior is available. Thus, although popular opinion often casts conformity in a negative light, objectively, conformity confers many adaptive benefits—so much so that some have argued that conformity is in fact the crucial prerequisite for the evolution of culture.

Automatic Conformity It is certainly true that some forms of conformity occur spontaneously and without conscious awareness, consistent with the idea that humans are equipped with evolved mechanisms that facilitate conformity. For example, people automatically mimic others’ facial, vocal, and emotional expressions, a process that often culminates in identical internal states in the observer as in the actor. Such conformity occurs even when the expressions are presented subliminally, providing strong evidence for the automatic nature of the process. Other internal states are also automatically inferred and conformed to: seeing someone else being ostracized leads observers to feel loneliness, and observing others’ accomplishments causes observers to experience satisfaction, for example. People also automatically mimic others’ behaviors, from eyeblinks and button presses to face touching, foot jiggling, and even goal striving. Seeing another perform a behavior activates the neural activity associated with that behavior in the observer, setting the stage for conformity and making later performance of the same behaviors more likely, faster, and more skillful. This neural preparation is substantial enough that later observers may not accurately recall whether they had personally performed the behavior. Thus, the benefits of conformity in coordinating group and interpersonal actions may be explained by the automatic nature of mimicry. The fact that this kind of conformity occurs without conscious awareness and sometimes even when people are warned against its possibility underscores its automatic nature. A human predisposition to conformity is also suggested by the fact that people conform to social norms that they imagine or infer. Even casual interaction with others whose political opinion can be inferred by their demographic characteristics causes convergence toward those imagined views. For example, when students whose

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parents hold opposing political viewpoints are asked first to think about a past interaction with either their mother or father and then in an apparently unrelated task to report their own political ideology, the students’ private political proclivities shift toward the attitudes of the momentarily salient parent, even when the recalled interactions have nothing to do with politics. People are also highly attuned to norm-relevant information. First, they pay more attention to and recall norm-relevant information than other kinds of information. Second, people spontaneously categorize others as violators versus endorsers of norms, much as we spontaneously categorize others based on sex and age. These findings converge to suggest that humans come equipped with evolved mechanisms that facilitate conformity.

Conformity Is In-Group Delineated Unless it is made obviously untrue, people assume that the norms they conform to are universal and generalized— that they represent “the way the world is,” “a wellknown fact,” and “what everyone thinks.” In reality, however, norms are group specific. Different groups form and maintain different norms, and so conformity produces behavior that converges on the behaviors sanctioned by a particular group. In addition, the group to whose norms an individual conforms can change quite fluidly. When a young single Latina thinks about herself as a Latina, norms associated with that group are salient and will guide behavior: Her voting behavior will reflect concern with immigration, official language laws, quality of schools, and so forth. If she thinks about herself as a woman, conformity to norms she perceives as endorsed by that group will increase: issues to do with insurance covering contraceptive costs, ­glass-ceiling barriers, and marriage equality might be more focal, and so forth. Many factors—the presence of fellow group members, hearing a particular accent, competition with out-groups, being treated as a group member, and so forth—can increase the likelihood that any individual thinks about him- or herself as part of a particular group at any time. Conformity occurs exclusively to in-groups. People view others with whom they share particular features as appropriate guides for thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The particular shared characteristics vary depending on the behavior that is called for. When physical judgments or statements of fact are required, many other people can be appropriate guides, because many people have the knowledge and skills to verify the solutions to such tasks. The appropriate guides for a valueladen or opinion-based judgment are those who share similar values, attitudes, and relationships. Thus, conformity occurs most often to others “just like us.”

For example, it is the expressions, emotions, and behaviors of in-group rather than out-group others that are automatically mimicked and conformed to. Readers and viewers are much more likely to adopt the personality characteristics of in-group rather than out-group protagonists in movies and books (a process with significant consequences for social behavior if in-group role models are lacking or cast in negative or deviant roles in these media). Conformity to the in-group (and deviance from the out-group) is a convenient heuristic (“If the Tea Party thinks this, it must be right!” or “If Democrats support this, I must oppose it!”). However, when cognitive and motivational resources are available, norm-relevant information from the in-group receives considerable attention. Communications about what in-groups think, feel, and do are processed more carefully than similar communications from an outgroup. For example, research has shown that both liberal and conservative students favor a social policy if they learn that the political party they identify with (Democrats and Republicans, respectively) expresses support for it but oppose the exact same policy if a political out-group supports it. Such conformity is not necessarily a knee-jerk reaction, however. When questioned more closely, students indicated that in-group endorsement had resulted in some deep and thoroughgoing thinking about how they saw the issue. All of these effects occur more strongly for individuals psychologically invested in or identified with the group.

Theories of Conformity Private Versus Public Conformity A key distinction is between private conformity and public conformity. Private conformity occurs when people willingly and privately accept group norms as their own beliefs, feelings, or behaviors and continue to follow those norms whenever they think about themselves as a group member, even if the group is not physically present. Private conformity is also sometimes referred to as internalization, because the responses of others have become the individual’s own. Because private conformity results in changes that are long lasting, resistant to later change, and sustained without external monitoring, most psychological and political scientists are primarily concerned with the antecedents and consequences of private conformity. Public conformity, in contrast, occurs when people respond to real or imagined pressure and adopt in public thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that they do not privately accept. Public conformity is sometimes referred to as compliance, a superficial and short-lived convergence with others’ responses. However, even public

Conformity

conformity can trigger changes that have long-term and thoroughgoing behavioral consequences. Compliance can often be induced in circumstances that eventually lead individuals to attribute the behavior to themselves rather than to the external pressure to publicly comply with norms that originally prompted the behavior. For example, a committee member might vote for the mayoral candidate obviously favored by the rest of the committee. After the vote has been cast, the operation of many psychological processes, such as cognitive dissonance, consistency striving, need for control, and groupthink, to name a few, make it likely that the individual will eventually come to see the vote as self-chosen rather than as a result of public conformity. In addition, the connectedness benefits of conformity to the group (and the disincentives of deviance) come into operation regardless of whether conformity was internally or externally produced.

Informational Versus Normative Influence A classic distinction suggested that conformity occurs via informational or normative influence. Informational influence occurs when people privately conform because they believe that the evidence or arguments that a group can offer reflect reality. Normative influence, in contrast, results in superficial public conformity unaccompanied by information exchange and motivated by individuals’ desire for approval from and inclusion in the group. Although the distinction between informational and normative influence has triggered extensive research, it appears increasingly indefensible. First, any delineation between the exchange of information about what a group prefers and the exchange of information about why the group prefers it is probably untenable. When people exchange information, the recipients of that information assume that the transmitters agree with the information they pass on (thus norms are transmitted with evidence). When people share only that they support an opinion, the recipients of this normative information generate the reasons the transmitters hold that view (thus information is transmitted with norms). Thus norms and arguments are spread simultaneously in social networks and groups and even in experimental sessions designed to separate them. Second, it has become clear that conformity that occurs because of connectedness concerns can be as deep rooted and long lasting—that is, it is private conformity—as any change typically associated with informational influence.

Referent Identity or Social Identity Influence The most widely supported alternative is the referent informational or social identity theory of conformity.

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This approach is an amalgam of social identity theory, which argues that group memberships are essential aspects of self-identity, and self-categorization theory, which specifies the processes by which one becomes, and the consequences of becoming, a group member. When social group membership is psychologically salient, individuals redefine themselves primarily as interchangeable members of a group rather than as distinct individuals. Under these conditions, individuals base their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on the norms of fellow in-group members, especially “prototypical” members of the group who exemplify the essence of the group vis-à-vis relevant out-groups. When individuals uphold the norms of their group, they feel certainty, since the in-group position is valued. When group members notice a difference between themselves and a fellow in-group member, they experience uncertainty, which is typically resolved by becoming more similar to the prototypical group member. From this perspective, the classic distinction between informational and normative conformity makes no sense. Information is valid only if it is normative of the group, and normative influence reflects internalized acceptance of group membership; normative influence conceived of as compliance occurs only when influence is attempted by non–group members or toward anormative positions. To the extent that a social identity or group membership is more central and important to an individual, these processes occur more strongly.

Conformity Effects in Political Behavior Media and Mass Communication Effects, Framing, and Agenda Setting Public opinion (basically, norms) matters in politics, especially in democracies. Public opinion can alter individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, affect the efficacy of political campaigns, determine the fate of politicians, and change the outcome of an election. Thus, getting the public to conform to a certain political position, opinion, or course of action has significant political consequences. The idea that mass communications could develop, organize, and influence public opinion on political issues first emerged in the 1940s and has gained significant empirical support from the 1960s onward. Two well-established phenomena are framing effects and agenda setting. Framing effects occur when the media structure communications so as to highlight particular points of view on an issue around which consensus (and thus norms) might form. Frames act as a general structure to both organize the information directed at the public and serve as a lens to color how the public views certain

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issues that may have multiple perspectives, such as abortion. Framing is especially important given the complexity that surrounds most political issues. Agenda setting occurs when certain issues become prioritized in the news media, leading people to believe that “everyone” cares more about these issues than others and that these issues therefore matter more. Agenda setting might also draw attention to one rather than another evaluative dimension, such as the morality of a potential candidate upon the media uncovering an illicit affair. Consequently, the political focus shifts to these issues, norms develop, and conformity is triggered. Perhaps consistent with the referent identity approach, mass media conformity efforts seem less effective with committed voters than with swing voters and to involve both conscious, effortful information processing and unconscious, automatic processing.

Bandwagon Effect In forming political opinions, individuals conform to those who have publicly displayed their own opinions and intentions. The bandwagon effect occurs when people adopt the position that is seen as attracting greater support or as attracting rapidly growing ­support. In other words, they jump on the bandwagon. This is seen when voting increases for candidates who appear successful, popular, and more likely to win, even if ­voters originally disfavored the candidate and even in the face of information disconfirming public opinion. Political issues can also benefit from bandwagon effects, as a given “hot button” issue becomes much more important to voters in an election than it was previously or would be again in the future. For instance, as marriage equality has become a prime political issue in the 2000s, more and more voters proclaim concern with this issue, and previously “crucial” issues, such as climate change or defense spending, have taken a ­ backseat.

Political Polarization In randomly assembled rather than real groups, there is typically a range of varying stances on any given issue. When the group interacts, people exchange viewpoints and information that expose a group norm. Real groups (often based on homophily) typically favor one position or one course of action over another. For both randomly assembled and real groups, conformity ­processes can produce a polarized, extreme position on the issue. For example, in jury discussions, in both experimental and courtroom settings, this process of group polarization can lead to exaggerated judgments of both guilt and innocence. Polarization occurs as a

result of group members moving toward the “prototypical” group member and distancing themselves from out-groups or from deviants. Polarization also results from processing the arguments of the majority in the group, which are often more numerous and more confidently and thoroughly discussed than nonnormative arguments. Polarization in politics can lead to distinctly divided and cohesive parties despite, perhaps, rather similar ideological stances between parties. This polarization, in turn, may lead to greater conformity to the prototypical group member. Although polarization affects political groups, there is currently little evidence to suggest that it dramatically affects policy outcomes toward liberal or conservative agendas.

Network Effects Social networks provide a structure through which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors flow and circulate until they converge on similar perspectives, reflecting the emergence of a norm. Networks can also reinforce individual and group identities via shared norms, especially as the nodes within a network become denser and more closely connected. Network analysis in political science offers an effective and fine-grained method through which to track the emergence and reemergence of norms as well as the kinds of connections between individuals and between networks that facilitate or inhibit conformity. For instance, the extent to which an individual’s political beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are influenced depends on the frequency and distribution of these activities in the network and on the individual’s structural (multiple ties among people with whom an individual has ties) and relational (multiple different ties to others) embeddedness. Network analysis has provided an important face-to-face interaction complement to social psychological theories of conformity understanding of the development and transmission of norms. The integration of these two approaches appears to be an avenue of great potential for the understanding of conformity. Diane M. Mackie and Janet V. T. Pauketat See also Framing Effects; Groupthink; Mass Communication; Mass Political Behavior; Party Identification; Political Socialization; Social Identity Theory; Social Networking

Further Readings Campbell, D. E. (2013). Social networks and political participation. Annual Review of Political Science, 16, 33–48. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-033011-201728

Conservatism Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.142015 Coleman, S. (2007). Popular delusions: How social conformity molds society and politics. Amherst, NY: Cambria. Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629–636. Flanigan, W. H., Zingale, N., Theiss-Morse, E. A., & Wagner, M. W. (2014). Political behavior of the American electorate. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Heerdink, M. W., van Kleef, G. A., Homan, A. C., & Fischer, A. H. (2013). On the social influence of emotions in groups: Interpersonal effects of anger and happiness on conformity versus deviance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 262–284. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033362 Heyes, C. (2011). Automatic imitation. Psychological Bulletin, 137(3), 463. doi:10.1037/a0022288 Kiesler, C. A., & Kiesler, S. B. (1969). Conformity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Lee, F. E. (2015). How party polarization affects governance. Annual Review of Political Science, 18, 261–282. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-072012-113747 Pool, G. J., Wood, W., & Leck, K. (1998). The self-esteem motive in social influence: Agreement with valued majorities and disagreement with derogated minorities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(4), 967. doi:10.1037/0022-3514 .75.4.967 Simon, H. (1990). Reason in human affairs. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2016). Representation and incorporation of close others’ responses: The RICOR model of social influence. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(4), 311–331. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations. New York, NY: Doubleday. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Turner, J. C. (1991). Social influence. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Conservatism Conservatism is a dominant political philosophy and ideology that is predicated upon the notion that change should not come from premeditated design. Rather, traditional values and customs should be preserved. This political ideology has played a pivotal role in the development of political systems around the world. In

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particular, the American system has been strongly influenced by conservatism’s strong alignment with the tenets of the U.S. Constitution and the protection of private property. Traditionally, conservatism has sought to preserve the existing structures of society in fear that a vast rearrangement of societal institutions would produce more negative outcomes than positive outcomes. The modern usage of the term conservatism is often synonymous with right-wing political views that stand opposed to the left-wing views along the political ­spectrum that are associated with liberalism. A more philosophical perspective of conservatism depicts it as doubtful of the utility of abstract reasoning in politics; however, it has not been given the same type of ­philosophical focus that has been present in liberalism. Some scholars argue that its resistance to abstract and theoretical reasoning makes it unqualified to be an ideology. The question then becomes whether this way of thinking has developed in a reactionary manner to major events throughout history or whether it is a political way of thinking that has existed for centuries. A specific focus on the history of American politics highlights that conservatives were disturbed by the Depression-era New Deal and the Fair Deal, which promoted the need for social welfare. Today, conservatives continue to fight against expanded powers of the federal government, increased government assistance for the needy, high tax rates, and a host of other issues that plague the concerns of the modern conservative agenda. Conservatism operates under a fear that if a centralized federal government gains an increasing amount of power, it will result in a loss of independence by the states and subsequently the citizens of those states. In order to develop a better understanding of conservatism, this entry continues with a description of its origins. These origins can be traced back centuries, with a strong connection to the opposing schools of thought surrounding the French Revolution (1789–1799). The work of influential writers such as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville are closely connected to the origination of conservative thought, as they sought a balance of individual rights and the social order that can be provided by government. Next, the common beliefs of conservatism are discussed, with a specific focus upon rights to private property, rule of law, and constitutional government; this is followed by an outline of an array of noted types of conservatism, including Burkean ­conservatism, social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, neoconservatism, and progressive conservatism. The entry concludes with a discussion of the differences between conservatism and liberalism, with a specific focus on how these schools of thought differ on modern American political issues.

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Origins of Conservatism The terms conservative and liberal were coined in the early 19th century principally to represent the polarized opinions surrounding the French Revolution. A journal in 1818 that was led by François Rene de Chateaubriand, the uncle of Alexis de Tocqueville, endorsed the monarchy and the church against participants of the revolution and was named Le Conservateur. This ­journal supported religion, the monarchy, and liberty. French conservatives were proponents of the old ­alliance of the throne and church against the uprising forces in the Revolution. These opposing forces often referred to conservatives as reactionaries that wanted to preserve what the Revolution aimed to destroy. Conservatives claimed that they did not want a return to feudalism; rather, they wanted the order and liberty that the ­monarchy provided. The term conservative was used in England to label individuals who aimed to preserve the monarchy and aristocracy. The term represented individuals opposed to the Reform Bill of 1832. Scholars during this time began to identify conservatism as an ideology because it grouped simplified ideas together that were rooted in elaborate political philosophies. Ideologies are meant to inspire political loyalty and bring rationalization to political action. The conservative ideology was opposed to government-forced equality in terms of resources, secularism, and atheism. English conservatives were most concerned with liberals’ criticism of monarchy and aristocracy, but they also were not fond of bureaucratic tyranny. British-Irish statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was a key figure in the origination and spread of modern conservatism. Burke did not create conservatism, but he was an important spokesperson for the ideology, as he advocated for a balance of individual rights and social order. Burke famously ­criticized the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by predicting many consequences that would follow the revolution as a result of the disorder it caused in Europe. Conversely, Burke, as a member of the British Parliament, sympathized with the American Revolution. Burke’s commitment to liberty led him to supporting religious liberties for Catholics in Ireland, an impeachment campaign aimed at Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, for mistreating the native population, and conciliation with the ­American colonies. Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution helped him become a leader of the ­conservative section of the Whig Party. French lawyer and aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville followed the work of Burke decades later when he visited the United States of America in the 1830s and later

wrote Democracy in America. This book detailed the rise of democracy in America and the entities that threaten it, such as the tyranny of the majority, materialism, and desire for equality. He wrote that people would never find an equality that satisfied them. Both Burke and Tocqueville have been characterized as liberal conservatives as a result of their shared support of colonialism, being wary of government-forced equality, fear of socialism, and the subsequent need to rely on property holders to resist it, thus leading them away from radical reforms that could have alleviated pressures on the poor. They also shared a distrust of uprisings led by individuals who simply wrote letters and articles based on abstract knowledge, as compared with pragmatic politicians forced to face the realities of laws and institutions. Other shared beliefs that shaped their form of conservatism include the notion that religious beliefs are needed for the foundations of every good civil society and a need for pluralism to protect liberties.

Common Conservative Beliefs A fundamental conservative belief revolves around private property and the notion that an individual should have the right to possess it. Conservatives strongly value independent liberty that is free from government oppression, and they oppose a government that allocates equal amounts of private property to its citizens. Rather, they support the notion that individuals who are successful should be able to purchase more private property than those who are less successful. A natural inequality will be produced, but conservatives champion this inequality as a difference between individual success and failure, which is a natural by-product of a free society. Conservatives argue that in a free society, all individuals have the opportunity to succeed or fail, but this success or failure should not be predetermined by the government. Conservatism does not necessarily oppose those who seek to increase equality; however, it fears that the efforts taken to increase equality will result in increased government intervention, which will in turn take rights away from its citizens. When a free society allows individuals to both succeed and fail without intervention in search of greater equality, a division of classes will inevitably arise. While conservatism does not specifically advocate for this hierarchy in society, it does desire that successful individuals be rewarded for this success rather than that their success be redistributed to all individuals. Conservatives would argue that the rise of individuals in the social class hierarchy is just a natural by-product of their success, and a free society gives all individuals the same chance to rise in the society without government restrictions. A counterargument to this notion would be that there are never equal

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opportunities for success for all individuals, as some citizens are born into privilege and have an increased chance of success compared with those who are not born into privilege. Conservatives would argue that a free society allows the individual born into the privilege and the individual not born into the privilege the same opportunities to succeed because success is a result of hard work rather than a result of inheriting a high-ranking social class as it occurs in traditional aristocracy. Another popular conservative belief is centered upon the rule of law and how it should organize individuals into a civilized society. Conservatism views these laws not as restrictions of freedom but as guidelines for the proper way for citizens to conduct themselves in a civil manner. These laws do not tell citizens what they have to do, but they provide a set of limitations for the actions that citizens choose to engage in. For example, the rule of law does not force an individual to drink alcohol. However, if someone chooses to consume alcohol, there are laws in place to guide the consumption of alcohol to ensure the safety of themselves and others. One of these laws attempts to prevent individuals under the influence of alcohol from operating a vehicle. This law does not force someone to drink alcohol or prevent them from consuming it. Rather, it provides guidelines to ensure that if an individual freely chooses to consume alcohol, he or she does so in a responsible manner (where “responsible” is defined through a value judgment). Conservatives advocate for a constitutional government with the primary goal of maintaining the rule of law in order to preserve the property rights of individuals, providing and maintaining a judicial system, providing a national defense in order to ensure the safety of the country, and maintaining law enforcement in order to assure that the rule of law is followed. A fine line for law enforcement exists for conservatives, as these officials seek to preserve the rule of law and not impose beliefs and values held by the government upon individuals. This demands a delicate balance of government to ensure that it takes the necessary steps to maintain order and the rule of law but does not force conformity among citizens and thus violate the foundations of a free society. Conservatives fear a government that takes overzealous steps to try to perfect some type of idealized social order because it could suppress individual freedoms and minimize the potential for the positive externalities that can arise from individuals free to be inventive.

Types of Conservatism Burkean Conservatism Burke served as a leading figure in conservatism, similar to the role of Karl Marx in fostering socialism.

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Burke shared the Whig Party’s belief in limited government, and he strongly valued individual liberties and the right to own private property. Christianity inspired Burke’s political writings, and he thought that the ­protection of liberty should be the main priority for ­rulers as they use their power. The moral natural law established by Christianity guided Burke’s political values, and he thought that moral principles should guide the establishment of legal constitutions that define governmental power and, more importantly, the limitations of this power, present in organized societies. The individuals in power are entrusted with their authority, and these rulers’ actions are held accountable to God under natural law and citizens of the society under constitutional law.

Social Conservatism Social conservatism is a branch of conservatism concerned with how moral issues, cultural traditions, and religious institutions should be preserved as society progresses. Specifically, social conservatives aim to preserve traditional norms and beliefs that are threatened by social progressivism. Social conservatism argues that history and traditions are vital to the development of society, and accomplishments within a society depend on maintaining the foundation established by these traditions. Modern social conservatism has largely been built upon a foundation of religious beliefs. Social conservatism in the United States has now been largely shaped by Christianity, and individuals within this niche place a great deal of focus upon political issues such as abortion, homosexual marriage, and access to birth control. This group can also be identified as religious conservatives that are concerned with the values of their religion being preserved by government policies. In the modern United States political system, social and religious conservatives have become difficult to distinguish. Some individuals specify a distinction between cultural and social conservatism, with cultural conservatism focused upon preserving the shared culture of a country and social conservatism primarily focused upon ­preserving traditional values.

Fiscal Conservatism Fiscal conservatism is an aspect of the conservative ideology that is primarily concerned with economic matters rather than social issues. Fiscal conservatives often share similar values with social libertarians that argue for government to be limited in both fiscal and social aspects. This belief of limited government in economic matters is embodied by reduced government spending, lower taxes for citizens, limited regulation,

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free trade, and strong property rights for individuals. Fiscal conservatism is largely embodied by the work of economic thinkers ranging from the likes of Adam Smith to the contemporary Milton Friedman.

Neoconservatism Neoconservatism is a modern branch of conservatism born in the United States that arose as a result of contention against communism and the counterculture movement in the United States in the 1960s. American neoconservatives largely promote the extension of American influence in international affairs. For example, neoconservatism became widely known when it gained influence at the national level during the George W. Bush presidential administration (2000–2008) and helped promote the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the ­American military. Irving Kristol is credited with influencing a number of neoconservative ideals beginning with his work with the magazine Encounter, which he cofounded in the 1950s, and he later used the term neoconservative in an article he wrote in 1979 titled “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative.’” Neoconservatism continues to play a role in national-level policies, especially those dealing with foreign policy.

Progressive Conservatism Progressive conservatism in the United States can be traced back to the Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft administrations, as they advocated for a coupling of progressive and conservative values. This form of conservatism has stronger roots in Europe, specifically the United Kingdom and Germany, where it was concerned with how to handle poverty. Progressive conservatisms are less stringent about the restriction of government, as they recognize its ability to properly implement regulations, as well as its ability to redistribute wealth in a limited fashion.

Conservatism Versus Liberalism The conservative ideology may be best understood when compared against its political opposite, liberalism. A specific look at the differences between conservatives and liberals on modern American political topics can help give insight into how the modern conservative ideology has been shaped. Conservatives generally tend to favor a reduced federal government in favor of greater states’ rights and reduced involvement of the federal government in citizens’ lives. Modern conservatives have embraced Christian religious values and strongly support a number of social agendas that align with these religious values. Conservatives oppose many laws

that give women the opportunity to have an abortion, identifying themselves as “prolife,” yet they tend to support capital punishment. Conservatives are also ­ opposed to homosexual marriage rights, but specifically, they argue that issues such as homosexual ­marriage, abortion, and capital punishment should be left for each state to decide. Conservatives also tend to oppose welfare and other similar government funding, as well as universal health care. On the other hand, conservatives tend to support increasing the federal budget for the military. Modern liberals oppose conservative stances on these issues, as they favor increased abortion rights, homosexual marriage rights, increased government assistance for the needy, universal health care, environmental restrictions on businesses, and a progressive income tax. Steven T. Keener and William V. Pelfrey Jr. See also Bureaucratic Politics; Democracy; Economics and Political Behavior; Liberalism; Mass Political Behavior; Religion-Based Voting Blocs; Values and Politics

Further Readings Allitt, P. (2009). The conservatives, ideas and personalities throughout American history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Broad, C. D. (1913). Lord Hugh Cecil’s “conservatism.” International Journal of Ethics, 23(4), 396–418. Dunleavy, P., Kelly, P. J., & Moran, M. (2000). British political science: Fifty years of political studies. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Graham, G. (1986). Politics in its place. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kirk, R. (2008). The conservative mind: From Burke to Eliot. New York, NY: BN Publishing. Lakoff, G. (2002). How liberals and conservatives think (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lurie, J. (2012). William Howard Taft: The travails of a progressive conservative. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Murrell, P. (1992). Conservative political philosophy and the strategy of economic transition (IRIS Reprint No. 13). College Park: University of Maryland: Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector. Nisbet, R. (1986). Conservatism. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press. Sanford, L. (1998). Tocqueville, Burke, and the origins of liberal conservatism. Review of Politics, 60(3), 435–464. Schneider, G. (2003). Conservatism in America since 1930. New York, NY: New York University Press. Shannon, J. B. (1962). Conservatism. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 344(1), 13–24.

Conspiracies Skorupski, J. (2015). The conservative critique of liberalism. In Steven Wall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to liberalism (pp. 401–422). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Conspiracies Conspiracies, or conspiracy theories, are beliefs shared by people that multiple actors—often powerful individuals within organizations—are working together to accomplish hidden, malevolent, or unlawful goals affecting others. Such beliefs are often resistant to ­falsifying evidence and tend to be driven by an overarching view that governments, in particular, are purposefully deceiving the general public. This entry ­ defines conspiracies, identifies individual differences and situational factors that influence conspiracy belief, and discusses the relationship between conspiracy belief and political behavior.

Conspiracy Theories Opinion polls find that the majority of the U.S. public endorses beliefs in some sort of conspiracy theory. Among the most popular contemporary conspiracy theories are beliefs that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11, 2001 (9/11), terrorist attacks, that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the work of multiple assailants rather than the lone work of Lee Harvey Oswald, and that the U.S. president and other world leaders are secretly controlled by a clandestine group of powerful people known as the New World Order, or Illuminati. It is important to note that some major world events are, in fact, the result of conspiracies. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were an attack on symbols of ­American capitalism and democracy coordinated by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was also the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by John Wilkes Booth and three companions who planned to kill the president, vice president, and secretary of state in an attempt to revive the Confederacy following defeat in the ­American Civil War. In the modern lexicon, alleged conspiracies are often labeled with the suffix “gate” in reference to the Watergate scandal, a conspiracy perpetrated during the Nixon presidency in which ­ presidential aides broke into the DC headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex to record conversations for political advantage.

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The Conspiracist Identity Many researchers have examined the link between different personality traits and endorsement of conspiracy theories. Although the so-called Big 5 personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) do not consistently relate to conspiracy beliefs, other traits do. Low levels of interpersonal trust and feelings of anomie and powerlessness consistently predict increased belief in conspiracies. Individuals who generally endorse conspiracy theories also tend to distrust government and authority figures, are often unaccepting of “mainstream” or commonly endorsed reasons given for major events, and often hold anomalous beliefs that defy conventional understanding of reality (e.g., paranormal beliefs). One robust finding is that those who believe one conspiracy theory are likely to believe multiple theories, even when the theories are contradictory. Such findings led researchers to coin the term conspiracist ideation—a general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracist ideation is argued to be monological, in that virtually any conspiracy, regardless of the degree (or lack) of relation, can be used to support belief in other, seemingly unrelated conspiracies. For example, researchers found that the more people believed Osama bin Laden was already dead when Navy SEAL forces invaded his compound, the more likely they were to also believe that Bin Laden is still alive—although these beliefs are contradictory, they both support conspiracist ideation that the government is lying to the general public and cannot be trusted.

Psychological Processes and Situational Effects Belief in conspiracies may fulfill psychological functions by providing answers to complex questions and providing meaning to the world, especially in light of tragic events and societal problems. Belief in nefarious intent on the part of world leaders (whether true or not) can provide a sense of understanding and predictability to an otherwise chaotic world. Multiple lines of research support this idea. For example, conspiracy beliefs may provide a sense of control and understanding for those who chronically feel powerless. Likewise, temporary feelings of uncertainty increase belief in conspiracies, and events that have profound consequences are more likely to be perceived as the result of conspiratorial agendas. Personal relevance is also a factor in specific ­conspiracy beliefs. For example, people who were in New York on 9/11 are more likely to believe conspiracy theories about 9/11 than those who were elsewhere.

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Likewise, African Americans, for whom HIV and AIDS rates are particularly high, are more likely to believe that the government created AIDS to kill off Black Americans—this belief is particularly concerning, as those who believe in such conspiracies are less likely to be tested or seek treatment for HIV.

Conspiracies and Politics Although conspiracist ideation is often linked with right-wing ideology, recent evidence suggests that both liberals and conservatives are likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs and that conspiracy belief is positively ­correlated with political extremism. Researchers propose that the conspiracist mentality is a generalized political attitude—similar to political ideologies such as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)—characterized by a monological belief system perceiving powerful individuals as responsible for negative political, economic, and s­ ocietal events. Although RWA and SDO legitimize authority and social structure and predict prejudice toward ­low-status groups (e.g., ethnic minorities and disabled people), conspiracist ideation is marked by distrust toward high-status others and prejudice toward groups perceived to wield high power and influence (e.g., ­Jewish people, who are often linked to alleged conspiracies about world domination and societal control).

Conclusion The availability of information provided by the Internet, television, and other media has likely made conspiracy theories more widely disseminated than ever and may have negative repercussions. For example, exposure to conspiracy theories increases feelings of powerlessness and distrust in government and can reduce willingness to engage in politics, vote, or participate in proenvironmental behaviors. Although questioning authority is important, healthy skepticism of conspiracies is advised, as analytical reasoning produces better political judgment and decreases belief in unsupported conspiracy theories. Corey L. Cook See also Closure, Need for; Confirmation Bias; Corruption; Death of Leaders; Environmental Skepticism; Locus of Control; Propaganda

Further Readings Douglas, K., Sutton, R. M., Jolley, D., & Wood, M. J. (2015).  The social, political, environmental and health-related

consequences of conspiracy theories: Problems and potential solutions. In M. Bilewicz, A. Cichocka, & W. Soral (Eds.), The psychology of conspiracy (pp. 183–192). London, England: Taylor and Francis. Wood, M. J., Douglas, K. M., & Sutton, R. M. (2014). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 767–773. doi:10.1177/1948550611434786

Contact Theory The contact that members of different groups (e.g., ­ethnic, religious, political) have in a society is critical for understanding political behavior pertaining to intergroup relations. Intergroup contact theory explains how close, positive contact experiences between members of different groups have the potential to foster political behavior that promotes harmony. According to the theory, contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and fosters trust and cooperation in diverse societies. These positive effects are in contrast to the potentially negative effects of living or working near out-groups without engaging in close contact, such as in cities segregated across ethnic lines. Especially for members of groups that are of different relative status (e.g., White Americans interacting with Black Americans, citizens of a nation interacting with immigrants and ­ refugees in that nation), these interactions not only increase comfort and liking toward those individuals but also toward the groups they belong to. However, the positive effects that contact has on enhancing harmony are sometimes coupled with a negative effect, reducing motivation for social change among members of lowerstatus groups. This entry outlines the positive effects that contact can have on enhancing harmony and cooperation while also reviewing recent research on the potential for contact to slow social change.

Early Research on Intergroup Contact Through the first half of the 20th century, blatant prejudice against Black Americans was normative among White Americans. Along with deep-seated structural inequalities that persist to the present day, prejudice and discrimination created discord and distrust that often led to violent conflict in the forms of lynching and rioting. Early contact research thus focused on reducing this blatant prejudice and hostility that White Americans held against Black Americans, which was made apparent across several domains of public life. Contact theory, as noted by social psychologist ­Gordon W. Allport, originally specified four conditions

Contact Theory

for contact to reduce prejudice: equal status, shared goals, cooperation between groups, and support from an authority. These conditions can be hard to meet when groups have unequal power in society. Fortunately, meta-analyses of contact studies show that these conditions are not necessary for contact to effectively reduce prejudice. But these conditions do facilitate contact’s positive effects, as illustrated by early tests of the theory. For example, desegregation of the U.S. public service sector, such as with the military, increased close contact between Black and White public servants. Evidence ­suggests that when desegregation led to close contact experiences, it effectively reduced prejudice in these professional settings. A study of seamen after desegregation of the U.S. merchant marine found that the more trips White seamen took as part of a desegregated unit, the less prejudice they expressed. White police officers in Philadelphia who had experience working with Black police officers were more cooperative taking orders from Black officers and more willing to work with Black officers. These studies highlight how close, positive intergroup contact experiences can foster cooperative behaviors critical for the successful implementation of public policy.

Close, Positive Contact Versus Proximity to Out-Groups Living, working, or studying in close proximity to outgroups may present the opportunity for contact, but it does not necessarily lead to close or positive contact experiences. When proximity, or opportunity for contact, does not lead to the kinds of close, positive intergroup contact experiences that reduce prejudice, it may instead lead to feelings of threat, distrust, and negative intergroup attitudes. Proximity to members of different out-groups, if not coupled with close positive contact experiences like cross-group friendship, can potentially reduce trust, consistent with conflict theories. It is also important to understand when proximity leads to negative contact experiences, because negative contact may exacerbate prejudice more than positive contact can reduce prejudice. Research on desegregation in school settings shows that the more negative preexisting relations are between the groups, the more likely that proximity will lead to negative rather than positive contact experiences. Hostility between Black and White students at the University of Alabama, where strong norms fostered negative interracial relations, increased following desegregation of the university in 1963. How people perceive their environment influences how they approach other groups and the contact

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experience. For example, in contrast to the proposition that more out-group members in one’s neighborhood or city enhance perceptions of threat directly, representative samples of native Germans’ attitudes toward foreigners shows that higher numbers of foreigners enhance ethnic Germans’ perceptions of threat only indirectly, by first increasing their perception of a high proportion of foreigners. Perceiving foreigners as threatening in turn increases prejudice toward them; thus, perceiving that there are large proportions of “the other” more reliably predicts threat than the actual ­proportion of foreigners. At the same time, people who live in areas with larger proportions of foreigners have more friends who are foreigners; these cross-group friendships reduce perceived threat and prejudice toward foreigners. Both the context and how people subjectively perceive that context influence whether people take ­ advantage of the opportunity for close, positive contact experiences. As mentioned, even though Allport’s optimal conditions for contact are not always necessary for contact to effectively reduce prejudice, when they are not present, or when the situation sets the stage for particularly negative relations between groups, positive contact experiences may be less likely. For example, positive norms for contact can encourage close, positive contact experiences, whereas norms of distrust and hostility could foster negative contact experiences. ­ However, research has yet to show a clear set of moderators integrating both contextual and perceptual factors to determine when opportunity for contact leads to the close, positive contact experiences that reduce prejudice.

Contact Can Reduce Intergroup Violence and Promote Equity Although preexisting conflicts and tensions between groups can foster negative contact experiences, positive intergroup contact also has the potential to curb conflict and promote cooperative political behaviors between groups during periods of open hostility. For example, White and Black residents of Detroit who had greater numbers of cross-group friends resisted the violence that members of both groups were using against each other in the riots of 1943. Non-Jewish residents of Nazi-occupied areas who had Jewish friends and friends from other ethnic groups outside their own (e.g., crossgroup friends) were significantly more likely than others to hide Jewish residents trying to escape the Nazis. Although these studies of extreme situations are correlational, taken together with experimental and longitudinal studies demonstrating causal effects of intergroup contact, they strongly suggest that close, positive

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intergroup contact experiences promote political behaviors that benefit society via intergroup cooperation and helping even in extreme situations. For members of historically advantaged groups, who hold the most power in society, positive contact experiences may also promote support for policies to increase integration and equity. For example, in a representative sample of White South Africans only a decade after the fall of apartheid, Whites who had more positive contact experiences with Blacks expressed less opposition to policies promoting racial equality. Surveys from the late 1980s and early 1990s showed that Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland with more intergroup contact experience expressed more support for integration (e.g., mixing the two groups in educational and recreational settings; intergroup marriage) and more support for abstaining from violence and forgiving the outgroup. Additionally, White American university students who had more contact experience with racial out-groups at the beginning of their first year expressed more support for policies that would promote ethnic diversity among students and faculty at the end of their first year; these effects emerged even after controlling for students’ attitudes toward these policies at the beginning of the year, political ideology, and other important controls.

Contact Is Effective Even When Indirect or Imagined More recent developments suggest that beyond having direct contact experience with members of other groups, contact may also be experienced indirectly or even imagined, and these forms of contact can also reduce prejudice. One form of indirect contact is known as extended contact. Knowing that members of one’s own group have out-group friends predicts fewer negative attitudes toward out-group members. This effect, which has been replicated in several experiments and tested over time, occurs because knowledge of cross-group friendships reduces the anxiety people feel about contact and creates more positive perceptions of norms for intergroup relations among one’s in-group and from the out-group. Extended contact effects occur above and beyond the direct contact experiences that people have, and they can emerge even when participants have been made to perceive that the groups are in conflict. Further research has shown that extended contact is most effective in changing attitudes among people who have little actual, direct contact. Related work has also shown that other forms of indirect contact—such as exposure to media depicting positive intergroup interactions—can lead people to develop more positive intergroup attitudes.

Contact may even reduce negative intergroup attitudes when it is imagined. Experiments have shown that mentally simulating positive intergroup encounters can make people project more positive characteristics to the out-group, reduce intergroup anxiety and negative stereotypes, and increase positive intergroup attitudes. The effects of imagined contact have proven consistent beyond potential effects of alternative explanations, such as positive emotional states or demand characteristics of the experiment. Richard J. Crisp and Rhiannon Turner, who conducted the first experiments on imagined contact, have argued that its value as an intervention lies in its potential in the absence of opportunities for direct contact. Thus, they propose that imagined contact could be particularly useful to prepare people for direct contact. Moreover, the positive effects of imagined contact may lead people to open themselves up to situations in which they might experience contact, thus making direct and positive contact experiences more likely when the opportunity occurs.

Contact Is Less Positive for Members of Low-Status Groups The effects of contact also depend on whether someone is coming from a group that is of relatively low or high status. In general, contact typically reduces prejudice to a greater degree among members of historically advantaged groups than among members of historically disadvantaged groups. Feeling disempowered in the ­ contact situation or subjected to prejudice and discrimination may also weaken the positive effects of contact for members of lower-status, disadvantaged groups. In particular, members of low-status groups have a greater need to feel empowered, as they are typically disempowered. From a functional perspective, “getting along” with the high-status group may cement the unequal conditions characterizing the relationship between the two groups. Moreover, positive contact with members of highstatus groups has the potential to reduce motivation for social change among members of low-status groups. Evidence for this effect is supported by a convergence of correlational data from South Africa and Israel, longitudinal evidence with U.S. college students, and experimental evidence between laboratory-generated groups. Contact may reduce motivations for social change because it increases the expectation that members of high-status groups will treat the low-status group fairly, which, if true, would imply less need for social change. Although less well researched, it is also possible that members of low-status groups may not support social change for strategic or instrumental reasons, as they may rely on positive relationships with those from

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high-status groups for their livelihoods. For example, the only Black employee in a predominantly White work environment might fear that speaking out about racial inequality could result in ostracism or even losing her job. Additionally, it is important to note that intergroup contact need not inevitably dampen low-status group members’ motivation for social change. Understanding whether and when contact leads to reduced support for social change will require further study and better understanding of the nature and dynamics of the ­contact situation. Some preliminary research is encouraging; members of an LGBTQ community did not show reduced support for collective action in favor of samesex marriage when they had non-LGBTQ friends who clearly expressed that inequality between non-LGBTQ and LGBTQ communities was not legitimate.

Future Directions for Contact Research Studying the content of contact interactions, along with the specific needs of members of low-status, historically disadvantaged groups, will lead to a better understanding of the conditions under which contact does or does not reduce motivation for social change. This research will lead to a better understanding of when intergroup contact can promote political behaviors that promote harmony and social justice as mutually reinforcing rather than opposing one another. Decades of research have demonstrated the importance of close, positive contact experiences for ­ enhancing intergroup harmony, trust, and cooperation in diverse societies. Contact research has made progress in understanding the conditions that will foster those close, positive experiences in contrast to negative contact experiences, but more research is needed to ­ understand when people will choose to engage in close contact experiences under conditions that are not ideal, such as when there are norms fostering negative relations between the groups. Future research on contact must also identify conditions under which contact will promote intergroup cooperation toward social justice rather than promoting intergroup harmony, trust, and cooperation at the expense of social justice. Thomas Christopher O’Brien and Linda R. Tropp See also Activism; Affirmative Action; Collective Action; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Conflicts, Protracted; Prejudice

Further Readings Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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Becker, J. C., Wright, S. C., Lubensky, M. E., & Zhou, S. (2013). Friend or ally: Whether cross-group contact undermines collective action depends on what advantaged group members say (or don’t say). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(4), 442–455. Crisp, R. J., & Turner, R. N. (2009). Can imagined interactions produce positive perceptions? Reducing prejudice through simulated social contact. American Psychologist, 64(4), 231–240. Dixon, J., Durrheim, K., & Tredoux, C. (2007). Intergroup contact and attitudes toward the principle and practice of racial equality. Psychological Science, 18(10), 867–872. Dixon, J., Levine, M., Reicher, S., & Durrheim, K. (2012). Beyond prejudice: Are negative evaluations the problem and is getting us to like one another more the solution? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(6), 411–425. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2011). When groups meet: The dynamics of intergroup contact. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. F., & Pratto, F. (2009). The irony of harmony: Intergroup contact can produce false expectations for equality. Psychological Science, 20(1), 114–121. Saguy, T., Tropp, L. R., & Hawi, D. (2013). The role of group power in intergroup contact. In G. Hodson & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Advances in intergroup contact (pp. 113–132). London, England: Psychology Press. Tausch, N., & Becker, J. C. (2012). Understanding the psychological processes involved in the demobilizing effects of positive cross-group contact. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(6), 447–448.

Corporatism Corporatism is a form of interest representation and intermediation in which functional interests of society, namely capital and labor, are granted a monopoly of representation by the state that shares its policy-making power with them. In order to perform this role, organizations of labor (trade unions) and capital (employer organizations) must be sufficiently encompassing and centralized.

Overview Corporatism is a contested and ambiguous concept used to characterize very different realities in different historical moments. It was originally coined to define the organization of interests under totalitarian regimes inspired by the social doctrine of the Catholic Church

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that viewed in corporatist ideas a solution to the social question posed by industrialization and the growth of the proletariat in the late 19th century. However, a ­similar organization of socioeconomic interests could also be found in several European democracies in the post–World War II period, where trade unions and employer associations were organized along unitary and centralized associations that shared significant decision-­ making powers with governments. Neo-­ corporatism, or social corporatism, was accordingly used in order to distinguish its democratic form from state corporatism in totalitarian or nondemocratic regimes. The growth of scholarly interest in corporatism in the late 1970s and early 1980s was caused by mounting evidence of a relationship between countries with neocorporatist institutions or policy-making methods and some indicators of social and economic performance. Moreover, research on transitions to democracy showed how neo-corporatist forms of policy-making contributed to smooth and peaceful transitions to democracy in some countries in those years. A cyclical character has characterized neo-corporatism, hence becoming less relevant in the late 1980s and experiencing a revival in the 1990s. Already in the 21st century, scholarly interest in neo-corporatism has significantly declined to a large extent due to the membership and organizational erosion experienced by organized interests and, in particular, trade unions.

Dimensions and Conceptions of Corporatism At the most abstract level, corporatism is used to describe a specific configuration of the relationship between civil society and the state. The work of Alan Cawson illuminates the three main different ways in which corporatism has been used by scholarship. First, some authors consider corporatism as a form and process of interest representation, as a distinctive way in which interests are organized and interact with the state. Other authors think of corporatism as a differentiated model of policy-making with a significant involvement of organized interests, in which corporatism emerges alongside and eventually dominates a parliamentary form of democracy. This view would be close to the concept of policy concertation. Finally, corporatism has also been used to refer to a novel political economy model different from capitalism and socialism, close to the ideal type of what have been called coordinated market economies (CMEs) in the political economics literature (e.g., Varieties of Capitalism, ed. Hall and Soskice, 2001). Efforts to develop a general and comprehensive theory of the corporatist model have highlighted four core

dimensions to it: (1) the role of the state, guiding the economy but without ruling it; (2) a mostly privately owned economic system; (3) the existence at least of a circumscription upon the role of liberal democratic institutions in policy-making; and (4) organizations of producers that both perform an intermediary role between state and societal actors and act as a regulatory agency on behalf of the state (Williamson, 1985, p. 10). Both (2) and (3) can be considered structural conditions in the framework developed by Williamson, whereas (1) and (4) emphasize behavioral patterns. A similar characterization can be found in the work of Alan Siaroff, according to which an “ideal-type” ­neo-corporatist political economy regime involves four different aspects: (1) structural features, namely the characteristics of interest groups (centralization, concentration, encompassingness, etc.); (2) functional roles, referred to as the involvement of labor and business organizations in decision making; (3) behavioral patterns; that is, the search for consensus in policy-making through compromise and political exchange; and (4) the existence of a favorable context, including a consensusbased political tradition, the dominance of social ­democratic parties, and a welfare state with high social policy expenditure.

Corporatist Theory Origins The idea of organizing society in large corporations as a mechanism to avoid social conflict dates back to the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim. It was embraced enthusiastically by the Catholic Church in its social doctrine and then implemented by some of the fascist totalitarian regimes both in the pre–World War II period and afterward. The first usages of corporatism contained a strong normative and ideological component being advocated by fascist and communist ideologues and activists for widely divergent motives, interests, and reasons, having as a common feature the advocacy of an institutional relationship between the systems of authoritative decision making and interest representation. Accordingly, the term as used for political reasons referred to a form of strong and dominant state. After World War II, Andrew Shonfield’s work signaled the “official” renaissance of the theoretical and political debate on corporatism. He provided empirical evidence supporting the validity of Mihail Manoïlescu’s (1936) argument, which predicted the gradual “corporativization” of Western capitalist economies. Shonfield observed that modern economies, in order to reach a high macroeconomic performance path within the

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Keynesian framework, had promoted centralized bargaining processes between the major interest groups in order to steer the economies along the desired policies. In the case of Western Europe, state corporatist experiences in countries like Portugal and Spain coexisted with forms of democratic, social, or neo-corporatism in Western European democracies, hence providing support to the corporativization thesis.

From State Corporatism to Social or Neo-Corporatism The decade of the 1970s witnessed the consolidation of scholarly interest in corporatism, with a milestone 1974 article by Philippe C. Schmitter. The existence of similar logics of interest representation in modern liberal democracies to those observed in right-wing authoritarian regimes obliged the establishment of some distinction between these two forms of corporatism. The difference between state and social corporatism or neo-corporatism was related not only to the existence (or not) of a democratic regime within which similar structures of interest representation could be observed but also to the policy-making role of corporate actors. Corporatist writers’ common concern was the general phenomenon of continuous, structured participation of interest organizations in the policy-making process and other stages of the policy process, especially policy implementation. Neo-corporatism soon started to be considered as another social science model, an “approach, an intellectual framework, a way of examining and analyzing political phenomena across countries and time periods” (Wiarda, 1997, p. 23). Neo-corporatism offered an overarching and coherent model for understanding how liberal economies and democratic societies work, thus losing gradually the negative ideological and political content associated with state corporatism. At the same time, there was a shift in the place occupied by corporatist literature in academia from political theory to political economy. This shift was provoked by the large divergences observed in the responses and performance of economies before the difficult economic context of the oil crisis. However, under the label of neo-corporatism, works conveyed very different realities. In some cases, authors pointed out the existence of distinctive forms of policymaking in which corporate actors played an important role alongside governments. Other authors paid more attention to the way in which interests were represented and structured. A difference was then introduced between corporatism as a structure of interest intermediation and corporatism as a form of policy-making that could be associated with policy concertation. A  1982

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essay by Schmitter used the term “neo-corporatism2” to refer to a system characterized by the involvement of social partners in public policy design and implementation, hence highlighting its intermediation function. By contrast, “neo-corporatism1” emphasizes the organizational characteristics of social partners, thus characterizing neo-corporatist systems based on the way in which social actors are organized in society. The character of actors involved in the decisionmaking process as well as their number and relations with the state were the main dimensions to distinguish a corporatist from a pluralist system of representation and formed at the same time a key dimension to establish a link between institutional configuration, policy-­ making, the character of policies, and policy outcomes. The positions of C. Crouch (1983) and R. Martin (1983) were representative of the two main points of view in this debate. According to the former, the difference between pluralism and corporatism has to be found in the character of actors and their internal arrangements rather than in their role in the policy machinery. Martin instead argued that the crucial difference between pluralism and neo-corporatism had to be found in the degree of integration of organized interest groups into the policy-making arenas of the state. There were two major and interlinked extensions of the corporatist literature during the 1980s. First is the subconcept of meso-corporatism, whereby the relevant collective actors are not peak class associations but organizations defending specific interests of sectors and professions. Their power dependence relationships with state agencies are monopolistic and exclusive but not necessarily tripartite. Second is the concept of privateinterest governments, which refers to the collective private self-regulation by industry associations of capital and labor, with more or less state assistance. This was considered an alternative form of economic coordination to either market liberalism or state interventionism. Thus, it can be argued that while the 1970s served to limit more clearly the concept of corporatism as well as to introduce greater rationality in its debate, the 1980s served to empirically apply the concepts as well as to enter into an in-depth analysis of the logic behind neo-corporatism, identifying mechanisms as well as ­ neo-corporatist structures.

Neo-Corporatism and Political Exchange The concept of political exchange is particularly important to characterize the way in which ­policy-making takes place in neo-corporatist countries. The concept was developed by Alessandro Pizzorno and later on incorporated into the mainstream of neo-corporatist theory. Cawson, for instance, defined neo-corporatism

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as “a specific socio-political process in which organizations representing monopolistic functional interests engage in political exchange with state agencies over public policy outputs which involves those organizations in a role which combines interest representation and policy implementation through delegated selfenforcement” (1986, p. 38). Thus exchange relations can be considered as an intrinsic element of corporatist systems. Political exchange is nonetheless different from the exchange taking place in collective bargaining between trade unions and employers in the industrial relations sphere. Crouch affirms that “if collective bargaining [as a form of market exchange in the area of Industrial Relations] is the characteristic mode of exchange in pluralistic industrial relations, GPE is the characteristic mode of neo-Corporatism” (1990, p. 72).

Neo-Corporatism and Economic Performance The study of neo-corporatism in the 1980s was linked to the experiences of response to the economic crisis of the 1970s and, more specifically, to strategies of wage moderation implemented in order to curb inflation. This literature detected a relationship between the existence of neo-corporatist structures and policy-making processes and positive macroeconomic performance. In those countries with more centralized and ­ encompassing-­ interest organizations, wage restraint by trade unions could be achieved more easily than in countries with more ­ decentralized actors and collective bargaining ­systems. Centralization and encompassingness allowed trade unions to internalize the negative effects of their policy demands, including wages, hence explaining their responsible economic behavior. Neo-corporatist structures that were present in several European economies started to come under pressure due to technological and social developments as well as to the extension of neo-liberal policies in most European economies. Because of this, several works at the end of the 1980s claimed the extinction of the neocorporatist “beast” due to its institutional erosion as well as to the decline of concertation and tripartite macropolitical bargaining. During the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in neo-corporatist theories before evidence of an increase in tripartite social dialogue and social pacts, particularly in those countries facing problems in the adjustment toward the European Monetary Union. Compared with the previous decade, a shift took place toward a more generalized usage of neo-corporatism as a form of policy-making due to the apparent erosion of the structural characteristics of neo-corporatist systems. Neo-corporatist forms of policy-making contributed to

achieving wage moderation in many of the countries in which the institutional setting had historically struggled to deliver wage restraint. In spite of the general erosion occurring in neo-corporatist structures, new forms of neo-corporatist concertation took place in Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s, thus attracting the attention of several authors interested in analyzing the characteristics of the new neo-corporatist wave. The return of neo-corporatism led another group of scholars to wonder about its cyclicality and the reasons for it.

Measuring Corporatism One of the main problems of neo-corporatist theory has been the weak evidence provided to support some of the claims made in the literature, including the fact that it was genuinely distinct from pluralism or that it correlated positively with economic performance. This was not so much a problem of neo-corporatist theory itself but of the way it developed. Hence, while the gradual broadening of the research and policy agenda led to considerable clarification of what was meant by and the consequences of corporatism, there was a gap in the understanding of the mechanisms or processes that linked the structures with the outcomes. Until the early 1980s, there was a tendency to underplay the refinement of the central components of the corporatist model, what we might term the operation of corporatism; that is, the establishment of a link between the corporatist polity and the corporatist policies, or, put another way, the role and characteristics of corporatist politics. There were a set of formal policy-making practices that were regarded as neo-corporatist (social pacts, tripartite negotiations at national or peak level, forms of policy concertation) but few insights about the mechanisms operating behind these practices, that is, about the logic underpinning neo-corporatist processes. The proliferation of the neo-corporatist literature during the 1980s led accordingly to a search for improving available empirical evidence. The problems in measuring neo-corporatism lay precisely in the very different uses of the term and its several dimensions, as it has been used to characterize all three aspects of the political phenomena (i.e., polity = structures/institutions, politics = processes/mechanisms, and policy = outcomes). Lane Kenworthy identified four categories of works on quantitative indicators of corporatism according to their main focus: •• Interest group organization: union centralization, union concentration, union density, business ­centralization or concertation •• Wage setting and collective bargaining arrangements: wage bargaining centralization, wage bargaining ­coordination, coverage of collective bargaining

Corruption •• Interest group participation in policy-making •• Political-economic consensus: strike rates

Relying on the quantitative indicators and rankings elaborated in those years, many works concluded that a positive relationship existed between macroeconomic performance and the neo-corporatist character of institutions during the period from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, especially when comparing corporatist with noncorporatist countries. However, before the erosion of neo-corporatist organizations and structures in the 1980s and 1990s, some works showed how the ­relationship between economic performance and neocorporativism had eroded. Oscar Molina See also Business in Politics; Clientelism; Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Lobbying; Moral Hazard; Political Morality; Realism; Rent-Seeking Behavior

Further Readings Cawson, A. (1986). Corporatism and political theory. London, England: Basil Blackwell. Crouch, C. (1983). Pluralism and the new corporatism: A rejoinder. Political Studies, 31, 452–460. Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hemerijck, A., & Schludi, M. (2000). Sequences of policy failures and effective policy responses. In F. Scharpf & V. Schmidt (Eds.), Welfare and work in the open economy: Vol. 1. From vulnerability to competitiveness (pp. 125–228). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kenworthy, L. (2000). Quantitative indicators of corporatism: A survey and assessment. Discussion Paper 00/4. Cologne, Germany: Max Planck Institut fuer Gesellschaftsforschung. Manoïlesco, M. (1934). Le siècle du corporatisme [The century of corporatism]. Paris, France: Felix Alcan. Martin, R. (1983). Pluralism and the new corporatism. Political Studies, 31, 86–102. Molina, O., & Rhodes, M. (2002). Corporatism: The past, present, and future of a concept. Annual Review of Political Science, 5(1), 305–331. Pizzorno, A. (1977). Scambio politico e identità colletiva nel conflitto di classe [Political exchange and joint identities in the class conflict]. Rivista Italiana di Scienza Política, 7(2), 165–198. Regini, M. (1986). Political bargaining in western Europe during the economic crisis of the 1980s. In O. Jacobi et al. (Eds.), Economic crisis, trade unions and the state (pp. 61–76). London, England: Croom Helm. Regini, M. (2000). Between deregulation and social pacts: The responses of European economies to globalization. Politics and Society, 28(1), 5–34.

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Rhodes, M. (1998). Globalisation, labor markets and welfare states: A future of “competitive corporatism”? In M. Rhodes & Y. Mény (Eds.), The future of European welfare: A new social contract (pp. 178–203). London, England: Macmillan. Schmitter, P. (1974). Still the century of corporatism? Review of Politics, 36(1), 85–131. Schmitter, P. (1982). Reflections on where the theory of neo-corporatism has gone and where the praxis of neo-corporatism may be going. In G. Lehmbruch & P. Schmitter (Eds.), Trends towards corporatist intermediation (pp. 259–274). Beverley Hills, CA: SAGE. Schmitter, P. (1989). Corporatism is dead! Long live corporatism! Reflections on Andrew Shonfield’s modern capitalism. Government and Opposition, 24, 54–73. Schmitter, P., & Grote, J. (1997). Sisifo corporatista: Passato, presente e futuro [Corporatist Sisyphus: Past, present, and future]. Stato e Mercato, 50, 183–215. Shonfield, A. (1965). Modern capitalism: The changing balance of public and private power. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Siaroff, A. (1999). Corporatism in 24 industrial democracies: Meaning and measurement. European Journal of Political Research, 36, 175–205. Wassenberg, A. (1982). Neo-corporatism and the quest for control: The cuckoo game. In G. Lehmbruch & P. Schmitter (Eds.), Trends towards corporatist intermediation (pp. 83–108). Beverley Hills, CA: Sage. Wiarda, H. (1997). Corporatism and comparative politics: The other great ism. New York, NY: Sharpe. Williamson, P. (1985). Varieties of corporatism: Theory and practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Corruption In its traditional sense, corruption means moral impurity or decay that harms the public interest. It could take place in both the private and public sectors. One example of corruption in history was the improper sale of indulgences in the Catholic Church, which triggered the Protestant Reformation. Nowadays, corruption often refers to misconduct in the public sector. The World Bank defines corruption as the abuse of public office for personal gain. Transparency International provides a similar definition that corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. The abuse of public power is not limited to economic improprieties, such as bribery, embezzlement, and wire fraud. It includes social improprieties as well, such as patronage and nepotism. This entry provides an overview of corruption, the popular forms of corruption, how to measure corruption levels, and consequences of corruption.

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Overview of Corruption There are many definitions of corruption in the literature. For example, J. S. Nye in his 1967 article “Corruption and Political Development” defines corruption as an action that deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains or an action that violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence. Carl Friedrich states that the pattern of corruption may exist whenever a power holder is induced to take actions that favor whoever provides the rewards and thereby does damage to the public and its interests. In these definitions, the damage to the public interest is the essence of corruption. If an official abuses a child or steals in a supermarket, it is not corruption, although it is a crime. Corruption is viewed as a social disease that particularly needs to be addressed in the public sector because the public interest is vulnerable. Leslie Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of ­Melbourne, explains in his book Corruption: A Very Short Introduction that the vulnerability of public interest stems from the lack of competition and choices in the public sector. In most cases, if we are dissatisfied with the goods or services of one private company, we can switch our custom to another, as market economics is based on competition. But government has a virtual monopoly. If we do not trust any part of the government, the judiciary or police for example, we cannot turn elsewhere for law enforcement. In addition, in cases of disagreement, a part of the government, the court for instance, is an arbiter between individuals and organizations. Therefore, the term corruption is often limited to misconduct by public officials and public employees. Corruption is a multidimensional phenomenon. According to the different actors and different purposes of interest involved, distinctions can be made between administrative corruption, political corruption, and state capture in the public sector. Administrative corruption, or bureaucratic corruption, refers to the situation in which bureaucrats and public servants use public office for pecuniary gain or financial benefits. Administrative corruption takes place in public services such as education and health systems. Political corruption involves the use of public office by elected politicians for gaining political power or support. Political corruption manifests as favoritism in the form of giving preferences to private organizations in order to directly receive political support or gain campaign funds to buy political support. State capture takes place when corrupt political actors formulate or change the regulations and institutions of the state in favor of their interests

and the interests of their political allies and supporters. With state capture, institutions are not operationalized to serve for the general public, but instead become the tools for preserving corrupt interests. State capture could be a phenomenon of undue influence of the state by powerful firms, in which multinational and domestic firms as a whole suffer by losing equal opportunities and legal protection. In a comparison among the three types of corruption, administrative corruption is the most widespread and sometimes is treated as a narrow definition of public corruption. State capture is the most fundamental and influential corruption because it makes the trespass of public good for the people in power legalized by changing game rules in the society. When a country is in a position of state capture, it is no longer a real or consolidated democracy. American political scientist Arnold Heidenheimer made distinctions between what he called “black,” “gray,” and “white” corruption, according to the severity level of corruption. “Black corruption” refers to misconduct that a majority consensus of both elite and mass opinion would condemn and would want to see punished as a matter of principle. “Gray corruption” signifies that some part of the community, either elite or mass, may want to see the corrupt behavior punished while others may not, and the majority may be ambivalent about it. “White corruption” indicates that the majority of both elite and mass opinion would tolerate the action and would not support the attempt to punish, although it is still formally perceived as corruption. In other words, corruption could be coded as severe violations (black), violations with some opprobrium (gray), and tolerable violation of moral and legal norms (white). The common forms of corruption include bribery, kickbacks, embezzlement, extortion, fraud, conflicts of interest, patronage, and nepotism. Each of the forms is briefly described in what follows.

Bribery Bribery refers to a situation in which public officials receive financial benefits from businesses or citizens, and as exchange they offer (or promise to offer) favorable treatment or services to the bribe providers. The financial benefits may vary from cash or other valuables to less tangible ones such as future employment positions. Bribery may involve a petty amount of benefits, such as greasy money paid by citizens to public officials in order to speed up the process of getting licenses or other services. Petty bribery is more likely to occur in local government facilities of licensing, utilities, taxation, policing, and the judicial systems. Bribery could involve

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a greater amount of financial benefits as well, especially when the bribery is associated with large-scale public projects of government contracts or procurement. When decisions are made without transparency, public officials might offer contracts to those who are willing to pay high-value bribes. With grant bribes to public officials, the quality of the public project may substantially suffer, and its financial costs to the public may substantially increase. A well-known bribery case in U.S. history took place in the New York Police Department (NYPD) and was investigated by the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption (known as the Knapp Commission, after its chairman Whitman Knapp) in 1970–1972. After testimonies were heard from whistleblowers, commissioners, corrupt patrolmen, and the victims of police shakedowns, as well as public hearings, the Knapp Commission confirmed that bribery had rampantly existed in the NYPD. More interestingly, the report of the Knapp Commission identified two particular classes of bribery, which it called “grass eating” and “meat eating.” “Grass-eating” bribery refers to the situation in which officials will accept a bribe if offered, while “meat-eating” corruption indicates more predatory bribery, in which officials actually solicit bribes in exchange for favorable treatment of the bribe provider. The Knapp Commission found that a significant number of NYPD officers were guilty of “grass eating.” It also concluded that “grass eating” was performed under peer pressure—police officers learned to do so from other cops or from imitating the deviants they watched and investigated every day. “Meat-eating” officers spent a good deal of time aggressively looking for situations they could exploit for financial gain. An example of “meat eating” was shaking down illicit drug dealers for money. In addition to the foregoing classifications of bribery, scholars also distinguish between “corruption with theft” and “corruption without theft.” According to scholars Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny, “bribery with theft” occurs when the regular payment to the government is not made to the government but instead to the government official. For instance, customs ­officials may allow goods to enter the country without the importer paying a duty to the government, but instead they intercept the charge for themselves. “­ Bribery without theft” involves instances in which officials receive bribes but still pass on the regular payment to the government. For example, an official may charge a bribe in addition to an import license fee from a ­business, but then he passes the license fee on to the government treasury. In bribery without theft, the bribe provider pays an additional amount to the government official.

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Bribery is the most widespread form of corruption; thus in many circumstances, corruption merely denotes bribery. However, “corruption” is a more general term than “bribery” and covers various forms of misuse of authority for personal gain.

Other Forms of Corruption Kickback A kickback is a negotiated deal in which a commission is paid to a public official in power as a reward for rendering a government contract or grant to the payer. The commission is normally negotiated ahead of time and might be in the form of money, goods, or services handed over to the government official. For example, a government contract manager may give a contract to a company that is not the best bidder or allocate more than they deserve. In return, the company makes a ­kickback payment to the contract manager, which is a portion of the amount the company received from the government.

Extortion Extortion as a form of public corruption signifies an instance in which a public official uses his office power to take money or property from a private party by means of illegal compulsion. The victim is forced to make a payment to the public official out of fear of getting other possible punishments if he does not cooperate with the public official. Extortion involves coercive approaches such as threat to induce cooperation. In the case of extortion, a public official may falsely claim authority to which he is not lawfully entitled in order to promote his personal interest. For example, a highway department officer oppressively solicits extra money for his personal gain from a tax-delinquent automobile owner under the pretense that he is collecting a fine. The automobile owner as a victim is not voluntarily making the payment but is forced to do so by the official authority.

Embezzlement Public-sector embezzlement refers to the illegal action in which public officials steal public funds, property, or other valuables, directing them into their pockets or to someone they entrust with receiving them. For instance, a school accountant could embezzle funds from the account of free and reduced-cost lunch programs to his or her pocket. In a case of public-official embezzlement, the public official has access to the public fund, property, or other valuables because he is in a

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position to take care of the public resources and he is trusted. Embezzlement may involve only a small proportion of the total resources the public official takes care of in an attempt to minimize the risk of detection of the misallocation. When successful, embezzlements may continue for years (or even decades) without detection. It is often only when a relatively large proportion of the funds is needed at a single time that the public organization realizes that the resources have been missing and that they have been duped by the embezzler.

Financial Fraud In the public sector, financial fraud occurs when a public official uses fake documents to exploit benefits from government grants, compensation schemes, or any other resources for his private gain. Cheating is the key element in fraud. A government official can perform fraud by claiming reimbursement for inauthentic business travel, for instance. In this case, only the official is involved in the fraud. It could involve multiple parties. An example took place in a housing development compensation program in a developing country, where the local government planned to redevelop an urban district and subsidize residents’ relocation to other places. A group of officials from the government notary, property ownership registration, housing dismantling, and cartography services conspired to forge certificates of property ownership that needed to be relocated in order to claim a large amount of government compensation and share the booty. In addition, fraud may be combined with kickbacks. For instance, a business firm may collude with government officials to forge documents in order to get additional benefits from the government or pay less than they should to the government. As an exchange, the officials get kickbacks from the firm.

Patronage and Nepotism Patronage refers to rewarding political supporters with government employment. It may be legitimate when a newly elected government changes the top officials in the administration in order to effectively implement its policy. Patronage becomes corruption when incompetent persons are selected over more competent ones in order to pay back political supporters. Patronage is relatively more widespread in nondemocracies, where no political leaders are elected through a public voting system, and all important government positions are appointed by a higher-level organization or supervisor. Then political loyalty rather than competence is heavily considered in the selection process. Nepotism is a synonym for cronyism, whereby a public official appoints relatives or personal friends to government

positions. In nepotism, personal relationships rather than competence determine who is hired to fill government positions.

Conflict of Interest Conflict of interest becomes a form of corruption when the private interests of a public official affect his public duty. One may distinguish between legislative conflict of interest and bureaucratic conflict of interest according to the form of interest. An example of the former is that a legislator owns stock in a food manufactory and votes for a bill that will give tax concessions to that company. In the legislative conflict of interest, the form of interest is the legislation that favors the legislator. Bureaucratic conflict of interest involves more straightforward monetary benefits to the public official. For example, a public procurement manager purchases office supplies from a company owned by his relatives. Or he establishes a part-time consulting firm that gives advice to private clients who are seeking government contract and procurement opportunities.

Measuring the Corruption Level It is hard to measure the actual extent of corruption in any society because the phenomenon and involved population are inherently secret. In research, scholars primarily use two types of indicators to measure corruption: official statistics and conceptual surveys. Official statistics typically report on up to five dimensions: the number of corruption cases reported, the number of corruption cases investigated, the number of prosecutions, the number of convictions, and the number of sentences meted out. When the numbers are used to compare corruption levels between countries (or between states/local governments), they should be weighted by the population size. This set of measures looks objective and straightforward. However, they might be misleading given different levels of law enforcement across countries. For example, Country A may investigate corruption cases on a more haphazard basis, while Country B makes more efforts in detecting corruption and investigates cases in a more consistent manner. As a consequence, Country A may have fewer corruption cases revealed and punished than Country B. But the real case might be that we see only the very tip of the huge iceberg in Country A, while we are able to view a much larger proportion of the overall corruption picture in Country B. Alternatively, perceptual surveys are widely used in research to compare corruption levels across countries. The most prominent measure of such an approach is the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published annually

Corruption

by Transparency International (TI) since 1995 to measure citizen perceptions of public sector corruption in each individual country. According to the 2015 CPI report, among the 167 countries surveyed in total, the most corrupt countries are Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan, and Angola, with their CPI scores from 8 to 15 in a 0–100 scale; the least corrupt countries are Denmark, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Norway, with CPI scores between 87 and 91. However, the CPI is also criticized for the data sources, because TI does not conduct actual surveys itself; instead, it compiles and standardizes information from comparative perception surveys conducted by other institutions, including the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, Bertelsmann Foundation, World Justice Project, and Economist Intelligence Unit, to produce CPI scores and rank order countries. Since some of the surveys, such as World Bank’s Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Report (GCR), seek perceptions mainly from businesspeople and specialists, the CPI score may not be able to accurately capture the corruption perception of the general public in each country.

safety can be severely threatened. A salient corruption case disclosed in China took place in the high-speed railway projects in 2011. A large, corrupt network of high-level officials was discovered to have accepted a huge amount of financial benefits from the contractors at the expense of sacrificing construction quality. The substandard railway led to a series of accidents, including a fatal collision in Wenzhou in 2011 that killed at least 40 passengers. In addition, corruption may generate long-term damage to the cultural system. Corrupt practices are immoral and unethical, involving lying, fraud, threats, and conspiracy. Such activities will spread widely and deeply to every corner of a society if there is no effective control over them and ultimately become socially acceptable and institutionalized. Therefore, pervasive corruption practices will create a culture of corruption in which more and more honest people succumb to the temptation to misuse the power entrusted to them. Moreover, corruption induces injustice and will eventually generate mistrust in government. Then mistrust creates more conflicts between citizens and ­ government, which in turn raises the level of corruption and further impairs popular trust. In this way, corruption and mistrust feed each other, producing a vicious circle.

Consequences of Corruption Corruption is a disease that plagues every government in the world, especially the governments in developing countries. Yahong Zhang and Jose Vargas-Hernandez, in the book Government Anti-Corruption Strategies, summarize the economic, political, and social damages that corruption may cause. First, corruption cripples equal competition in the market. Corruption adds costs to the government and business, violates established rules, and creates uncertainty for businesses and citizens. A higher level of corruption in a country is usually associated with greater government intervention in the economy, which threatens investment intention of foreign capital investors. On the contrary, countries with low levels of corruption attract more capital for investment. Therefore, corruption will eventually decrease economic efficiency. Second, corruption degrades the quality of life and even causes severe safety problems for citizens. For instance, corruption in the forms of embezzlement and fraud may divert public funds from paying for public goods, such as safety, social services, infrastructure, and public schools. In the case of bribery that leads to violations of laws and regulations—including building codes, environmental controls, traffic laws, prudential banking regulations, and so on—public well-being and public

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Yahong Zhang See also Bureaucratic Politics; Clientelism; Conspiracies; Election Rigging; Ethics of Political Behavior; Free Rider Problem; Political Crimes; Tragedy of the Commons; Utopia

Further Readings Friedrich, C. (2002). Corruption concepts in historical perspective. In A. Heidenheimer & M. Johnston (Eds.), Political corruption: Concepts & contexts (pp. 15–24). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Heidenheimer, A. (2002). Perspectives on the perception of corruption. In A. Heidenheimer & M. Johnston (Eds.), Political corruption: Concepts & contexts (pp. 141–154). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Holmes, L. (2015). Corruption: A very short introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Nye, J. S. (1967). Corruption and political development: A costbenefit analysis. American Political Science Review, 2, 412–427. Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. (1993). Corruption. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3), 599–617. Zhang, Y., & Vargas-Hernandez, J. (2015). Introduction: Corruption and government anti-corruption strategies. In Y. Zhang & C. Lavena (Eds.), Government anti-corruption strategies: A cross-cultural perspective (pp. xiii–xxv). Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis.

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Counter-Elite Counter-elites are individuals whose views and goals differ significantly from those of the ruling body of a country and who, by their abilities, by their wealth, and/ or by their heritage, occupy positions of influence in a society. In classic elite theory as developed by Vilfredo Pareto, counter-elites are more likely to mobilize against the ruling elite when social mobility is low and talented individuals are prevented from rising up the status hierarchy. A defining characteristic of counter-elites is their ability to mobilize for their cause parts of the society that are able to exert pressure on the ruling body either because of their numbers or through their financial or military power. The ruling group and counter-elites diverge in their opinions over which economic, social, or national security policies to follow. The disagreement may be latent or manifest. Open disagreement may take the form of lobbying, political discourses, mobilization of masses, protests, and, in its more extreme form, violent action. The type of opposition adopted by the counter-elites is a direct consequence of the regime’s tolerance toward the former’s actions. As democratic regimes do not persecute opposition leaders, counterelites tend to be both more active and more peaceful. The higher the degree of persecution of a regime against opposition forces, the more concealed the counter-elite’s activity is, and if the latter’s actions become open, they tend to be more violent.

Counter-Elites’ Basis of Support Counter-elites draw their power from the support of subordinates and allies. As no individual can reasonably exert political pressure on her own, one needs to gather support that translates into coercive power. Consequently, the divergence in views between ruling elites and counter-elites reflects the underlying divergence in their respective subordinates’ views. It is ­therefore not uncommon for ruling elites to attempt coopting counter-elites in power-sharing agreements, since the elimination of a specific member of the counter-elite will usually not remove the underlying ­ threat. The divergences in the subordinates’ preferences are based on ethnic, religious, or purely ideological grounds. Counter-elites whose support rests on ethnic or religious characteristics possess more loyal followers but are equally more constrained in the capacity to expand the numbers of their subordinates. These counter-elites therefore represent a permanent threat to the central regime, given that their power is highly resilient to actions by the ruling elites. Notable examples can be found in the Kurdish independence

movement in modern Turkey and in the Shia–Sunni opposition polarizing the Arab world in the 21st century. James De Nardo developed an entire theory showing that in instances in which the divide is ideological, counter-elites have flexibility over their precise ideological positioning, allowing them to garner more support. On the other hand, ideological subordinates are less loyal, and by extension the counter-elites’ power is more volatile. Alliances among counter-elites whose objectives ­differ are not uncommon. The opposition to Bashar alAssad in the ongoing Syrian civil war initially was a mosaic of groups representing different ethnicities and ideologies. Yet as became apparent during the Syrian civil war, in which Syrian opposition forces started a sub-civil war against the armed forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as DAESH), such alliances are by construction short lived: when the power balance starts shifting in favor of the opposition forces, these coalitions break down, and a contest for power among counter-elites emerges.

Counter-Elites in Democracies In democratic regimes, counter-elites occupy key positions in political parties and attempt to influence political outcomes, for example by proposing an ­ ­election-winning policy and in some cases by lobbying in favor of their preferred electoral outcome. As party candidates, counter-elites propose policies in anticipation of the voters’ policy preferences. The electorate is then called to cast votes for their preferred party. In the archetypal conceptualization of political competition, Anthony Downs demonstrated that in a two-party system, world ideologies should not matter, whereas increasing the number of political parties made ideological positioning more salient. More elaborate models of political economy introduce political leaders with ideological preferences that result in the proposed policies of the counter-elites diverging from the ones of the incumbent party and being closer to their own ideology. Counter-elites may equally resort to lobbying practices, whereby resources are devoted to tilt the voters’ preferences toward their own. In democratic regimes, the opposition of counterelites to the ruling government is therefore expressed via nonviolent means, with resources being wasted in the race for power in the presence of lobbying.

Counter-Elites in Autocracies Under autocratic regimes, the opposition of counterelites to the central power is either latent or else violent.

Counterinsurgency

In mild authoritarian regimes, counter-elites are given some latitude for expressing their preferences. Given, however, that autocratic regimes do not feature fair and open elections, the opposition of the counterelites is necessarily tainted by violent actions. The mildest forms of opposition are organized protests and urban riots. Harsher regimes typically repress opposition movements by extensively implementing purges, jailing and deporting suspected counter-elites, and, in some extreme cases, killing them. Counter-elites in such instances are unable to openly garner support for their cause, pushing them to remain silent, to go underground—which necessarily limits their visibility and capacity to act—or else to seek political asylum in other countries. The threat of counter-elites is therefore latent or else translates into isolated acts of extreme violence (terrorist attacks; sabotage). In a classical book on dictatorships, Ronald Wintrobe spells out the dictator’s dilemma: since expressing one’s discontent toward the central regime exposes oneself to repression and purges, the most repressive dictators will face less open resistance. The dilemma lies in that this latent threat fuels the dictator’s fear of sudden violent opposition, thus further incentivizing him to coerce. In such regimes, exemplified by the rule of Joseph Stalin in the USSR or Kim Jong-un in North Korea, counter-elites represent a latent threat and will grasp any opportunity that may emerge to violently depose the ruler. Historically, the Soviet Union captures the different degrees of coercion faced by counter-elites. In the early days of the regime, opposition was mildly tolerated. For instance, Leon Trotsky—once a key member of the ruling elite—openly expressed his discontent toward the implemented policies before being forced into exile and later assassinated in Mexico. In the last days of Stalin’s rule, repression was at its peak, and the regime witnessed no open opposition. Petros G. Sekeris See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Calculus of Dissent; Clientelism; Democracy; Dictatorship; Elite Theory (Pareto); Lobbying; Political Ideology

Further Readings Bueno de Mesquita, B., Smith, A., Siverson, R., & Morrow, J. (2003). The logic of political survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Nardo, J. (1985). Power in numbers: The political strategy of protest and rebellion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

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Wintrobe, R. (1998). The political economy of dictatorship. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Counterinsurgency Counterinsurgency originated in British military and foreign policy during the 1940s. It later emerged as a showcase strategy among American foreign policy advisers and military strategists in the early 1960s. Eventually, it evolved into a major component of cold war strategy, and what became known specifically as “counterinsurgency theory” played a significant role in the planning of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War forced planners to become far more sober minded about the limitations of the theory, but many of its general principles, nonetheless, found their way into cold war applications for years to come and contributed to the intellectual groundwork of 21st-century counterterrorism efforts.

The 1940s: A World in Transition The conclusion of World War II, in many ways, concluded themes of human history that had their roots in the 15th century. The rise of nation-states and empires created a fragile global balance of power that in 1914 would be torn apart by two world wars. By 1945, the last two European empires to still have global stakes were Great Britain and France. Both hovered on the financial precipice of accumulated war debt, and both faced numerous nationalist independence movements within their realms. In addition, a new force contributed to instability: aggressive, Sovietbacked communist insurgencies. Inspired by leaders such as Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, who preached the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare, and often given technical assistance from the emerging communist superpowers in Moscow and Beijing, these movements threatened the stability of European colonies across Asia and fledgling regimes elsewhere. The insurgents called for the expulsion of foreign powers and revolution of political systems while relying almost entirely on nonconventional means of warfare. The cult of the guerrilla, championed by Ernesto (“Ché”) Guevara, a leader of the Cuban Revolution, urged the creation of a new world order through long underground wars of attrition. Whereas the methods of guerrilla warfare— ambush, sabotage, assassination, intimidation of innocent civilian populations, employment of political cadres and ideology, hit-and-run tactics—would transform the face and nature of war into our time,

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several key fundamental shifts would challenge the basis of conventional military and diplomatic strategy that had been in place for centuries. Counterinsurgency was an attempt by those in power to come to terms with ideologically driven guerrilla warfare on its own ground: to meet and defeat the guerrilla on his terms with the realization that deployment of conventional forces in  certain situations would only play into the guerrillas’ hands. In this context, British strategist Robert ­Thompson developed a plan to fight guerrillas in Malaysia in the 1940s, and British units were assembled along lines similar to today’s military Special Forces. Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA operative of the cold war era, began his career in the predecessor to the CIA, the Army’s Office of Special Services, also in covert Asian operations.

The United States and the Cold War Implicitly, counterinsurgency was conceptually linked to “containment,” the theoretical foundation for American cold war policy formulated by diplomat and historian George F. Kennan shortly after the delivery of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of 1946. Kennan understood Soviet communism as ideologically incompatible with American values and interests and driven by expansionist goals. Realizing that the Kremlin would support communist insurgencies in all forms where it could do so unchecked, Kennan proposed “containment” as a flexible yet globalist posture for American policy. If the Soviet Union unleashed covert operations or supported local guerrillas to advance their side of the struggle, the United States, in Kennan’s view, must do the same to assert its interest and to fulfill its moral duty as the leader of the “free world.” Cold war policies ranged from conventional military alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to major economic policies like the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of postwar Europe but also paid enormous attention to fifth columns and covert operations. Early in the cold war, U.S. planners saw the need to win the “hearts and minds of the people” in contested areas where power vacuums and struggles developed. Early efforts focused on Europe. By 1960, concerns over South and East Asia grew as the former colonies of Great Britain and France displayed increasing volatility.

Counterinsurgency and the Vietnam War At the conclusion of the French Indochina War in 1954, the United States set out to establish an independent, Western-aligned, anticommunist nation-state in South Vietnam. This was an act of unilateralism in defiance of

the Geneva Accords, which were not signed by the United States. To install the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, the United States deployed Edward Lansdale, a CIA operative with vast Asian experience. Covert operations, propaganda campaigns, American intelligence and surveillance, economic assistance, and military advisory functions all played key roles in ­ establishing and supporting the Diem regime and fight against the indigenous Viet Minh and Viet Cong movements. However, it was not until 1961, when Robert McNamara became U.S. secretary of defense and set out to modernize the Pentagon, that “counterinsurgency” became official parlance and theory. A Harvard graduate who had worked in intelligence on the Allied air war in Europe, McNamara had caught President Kennedy’s attention by transforming the Ford Motor Corporation in the 1950s. Kennedy sought McNamara’s assistance in transforming the Pentagon in the same way—employing business models and paying enormous attention to quantitative analysis in the procurement and allocation of resources. Counterinsurgency in the Pentagon evolved from the crunching of numbers and projection of outcomes. The formation of the National Liberation Front, an alliance between Northern and Southern Vietnamese communists, led to a deterioration of conditions for the Diem regime in 1961. Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited South Vietnam, and a new team was assembled in ­Washington to deal with the problem. General Maxwell Taylor, Ambassador Fred Nolting, and important Defense Department personnel like Roger Hilsman all acknowledged a need to develop better ways to win the minds and hearts of the people of South Vietnam and drum up support for the Diem regime. In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet Plan began to unfold, again an application of counterinsurgency. Unable to identify, isolate, and remove insurgents from villages, the Strategic Hamlet Plan bulldozed old v­ illages and built new ones, hoping to quarantine the villagers from insurgents and thus create safe harbors. Lt. Col. Lucien Conein was assigned initially to conduct covert operations against North Vietnam and later in 1964 to establish support for post-Diem regimes in Saigon. His role would be that of a latter-day Lansdale. By 1966, many American planners had come to see the importance of gaining the support of the local populations, a key problem that would persist until the end of the conflict. Despite every imaginable effort to adjust and calibrate to the local situation, the United States never did win the minds and hearts of the people in South Vietnam. Why? First, as the example of the American Revolution illustrates, in wars of independence and civil wars, insurgents develop an enormous “home field advantage” if they are able to sustain the conflict long enough to become

Crisis Decision Making and Management

a nagging war of attrition. Second, foreshadowing 21stcentury wars, the insurgents were willing to sustain extremely heavy losses and not be deterred by further threats of punishment. In the end, they were willing to pay a human cost for war unacceptable to the United States.

The Changing Face of 21st-Century War Counterinsurgency in a general sense has become fundamental to all contemporary conflict. The advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 brought a cessation to “total” wars leading to unconditional surrender, replacing them with more limited “small wars.” Wars between nation-states have often been transcended by wars within nation-states or people’s wars across transnational borders. In all of these, the distinctions between soldiers and civilians have diminished, and military strategies and policies have become bitterly entwined with politics. Counterinsurgency is hence embedded in “people’s wars.” Terrorism has also transformed counterinsurgency efforts but again with a significant change. Whereas the guerrilla movements of the cold war era were largely founded to eventually establish independent nation-states that the guerrillas ultimately hoped to lead—and Mao, Ho, and Fidel Castro all accomplished this—today’s terrorists are more interested in changing or shaping policies. For example, in attacking the United States, Osama bin Laden’s goal was to change American policy toward Saudi Arabia. Counterterrorism, while embracing many of the principles of counterinsurgency, is by its nature much more broad and varied in its scope. Conventional warfare remains important, but achieving military aims and goals without securing political stability has proven fruitless again and again. The changing face of war has forced traditional armed forces to respond in nontraditional ways. Robert Tomes See also Civil Wars; Hearts and Minds Approach; Indoctrination; Insurgency; Political Ideology; Realism; Social Revolts; Wars of Attrition

Further Readings Bobbitt, P. (2002). The shield of Achilles. New York, NY: Penguin. Bobbitt, P. (2008). Terror and consent. New York, NY: Anchor. Karnow, S. (1983). Vietnam: A history. New York, NY: Penguin. Smith, R. (2005). The utility of force. New York, NY: Penguin. van Creveld, M. (2008). The culture of war. New York, NY: Presidio Press.

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Crisis Decision Making and Management Crisis management studies is a research area that analyzes how public and private actors respond to events that threaten individuals and society. There are many organizational and societal processes that enter this empirical space, and several social science disciplines have contributed to the development of this research area, such as sociology, political science, psychology, public administration, and international relations. A core question when studying the management of crises will always be: What characterizes high-stakes decisions made under pressing circumstances? When starting to answer this question, we need an understanding of both psychological and institutional forces that surround the situation in order to see the individual decision maker in context.

Overview Societal crises, according to a well-established definition, are characterized by a threat to core societal values, time pressure, and uncertainty. The concurrence of these factors, each a potentially destabilizing influence on situational awareness and social interaction, constitutes a unique combination of organizational and psychological challenges for arriving at collective decisions. Individuals experience a heightened level of stress, typically causing an effect on performance that describes an inverted U-curve. In modest amounts, psychological stress increases performance of mental tasks, but above a certain level, decision makers experience an impaired ability to evaluate the circumstances and deal with complexity. Decision making under stress is hampered by deterioration in information processing, the incorporation of fewer tactical and strategic options, and a restriction in the number of individuals involved in the decision-making process. For all the mental and organizational limitations introduced by stress, some benefits can also be identified in the literature: More attention is often devoted to the problem at hand, resources can be redistributed to deal with it, and allies can be summoned to contribute to managing the situation. An increasingly central way of categorizing human decision making is to differentiate between the cognitive systems 1 and 2. System 1 consists of the instinctive identification of a dominant option based on a cursory scan of previous experiences. This is how numerous everyday decisions are made, and their instinctive quality makes them virtually effortless. The problem is that if the potential consequences are serious, system 1 does

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not help us assess the complexity of the decision or its risk structure. In the more consequential situation, decision theorists claim that we are better served by system 2, which has a more formalized approach to the problem. The decision maker assesses the relative satisfaction to be gained from each outcome and the likelihood that it will come about. Systems 1 and 2 are useful ways to describe the processes of choice that are pursued by individuals as well as collectives of individuals.

Theories of Decision The classical way to look at decision making, whether in a crisis or any other context, is to take the view of the rational actors. The decision then becomes a strategic choice based on the utility and likelihood of different possible outcomes, a distilled version of what was previously described as system 2. A rational actor methodically picks the option with the highest expected utility. This school of thought is still dominant in many social science disciplines, including economics, from which it originated. Even though many of its proponents acknowledge that it does not perfectly describe every instance of individual choice, it arguably captures consequential choices on average and is thus the best approximation possible. The critiques of the rational-actor approach are manifold but will here be represented by two primary principled objections: One says that the risk neutrality in human decision making assumed by rational choice theory has been disproven. When weighting a medium to large likelihood against a dismally small one, most people overestimate the latter. The other objection comes from the observation that individuals evaluate the relative losses and gains to be had from an alternative rather than the value of the exact outcome. This effect is known as the framing effect on choice and has certain repercussions for crisis decision making: Crises often pose decision occasions in which the stakes are high (implying a need for system 2) and the sense of possible losses is high (creating a framing effect on decision makers). To many crisis-management scholars, this creates the need for a more process-oriented theory of choice that probes the psychological context for the decision makers and the resulting pressures on risk perceptions.

Group Decision Making A decision-making unit that is common in sensitive political situations is the small group. Due to needs for discretion, issues of trust, and time pressures, it is common that leaders gather a small group of principals or advisers to prepare and make decisions. Social

psychology is highly informative about the specific characteristics that can arise under the social pressure of group dynamics, and crisis-management studies have taken notice. Many seminal events in recent world history have been analyzed through the perspective of group decision making. When this mode of analysis first became prominent in the 1960s, the detrimental effects of group dynamics on decision making were emphasized. Groups, many argued, can easily be isolated from the larger organizational setting, can be subject to pressure from the outside, and can develop unsound procedures for assessing risk and reaching internal consensus, in the worst case leading to a pathological phenomenon called groupthink. More recently, the view on group decision making has become more nuanced. The social meaning of groups for their members, however, is given analytical power, and developmental phases of relationships in a government can be observed over time and give clues as to the influence of certain individuals or the predominance of certain strategic alternatives. Fredrik Bynander See also Blaming the Victim; Decision Making; Peacemaking; Political Crimes; Positioning Theory; Reconciliation

Further Readings Boin, R. A., ‘t Hart, P., Stern, E., & Sundelius, B. (2005). The politics of crisis management: Public leadership under pressure. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458. Vertzberger, Y. Y. I. (1994). The world in their minds: Information processing, cognition, and perception in foreign policy decisionmaking. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Zsambok, C. E., & Klein, G. (Eds.). (2014). Naturalistic decision making. London, England: Routledge.

Cyberactivism Also known as online activism or digital activism, cyberactivism is the gamut of Internet-based strategies and methods utilized by individuals and organizations for organizing, managing, and performing various types of activism. Cyberactivism aims to generate c­ itizen-based movements for specific causes, similar to traditional activism (see entry on Activism). It gained prominence with the emergence of social media and mobile technologies.

Cyberactivism

This entry reviews various facets of cyberactivism: online actions to promote awareness of causes, actions for organization and mobilization of followers, and actions substituting or enhancing traditional forms of activism. It goes on to show examples of cyberactivist movements and concludes with an overview of the ­critical debate on cyberactivism.

Types of Cyberactivism First, online activism enables the dissemination of information to large audiences. Social networks have increased the level of independence of activists from mainstream media by providing alternative platforms in which unedited and uncensored information can be spread. Grassroots information networks disseminate valuable information for activists worldwide in real time. Messenger services facilitate communication among activists and with the wider public. Streaming platforms enable easy sharing of videos, documenting everything from opinions to live events. This upheaval of traditional gatekeeping mechanisms of the media allows individuals to be involved in the information gathering and distributing process, a phenomenon termed “citizen journalism.” Second, activists use new technologies to mobilize and organize individuals in social movements. The Internet has enabled activists to coordinate both local and global protests with thousands of members in a short period of time. The Battle of Seattle in 1999 is an early example of worldwide protests coordinated through online activist networks. Finally, the Internet creates arenas for direct political action and alternatives to offline collective action. Activists can sign online petitions and instantly send them to governments, corporations, or organizations. They can raise money using crowdfunding platforms, which help gather contributions from a wide public of supporters. Activists can also directly contact government officials via social media channels. While we can conceptually differentiate the aforementioned forms of online activism, in reality they often converge, as cyberactivism aims to engage a wide variety of people both offline and online. The international Occupy movement of 2011 emerged in the fall of 2011 as a network of diverse activist groups concerned with social inequalities. While the movement relied heavily on cyberactivism in social media, it also mobilized people to physical protests in more than 950 cities around the world. In authoritarian countries, social media may undermine a regime’s legitimacy by empowering people to organize resistance and to expose wrongdoings of the regime. As such, they have the potential to challenge

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conventional power relations. Online communication and information networks became the catalyst for the Arab Spring of 2011. Social media created new gateways for mobilization and engagement when other means of organization were suppressed by the regime. The large-scale protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were initially organized through Facebook, triggering social and political reactions that led to the fall of the incumbent government. Another form of cyberactivism is Internet hacking. Hacktivists are non-government-affiliated individuals and groups. They promote self-proclaimed ethics such as sharing, openness, decentralization, free access, and world improvement and act against ideological enemies. Their activities often cross the border of legal behavior and include taking down websites, breaking into websites, altering content, and making classified data available to the wider public. Whereas some hacktivist groups, such as the European Chaos Computer Club, have established themselves as legitimate political actors, others, such as the structurally loose collective Anonymous, remain a symbol of illegal hacking activity, targeting organizations and individuals worldwide.

Criticism of Cyberactivism The extent to which cyberactivist efforts are effective compared with traditional methods of action is a matter of debate. On the one hand, the loose organizational structure of online activist networks may reduce the potential for creating strong bonds and mutual trust among activists. On the other hand, it is precisely their decentralized structure that enables cybermovements to be effective in mobilizing spontaneous global activism and in creating broad coalitions that are capable of adapting to changing circumstances. Low costs and barriers of the online realm, coupled with high reactivity of social media, provide an environment in which minimal participation is rewarded. Usergenerated content, such as Internet memes, is becoming increasingly popular, allowing users to instantly comment on political debates and to express their views. Individuals can contribute to social movements by performing undemanding tasks, such as sharing or liking content, using hashtags, and signing petitions, often without being subjected to direct mobilization efforts, and remaining anonymous in the process. Although such actions often characterize successful contemporary campaigns, some refer to cyberactivism as clicktivism or slacktivism, terms that imply effortless and feel-good online actions with minor real-life impact. Some are worried that even if the Internet helps engage people in activism, it could decrease traditional activism and long-term commitment to a cause. Moreover, the

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possible increase in online activism at the expense of offline activism has been criticized for deepening the digital divide, keeping citizens of low socioeconomic status and the elderly out of the activism arena.

Conclusion Digital communication has changed the way activists raise awareness, mobilize followers, organize protests, and conduct campaigns. While some movements remain solely in the online world, many cyberactivists utilize myriad methods of online and offline activities to ­promote their causes and to generate reactions from governments, corporations, or organizations. A clear line between online and offline activism can therefore not easily be drawn, as both realms are closely intertwined in many social movements. Cyberactivism demonstrates how public opinions can be formed through online political discourse and how information can be obtained through citizen journalism. The speed and breadth of cyberactivism’s reach is as of yet unparalleled in the offline world. While it is unlikely to replace traditional activism altogether, it may continue to enhance conventional forms of citizen participation and create new avenues for political self-expression. Maor Shani and Anne Leiser See also Activism; Collective Action; Social Movements

Further Readings Christensen, H. S. (2011). Political activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or political participation by other means? First Monday, 16(2), 2–7. Hill, S. (2013). Digital revolutions: Activism in the Internet age. Oxford, England: New Internationalist. McCaughey, M., & Ayers, M. D. (Eds.). (2013). Cyberactivism: Online activism in theory and practice. New York, NY: Routledge.

Cyberwar Cyberwarfare consists of those operations that use digital communications to inject binary information into the networks and systems of others in order to make them behave incorrectly—meaning that they are deceived, degraded, disrupted, or (occasionally) destroyed. By such means, one side can usurp another’s command and control over its own information

systems. In many cases, this power extends to the physical instruments (e.g., machines) controlled by such information systems (hence the potential for destruction). Cyberwar also includes attacks on the Internet infrastructure that serves a targeted system in order to clog its input pipes or intake servers (also known as DDOS: distributed denial-of-service attacks) or to misdirect communications (e.g., by manipulating the ­Border Gateway Protocol). Cyberwarfare can be used in support of military operations (e.g., blinding an adversary’s radar); this is referred to as operational cyberwar. It can also be used independently, much as strategic bombing was used in World War II; this is referred to as strategic cyberwar. For obvious reasons, people attempt to build their systems in a way that minimizes having their command and control usurped by others, particularly competitors. More to the point, there is no forced entry in cyberspace. If someone has managed to penetrate a system or network, it is largely by convincing the system or network that what it is absorbing from the outside is authorized and benign—when the contrary is true. Cyberwarfare is a matter of guile rather than force. For its part, guile relies on surprise rather than numbers. Once an attacker has compromised a system, it can extract information from it (cyberespionage) or create effects within it (cyberattack). The exfiltration of data is usually difficult to detect; thus cyberespionage can be carried out for extended periods. The effects of cyberattack are often easier to see; once seen, the effects can be halted and often reversed. As a general rule, once a target has been penetrated (or, what is similar, once a system has been proven to have a vulnerability) and the target realizes as much (and is hurt or scared badly enough), it makes changes that (are intended to) frustrate easy repetition of the original attack. These changes can be a mix of specific (e.g., a software patch) and general (reduced access or user privileges). Such changes do not make targets invulnerable thereafter; attackers may have more tricks up their sleeve, and the administration of these changes may be less than completely thorough. But it does mean that the same attack against different targets or against the same target at different times may produce completely different results. There is no munitions-effectiveness manual in cyberspace, nor can there be, by its very nature. Indeed, one of the difficulties of gauging the strategic impact of cyberwar is that physics cannot predict the effects. As for looking at examples for a guide, almost all of our experiences, to date, have been in peacetime—and hence an unreliable indicator of what wartime might bring. Because cyberattack techniques (i.e., cyberweapons) are unlikely to work if their particulars are exposed, these particulars are highly classified. No one

Cyberwar

really knows what others are capable of, and no one has figured out a foolproof way of demonstrating what they themselves are capable of without carrying out an attack that could nullify the particular technique used. That cyberespionage can persist and cyberattacks cannot creates a collect-or-take-down dilemma for war planners. It also makes it difficult to determine whether a successful penetration by the other side was meant for collection or to set up a future cyberattack. The importance of adjusting systems to prevent repeated cyberattacks means that there are both micro and macro measure–countermeasure contests going on. At the macro level, this can be seen, for instance, in the contest between Microsoft to create secure operating systems in which a measure (e.g., address-space layout randomization) begets a countermeasure (e.g., returnoriented programming) begets a partial counter to that countermeasure (e.g., EMET: the enhanced-mitigation experience toolkit). The need to penetrate systems prior to attack, coupled with the enormous variations among systems, means that the time required to set up an attack is highly unpredictable and that the failure to do so successfully can go unnoticed by the target. Once an attack is launched, however, the likelihood of initial success can be high—but whether the effects can be maintained is questionable. Cyberattacks can disrupt or corrupt, but destruction has taken place only on two occasions (the Stuxnet computer worm, which targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities, and what appears to have been a cyberattack on a German blast furnace). To date, no one has been killed as a direct consequence of a cyberattack. Attackers are more likely to waste their victims’ time and money than to create the sort of damage that implicates laws-of-armed-conflict (LOAC) concerns. Ambiguity is consequently a deeply embedded feature of cyberwar. It is often very difficult to determine who carried out an attack using technical means alone. Battle-damage assessment is also complicated by the need to access the attacked system to see how it was affected (there’s no equivalent to overhead reconnaissance) at a time when systems are likely to be withdrawn for repair. Against some types of attacks (e.g., to

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corrupt data or processes), not even the victim may be sure what was rendered amiss. In theory, cyberwar promises instant effects a­ nywhere in the world at low risk to individual cyberwarriors. This makes it possible for one country—or non-state actor—to help another (notably by defending another, given the high levels of secrecy associated with offense) without leaving home. These days (as opposed to the mid-1990s), almost all of the effort to penetrate a system is entailed in finding a usable vulnerability, building the attack tool, and monitoring the results rather than triggering the malware itself. Thus, the actual trigger puller (the responsible party under LOAC) can be anyone with the necessary expertise. The various components of cyberwar can be separated in ways unavailable to most conventional combat arts. However, when working against a system unconnected to the Internet, attackers may need physical proximity, and their effects may require waiting for some random event (someone inserting a USB stick, or flash drive, into an otherwise isolated system) to occur. The fact that hackers are at low risk and equipment requirements are inexpensive suggests that a cyberwar capability can be difficult to destroy but also that rogue cyberwarriors could operate without high levels of command and control. Martin Libicki See also Civil Disobedience; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Defense Planning; Drones; Internet Jihadism; Social Influence; Youth and Political Change

Further Readings Clarke, R., & Knake, R. (2010). Cyberwar. New York, NY: Ecco. Libicki, M. C. (2016). Cyberspace in peace and war. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Singer, P. W., & Friedman, A. (2014). Cybersecurity and cyberwar: What everyone needs to know. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Zetter, K. (2014). Countdown to zero day: Stuxnet and the launch of the world’s first digital weapon. New York, NY: Crown.

D Death

of

history and are even rarer in modern times. In some cases, it is not clear whether the death of a leader is “accidental,” an example being the death of the Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash in 1988.

Leaders

The death of a leader may have significant impact on the political environment, particularly if the death is sudden and unexpected. Leaders’ lives may be cut short due to political assassination, accident, suicide, or natural causes such as heart attacks or cancer. Regardless of the cause, power must be transferred after the death of a national leader, and this transition may create instability within the political structure of the state. Power transitions at the national level are substantially different in a democracy from power transitions within an authoritarian dictatorship. In any political system, the death of any national political or societal figure affects citizens and often leads to mass public gatherings, which may turn violent or may remain peaceful. After the death of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, several cities experienced violent riots, but after the death of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, mournful gatherings remained largely peaceful. This entry briefly addresses the varying causes of death of leaders, highlights two controversial deaths, and concludes with a discussion of the public response and policy ramifications of leader deaths.

Assassination/Coup d’État The killing of political leaders is a historical occurrence, with the killings of Julius Caesar of Rome, archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and Abraham Lincoln of the United States all receiving a plethora of attention in popular literature. The assassination of political and societal leaders, particularly heads of state, has become less likely with improved technology and improved security details. National leaders no longer ride in convertible vehicles as did John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, nor does the general public have access to their leaders as they did in 1901 when Leon Czolgosz was able to shoot U.S. President William McKinley from just a few feet away. Sitting heads of state are more likely to die from natural causes in contemporary times than from assassination. Leaders are also vulnerable to losing their lives during and after a coup d’état. Should internal military or security forces, for example, decide to overthrow a sitting head of state, the leader may be inadvertently caught in the crossfire or the leader may be executed after the coup event. A leader may also be targeted for death, such as in 1981 when Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh was shot and killed as part of a failed coup attempt by members of the military.

Accidents Leaders are not immune from the risk of injury or death from accidents. While rare, leaders have died in plane crashes, such as Ahmed Ould Bouceif of Mauritania in 1979 or Samora Machel of Mozambique in 1986. Other accidents such as the house fire that killed Bjarni Benediktsson of Iceland in 1970 and the horse-riding accident that killed Don Stephen Senanayake of Sri Lanka in 1952 also occur. These accidental events are rare in

Natural Causes Leaders are more likely to die from natural causes such as heart attacks and cancer while in office than any other reason. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died in 2013 161

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from cancer, Hafiz al-Assad of Syria died in 2000 from a heart attack, and William Henry Harrison of the United States died in 1841 from pneumonia only 32 days after his inauguration.

a positive effect on that state’s transition to a democracy and may affect fiscal policy. Current knowledge is not robust, and the impact of leader deaths merits additional interdisciplinary scholarly attention from fields such as psychology, political science, and criminal justice.

Suicide Suicide among leaders is rare. Possibly the most wellknown leader suicide is that of Adolf Hitler of Germany in 1945. Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide reportedly by consuming cyanide pills to avoid capture in the last days of World War II. Salvador Allende of Chile is reported to have shot himself in 1973 during a coup d’état by the Chilean military, also in order to avoid capture.

Controversial Events Causes of death for certain leaders are controversial in nature. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, died in Paris in 2004, and his cause of death was originally ruled as natural due to illness. In 2013, evidence surfaced suggesting that Arafat may have died from polonium-210 poisoning, resulting in conflicting reports on the cause of death. Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat, has long argued that her husband was assassinated. Preceding the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the plane carrying President Juvenal Hbariymana of Rwanda and President Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi crashed, killing everyone on board the plane. Evidence showed that the plane was hit by a missile, but investigations have been unable to determine who was responsible for the attack.

Public Reaction and Public Policy Studies indicate that the death of a leader in a democratic state has little to no effect on the stability of the state. The sudden death of a leader certainly has a psychological and emotional impact on citizens, and it is not uncommon for people to gather to mourn their fallen leader. If the leader is assassinated, anger may be the primary emotion, resulting in further political violence. After Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated, an insurrection resulted in the death of 68 police and soldiers. In the United States after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, public anger resulted in the burning of newspaper offices and protests in the streets. Some Southern sympathizers were tarred and feathered. Scholarly inquiry into public policy changes after the death of a leader indicates that these events do not have an effect on policy in democratic states. In an authoritarian state, evidence indicates that the death of a leader, whether by natural means or by assassination, may have

Laura N. Bell See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Civil Wars; Conspiracies; Dictatorship; Mass Political Behavior; Political Crimes; Transitioning Fragile States

Further Readings Iqbal, Z., & Zorn, C. (2006). Sic semper tyrannis? Power, repression and assassination since the Second World War. Journal of Politics, 68(3), 489–501. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508 .2006.00440.x Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A. (2005). Do leaders matter? National leadership and growth since World War II. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), 835–864. Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A. (2009). Hit or miss? The effect of assassinations on institutions and war. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 1(2), 55–87.

Decision Making Decision making is a dynamic and interactive process incorporating a sequence of events from the time when decision makers recognize the need to solve a problem until the time when they authorize a course of action to solve it. This definition shows that the process by which a decision is implemented is not part of the decision-making process itself, although both processes are complementary. In other words, decision making and implementation are related but distinct concepts. The process of decision making can be based on rational, intuitive, or political processes. This entry pre­sents the political perspective on decision making in organizations by providing an overview of the concept and aspects of political behavior in decision making, the types of political actors, the link between political behavior and rationality, and tactics of political behavior. The entry concludes with a model of political behavior in decision making which incorporates the conditions that favor the presence of political behavior, along with its dynamics and consequences.

Overview Decisions involve a technical problem of struggling to reach a relevant choice which takes into account

Decision Making

various contextual factors as well as the political problem of reconciling conflicts among subgoals and demands. The political view/problem in decision making has been accepted as a central characteristic of the decision process, intriguing both scholars and practi­ tioners. It focuses on the way in which concerned people exercise power together with other political tactics to make decisions on behalf of their organization. This view emerged in the literature of political science in the 1950s and looks at an organization as an arena of political games in which decision makers attempt to ensure that their personal goals are met by the organization’s decisions; as a rule, the preferences of the most powerful people prevail. Such a view can offer a compelling portrayal of the way in which decision makers actually make organizational decisions.

The Concept and Aspects of Political Behavior In line with the behavioral theory of the firm, actions, interactions, and counteractions among people, along with their conflicting interests and motivations for getting involved in decisions, are common features of organizational work that lead the decision-making process to be largely political in nature. In the same vein, differentiation between people and organizational units within an organization tends to encourage political activities among interest groups as they seek to defend their own goals. Political behavior can be defined as intentional actions taken by people to defend their own goals, those of the organization, or some combination of these. This definition reflects several facts about political decision making. First, political behavior is a planned or intended activity. In other words, political actors practice politics deliberately. Second, politics can be practiced by decision makers who directly participate in the decisionmaking process or those who are not involved in this process but can affect it and have their own interests at stake in its outcomes. For example, an employee with a personal agenda may spread rumors and lies about a candidate whose promotion would be well deserved, in order to adversely influence the attitude of those who will decide on this case; and the candidate may retaliate in kind. Third, although political behavior often has a negative connotation in people’s minds and, equally, although researchers have overstated its negative aspect, it is a broad and multidimensional concept which can be seen in two ways: the constructive, functional, or positive way and the destructive, dysfunctional, or negative one. While the former refers to the cases where political actors are interested in defending organizational

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interests, the latter stresses the fact that people play politics to secure their own positions and interests even if these are hostile to those of their organization. Both aspects coexist in organizations with every possible variation, although there is scant research, if any, that empirically examines their simultaneous existence. This multidimensional nature of political behavior shows the need to develop new constructs to show its evolving concepts and to develop measures of these constructs to reveal a more faithful and dynamic picture of political behavior in decision making. The evidence discussed in the literature of decision making indicates a general negative influence of political behavior on organizational outcomes. This may be due to factors such as the delays and extra costs resulting from tracking back in the process to undermine the power of the antagonists, taking counteractions to override opposition, manipulating information to defend preferred outcomes, and, finally, coercion by superior power holders to block a viable option or weaken competing demands. However, some commentators counter this conclusion, arguing that if decision makers possess good intentions toward organizational interests accompanied by the required skills to deal constructively with political behavior, the effect may be to produce a diversity of arguments, neutralize negative politics, assist an organization to learn and adapt, lead to a better strategy, and secure enough support for it.

Types of Political Actor Because interaction between people within the organization and through its recognized borders is a fundamental feature of political behavior, political actors can be categorized into four types according to the relations involved. The first type refers to members of an organization and their endeavors to influence decision processes in order to serve their own interests. The second type points to the concept of the interest group, which is essential for understanding the interorganizational impacts on the decision-making process. Interest groups can be seen as organized social entities whose members recognize that they have substantial common demands and who thus tend to work together in order to defend their demands from those of others. In so doing, interest groups may play politics within themselves and across their formal boundaries. The third type accommodates political behavior among the organization’s units and considers their attempts to sway the decision-making process to defend the interests of these units, for instance by securing organizational resources. The final type incorporates external parties, such as stakeholders, customers, unions, funding institutions, governmental agencies, and community

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bodies, and refers to their influence on the decisionmaking processes for the sake of meeting institutional demands. This last type is of increasing importance nowadays, since organizational decisions are increasingly judged by reference to social criteria and organizations are increasingly extending their external networks. In some cases, certain important decisions may be an arena for the political maneuvers of a range of ­political actors such as internal organizational actors—­ individuals, groups, or units—in addition to external parties. What links these types of political actors together is the belief that people, whether insiders or outsiders, need to engage in politics to defend their ­personal, group, unit, or institutional interests.

Political Behavior and Rationality Exponents of the political decision-making model reject the notion that organizational members are rational, since their interests and expectations about the future usually conflict with those of their organization. On these grounds, this model contrasts with rationality and at the same time impinges on it. For example, strong power variation, as a political tactic, may restrict the exchange of knowledge and impose a blind spot wherever relevant information, views, and formal analyses are concerned if they conflict with self-interests. Otherwise, politically motivated behavior may increase the scope for intuition, in particular when there is no objective criterion for success. Although more important decisions, rather than less important ones, may stimulate political behavior because they may be crucial to the interests of decision makers, paradoxically, the same decisions may greatly need rationality for functional reasons, such as reducing the risk and cost for the organization, and for symbolic reasons, such as spotlighting capable decision makers. Several commentators support this notion and argue that the decisionmaking process can be best described as an “­interweaving” of rational, intuitive, and political processes. This lack of consensus ultimately reflects the need for further research on the relationship between decision politics and other distinct characteristics of the decision-making process: reflexivity, conflict, intuition, and rationality.

Tactics of Political Behavior Political tactics can be split into two classes, depending on their source. The first class depends on power and contains mainly those who exercise the formal authority of their superior hierarchical positions. Decision politics is a field for exercising influence, and power is a reservoir of potential influence; hence, the use of power can be considered as the most effective political tactic.

The link between power and political behavior is direct, though the ways in which political actors use power are diverse and complicated. One way to use power is to alter the analytical techniques when they do not conform to what is preferred. Another way, notably in less developed countries, is to appoint less qualified people to key positions. Such appointments provide a power base from which top managers, such as CEOs, general managers, and leaders of governmental organizations can steer the decisions made by lower managers in the desired direction as well as driving the decisions made at higher levels toward predetermined ends, rather than what are necessarily the best ends for the organization. Similarly, decision makers can use their power to change decision premises and targets, prevent an issue or option from being considered, control key appointments or other resources required to implement decisions, use the general right of veto and final approval, and, finally, enhance the ability of decision makers to use the second class of political tactics, which are discussed in what follows. Power is neither synonymous with political behavior nor the only political tool that decision makers can use, since those without power are still able to exercise politics through the second class of tactics. This class incorporates the tactics engaged in by people occupying positions similar to, or lower than, others in the hierarchy who are also involved in the decision process. It includes tactics such as persuasion, repeated negotiation or bargaining, co-opting, threats, the manipulation of credibility and the reputation of others, rewards or the exchange of favors, the forming of coalitions, agenda control, limiting the apparent alternatives, the tactics of timing that affect communications and meetings, the use of outsiders such as experts or consultants to support preferred options, and tactics relating to the control and manipulation of critical information. For example, a manager can restrict the flow of information to lower and top managerial levels in order to feed encouraging information in favor of his or her personal benefits and to bias the information about the benefits of his or her opponents. Similarly, agendas and meetings can be controlled by setting the order in which problems are discussed so that the early decisions are likely to exclude less preferred alternatives. In practice, political tactics are rarely used singly; rather, political actors usually use a combination of the above tactics.

A Model of Political Behavior in Decision Making Although any modeling of political behavior in decision making is suggestive rather than conclusive, two modes

Decision Making

of modeling can provide a way forward. One is concerned with process analysis, and the other focuses on variance analysis. The former is oriented toward the sequence of events in the phenomena of theoretical interest, which in our case is the political process of decision making; the latter directs attention to predicting the variance in the antecedents and outcomes of political behavior. The model shown in Figure 1 presents an analysis of political behavior in decision making that builds upon these two modes in addition to other concepts and issues discussed in this entry and related research. It is divided into three stages: antecedents, dynamics, and consequences. The model starts with the antecedent conditions that may stimulate political behavior. As proposed in this model, the variance in political behavior dynamics is likely to be predicted by the factors associated with four perspectives. These are (1) demographic and ­personal-based antecedents, (2) decision-based antecedents, (3) organization-based antecedents, and (4) environmental and externally based antecedents. For example, certain features of decision makers, such as propensity to risk, and those of the decision in

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question, such as its significance for resource allocation and organizational survival, may intensify political behavior. Similarly, some organizational characteristics, such as the level of horizontal differentiation, the hierarchical centralization of power, and the existence of occupational groups, are likely to encourage political behavior. A further antecedent of political behavior is external factors such as environmental hostility and the dependence on external bodies for resources or approval. Political behavior dynamics represent the second stage in the proposed model. They can be depicted in terms of (1) political tactics, such as the use of power, manipulating information, lobbying, co-opting, and secret communication; (2) political purpose, such as constructive and destructive politics; and (3) the level of political intensity and hence politicking. The third stage in the proposed model indicates the influence that political dynamics have on decision outcomes. Most previous research has provided several reasons for political behavior to have an adverse impact. For example, many political tactics, such as manipulation and secret communication, are likely to distort relevant information and lead decision makers to take

Antecedents Demographic and personal-based antecedents • Age, tenure, experience, education, occupational groups • Affect/emotion, self-confidence, propensity to risk, cognitive styles, mood status, jealousy Decision-based antecedents • Ambiguity, uncertainty, motive, complexity, significance/urgency

Organization-based antecedents • Size, age, performance, corporate control, hierarchical centralization of power, horizontal differentiation, slack, organizational culture

Environment- and external-based antecedents • Environmental hostility, turbulence, complexity, and instability • Reliance on other organizations for resources • National context

Dynamics

Consequences

Tactics • Power • Lobbying and co-optation of key external parties, manipulating information, secret communication, bargaining, tactics of timing

Purpose • Constructive/positive/ functional politics • Destructive/negative/ dysfunctional politics

Intensity • More intense politicking • Less intense politicking

Figure 1  A Model of Political Behavior in Decision Making

Negative • Organizational outcomes compromised • Less commitment to decision implementation • Additional costs and delays in the decision process

Positive • Decision quality enhanced • Considering various views • More careful decision making • Improving organizational adaptation • Obtaining external support

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decisions on the basis of inadequate information, which results in poor performance. Similarly, political behavior may give rise to impaired understanding of the contingencies of the decision, such as its environmental constraints, which also discourages an accurate and broad examination of decisions and therefore increases the likelihood of disappointing outcomes. Interestingly, some commentators, as discussed earlier, argue that political behavior can be helpful in certain situations. For example, in a rapidly changing environment, political behavior may be a mechanism for prompt organizational adaptation. It may also contribute to considering new assumptions for making the decision, endorse a necessary change blocked by those who may have conflicting demands, and ease the path for implementing the decision. Finally, the relationships depicted in Figure 1 may not be as simple as shown, since interactions are expected among the components of each stage in this model, such as the possible impact of political tactics on political intensity. Similarly, consequences of previous politics-based decisions may have an impact on antecedents and dynamics of political behavior in future decisions. Studying such interactions needs to continue, in order to improve our understanding of political behavior in decision making. Said Elbanna See also Civic Engagement; Crisis Decision Making and Management; Direct Versus Indirect Democracy; Lobbying; Partisanship; Political Participation; Third Party; Women and Leadership

Further Readings Child, J., Elbanna, S., & Rodrigues, S. (2010). The political aspects of strategic decision making. In P. C. Nutt & D. C. Wilson (Eds.), The handbook of decision making (pp. 105–137). Chichester, England: Wiley. Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Elbanna, S. (2006). Strategic decision-making: Process perspectives. International Journal of Management Reviews, 8(1), 1–20. Elbanna, S. (2016, February). Managers’ autonomy, strategic control, organizational politics and strategic planning effectiveness: An empirical investigation into missing links in the hotel sector. Tourism Management, 52, 210–220. Ferris, G. R., & Treadway, D. C. (Eds.). (2012). Politics in organizations: Theory and research considerations. London, England: Routledge. Hickson, D. J., Butler, R. J., Cray, D., Mallory, G. R., & Wilson, D. C. (1986). Top decisions: Strategic decision-making in organizations. Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Mintzberg, H., Raisinghani, D., & Theoret, A. (1976). The structure of “unstructured” decision processes. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 246–275. Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985). Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6, 257–272. Pfeffer, J. 1981. Power in organizations. London, England: Pitman.

Decision Making, Political See Political Deliberation

Defense Planning This entry is about U.S. defense planning, which is a special case of strategic planning, the process through which an organization decides on objectives, strategies, and particular actions. This includes allocating resources and establishing controls for implementation.

History Modern U.S. defense planning owes much to four events, all of which sought better alignment of responsibilities, authorities, and incentives. Under President Harry S. Truman, the 1947 National Security Act created a new cabinet position: the secretary of defense, to whom the Departments of Army, Navy, and Air Force report. The act also created statutory unified and specified commands (i.e., joint commands), the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Congressional amendments gave the secretary of defense substantially more statutory power, but the army, navy, and air force still had separate budgets and pursued agendas that were sometimes service–parochial rather than nationally coherent. Interservice rivalries sometimes caused inefficiency and ineffectiveness. In 1962 under the Kennedy administration, secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara was the first ­secretary to exploit the new responsibilities and authorities. He introduced reforms that applied lessons of management theory and practice, which included clarifying objectives, strategy, and implications for defense programs. He sought to integrate and balance foreign policy, military strategy, force requirements, and the defense budget, and to approach all defense planning in a rational and analytical way based on the national

Defense Planning

interest. Although McNamara is often remembered negatively for his role in the failed Vietnam War, the essence and benefits of his reforms have endured for more than 50 years. The third event was congressionally driven during the Reagan administration. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 elevated the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to that of the principal adviser to the secretary of defense and the president on military matters, supported by a large joint staff. The act also created the vice chairman, who was to have a major role in the defense planning process. The act also sharpened and streamlined the military command system. Authority flows from the president to the secretary of defense, and then to combatant commanders without going through the armed services. The chairman is not in the command chain, but usually communicates leadership orders to combatant commands, and otherwise assists the secretary of defense in execution. A fourth event was the 2001 introduction of capabilities-based planning, by Secretary Donald ­ Rumsfeld under the George W. Bush administration. The impetus was again the desire to improve jointness and related integration, in this case in developing future forces. This recognized continuing barriers to planning for effective joint operations that cut across service boundaries, as discussed in the mid-1990s by the joint staff’s study, Joint Vision 2010 (followed later by Joint Vision 2020), the Defense Science Board, and others urging what were then called force ­transformation. Rumsfeld also renamed his system the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE), rather than the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS).

Process The process of defense planning is very complex because of the number of, and relationships among, planning documents, the number of organizations, and the frequent departures from nominal schedules. ­ Figure 1 provides one idealized schematic showing major elements (actualities vary). Time is shown left to right. The president’s national security strategy (NSS) records and explains national interests, objectives, and top-level strategy. Many aspects of these are enduring. The secretary of defense issues a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) every four years as a requirement of Congress. The QDR is supposed to have a short embedded national defense strategy (NDS) closely tied to the NSS, but ­specialized to the Department of Defense (DoD). The QDR is explicitly consistent with the NSS but adds substantial DoD-­ relevant detail. By congressional mandate, however, it is

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still nominally “resource unconstrained.” The Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) is more detailed than the QDR and is typically classified. It provides specific guidance, with respect not only to goals, priorities, and objectives but also to fiscal constraints. The military services then develop their separate programs and budgets (called project objective memoranda or POMs). In reality (as distinct from Figure 1), the services start their program building much earlier, but they do so with a fair understanding of what guidance is likely to be. The POMs are then reviewed by the secretary and adjusted in various ways to be consistent with both policy and final fiscal guidance, which often comes late because it reflects painful and controversial political decisions. After White House approval, the “president’s budget” goes to Congress. Congress then reviews and adjusts, sometimes quarreling with the secretary and president until a final bill is passed and signed into law by the president. The cycle then continues. Disputes between Congress and the executive branch are sometimes dramatic, regarding, for example, continuation, cessation, or cancellation of a major weapon system, but the final budget is usually rather close to the president’s budget overall. Many additional events occur along the way. In particular, the secretary of defense receives formal reports from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the National Military Strategy and the Chairman’s Risk Assessment. The secretary receives other advice and recommendations in a variety of forms from the chairman, combatant commanders, and military services. Finally, the secretary often requests special reviews, such as the 2013 Strategic Choices and Management Review. The process and outcomes are easily criticized, and often are. However, the defense planning process has long been admired by other government agencies and other nations because, to a significant degree at least, it accomplishes goals such as being “strategic.” Further, U.S. military forces today are extraordinarily effective in significant part because of the long investment in promoting jointness.

Current Issues There continue to be many challenges in defense planning. In the second decade of the 21st century, political gridlock in Washington led to the infamous “sequestration fiasco,” which has caused great difficulties for defense planners. Further, the United States now has an unprecedented combination of challenges involving Russia, China, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. After 15 years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, U.S. forces have readiness problems with respect to their

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President, Congress Secretary of Defense

National Security Strategy

Ad hoc Sec Def Reviews

Chairman, Joint Chiefs, Combatant Commanders

Fiscal Guidance

Quadrennial Defense Review and National Defense Strategy

President’s Budget

Defense Planning Guidance

Congressional Budget, Signed by President

Program/Budget Reviews and Adjustments

National Military Strategy Chairman’s Risk Assessment

Services

Other Assessments and Recommendations from Chairman, Combatant Commands, Services

Service Plans (POMs)

Figure 1  An Idealization of the Defense Planning System

other worldwide missions. Profound challenges exist that will require substantial changes in concepts of operation, organization, and weapon systems. Paul K. Davis See also Deterrence and International Relations; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Nationalism; Negative Peace; Non-Aligned Nations; Pacifism; Positive Peace; Saber Rattling

Further Readings Dale, C. (2013). National security strategy: Mandates, execution to date, and issues for Congress (Congressional Research Service Report 7-5000). Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Hagel, C. (2014). 2014 quadrennial defense review. Washington, DC: Department of Defense. Perry, W. J., & Abizaid, J. P. (2014). Ensuring a strong U.S. defense for the future: The National Defense Panel Review of the 2014 quadrennial defense review. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute for Peace.

Democracy Democracy is a contested concept. While some perceive it as essentially contested, others observe consensus regarding core assumptions and thus speak of a boundedly contested concept. Such core assumptions relate to democracy as rule by the people and political equality among people. But the common ground is limited. One major difference in understandings of democracy concerns the sphere to which it applies. From a broad perspective, democracy refers to every context in which collectively binding decisions are taken, which includes the family or the workplace. From a narrower perspective, it refers to the form of

government within a state. This entry focuses on the latter and provides a brief overview on democracy’s historical roots, normative and empirical democratic theory, and measurements of democracy, and concludes with a brief discussion of challenges to democracy in the early 21st century.

Historical Roots Democracy literally means rule by the people. The original Greek term demokratia consists of the two components demos (people) and kratein (to rule). However, it does not specify who belongs to “the people” and how ruling should be organized. Opinions about both have changed over time, as is visible in shifts toward the inclusion of women and representation instead of direct participation. In ancient Greece, democracy had a negative connotation. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle feared the involvement of the poor and uneducated in decision making. For Aristotle, democracy was corrupted because it implied that the people only governed for the good of themselves instead of the common good. The mainly negative attitude toward democracy persisted to the 18th century, the “age of Enlightenment,” when the French and American revolutions stimulated the emergence of new models of democracy. The revolutionaries found support in ideas developed by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Comte de Montesquieu. Although both were no enthusiasts of democracy, they contributed important concepts to the debate: the former with his concept of popular sovereignty and the latter with concepts such as the distribution of powers and the value of checks and balances between branches of government. Robert Dahl conceives the history of democracy as a sequence of three great transformations. The first took place during the fifth century BCE, when the Greek ­city-states became democracies with assemblies as their central institutions. When nation-states emerged with

Democracy

the decline of feudalism, a second transformation occurred to adapt democracy to these larger scale entities, notably by establishing a system of representation. During the ongoing third phase, globalization and the development of transnational systems are contributing to the blurring of national boundaries and a further increase of the scale of the political system. According to Samuel Huntington, democracy has spread around the world in three waves, with the first lasting from the 1820s to the 1920s, the second from the 1940s to the 1960s, and the third starting in the mid-1970s. Both the first and the second waves were followed by reverse waves.

Conceptions of Democracy There are countless definitions of democracy, and myriad adjectives have been devised to describe it. At the same time, there have been attempts to group conceptions of democracy according to several criteria. One major distinction is often made between normative and empirical theories of democracy. Generally speaking, normative democratic theories focus on ideals and deal with the questions of how a democracy should be and how it can be justified. Empirical democratic theories focus on existing democracies. They describe different types of democratic political systems and aim to establish causal relationships with regard to their development, stability, or performance. It is clear that this ­differentiation is not absolute but a matter of degree. Neither are normative democratic theories detached from their real-world contexts, nor can empirical approaches completely dismiss normative decisions. A second way of classification locates democracy along a continuum ranging from minimalist to midrange to maximalist conceptions. The former two have in common that they are restricted to institutions and procedures and are therefore also called procedural definitions. They relate to the “input dimension” of political processes. The latter, in contrast, also take into account the results that a political system produces. In doing so, they add a focus on the “output dimension.” Therefore, these concepts are also characterized as substantive.

Normative Democratic Theory Minimalist conceptions of democracy take their point of departure in Joseph Schumpeter’s competitive elitist model, which he devised in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In this model, which understands democracy as a method and in analogy to a market, elections are a sufficient characteristic. In the 1950s, Anthony Downs developed an economic theory of democracy, which has

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its roots in Schumpeter’s work. Based on the assumptions of rational choice and methodological individualism, it expects actors to make choices that maximize their individual utility. Schumpeterian conceptions of electoral democracy have more recently been employed by Samuel Huntington and Adam Przeworski. Midrange conceptions share the view that democracy cannot be reduced to the institution of elections. Beyond this, however, they differ considerably. Major differences exist between the liberal and republican strands of democratic theory. Among the former, pluralist conceptions view democratic society as characterized by manifold, that is, pluralistic, interests. This is reflected in multifaceted intermediary institutions connecting state and society. The involvement of citizens and their organizations constrain the government. At the same time, pluralist democracy advocates representation instead of direct democracy. In his book Democracy and Its Critics, Dahl, one of the most well-known representatives of pluralism, identifies five criteria of a ­democratic process: (1) voting equality, (2) effective participation, (3) enlightened understanding, (4) control of the agenda, and (5) inclusion. In order to satisfy these criteria in practice, political systems must embody the  following seven ­institutions: (1) elected officials, (2) free and fair elections, (3) inclusive suffrage, (4) the right to run for office, (5) freedom of expression, (6) alternative information, and (7) associational autonomy. These institutions are specifications of two of the underlying basic characteristics of polyarchies, inclusion and contestation. (It is important to note that Dahl does not use the term democracy for existing political regimes, but reserves it for an ideal; real-world political systems that approximate democracy are called polyarchies.) The republican strand of democratic theory, on the other hand, includes participative and deliberative approaches. Participatory democracy, as initially ­developed in the works of Carol Pateman and C. B. Macpherson, stresses the participation of citizens in the political process beyond elections. As one of the most prominent representatives, Benjamin Barber argues in favor of a “strong democracy,” based on the idea of self-government, and stressing civic education and civic attitudes. As explained in the work of Jürgen Habermas, deliberative democracy emphasizes the role of public deliberation for preference formation and transformation as well as decision making. Some feminist works are linked with both approaches. Iris Marion Young develops a concept of inclusive “communicative democracy” on the basis of deliberative approaches. Maximalist conceptions of democracy extend the focus to the political output and outcome. As an instance, social democracy not only advocates extensive

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participation on the input side but also points to the importance of social equality and welfare.

Empirical Democratic Theories Empirical democratic theories deal with the functioning of existing democracies. They are related to several debates about how to best describe and explain democratic politics. In the 1950s, Anglo-American political systems were presented as prime examples of the majoritarian or “Westminster” model of democracy. In the 1960s, in particular Arend Lijphart and Gerhard Lehmbruch developed opposing nonmajoritarian models. The second and third waves of democratization, in turn, advanced debates about the conceptualization as well as advantages and disadvantages of parliamentarian, presidential, and semipresidential political systems. In addition, in particular the third wave of democratization has sparked the development of new typologies of democracy, including diminished subtypes. Since the early 2000s, empirical research on deliberative democracy has gained momentum.

Majoritarian, Consensus, and Consociational Democracy The notions of majoritarian, consensus, and consociational democracy are closely connected with the work of Lijphart, although he borrowed the terms themselves from earlier work. In his landmark studies, he distinguishes between the majoritarian and nonmajoritarian models of democracy. The essence of the former is that governing is done by the majority of the people. The model is exclusive and competitive; power is concentrated in the hands of the majority. In Patterns of Democracy, Lijphart lists the following characteristics of majoritarian systems: (1) concentration of executive power in single-party majority cabinets, ­ ­(2)  executive-legislative relationships with a dominant executive, (3) two-party systems, (4) majoritarian and disproportional electoral systems, (5) competitive pluralist interest group systems, (6) unitary and centra­ lized government, (7) concentration of legislative power in a­  unicameral legislature, (8) flexible constitutions, (9)  ­ ­ parliamentary sovereignty, and (10) dependent ­central banks. The consensus model agrees with the majoritarian model in that it accepts the majority rule. The difference is in the kind of majorities it seeks. These majorities involve as many people as possible, and rules and institutions are designed with this aim. Power is shared, dispersed, and thus limited. Decision making is inclusive and relies on bargaining and compromise, which justifies calling this model a negotiation democracy.

Corresponding to the ten criteria for majoritarian democracies, the consensus model is characterized by  (1) executive power sharing in broad multiparty ­ coalitions, (2) executive-legislative balance of power, ­(3) ­multiparty systems, (4) proportional representation, (5) coordinated and corporatist-interest group systems aimed at compromise and concertation, (6) federal and decentralized government, (7) division of legislative power, (8) rigid constitutions, (9) judicial review of legislation, and (10) independent central banks. Matched with their respective counterparts, all variables form continua and can be grouped into an executive-parties dimension (1–5) and a federal-unitary dimension (6–10). Lijphart refers to similar distinctions between “populistic” versus “Madisonian” democracies suggested by Dahl, “populism” versus “liberalism” by William A. Riker, or “adversary” versus “unitary” democracy by Jane Mansbridge. Consociational democracy is another instance of nonmajoritarian democracy and together with consensus democracy is sometimes subsumed under the label of power-sharing democracy. However, while there are overlaps between the two, they remain separate. Lijphart’s definition of the term has changed over time. Initially, consociational democracy was presented as a (deviant) case of fragmented but stable democracies, where the behavior of the political elites is essential for stability. Through their cooperative behavior in a context of fragmented political culture, leaders deliberately turn democracy into a more stable system. Later on, Lijphart defined consociationalism in terms of the following four characteristics: (1) grand coalition, (2) cultural autonomy, (3) proportionality, and (4) minority veto.

Parliamentary, Presidential, and Semipresidential Democracy The main difference between parliamentary and presidential democracies lies in the government’s responsibility to the elected legislature. In a presidential system, government and parliament are largely independent. Most importantly, the legislature cannot remove the government without cause, that is, except in cases of impeachment. This applies to the United States of America, often mentioned as the most prominent example of a presidential system. In a parliamentary system, the legislature has the constitutional power to remove a government from office. The respective mechanism is the vote of no confidence. This is the case in the United Kingdom. In 1980, Maurice Duverger introduced the concept of a semipresidential system, which is characterized by a popularly elected president who enjoys considerable constitutional authority and who coexists

Democracy

with a prime minister and cabinet that are subject to the confidence of the parliamentarian majority. M ­ atthew Søberg Shugart and John Carey have further subdivided semipresidentialism into premier-presidential and ­president-parliamentary forms. The advantages and disadvantages of parliamentary versus presidential systems have been discussed at length in the literature. Evidence suggests that presidential systems have a negative effect on democratic consolidation and stability, especially in combination with a highly fragmented legislature, which made Juan J. Linz speak of the “perils of presidentialism.”

Diminished Subtypes The third wave of democratization and especially developments after 1989 have confronted scholars with an unprecedented variety of postauthoritarian regimes. The sudden challenge of grasping these new political systems empirically entailed conceptual confusion and led to the mushrooming of new labels. A widely used strategy consisted in the creation of “diminished subtypes.” In order to arrive at these, scholars proceed from a predefined democratic standard, that is, a root concept, and identify attributes that are missing in specific cases. For instance, regimes that lack civil liberties but where elections take place have been called electoral democracies or illiberal democracies. Some of these diminished subtypes have been arrived at inductively; others were developed by systematic variation of the respective root concept of democracy.

Measuring Democracy Measures of democracy and autocracy help in classifying political systems, comparing them with others, assessing their quality, and, eventually, advancing causal arguments. Some measures include both democracies and autocracies, whereas others deal with democracies in depth. Among the former, the Democracy-Dictatorship Index divides the 202 included countries into democracies or dictatorships for the period 1946 to 2008. In ­addition, it subdivides democracies into parliamentary, semipresidential, or presidential and dictatorships into military, civilian, or royal. Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy represents a parsimonious approach based on Dahl’s concept of polyarchy. Tatu Vanhanen includes just one indicator for each of the two dimensions of competition and participation. The latest version covers 187 countries over the period 1810 to 2000. The Polity IV project’s Polity Score measures a regime authority spectrum ranging from fully institutionalized autocracies to fully institutionalized democracies. It covers 167 countries over the period 1800 to 2014. Since 2006, the Economist

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Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index has classified 167 countries into full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes. Freedom House, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., has provided yearly data covering 195 countries and 15 territories since 1972. Although by measuring political rights and civil liberties, Freedom House does not strictly offer a measure of democracy, it is often used as such. Similarly, the Worldwide Governance Indicators project offers an assessment of six dimensions of governance, including Voice and Accountability and Rule of Law, for 215 countries over the period 1996 to 2014. Particular attention to developing and transition countries is paid by the Bertelsmann Transformation, which has rated 129 countries since 2003 on the basis of comprehensive country reports. With the Combined Index of Democracy, which measures the regime quality in 161 states between 1996 and 2010, there exists a meta-index combining data from Freedom House, Polity, and the Governance Indicators collected by the World Bank. The resulting measure is supposed to overcome shortcomings of these individual measures. Whereas in general there is a strong correlation between the different measures of democracy, significant deviations exist especially with regard to hybrid regimes, which are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. Measures that focus on determining the quality of democracy include the Democracy Barometer, which rests on the three principles of freedom, control, and equality and includes 70 countries over the period 1990 to 2012. The Democracy Ranking combines a political dimension with five socioeconomic dimensions, including health and environment. By including seven high-level principles of democracy, the Varieties of ­ Democracy project does justice to the various conceptions of democracy, such as electoral, deliberative, or egalitarian democracy. It covers 173 countries from 1900 onward. A special type among the measures of democracy are self-assessments undertaken by the citizens of their respective countries. The methodology, which was originally developed for the Democratic Audit in the UK and is supported by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, has in the meantime been applied in more than 35 countries. According to Polity, there were 94 democracies in 2013. Freedom House counted 86 free and 59 partly free countries in the world in 2016, which corresponds to almost three quarters of the world’s polities.

Challenges to Democracy Despite these numbers, Freedom House sees democracies in distress and points to a decade of decline in global freedom. Some observers, however, do not share this

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assessment and instead refer to democracy’s resilience. Still, scholars and advocates alike state a variety of challenges to democracy. With regard to participation and representation, they are concerned about decreasing turnouts and the resulting decrease in the representation of the lower social classes. Denationalization, globalization, and supranationalization have been mentioned as concerns in this regard, too. On the one hand, they lead to the erosion of the congruence between decision makers and those affected. On the other hand, long ­ chains of legitimacy may erode citizens’ support. International migration raises questions about who should be included in the demos. With regard to civil liberties such as the freedom of information, scholars have identified ­mediatization—that is, the growing role of the media logic into fields such as political communication—as a challenge because it may eventually lead to increasing commercialization of news, a lowering of their quality, a shift toward media as agenda setter, and depoliticization. Technological innovations that enable large-scale surveillance of citizens are also a case in point. With regard to performance, some scholars doubt democracy’s longterm problem-solving potential. It is feared that present problems may be deferred to future generations. In view of economic and financial crises, some scholars wonder about the poor performance of democracies. Colin Crouch has expressed his discomfort with what he calls “post-democracy,” a condition in which nontransparent elite interaction takes place within formally intact democratic institutions. While discussions about the challenges to democracy are continuing, Philippe C. Schmitter speculates about the development of democracy into a “post-liberal” configuration. Reforms such as devolution, participatory budgeting, the nomination of “future commissions,” the adoption of freedom-of-information acts, and the development of e-government contribute to the transformation of liberal democracy. Thus, democracy seems here to stay, even if modified by yet another adjective. Anne Wetzel See also Dictatorship; Electoralism; End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Liberalism; Parliamentarism; Presidentialism; Representative Democracy; Rule of Law; Totalitarianism; Transitology

Further Readings Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barber, B. R. (1984). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blaug, R., & Schwarzmantel, J. (Eds.) (2001). Democracy: A reader. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A., Shapiro I., & Cheibub, J. A. (Eds.). (2003). The democracy sourcebook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diamond, L., & Plattner, M. F. (Eds.) (2009). Democracy: A reader. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Held, D. (2006). Models of democracy (3rd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity. Lijphart, A. (1999/2012). Patterns of democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Dependency Theory Dependency theory proliferated in the 1960s as a Marxist-inspired political economy paradigm seeking to explain economic underdevelopment. The many varieties of dependency combine Marxism with economic nationalism. While economic liberals describe underdevelopment as a condition from which countries can exit, dependency theorists consider underdevelopment as a process that was inherent in the way the international economy operated. Its novelty as a school of thought was that most of its leading theoretical fathers (including Andre Gunder Frank, Theotonio dos Santos, Celso Furtado, and Fernando Henrique C ­ ardoso) were intellectuals from the Third World, unlike those of other ideological paradigms, which were usually imported from the First World. Dependency stood in sharp ­contraposition to modernization theory. Modernization theory posits that economic development in the Third World could be constructively guided by the First World via foreign aid, trade, and investment. Dependency theorists, by contrast, held these interactions with the developed “North” to be a hindrance to economic development in poor countries. Dependentistas maintained that the world economy was best conceptualized as divided between a core (the North) and a periphery (the South), and that the relationship between the two is what determines economic outcomes (wealth and poverty across countries). Gunder Frank, one of the founders of the dependency school, famously theorized that the same process that shapes the economic development of the North undergirds the underdevelopment of the South—“the development of underdevelopment.” The First World had become rich by siphoning off resources away from the South, and by keeping it underdeveloped; the northern capitalist class thus ensured a cheap supply of raw materials for

Dependency Theory

northern factories. A key element of dependency theory rests on the role played by the dominant (capitalist) classes of the South, which in alliance with the North, were theorized to promote the protection of global capitalist interests. These dependent bourgeoisies (chiefly composed by the rural oligarchy) had interests in the modern sector in trade and services. The underdevelopment of southern nations was thus functional to the interests of dependent bourgeoisies, who therefore rejected a national industrialization strategy. Dependency theorists made a number of arguments to explain the pernicious consequences stemming from the economic interaction with the North. International trade was biased against the South because, over time, the terms of trade (the average price of exports divided by the average price of imports) declined for exporters of raw materials. The monopolistic and oligopolistic nature of industry in the rich North ensured that the prices of manufactured goods would increase over time in relation to the prices of raw materials, which belonged to markets close to perfect competition. Investment from the North also failed to promote development in poor countries because it was capital intensive (and therefore did not generate much employment in local economies) and because profits were repatriated to the North and not reinvested in the countries that were home to foreign direct investment. Foreign aid was often “tied aid,” that is, used to promote economic interests of the industrialized North. The dependency school became dominant in Latin America, led by intellectuals such as dos Santos, Furtado, and Cardoso. It also gained prominence among African intellectual elites, some of whom contributed their own insights, including Samir Amin. While grouped under one paradigm, the writings of dependency theorists showcased significant variety in terms of their theoretical edifices, as well as their proposed solutions to underdevelopment. The most radical versions of dependency, such as that propounded by Gunder Frank, asserted that the only way out of poverty for these underdeveloped nations was to sever links with the world economy and embark upon a socialist revolution. Cardoso, by contrast, spearheaded a new wave of theorists for whom dependency relations could spur economic development under some conditions—what was termed associated dependent development. These writers saw development as historically open-ended, and therefore were less deterministic than earlier dependency scholars. They allowed for different degrees of dependency between particular countries and the North, and also allowed for the possibility that the nature of dependent relations could change over time. The most prominent work representing this line of thought was Cardoso and Enrico

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Faletto’s 1967 work Dependency and Development in Latin America. By the 1980s, dependency theory had become largely discredited among mainstream experts in economic development and in the economics profession. (However, the theory still finds some adherents in Africa and Latin America.) The motives for the decline of the dependency school are widely recognized: one is methodological, the second is empirical. The first relates to the development of social science as a discipline and economic science’s increased level of professionalization. Dependency theory came under a barrage of criticism on the grounds that it was not rigorous enough. These critics held that the “theory” could not be put to the test, and as such, violated one of the first cardinal rules of scientific inquiry, as laid out by Karl Popper: for a theory to be scientific, it needs to be testable. Adherents to the paradigm were not able to answer such criticisms to the satisfaction of most economists. A second set of reasons for the decline of the dependency school lies in empirical developments in the world economy. The enormous economic progress witnessed among the “Asian tigers” (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong) and other countries negated the major basic tenet of dependency theory: the impossibility of economic catch-up with the North. These countries demonstrated that economic convergence was indeed possible and, more damaging still to the dependency view, that it was possible via integration with the world economy—rather than isolation. The fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the Eastern bloc also did much to undermine the intellectual standing of Marxist-derived theories, such as dependency. One of its founders, ­Cardoso, publicly disavowed the theory in the 1990s, upon becoming president of Brazil. It was symptomatic of the paradigm’s much-diminished standing. Ultimately, the scientific value of dependency was undermined by its politicization, because its theorists desired not only ­economic growth for their countries but also the development of their societies in a particular political direction: an independent, equitable, and industrialized ­nation-state. Scientific inquiry was thus marred by placing political ideology (neo-Marxism) above an impartial, bias-free analysis of economic underdevelopment. Omar Sanchez-Sibony See also Development, Theories of; Non-Aligned Nations; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1967). Dependency and development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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dos Santos, T. (1980). Imperialismo y dependencia [Imperialism and dependency]. Mexico City, Mexico: Ediciones Era. Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Packenham, R. (1992). The dependency movement: Scholarship and politics in development studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Palma, G. (1978). Dependency: A formal theory of underdevelopment or a methodology for the analysis of concrete situations of underdevelopment. World Development, 6(7/8), 881–924. Seers, D. (Ed.). (1981). Dependency theory. London, England: Frances Pinter. Smith, T. (1979, January). The underdevelopment of development literature: The case of dependency theory. World Politics, 31(2), 247–288. Sunkel, O. (1969, October). National development policy and external dependence in Latin America. Journal of Development Studies, 6(1), 23–46. Valenzuela, A., & Valenzuela, S. (1978, July). Modernization and dependency: Alternative perspectives on the study of Latin American underdevelopment. Comparative Politics, 10(4), 535–557.

Deterrence

and

Crime

The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing individuals who break the law. These activities may also prevent crime by three distinct mechanisms—incapacitation, specific deterrence, and general deterrence. Convicted offenders are often punished with imprisonment. Incapacitation refers to the crimes averted by offenders’ physical isolation during the period of their incarceration. Specific deterrence and general deterrence involve possible behavioral responses. Specific deterrence refers to the reduction in reoffending that is presumed to follow from the experience of being punished. There are many sound reasons for suspecting that the experience of punishment might actually increase reoffending. The threat of punishment might also discourage potential and actual criminals in the general public from committing crime. This effect is known as general deterrence and is the subject of this entry. The theory of deterrence is predicated on the idea that if state-imposed sanction costs are sufficiently severe, criminal activity will be discouraged, at least for some. Thus, one of the key concepts of deterrence is the severity of punishment. Our review of severity effects focuses on research findings concerning imprisonment. Severity alone, however, cannot deter. Another key concept in

deterrence theory is the certainty of punishment. In this regard, the most important set of actors are the police— absent detection and apprehension, there is no possibility of conviction or punishment. For this reason, we discuss what is known about the deterrent effect of police.

The Deterrent Effect of Imprisonment Six studies nicely illustrate large differences in the deterrence response to the threat of imprisonment. One that examines the use of imprisonment to enforce fine payment and another that examines the effect of swift and certain punishment for violations of conditions of probation find substantial deterrent effects, whereas study of the deterrent effect of California’s third-strike provision finds only a modest deterrent effect. Still other studies of respectively the deterrent effect of prison sentence enhancements for gun crimes and the heightened threat of imprisonment that attends aging into the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court find no deterrent effects. The six exemplar studies suggest several important sources for the large differences in the deterrent effect of imprisonment. One concerns the length of the sentence itself. Figure 1 depicts two alternative forms of the response function relating crime rate to sentence length. Both are downward sloping, which captures the idea that increases in sentence severity deter crime. At the status quo sentence length, S1, the crime rate, C1, is the same for both curves. The curves are drawn so that they predict the same crime rate for a zero sanction level. Thus, the “absolute” deterrent impact of the status quo sanction level is the same for both curves. But because the two curves have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental increase in sentence level to S2. The linear curve (A) is meant to depict a response function in which there is a material deterrent effect accompanying the increase to S2, Crime Rate C0 A

B C1 S1

S2

Figure 1  Marginal Versus Absolute Deterrent Effects

Sentence Length

Deterrence and Crime

whereas the nonlinear curve (B) is meant to depict a small crime reduction response, due to the diminishing deterrent returns to increasing sentence length. The authors’ reading of the evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length is that it implies that the relationship between the crime rate and sentence length more closely conforms to curve B than to curve A. For example, Steven Raphael and Jens Ludwig (2003) found no evidence that gun crime enhancements deter; David Lee and Justin McCrary (2009) found no evidence that the more severe penalties that attend moving from the juvenile to the adult justice system deter, and find only a small deterrent effect of California’s third-strike provision. As a consequence, the deterrent return to increasing already long sentences is small, possibly zero. The fine payment and Project Hope experiments also suggest that that curve B, not curve A, more closely resembles what, in medical jargon, would be described as the dose–response relationship between crime and sentence length—the incremental change in crime that accompanies an incremental change in sentence length. While neither of these studies is directed at the deterrence of criminal behavior, both suggest that, unlike increments to long sentences, incremental enhancements to short sentences do have a material deterrent effect on crime-prone populations.

The Deterrent Effect of Police Research on the marginal deterrent effect of police has evolved in two distinct literatures. One has focused on the deterrent effect of police presence and crime, while the other has focused on the crime prevention effectiveness of different strategies for deploying police.

Police Presence and Crime Some of the most convincing evidence on the effect of police presence on crime comes from before-and-after studies in circumstances in which an abrupt change in police presence is clearly attributable to an event unrelated to the crime rate. For example, in September 1944, German soldiers occupying Denmark arrested the entire Danish police force. According to an account by Johannes Andenaes (1974), crime rates rose immediately but not uniformly. The frequency of street crimes such as robbery, whose control depends heavily on visible police presence, rose sharply. By contrast, crimes such as fraud were less affected. Contemporary tests of the ­police-crime relationship based on abrupt decreases in police  presence investigate the impact of reductions in police

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presence and productivity as a result of large budget cuts or lawsuits following racial-profiling scandals. These studies consistently find that large reductions in police presence are followed by increases in crime. The ongoing threat of terrorism has also provided a number of unique opportunities to study the impact of police resource allocation in cities around the world. For example, Jonathan Klick and Alexander Tabarrok (2005) examined the effect on crime in the National Mall area of Washington, D.C., of the color-coded alert system implemented in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. The purpose of the alerts was to signal federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to occasions when it might be prudent to divert resources to sensitive locations, such as the National Mall. During high alerts, police presence increased by 50%. Such increases were associated with about a 15% reduction in crime.

Police Deployment and Crime Much research has examined the crime prevention effectiveness of alternative strategies for deploying police resources. One way to increase apprehension risk is to mobilize police in a fashion that increases the probability that an offender will be arrested after committing a crime. Strong evidence of a deterrent as opposed to an incapacitation effect resulting from the apprehension of criminals is limited. For example, studies of the effect of rapid response to calls for service find no evidence of a crime-prevention effect, but this may be because most calls for service occur well after the crime event, with the result that the perpetrator has fled the scene. Thus, it is doubtful that rapid response materially affects apprehension risk. The second source of deterrence from police activities involves averting crime in the first place. In this circumstance, there is no apprehension because there was no offense. In the authors’ view, this is the primary source of deterrence from the presence of police. One of the authors (Nagin) describes this as the sentinel role of policing. If an occupied police car is parked outside a liquor store, for example, a would-be robber of the store will likely be deterred because apprehension is all but certain. One example of a police deployment strategy that has been shown to be effective in averting crime from occurring in the first place is “hot-spots” policing. David Weisburd and John Eck (2004) propose a twodimensional taxonomy of policing strategies. One dimension is “level of focus” and the other is “diversity of focus.” Level of focus represents the degree to which police activities are targeted. Targeting can occur in a variety of ways, but Weisburd and Eck give special

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attention to policing strategies that target police resources in small geographic areas (e.g., blocks or specific addresses) that have very high levels of criminal activity—so-called crime hot spots. Just as in the liquor store example, the rationale for concentrating police in crime hot spots is to create a prohibitively high risk of apprehension and thereby to deter crime at the hot spot by completely eliminating the opportunity to offend in the first place. Anthony Braga’s (2008) informative review of hotspots policing summarizes the findings from nine experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations. All but two of the studies found evidence of significant reductions in crime. Further, no evidence was found of material crime displacement to immediately surrounding locations. On the contrary, some studies found evidence of crime reductions, not increases, in the surrounding locations—a “diffusion of crime-control benefits” to nontargeted locales. The second dimension of the Weisburd and Eck taxonomy is diversity of approaches. This dimension concerns the variety of approaches that police use to impact public safety. Low diversity is associated with reliance on time-honored law enforcement strategies for affecting the threat of apprehension, for example, by dramatically increasing police presence. High diversity involves expanding beyond conventional practice to prevent crime. One example of a high-diversity approach is problem-oriented policing. Problem-oriented policing comes in so many different forms that it is regrettably hard to define. One of the most visible examples of problem-­ oriented policing is Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, ­initiated in the spring of 1996. The objective of the collaborative operation was to prevent intergang gun violence using two deterrence-based strategies. One was to target enforcement against weapons traffickers who were supplying weapons to Boston’s violent youth gangs. The second involved a more innovative use of “focused deterrence.” The youth gangs themselves were assembled (and reassembled) to send the message that the response to any instance of serious violence would be “pulling every lever” legally available to punish gang members collectively. This included a salient severity related dimension—vigorous prosecution for unrelated, nonviolent crime such as d ­ rug dealing. Thus, the aim of Operation Ceasefire was to deter violent crime by increasing the certainty and severity of punishment but only in targeted circumstances, namely if the gang members were perpetrators of a violent crime. Just as important, Operation ­Ceasefire illustrates the potential for combining elements of both certainty and severity enhancement to generate a targeted deterrent effect.

Three Topics for Future Deterrence Research An Integrated Model of the Effects of the Threat and Experience of Punishment At the outset of this review, a distinction was made between what criminologists call specific deterrence and general deterrence. The former is the response to the experience of punishment, whereas the latter is the response to the threat of punishment. There is no logical contradiction between the conclusions that the experience of punishment actually increases the propensity for offending, even as the threat of punishment deters it. Indeed, a review by Daniel Nagin, Francis Cullen, and Cheryl Jonson (2009) of the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism concluded that the great majority of studies point to the prison experience as increasing, not decreasing, subsequent offending. We see two major tasks related to developing an integrated model of the response to both the threat and the experience of legal sanctions. One involves extending deterrence theory to account for how the proclivity for crime is affected by the experience of punishment. This will require, at a minimum, consideration of the effect of the experience of punishment on sanction risk perceptions, as well as the limiting of legal alternatives to criminal behavior owing to factors such as stigma and human capital erosion. Because by construction this model will require a dynamic framework, consideration of the degree to which potential offenders anticipate and discount future consequences of crime and non-crime will be necessary. There is a vast literature that documents the present orientation of criminals. This raises difficult issues of how best to model this present orientation in the context of criminal decision making.

Measuring Perceptions of Sanction Regimes A sanction regime defines the sanctions that are legally available for the punishment of various types of crime, in addition to the way that legal authority is actually administered. A major theoretical and empirical gap involves how active criminals and people on the margin of criminality perceive the sanction regime. As (general) deterrence is the behavioral response to perceptions of sanction threats, establishing the linkage between risk perceptions and actual sanction regimes is imperative. Unless perceptions adjust, however crudely, to changes in the prevailing sanction regime, the desired deterrent effect will not be achieved.

Deterrence and International Relations

The Deterrent Effect of Shorter Prison Sentences and Identification of High-Deterrence Policies Crime prevention by incapacitation necessarily requires higher imprisonment rates and the attendant social costs. By contrast, if crime can be deterred from occurring in the first place, there is no perpetrator to punish. Steven Durlauf and Nagin express skepticism that there are large numbers of policies involving increases in sentence length that produce substantial deterrent effects. The one exception may involve short prison sentences. Sentence lengths in Western European countries tend to be far shorter than in the United States. Research based on European data of the deterrent effect of shorter sentence lengths should be a priority (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011). Durlauf and Nagin are among the researchers who express optimism that viable police-deployment strategies hold promise for having large deterrent effects. Specifically, they speculate that strategies which result in large and visible shifts in apprehension risk are the most likely to have deterrent effects that are large enough to reduce imprisonment as well. Hot-spots policing might have this characteristic. More generally, the types of problem-oriented policing strategies used in Operation Ceasefire have the common feature of targeting enforcement resources on selected high-crime people or places (Kennedy, 2009). Also, the multimodal approach to preventing crime among high-risk groups that combines deterrent and reintegration tactics described by Andrew Papachristos, Tracey Meares, and Jeffrey Fagan (2007) is a creative example of a carrot-and-stick approach to crime prevention. Although the effectiveness of these strategies for focusing police and other criminal justice resources has yet to be reliably demonstrated, priority attention should be given to their continued evaluation, particularly as they relate to the carrot component of the intervention. Indeed, the effectiveness of positive incentives as a crime preventive is an understudied topic. Daniel S. Nagin and Robert Apel See also Blaming the Victim; Conformity; Deviance and Control; Distributive Justice; Human Rights; Procedural Justice; System Justification

Further Readings Andenaes, J. (1974). Punishment and deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Apel, R. (2013). Sanctions, perceptions and crime: Implications for criminal deterrence. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 29, 67–101.

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Braga, A. A. (2008). Police enforcement strategies to prevent crime in hot spot areas. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011). Imprisonment and crime: Can both be reduced? Criminology and Public Policy, 10, 9–54. Nagin, D. S. (2013). Deterrence in the 21st century: A review of the evidence. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Papachristos, A. V., Meares, T. L., & Fagan, J. (2007). Attention felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhoods in Chicago. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 4(2), 223–272.

Deterrence Relations

and International

The period of relative peace and stability following the massive violence, destruction, and instability that pervaded the first half of the 20th century poses an important question: Why was there no World War III? Political scientists and theorists largely attribute the absence of a third world war to successful deterrence practiced by the world’s superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, during the cold war (1945–1989). War-ravaged Europe during the first half of the 20th century gave tragic visibility to how instability could manifest when not effectively managed, imbuing the pursuit of stability with a new significance. In a world without an overarching international sovereign, political scientists who subscribe to the realist interpretive framework of international relations believe that the ensuing anarchic nature of the international system makes instability the norm, conflict inevitable, and the status quo constantly under threat from states seeking greater resources. The post–World War II geopolitical landscape did not alleviate the inevitability of conflict, but rather systemically changed the ways in which it would come about. With the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) occupying the role of predominant hegemons in a newly bipolar international system, stability became contingent upon maintaining a balance of power between the two competing camps, with the United States leading the “West” and the Soviet Union representing the “East.” Striking a balance of power between the United States as a bulwark of capitalism and the communist expansion of the Soviet Union required maintaining this bipolar system, a new status quo under threat by communist expansion. The looming possibility of Soviet dominance motivated the United States’ defensive posture toward the bipolar status quo as a means to

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protect its own dominance within the international system and maintain stability in a post–World War II world. Security measures to safeguard the bipolar system and American hegemony within it do not fully explain why a third world war did not break out. Coercive strategies provide this necessary in-between. The coercive strategies at the United States’ disposal at the onset of the cold war included both deterrence and compellence. Compellence, unlike deterrence, is more offensive in its approach and entails coercing the opponent to take a specific action or to undo an action already done. In short, compellence is a method of coercion that seeks to change the status quo. Deterrence, by contrast, seeks to protect the status quo by dissuading the opponent from taking some unacceptable action that might alter it. Deterrence involves manipulating the cost–benefit analysis of the opponent in such a way that their initial intended course of action is no longer in their best interest. For example, if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack against the United States, then the United States would retaliate in such a big way that the Soviet Union could not rationalize attacking in the first place. Ultimately, the United States opted to pursue deterrence over compellence as its security strategy during the cold war for two reasons. First, because deterrence tactically prevented the Soviet Union from using force without the need for the United States itself to use force in a form of preventative coercion. Second, because ­American strategists decided it is easier to keep things the way they are than to try to change them—for instance, it’s unlikely the Soviet Union would get rid of their nuclear arsenals upon the United States’ request. Those characteristics of deterrence, among others, also help explain why the cold war never turned “hot” between the respective militaries of the superpowers themselves. Deterrence as both practice and theory predates the cold war and the nuclear age. Historically and still today, deterrence can involve a variety of tactics, including forming alliances, building up armies or arsenals, and dissuading potential attackers from attacking through fear-mongering or threats. The reason behind the close association between deterrence and the cold war, despite the widespread and historical practice of deterrence, will become apparent through the following discussions of how the introduction of nuclear weapons elevated deterrence from a routine military practice to the best-known way to prevent the end of the world.

Dealing With a Different World: Deterrence in a Bipolar System The cold war arose from systemic change in the international balance of power. Following World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union ascended the world

stage as the dominant superpowers and transitioned the world from its prewar multipolar status to a bipolar international system with the balance of power shared (and contested) between the communist “East” and the capitalist “West.” This new system and distribution of power problematized an already-existing s­ecurity dilemma, the theory that in an anarchical international system an increase in one state’s security decreases the security of others. Because the global balance of power is maintained between only two great powers in a bipolar international order, the two actors focus solely on each other. The states are internally balanced due to their matched military capabilities, whereas in a multipolar system states form alliances to balance externally. Although a bipolar system’s balance of power is inherently more stable than a multipolar system, which produced both world wars, it is more difficult to determine in a bipolar system if the security measures taken by one party are offensively or defensively intended. This is because when one party undertakes a defensive measure it necessarily reduces the relative security of the other, thus leaving the other feeling threatened. The Vietnam War, for example, resulted in part from the United States overreacting to a potential gain by the Soviet Union. Proxy wars such as the Vietnam War are part of what makes the bipolar system unique: The relative stability allows both states to concern themselves only with the security measures of the other. As a consequence, deterrence works more effectively in a bipolar system because it is easier to communicate effectively among a smaller number of parties, and in doing so, dispel misperceptions about the balance of power that could lead to full-on war. Thus, the nature of a bipolar international system is such that the ambiguity of security measures taken by either superpower may cause a spiral effect toward instability or open conflict, even if such a result is against the interests and desires of both parties. For instance, if the United States defensively undertook to heighten its security by increasing its military strength, such an action might prompt Soviet leadership to feel relatively less secure. This, in turn, might cause the Soviet Union to respond with similar militaristic measures, heightening the United States’ own feelings of insecurity in return. This reciprocal process has the capacity to intensify tensions on both sides and increase the likelihood of conflict even if neither side truly desires it. Therefore, maintaining a balance of power requires open acknowledgment of each state’s strengths and vulnerabilities because capability, credibility, and clear communication are all crucial for deterrence to succeed and conflict to be avoided. The United States and the Soviet Union in turn had to learn how to pursue their interests in a bipolar world in which their

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decisions depended in part upon the actions of the rival power. Accordingly, the United States and the Soviet Union needed a way to predict the response of the other, and this new impetus gave rise to a revolutionary application of deterrence theory. Deterrence requires manipulating the cost-benefit analysis of the adversary in such a way that it no longer is in the adversary’s best interest to pursue a course of action that the other party sought to prevent. Thus, when either making or manipulating these cost–benefit calculations, both parties work under the assumption that the adversary is a rational actor. This baseline assumption made rational deterrence theory more central to cold war deterrence strategy and prompted the use of game theory, models through which to predict decision making by rational actors in a bipolar system. Originally a method for analyzing economic models, game theory helped explain why cooperation between two rational actors is more difficult to achieve in some circumstances than in others, even if cooperation is beneficial for both parties. One illustration of this is the now-famous prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a game theory model that explains why two “rational” actors—that is, two actors with their own best interests at heart and the ability to take logical action—might not cooperate. The game takes its name from an imaginary situation in which two perpetrators, who are in cahoots committing a crime, are incarcerated, taken into solitary confinement, and given no way to communicate. However, the police don’t have enough evidence to convict the prisoners, so they have to rely on the prisoners’ testimonies. If prisoner A testifies against prisoner B, that would be sufficient evidence for the police to convict prisoner B to a full sentence of 20 years and set prisoner A free. Alternatively, if they both stay silent (cooperate), they both will serve 1-year sentences, or if they both testify (defect), they will both serve 10-year sentences. Making this decision in isolation from one another, both prisoners, assumed to be rational actors, will decide to testify and avoid the possibility of a full sentence. The figure shown here depicts this phenomenon by providing numerical values that show the extent to which cooperating versus defecting—given the adversary’s action—serves one’s best interests. For example, if both participants cooperate, they settle for a lower premium of “2” in serving their interests than if they were both to defect and attain the higher premium of “3.” Thus, in the prisoner’s dilemma model, there is no ­solution that accommodates the best interests (“4”) of all participants. Each actor must therefore assume the other is only concerned with self-interest and defect unless each participant has reason to believe the other will cooperate. If prisoner A defects while prisoner B cooperates, as mentioned above, prisoner A goes free

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while prisoner B serves a maximum sentence. Consequently, striking a deal to cooperate involves more than communication—both actors must be credible. PRISONER’S DILEMMA COOPERATE

2

COOPERATE B DEFECT

DEFECT

A

1 4

2 4 1

3 3

The prisoner’s dilemma model found real application in the arms race, the competition for superior military capability, between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. The arms race presented three options for the United States and the Soviet Union with “armament” and “disarmament” operating as the proxies for defect and cooperate, respectively. The two parties could (1) both disarm, resulting in no arms race, lower military expenditures, and greater security for both parties; or (2) both arm, resulting in both parties pursuing an arms race, incurring heavy military expenditures, and reducing their mutual security by creating a more dangerous world; or (3) one party could arm and the other disarm, leaving one party more secure and the other more vulnerable. The prisoner’s dilemma model concedes that disarmament by both parties serves the security interests of all. However, despite the detrimental consequences, both the United States and the Soviet Union pursued armament during the cold war, so why was that the case? Without communication, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could be sure the other would cooperate and disarm, and the world became less safe as a result. As evidenced in the U.S.–U.S.S.R. arms race, cooperation only becomes a viable option when each participant has reason to believe the other will cooperate. But under what circumstances would this belief come about? This is explained by deterrence strategy. Successful deterrence requires accurate communication and signaling. Well-communicated, credible threats can change the cost–benefit analysis of an adversary, so that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the consequences of noncooperation. Theoretically, if Washington and Moscow had established an effective line of communication and mutually agreed to disarm, then pursuing armament would have come at the cost of retaliation, thus eliminating armament as a rational course of action.

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Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence Strategy The introduction of the United States’ nuclear arsenal to the global balance of power in 1945 with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, altered deterrence strategy in important ways. Reflecting this, President Eisenhower outlined a foreign policy that placed nuclear deterrence at the center of American strategy. Through the threat of “massive retaliation,” the Eisenhower administration in 1954 sought to deter communist aggression by offsetting the benefits of Soviet expansion with the high cost of a potential, retaliatory nuclear attack by the United States—the core of nuclear deterrence. This form of deterrence dominated U.S. foreign policy until the collapse of the Soviet Union created a seismic shift in the balance of power and ended the bipolar system. Although the Soviet Union first developed its nuclear capability in 1949, during the mid- to late 1950s it acquired second-strike capability, and the nature of the game completely changed. The Soviets had assembled a nuclear arsenal large enough to support nuclear retaliation if the United States were to launch a nuclear attack against them first. Thus, the “massive retaliation” deterrence strategy that characterized the Eisenhower administration became impractical and needed to be replaced. By the 1960s (coinciding with the Kennedy administration), the policy conversation had shifted along with the nuclear balance of power from deterrence to mutual deterrence. The late 1950s and early 1960s marked the golden age of nuclear strategy as game theorists grappled with the implications of mutual deterrence in particular. The bipolar balance of power at the time meant that neither superpower could gain advantage by nuclear attack without inviting mutually assured destruction (MAD), a theory holding that both U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals had grown so large that each superpower, if provoked militarily, had the ability to annihilate the other in a counterstrike. Thomas Schelling, famed game theorist, even went so far as to argue that because of MAD, nuclear weapons were useful only as deterrents in a bipolar system. The utility of nuclear capability in the cold war world thus resided in its defensive, deterrent power rather than in its offensive possibilities. Fittingly, the concept of “stability” became more prominent in nuclear deterrence discussions. The irony of stability during the cold war was that effective deterrence required each superpower to maintain a nuclear arsenal large enough to balance the nuclear power of the other. Both the United States and the Soviet Union issued nuclear threats as a deterrence strategy to prevent the other from upsetting the balance of power. Their threats operationalized the following

logic: If the Soviets were to attack the United States, the United States might not be able to prevent their attack but had the potential to retaliate in such a way that would deter the Soviets from attacking in the first place. Provided the Soviet Union was a rational actor, this logic reveals the importance of credible, capable, wellcommunicated threats as means to maintain stability. However, this entire system relied heavily on the quality of communications between the “great powers.” Without effective communication, the two countries found themselves at the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Coinciding with the golden age of nuclear strategy was a period of little to no communication between the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union, which complicated both sides’ ability to effectively implement deterrence. Deterrence strategies for both leaderships at this time frequently took the form of balancing nuclear power through signaling threats. That being the case, the decline of communications between the superpowers ­during the late 1950s and early 1960s made miscommunications inevitable. Without clear signaling in a bipolar system, defensive measures taken by one side could seem offensive to the other, and thus routine attempts to balance power could be (and were) misinterpreted or, worse, presumed to warrant retaliation. In theoretical terms, this is how the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis at the brink of the most devastating attack in human history.

Criticisms of Deterrence Theory Deterrence theory, as a political application of game theory, derives its legitimacy and predictive power from baseline assumptions about (1) human nature and (2) the nature of threat. Regarding human nature, deterrence theory assumes that the actors involved (both states and leaders) are rational and will work to safeguard and secure their best interests. Regarding the nature of threat, deterrence theory assumes that all threats are credible and could be precursors to an ­outright attack. When U.S. president Richard Nixon put American nuclear weapons on high alert in 1969, he employed a “madman” strategy so the Soviet Union would take his threats more seriously. Similarly, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s decision in 1960 to take off his shoe and pound the podium at a United Nations assembly was a calculated ploy to make himself appear crazy so that Westerners would take the threat of nuclear war more seriously. These memorable theatrics give the impression of credibility, but it cannot be assumed without confirming against other variables (such as the actor’s capability to act on said threat, whether it is in the actor’s best interest to carry out

Deterrence and International Relations

such a threat according to a cost–benefit analysis, etc.). Effective nuclear deterrence requires multifaceted confirmation of what the adversary is capable of and willing to execute. Otherwise, the (inherent) deterrent power of mutually assured destruction no longer holds. Likewise, the baseline assumption in deterrence ­theory—that the adversary is a rational actor who makes predictable decisions according to a cost–benefit ­analysis—has little basis in reality because of essential confounding factors. Rational decision making, for example, involves determining the best course of action based on available information. But what about situations in which there is asymmetric information—where one party knows less than the other? If rational decision making follows a cost–benefit formula, then party A’s unawareness of important variables that led to party B’s rational choice make party B’s subsequent behavior less predictable to party A. Additionally, the rational-choice model that underpins deterrence theory’s predictive power fails to account for the inseparable influence of the “irrational,” which includes emotion and biased beliefs. There are no one-dimensional actors who act only out of self-interest; humans are guided by both rational and irrational motivations, such that their future behaviors and actions cannot be predicted by mapping all available information onto a cost–benefit formula. For example, consider the case of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Could the United States rightfully characterize Saddam Hussein as a rational actor who would react to deterrence in a predictable way? Unlike the calculated madman strategies of Khrushchev and Nixon, Hussein’s decision to gas his own people contributed to his reputation, among Western powers, as a real madman. Given Hussein’s reputation as an aggressive and seemingly irrational leader, capable of hurting his own people, invading Kuwait, and more, the dangers of assuming an adversary’s rationality become apparent. Another criticism of deterrence theory developed during the heyday of nuclear strategy in the 1950s and early 1960s with the arrival of nuclear deterrence and the alleged deterrent power of MAD. Game theorists argued that in situations of mutual deterrence, like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, stability occurs from the balance of nuclear power. When the adversary acquires second-strike capability, the costs of nuclear attack o ­ utweigh the benefits. In that event, the stable nuclear balance decreases the likelihood of nuclear attack. However, a crucial double standard exists. Why is it that a stable nuclear balance decreases the likelihood of nuclear attack but does little or nothing to reduce the probability of limited war, a war where ­neither side uses all the resources available to it? The resulting stability–instability paradox lies at the core of nuclear deterrence criticism: do nuclear

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weapons make the world safer? Answering this question requires a metric for measuring the success or failure of deterrence. United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, for example, exemplifies a limited, proxy war that erupted between the “West” and the “East” during the cold war despite both sides having nuclear capability. Does the use of force in Vietnam indicate deterrence failure? Ironically, the stability– instability paradox would hold mutual nuclear deterrence itself responsible for proxy wars like Vietnam, and more recent wars such as in Syria. A stable nuclear balance decreases the likelihood of direct war between two superpowers at the cost of allowing greater risk taking in indirect and lower intensity conflicts. Consequently, the nuclear peace hypothesis, which claims that nuclear weapons in certain circumstances (like those of the cold war) can lessen the likelihood of conflict and foster stability, fails to account for the instability that stems from such stability.

Conclusion The cold war did not mark the birth of deterrence theory, but it did usher in a new era for international relations. The bipolar international system that emerged following World War II changed the nature of the global balance of power, and introduced new difficulties in maintaining stability and preventing conflict. During this time of flux, deterrence strategy became a central stabilizing agent in the global balance of power. The cold war between the “East” and the “West” never became hot enough to spark a World War III despite both superpowers having significant nuclear capability. However, the crux of nuclear deterrence strategy arises from that irony. When the United States and the Soviet Union already have nuclear weapons arsenals, the balancing of nuclear power by (1) deterring further armament and (2) deterring nuclear attack results in relative stability. This form of stability does not preclude the possibility of limited war erupting, but it does reduce the likelihood of nuclear war or an interstate war between superpowers. The reverberations of cold war–era deterrence strategy are also seen in international relations theory. Deterrence strategy transformed international relations theory by, first, introducing strategic models used to predict an adversary’s likelihood of resorting to cooperation versus conflict and, second, striking a nuclear balance of power that precipitated relative stability. Few would have predicted that a world in which rival superpowers have nuclear capability would be the same world in which another world war seems less likely. Harper Weissburg and Fathali M. Moghaddam

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Development, Theories of

See also Aggressive Capitulation; Conflict Theory, Realistic; International Security; Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives; Nonviolence; Realism; Wars of Attrition

Further Readings Allison, G. T. (1969). Conceptual models and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The American Political Science Review, 63(3), 689–718. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/ 1954423.pdf Ayson, R. (2004). Thomas Schelling and the nuclear age. Canberra, Australia: Frank Cass. Danilovic, V. (2002). When the stakes are high: Deterrence and conflict among major powers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jervis, R. (1978). Cooperation under the security dilemma. World Politics, 30(2), 167–214. Retrieved from http://www .jstor.org/stable/pdf/2009958.pdf?acceptTC=true Morrow, J. D. (1994). Game theory for political scientists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nye, J. S., & Welch, D. A. (2013). Understanding global conflict and cooperation: An introduction to theory and history. New York, NY: Pearson. Payne, K. B. (2001). The fallacies of cold war deterrence and a new direction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Rauchhaus, R. (2009). Evaluating the nuclear peace hypothesis: A quantitative approach. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53(2), 258–277. Retrieved from http://jcr.sagepub.com/ content/53/2/258.full.pdf Wells, S. F. (1981). The origins of massive retaliation. Political Science Quarterly, 96(1), 31–52. Retrieved from http://www .jstor.org/stable/2149675

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of

This entry provides a brief critical history of theories of development by reference to modernization, development theory, postdevelopmentalism, and sustainability. It focuses on recent theories of economic development within the context of globalization that highlight human capital theory and the role of education, and it examines the free-market ideology of neoliberalism in relation to development. The entry also introduces readers to the recent paradigms of the knowledge, creative, and innovation economies and examines alternative development possibilities of open science and open development.

Origins Theories of development have been a major feature of modernization and globalization theory since the end of

World War II, aimed at the development of a higher quality of life for humans and encompassing aspects of foreign aid, poverty reduction, gender equality, information and communications technology (ICT) and i­nfrastructure development, human rights, and the environment. Increasingly, in the 21st century development has been tied to the Millennium Development Goals initiated and first formulated at the September Summit of 2000 when a large group of nations adopted the UN Millennium Declaration and committed themselves to a global partnership to reduce extreme poverty by 2015. At the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015, world leaders adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development including 17 goals. The notion of development is a contested concept with a very troubled history. In development studies, which emerged as an academic subject in the 1970s and became popular in the 1990s, the term development focused on economic prospects for countries following decolonization, often associated with modernization theory, with development economics and recently with critiques of Westernization and forms of neoimperialism. The concept came into view in the aftermath of World War II and in the cauldron of the cold war as the basis for securing young states and transition economies as part of the Western alliance of free market capitalism against the emerging and burgeoning Soviet communist system. At this early stage, these new states, many of which had only recently achieved independence from past colonial powers, were referred to as “undeveloped” countries, and the problems they faced were termed problems of “underdevelopment.” Two predominant views echoed the divisions of the cold war. In the West, the concept of development was seen as primarily an economic problem that could be conceptualized in stages following the model and industrializing experience of Western development. This linear concept of development in large measure was still strongly caught up in the metaphysics of the world history of “progress” most clearly illustrated by Walt Whitman Rostow’s anticommunist (1960) Stages of Development that postulated a structural model in which “take off” from traditional society leads to an age of high mass consumption. Rostow’s liberal model utilized ideas of free trade and the ideas of 18th-century economist Adam Smith. It was purportedly based on the historical experience of the United States and Europe and has been roundly criticized for being biased toward a Western model of modernization. In the Soviet bloc, by contrast, questions of development were seen as inextricably tied to the problem of domination and exploitation to be understood in terms of V. I. Lenin’s theory of imperialism that describes the function of financial capital in generating profits from colonization

Development, Theories of

as the final stage of capitalism. Lenin’s model, which hypothesized a core-periphery model of capitalist exploitation, has influenced Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and the dependency theory of Gunder Frank and others. Both sides in reality have been caught up in partisan political ideologies and historical assumptions about world history and Hegelian assumptions of development. Most recently, postdevelopmental theory, so called, holds that “development” is an ideological creation of the Western academy; on the basis of the critique of ethnocentrism and universalism, it sees ­ “development” as an obstacle to genuine social progress. According to Arturo Escobar, postdevelopmental thought is interested in the potential of local culture and knowledge as well as pluralistic grassroots political movements based in solidarity and direct democracy.

Theories of Economic Growth Theories of economic growth have broadly followed four models. Classical liberal theory (Gerschenkron & Rostow) understands development as capital formation leading to large-scale infrastructure projects. This approach, typical of the 1960s, employed a historical stage model that hypothesized the shift from undeveloped countries to developed countries on the basis of the Western experience. Social theories of development emphasize the importance of human capital based on investment in education as the key to economic growth. Various approaches following this model tended to relate the rate of economic growth as more closed to poverty and inequality. Structural theories focused on the conditions of the Third World and the capacity to duplicate the Western experience of development in former colonies. Liberal approaches emphasized “import substitution” policies and government protectionism, and Marxist approaches tended to focus on the analysis of colonialism or “dependency” core-periphery relations, whereby poor countries became a source of raw materials for developed countries. Neoclassical theories tend to rely on free markets with an emphasis on the encouragement of private investment and increasing market efficiency at home. Neoliberalism has become the most prevalent form of this model of development, beginning in the 1980s with the election of Margaret Thatcher as UK prime minister in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States a year later. The major theorists are members of the Chicago school, including Milton Friedman, with advocacy of markets over government intervention, and Gary Becker on human capital. Neoliberal development theory charts the transition from education considered as primarily a social issue of integration to a new development paradigm whereby

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education is considered central to international economic development within a global knowledge economy. Investment in education is said to benefit the individual, society, and the world as a whole. The shift from state investment in education to investment by individuals took place in the 1980s and 1990s after the neoliberal privatization of state education systems. Yet there is a consensus that broad-based education of good quality is among the most powerful instruments known to reduce poverty and inequality. Education is considered not only fundamental to the construction of democratic societies but also the key to creating, applying, and spreading knowledge—and thus to the development of dynamic, globally competitive economies. The major difference has followed the neoliberal application of human capital theory. It was during the decade of the 1980s that Friedrich von Hayek’s political and economic philosophy and Chicago-school arguments were used by Thatcher and Reagan to legitimate the neoliberal attack on “big government” and the bureaucratic welfare state with a policy mix based on “free trade” and the establishment of the “open” economy. This doctrine was accompanied by a raft of policies that supported economic liberalization or rationalization characterized by the abolition of subsidies and tariffs; floating the exchange rate; the freeing up of controls on foreign investment; the restructuring of the state sector, including corporatization and privatization of state trading departments and other assets; “downsizing,” “contracting out,” an attack on unions and abolition of wage bargaining in favor of employment contracts; and, finally, the dismantling of the welfare state through commercialization,“contracting out,” “targeting” of welfare services, and increasingly individual “responsibilization” for health, welfare, and education. On this neoliberal view, there is nothing distinctive or special about education or health; they are services and products like any other, to be traded in the marketplace.

Financialization Financialization, along with globalization and neoliberalism, is one of three forces that structure global development. The rise of neoliberalism as the prevailing global policy paradigm is explained by the growing role and power of finance in the political economy of capitalism and in the finance class of owners and banking institutions. This shift since the mid-2000s is not just a quantitative expansion but a change in the nature of financial institutions that jettisoned traditional loanmaking functions to pursue the creation and sale of its own financial instruments. Financialization is a systematic transformation of capitalism based on (1) the massive expansion of the financial sector, where finance

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companies have taken over from banks as major financial institutions and banks have moved away from old lending practices to operate directly in capital markets; (2) large previously nonfinancial multinational corporations having acquired new financial capacities to operate and gain leverage in financial markets; (3) domestic households having become players in financial markets (the ascendancy of shareholder capitalism), taking on debt and managing assets; and (4) in general, the ­ dominance of financial markets over a declining production of the traditional industrial economy. This shift is part of a larger change that favors new informational, cultural, cognitive, and biotech forms of capitalism. Richard Peet (2011) expresses the change in terms of a process increasingly formalized and expressed as abstraction represented in algorithmic regulation: Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include “everything.” We now live in the era of global finance capitalism. (p. 1)

Financialization has huge implications for “development” as the world integration of markets involves increasingly new forms of financial instruments and the growth of a shadow banking system alongside regional free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that takes away local control and favors the multinational control of forms of symbolic capital in the form of copyright and trademarks. Financialization is a term that describes an economic system or process that attempts to reduce all value that is exchanged (whether tangible, intangible, future, or present promises, etc.) into either a financial instrument or a derivative of a financial instrument. The original intent of financialization is to be able to reduce any work product or service to an exchangeable financial instrument. It is an aspect of increased symbolization, mathematization, and computerization of financial markets that are trends within knowledge capitalism. Neoliberalism is an expression of the power of finance that has gathered pace with the internationalization of capital and the globalization of markets. Algorithmic capitalism and its dominance of the market increasingly across all asset classes has truly arrived. It is an aspect of informationalism (informational capitalism) or cybernetic capitalism, a term that recognizes more precisely the cybernetic systems similarities among various sectors of the postindustrial capitalist economy in its third phase of development—from mercantilism to

industrialism to cybernetics—linking the growth of the multinational info-utilities (e.g., Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon) and their spectacular growth in the last 20  years, with developments in biocapitalism and the informatization of biology, and fundamental changes taking place with algorithmic trading and the development of so-called financialization. Some scholars suggest that neoliberalism and globalization are themselves expressions of finance, closely tied to the development of derivatives markets and the evolution of an international financial system where the international rentiers have managed to significantly increase their share of national income often on the basis of systematic fraud, corruption, and widespread criminalization of financial practices. The current financial crisis is a systemic crisis of the entire capitalistic system based on interconnected global financial markets. Christian Marazzi (2010), in The Violence of Financial Capitalism, indicates that the global crisis is a new type of crisis: “It is the capitalist way of transferring to the economic order the social and potentially political dimension, the dimension of the resistances ripened during the phase leading up to the cycle” (p. 85). He maintains it is the first systemic and global crisis of neoliberal financial capitalism that began with the crisis of the Fordist model of accumulation and the consequent deregulation of the banking system during the 1970s. One of the most significant alternatives to emerge against the entrenched power of neoliberalism and its market fundamentalism is the openness movement based on expanding the commons. The prevailing dogma of individual self-interest, individual property rights, market exchange, and globalized free trade has been called into question through the commons, or openness, movement, which demonstrates that a wide range of commons both in nature and in civic life especially the Internet as platform can provide stable, equitable, and ecologically sustainable outcomes in ­ preference to the predation of markets. Development studies, in its infancy, focused on the world’s poorer countries and applied Western solutions to their problems focusing on industrialization and economic growth. Today, we are beginning to recognize that the impact of economic, political, and social forces are global and radically interconnected. It is also better understood that solutions need to reflect local values with grassroots participation based on the recognition of different cultures, histories, and identities. Perhaps most tellingly it is deemed that Western science and technology must work with and learn from indigenous knowledge systems. Even in these new partnerships, the term development looms large—development studies, cultural development, sustainable development—that

Deviance and Control

demonstrates the discourse has not yet fully liberated itself from the underlying linear logic and Hegelian metaphysics. Michael A. Peters See also Capitalism; Civil Wars; Democracy; Dictatorship; Energy Competition; Hierarchy of Needs; Keynesian Economics; Meritocracy; Religiosity; Rule of Law; Social Welfare; Socialism and Communism; Springboard Model of Dictatorship; Tragedy of the Commons; Weber’s Protestant Ethic

Further Readings Becker, G. (1964). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Escobar, A. (1995). Escobar: Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frank, A. G. (1966). The development of underdevelopment. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Friedman, M. (1962). Freedom to choose. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lenin, V. I. (2010). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1916/imp-hsc/ Marazzi, C. (2010). The violence of financial capitalism. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Peet, R. (2011). Contradictions of finance capitalism. Monthly Review, 63(7). Rostow, W. W. (1960). The stages of economic growth: A noncommunist manifesto. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015 U.N. Millennium Project. Retrieved from http://www .unmillenniumproject.org/goals/ Wallerstein, I. (1992). The West, capitalism, and the modern world system. Review, 15(4), 561–619.

Deviance

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Control

Deviance is a highly contested concept in the social sciences and beyond. As with most scholarly topics, the research on deviance includes many competing perspectives and shifting historical frameworks that can generally be divided into two main camps: (1) positivism, or consensus theories; and (2) social constructionism, or conflict theories. The former approach can be  described as conservative (conserving tradition) and  is  based on the premise that there is a shared

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understanding in society about social rules or norms, what constitutes the violation of norms, and how violations should be punished and regulated. Conflict theories are based on the premise that there is no underlying agreement about what constitutes norms or violation of norms, and that deviance is socially constructed based on the interests of those who hold or exercise power in society. Most broadly, deviance can be defined as any ­behavior that violates a social norm or a rule of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior. Deviance and conformity are forms of response individuals and ­ groups make to real or imagined pressures or threats. Norms and laws are key elements of social control used to maintain order and conformity. Rules about deviance and conformity vary dramatically across cultures and over time, which is why most contemporary scholarship on deviance tends to focus on the social bases, process, rules, and responses to deviance constructionism. Social scientific research on deviant behavior takes two major forms: (1) quantitative research that measures crime rates, for example, by relying on statistics of criminal behavior; or (2) qualitative research as seen in critical discourse analysis or historical orientations, or based on interviews examining how people (individually and collectively) come to define some conduct as deviant and other acts as normative. Deviance and conformity are the social product of real or imagined pressures and threats. To understand the concept of deviance, it is also crucial to see it as inextricably intertwined with social control—regulating the way people think, feel, and behave. Norms and laws are key elements of social control used to maintain the social order and to ensure conformity. Depending on the controlling powers in a particular historical period, people classified as deviant are subjected to an array of social control practices, such as fines, shaming, beatings, incarceration, drugging, surgical interventions, involuntary hospitalization, and even torture and execution. Social control refers to the various tactics and means used by a society to bring its transgressive members back into line with social norms. Social control can be seen in two ways: The first is internal or self-control: the processes of internalizing the norms of society, accepting them as valid, and personally investing in them. Internal social control operates by way of different agents of socialization such as the family, school, peers, and mass media. The second is external social control, which refers to the formal, semiformal, and informal (see below) efforts on the part of society to enforce social conformity. There are three general types of social control that may work in concert or separately: formal social control, semiformal social control, and informal social

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control. Formal social control relies on agents and institutions such as the police, courts, and corrections that possess the legitimate authority to force conformity or impose punishment. Semiformal social control is enacted by social institutions and social agents, such as psychologists, social workers, counselors, and mental health workers in psychiatric hospitals, who treat individuals for the purpose of the resocialization of those who break formal (law) and informal rules (norms). Semiformal agents are experts who exercise power by virtue of their specialized training and credentials; although they do not possess the power of arrest and detention, they may have an important role to play in the formal deviant’s criminal justice outcome. Informal social control refers to expressions of displeasure with, or approval of, someone’s actions, such as frowning or smiling. Given that most individuals are approval seeking, informal social control forms a cornerstone of everyday life. The social control of deviance can also be referred to as criminal and noncriminal deviance. Crime is defined as the violation of formally enacted criminal laws and can be referred to as formal deviance such as robbery, theft, assault, rape, and murder. The second type of deviant conduct refers to violations of informal norms or social rules that have not been codified into law but may elicit a negative social reaction or response. Formal social control provides functions that include (1) retribution—the idea that people should pay for a  crime they have committed; (2) deterrence—­ punishments, such as incarceration, intended to prevent people from committing future crimes; (3) rehabilitation—­ society should work to reform or rehabilitate criminals to transform them into productive members of society; and (4) societal protection—­ removing the formal deviant from the community to protect the safety of nondeviants. Lastly, a new paradigm has been emerging calling for a restorative paradigm: rather than causing harm through the damaging and traumatic effects of incarceration, it provides a communal and collective ­healing for all parties involved. Most contemporary approaches study the social construction of deviance both historically and contemporarily by examining religious, scientific, technological, moral, governmental, political, legal, medical/­ psychiatric, and popular cultural discourses and practices. Those who study deviance examine how judgments of good/bad, normal/abnormal, and moral/ immoral come to be defined, institutionalized, regulated, enforced, punished, evaded, resisted, and rejected. Such approaches examine deviance in Western society by emphasizing the role of power, knowledge, and ­politics involved in the social production, reproduction, and maintenance of categories and identities of

“Other”—negative classifications based on exclusionary rather than inclusionary practices. Heidi Rimke See also Conformity; Deterrence and Crime; Dictatorship; Human Duties; Human Rights; Obedience; Procedural Justice; System Justification

Further Readings Phol, S. (2009). Images of deviance and social control: A sociological history. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Rimke, H. (2011). The pathological approach to crime: Individually based theories. In K. Kramar (Ed.), Criminology: Critical Canadian perspectives (pp. 78–92). Toronto, Canada: Pearson. Rimke, H. (2016). Pathologizing resistance and promoting anthropophobia. In H. Ramadan & J. Shantz (Eds.), Manufacturing phobias: The political production of fear in theory and practice (pp. 17–26). Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Dictatorship A dictatorship is the type of political regime in which political officeholders are not elected in a free and competitive election and where political conflict is, or in principle may be, resolved by violence as opposed to election or the rule of law. While many definitions of dictatorship exist, the majority of scholars rely on that which is based on what dictatorship is not: If democracy is a regime in which officeholders are chosen through competitive election, then dictatorship is a political regime that fails to meet this requirement. The dictator, dictatorship’s supporters and opponents, and citizens have different political goals, and different strategies to achieve them; political actors therefore engage in political behavior just like they do in a democracy. This entry discusses the concept of ­dictatorship, typologies, politics, and policies in dictatorships.

Dictatorship: Concept and Theory Dictatorship can be understood as an analytical concept but also refers to the specific form of government. As an abstract concept, dictatorship denotes a possible solution to the problem of cooperation where a single person (or a group) is able to dictate his or her political preferences (e.g., as in the concept of benevolent dictatorship or in a dictator game in economics). Dictatorship, therefore, can be understood in abstract terms, similarly as the “perfect market,” or “the state of nature.”

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In more detail, democracy and dictatorship can be regarded as two possible solutions to the problem of order in the Hobbesian state of nature (i.e., to anarchy). In such a state, even though individuals are better off cooperating with each other, being selfish, they will instead opt not to cooperate for public good. In theory, the solution to achieve and maintain their cooperation may be consensual, based on a shared belief system and self-imposed limits on political power—democracy, or authoritarian; that is, dictatorship. In practice, it is difficult for individuals to cooperate in order to establish and maintain democracy and prevent the emergence of dictatorship instead. Almost always therefore, societies that emerge out of anarchy, such as from civil war and other calamities, or those lacking in democratic culture and civic tradition, especially societies divided along ethnic and other cleavages, find it very difficult to create and maintain the collective action mechanism that is necessary for democracy to survive. Dictatorship emerges instead. In an influential theory, Mancur Olson explained how a dictator—the so-called stationary bandit— emerges out of anarchy and imposes social order. Typically, the strongest individual, group, or institution attempts to take over less organized groups and, if successful, establishes a dictatorship. While dictatorship as a solution to the problem of order is mainly discussed in social science theories, it is not without an empirical basis. For instance, the majority of newly independent states that emerged in the 1960s in Africa were characterized by extreme ethnic fragmentation. There is no surprise that these societies were unable to solve coordination problems to sustain their fragile democratic regimes, and most descended into dictatorships instead. Dictatorship, however, is not only an abstract concept in theory. It is also the form of government, the type of political regime where political offices are not occupied following free and competitive election and where political conflict is, or in principle may be, resolved by violence as opposed to free election or the rule of law. While definitions of dictatorship exist that are based on what it does or who rules, a definition of dictatorship as not a democracy—that is, first we define democracy, then any regime that does not meet those criteria has to be a dictatorship—is accepted by the majority of scholars. It is, therefore, common to use the terms of dictatorship and nondemocracy interchangeably. Not every dictatorship looks like one. Many on the surface resemble democracy: for example, they feature multiparty elections and nominally elected offices. Some dictatorships even impose mandatory departures from office on their own dictators—a seemingly oxymoronic policy since dictators are supposed to dictate. Still, dictatorships often have routinized procedural rules for

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political elites to comply with, and the military regime in Brazil from 1964 to 1985 or China following Mao mandated their leaders to depart at regular intervals. Yet in other dictatorships, even though formal leaders may be subjected to binding term limits similar to their peers in democracies, the effective political leaders who hold real power are free from any restrictions on their time in office. For instance, even though the president of Iran may only serve two terms in office, the Supreme Leader, however, is granted perpetual tenure. What distinguishes dictatorships from democracies, however, is that the rules and elections in dictatorships are or can be manipulated. Such rules and elections are also tolerated as long as they produce the desired results. If there emerges political conflict, for instance, between two rival factions over policy or leadership, dictatorship lacks a third-party enforcement mechanism to adjudicate such conflict. This distinguishes dictatorship from democracy as the latter can always resort to free and fair ­election, constitutional provisions, and an independent judiciary. Therefore, what defines dictatorship—even those that appear peaceful and even resemble ­democracies—is that elite conflict in principle may be resolved by violence if required. For example, the 2009 presidential election in Iran, which was characterized by a rather open and competitive campaign, in the end, resulted in a rigged outcome in favor of the incumbent and in hardliners using violence to squash opposition from within the regime ranks, bringing to power ­Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his second term as president. In contrast, democracy can always hold an election to adjudicate between parties and policy disagreements, and to honor its result. In history, people referred to tyranny, despotism, and autocracy while describing “bad,” nondemocratic forms of rule. Dictatorship, understood as such, in other words nondemocracy and synonymous with tyranny, had come to be accepted by the middle of the 20th century only. What is not universally known is that in ancient Rome dictatorship was a specific (and legitimate) institution only convened in a state of ­emergency; that is, a dictator was to assume dictatorial powers for a limited period only. Its temporary nature, however, distinguished dictatorship from perpetual tyranny. It was the assumption of perpetual dictatorship by Julius Caesar that led conspirators to regard Caesar as the de facto king, and to assassinate him. Similarly, the 1793 Jacobin dictatorship in France was provisional, to deal with a national emergency. In the 20th century, however, dictatorship acquired its universally negative meaning, and even the most repressive dictatorships have to call themselves democracies (e.g., Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; not, for example, the Kim Family’s Dictatorship of Korea).

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Types of Dictatorships Although it is true that every dictatorship is not a democracy, we can distinguish between different types of dictatorships. A single-party communist regime in the Soviet Union with its rigid structure and ideology was very different from the personal rulership of Idi Amin in Uganda, from the military junta in Myanmar, and from the Saudi monarchy. What should be immediately clear is that these four equally nondemocratic regimes can be distinguished by who rules them: single party, ruler, military, and monarch. In fact, the “who rules’’ typology of dictatorships is probably the most commonly used by scholars who study nondemocratic politics. The categorization and typology building are not only intrinsically interesting but also important and may illuminate what behavior to expect from different dictatorships. Barbara Geddes, who studied politics in different nondemocratic regimes, argued that military regimes are the most likely to break down and transit to democracy. In contrast, personalist regimes are tied to the fate of their dictators and are more lasting, while party regimes are the most stable. This happens because many (but not all) military regimes regard their taking of power as temporary, to address specific grievances, and they may be willing to return to the barracks later. In contrast, political elites are more loyal in personalist regimes as they are drawn from the ruler’s inner circle and often have no other place to go; such regimes are vulnerable when something happens to their leaders, however. In turn, party cadres in party regimes are all better off if they remain united, but if a democratic transition looms, many may also foresee the future as democratic politicians. There are, however, many ways we can distinguish between dictatorships. Scholars have also offered typologies based on the size of the elite group necessary for the survival of dictators, based on whether dictators prioritize loyalty or repression as goals, and based on the extent of their penetration of society. Also, instead of using regime-type categories, we can distinguish between dictatorships based on how repressive they are. Think of an imaginary scale that ranks all political regimes based on political rights and civil liberties and that ranges from liberal democracies on one hand to the most repressive political regimes that approximate totalitarian ideal type, on the other. Totalitarianism was often applied in relation to regimes that only ruled in a dictatorial manner but that also attempted to penetrate society with ideology and remake it using ubiquitous propaganda, for example, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Dictatorships may also exhibit different features and varied behavior over their lifetimes; a political regime that is first regarded as one type of dictatorship often

evolves into a different regime type. Dictatorship may also develop into a ‘‘softer’’ or more repressive one, over time. For example, the military regime in Chile (1973–1989), initially a collective junta, became more ‘‘personalized” as General Pinochet assumed more power for himself over time and came to dominate other generals. In contrast, the Soviet regime under Stalin in 1924–1953 was quite different from “later’’ Soviet, equally nondemocratic, but less personalized and less repressive, regimes. A dictator is also different from a dictatorship; a dictatorship does not have to end with the departure of a particular dictator. The Soviet Union had seven political leaders in its entire 1917–1991 history; the military regime in Argentina had six in only 8 years from 1976 to 1983. These two regimes, however, continued after departures of particular leaders, barring their last ones. In general, leaders can be overthrown or assassinated, but some can also die in office like kings only to be succeeded by their offspring (as in North Korea); some even depart from office peacefully. It is also true that dictatorships may be replaced by democracies. In the majority of cases however, by some accounts in three out of four, the dictatorship continues as one dictator is merely replaced by another.

Politics in Dictatorships A dictator is the most important political actor in a dictatorship. It is, however, incorrect to assume that all dictators exercise their power alone and that they don’t have to take into account elite and other interests. Dictators rule together with the ruling groups that support them, and many dictatorships are also governed collectively (e.g., military juntas); citizens may also exercise their influence, especially if they are organized and capable of rebellion. There is politics in dictatorships, albeit different from its democratic counterpart. Dictators, like all politicians across the world, desire to remain in office. In fact, the dictator’s main policy goal is to survive in office; everything else is secondary. Countries may become hostages to one particular individual at the helm who wants to prolong his (almost all dictators are male) stay in office at whatever cost; one’s survival in office becomes (the only) national policy. Because many dictators assume power unconstitutionally (for example, in a coup), commit abuses, and enrich themselves while in office, they do not look forward to life out of office in retirement. Running nonprofit foundations and lecturing tours is not for them, as they have legitimate fears for their immunity. Unlike democratic politicians who have to concede to the will of the people at elections or comply with constitutional term limits,

Dictatorship

dictators have fewer constraints on their authority. They can manipulate elections and rewrite constitutional provisions in order to achieve political longevity. Some dictatorships constrain their leaders and, as discussed earlier, mandate their departures from office. Almost always, dictators are replaced by elite insiders rather than by popular rebellion. Dictators must, therefore, make efforts to ensure that their political ­supporters remain loyal. Depending on the type of dictatorship, such supporters typically hail from the military, political party, dictator’s family and clients, the wealthy, or all of the above. Dictators can share the spoils of office by offering important posts; in fact, the establishment of a dominant ruling political party in a dictatorship that did not previously have one can be seen as a power-sharing mechanism between dictators and their supporters. Dictators can also offer rent-seeking opportunities to their closest supporters: rigged public tenders, privatization of enterprises in favor of their cronies, and policies that promote the interests of particular individuals and firms, among other things. As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his coauthors underline, what may be mistakenly perceived as a shortsighted or bad economic policy from the public-interest point of view may be a perfectly rational policy from a dictator’s standpoint, as the latter needs to satisfy his supporters in order to stay in office. Dictatorship, therefore, may endow its supporters with remarkable economic opportunities and political careers that they would not have been able to have in a democracy. Therefore, it is often in the vested interest of regime insiders to ensure the survival of dictatorship. By design, however, dictatorship lacks a third-party enforcement mechanism to mediate elite conflicts such as a regular election or a binding constitution; the ­possibility of political violence, therefore, cannot be excluded. Elite supporters may decide that their dictator is about to overstep the boundaries of their powersharing arrangement and have him replaced, or worse. Elites may also be dissatisfied with the policies advanced by a dictator that are contrary to their interests—for example, that provoke foreign sanc­ tions. In turn, a dictator may feel insecure in the presence of an autonomous military and powerful ­ political party that may be capable of carrying out a coup and depose the former. Therefore, the world of dictatorships is full of “extra-electoral” battles between rulers and elites and between elite factions. This explains the ever-present danger of coups launched by regime insiders against the dictator as well as purges and replacements initiated by a dictator against his erstwhile supporters. The politics are, or may always become, violent in a dictatorship.

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A successful dictator who is able to amass enough power at the expense of other political actors and institutions and can install more loyal supporters in their place, emerges supreme and rules uncontested, often dying in his own bed, e.g., Hafez Assad (1971–2000) of Syria, Ruhollah Khomeini (1979–1989) of Iran, or Francisco Franco (1936–1975) of Spain. In a way, such a dictator becomes a focal point around whom elites coordinate their future expectations, an institution by itself. Such dominant dictators can also be ousted, but not as easily as those who have been in office for only a few years. There are two serious problems that almost all dictatorships find very difficult to deal with. One is the succession problem and the second is the challenge of adequate information for policy-making. Even the strongest dictators die eventually. Succession may bring about a new dictator with a new set of supporters that will in turn replace an old ruling group in power. While some dictatorships are able to regulate succession peacefully, such as Mexico under the PRI party from 1929 to 2000, the majority experience uncertainty and even violence at the time of succession. In contrast, democracy with elections and binding constitutions to mitigate elite conflict does not have such a problem. Second, as the dictator accumulates more and more power and installs more loyal—though not necessarily more capable—supporters, the free flow of information is disrupted. The ruler’s supporters become reluctant to report true information if the latter endangers their position or provokes the dictator’s wrath. In fact, it may be incentive compatible to transmit only information that is in line with the ruler’s beliefs or expectations. As a result, an insulated dictator may become detached from reality and policy-making will be disrupted, which in turn may lead to economic or even military disasters. Democracy, in contrast, has free communications media capable of transmitting alternative information. Dictatorship must also manage its citizens. Citizens who are able to organize into parties or opposition groups may be repressed or (if they have political ambitions) co-opted into the ranks of regime elites. Because of the difficulty of launching collective action against a dictatorship—the lack of such a mechanism brings about dictatorship in the first place—most dictatorships are capable of preventing rebellion by their citizenry and mainly have to fear the enemy within, as discussed earlier. In turn, citizens in dictatorships choose between exit, voice, and loyalty. They can emigrate—during the cold war this option was banned by many dictatorships; many emigrated internally by choosing not to participate in the regime’s rituals and institutions. They can

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raise their voice in protest or acquiesce and even become loyal. While citizens living in a democracy may associate dictatorships with the mass repression of citizens, in reality, most dictatorships only have to practice selective repression, such as arresting party leaders or threatening activists with a job loss, to keep their citizens docile. Although some individuals in a dictatorship may genuinely prefer it to democracy, the majority simply calculate the costs and benefits of acquiescence versus rebellion. Short of dramatic events that may bring about momentous changes in people’s minds about how strong a dictatorship is and triggering a popular revolution, as in the 2011 Arab Spring protest, in everyday situations individuals in dictatorships engage in what is known as preference falsification, whereby they publicly express their support for the regime while their true private political preferences may be different, or indifferent. They rationally choose to get on with their daily life, participating in regime-sanctioned rituals, such as elections. Whereas dictatorships of old typically based their legitimacy on the will of some deity—admittedly, some contemporaneous regimes such as Saudi Arabia or Iran still use religious ideology or aspects thereof to justify dictatorial rule—or on science, almost all contemporary nondemocratic and democratic regimes alike legitimate their rule by the will of the people. In contrast to democratic elections, elections in dictatorships are meant to project the invincibility of the regime and demoralize the opposition by amassing supermajorities reaching 100% of votes cast; elections may also serve to monitor local elites and their performance to get out the vote or to please foreign donors. Citizens who participate in such elections and who are able to observe the regime’s overwhelming victories may become apathetic and abstain from supporting the opposition in the future. Still, elections are inherently dangerous to dictatorships. Now and then, some dictators miscalculate and give an opportunity for their opponents to mobilize their supporters and overthrow the incumbent. Typically, it only happens in hybrid, or competitive authoritarian, regimes, not in full-blown dictatorships. For example, to the great surprise of Slobodan Miloševic´ of Serbia in 2000, citizens took to the streets after he attempted to steal the election and his erstwhile supporters defected.

Policies of Dictatorships Scholars have long investigated whether dictatorships are different from democracies in terms of their policies or the effects on the economy. In a magisterial study,

Adam Przeworski and his coauthors found that democracies and dictatorships exhibit very similar rates of economic growth, but there was more variance among dictatorships; that is, while there are dictatorships that may outperform democracies, just as likely one can encounter an economic basket case and complete disaster also among dictatorships. Also, democracy is a safer bet not only in terms of its economic growth, but also for international peace as dictatorships are more prone to initiate military conflict than democracies. Dictatorships, lacking accountability, are also generally more corrupt than democracies. Indeed, one of the tools of staying in office for dictators is to distribute rents to their supporters. Certainly, such practices are also common in democracies, and not all dictators tolerate corruption: Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore famously arrested his own supporters for corruption. Still, even though dictatorships exist that promote development and are steered by rulers who appear benevolent, even such regimes have the “who guards the guardians” problem: Dictatorships that can impose order can also extract possessions and infringe on the liberties of citizens. Even benevolent rulers may be replaced by capricious kleptocrats. Dictatorships also lack the capacity to correct policy mistakes via elections if necessary and may always resort to policies that promote survival in office rather than public good. Most important, irrespective of other effects, it is the effects on human rights and respect for human dignity that most clearly distinguish democracy from dictatorship. Alexander Baturo See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Collective Action; Competitive Authoritarianism; Corruption; Death of Leaders; Democracy; Election Rigging; Hybrid Regimes; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Rent-Seeking Behavior

Further Readings Brooker, P. (2000). Non-democratic regimes: Theory, government, and politics. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Bueno de Mesquita, B., Smith, A., Siverson, R., & Morrow, J. (2003). The logic of political survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gandhi, J. (2008). Political institutions under dictatorship. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Geddes, B. (1999). What do we know about democratization after twenty years? Annual Review of Political Science, 2, 115–144. Linz, J. (2000). Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Diplomacy Olson, M. (1993). Dictatorship, democracy, and development. American Political Science Review, 87(3), 567–576. Przeworski, A., Alvarez, M., Cheibub, J., & Limongi, F. (2000). Democracy and development: Political institutions and wellbeing in the world, 1950–1990. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Svolik, M. (2012). The politics of authoritarian rule. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Diplomacy Diplomacy is one of the most central concepts in international relations. It has long played a vital role in instituting and maintaining peace among states. Generally speaking, diplomacy is the process through which states conduct their foreign relations. It is a principal means for allies to cooperate and for adversaries to resolve conflicts without force. In a narrower sense, diplomacy is the implementation of foreign policy, as distinct from the study of policy formation. It reflects in this sense how states communicate, bargain, influence one another, and adjust their differences. As the individual agents of diplomacy, diplomats can influence policy through their negotiation with the representatives of other countries. Ambassadors, ministers, and envoys are official spokespersons for their country abroad, and the instruments through which states maintain regular direct contact. Although nowadays messages can be rapidly transmitted from one state to another, only personal, face-to-face encounters ensure the privacy and authenticity of diplomatic exchanges. Diplomacy, then, involves the exchange of ambassadors, the maintenance of embassies in foreign capitals, the dispatch of messages through officially accredited emissaries, and participation in conferences and other direct negotiations. The need for diplomacy arises from the fact that most foreign policies are stated very generally, which leaves considerable space for interpreting the proper course of action for achieving and maintaining peace. As such, there are numerous occasions when the demands of a particular situation might justify an exception to policy, requiring a state to rely solely on the wisdom of its diplomatic officers in the field. It falls to the diplomats to reconcile competing voices and to give coherence, emphasis, and interpretation to their state’s foreign policy. Diplomats, in other words, must constantly balance the need to protect their state’s interests and to avoid conflict with other states. On the one hand, therefore, diplomacy constitutes a vehicle through which a state asserts itself and represents its concerns to the world. On the other, it remains a principal means for

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conciliating competing national interests: a fundamental and functional tool that states use to get their way without arousing the animosity of other states. In short, there are three main functions of diplomacy: intelligence gathering, image management, and policy implementation. An embassy gathers information on the thinking of the local political leadership, the state of the local economy, and the nature of the political opposition—knowledge that is critical for predicting internal problems and anticipating changes in foreign policy. Diplomatic representatives are the eyes and ears of their government; their cables and reports form part of the raw material from which foreign policy is developed. Diplomacy also aims at creating a favorable image of the state. Modern communication makes it even more possible to shape perceptions and attitudes around the globe. States today have vast public relations apparatuses whose purpose is to place their actions and policies in a favorable light. Foreign embassies supply local news media with official interpretations and try to avoid negative publicity, or explain it away. Finally, diplomats administer the overseas programs of the state. This continues a long tradition of negotiating peace that can be traced to ancient times.

Premodern Practices In ancient civilizations, treaty making and articulating codes of conduct marked early forms of diplomacy. The Sumerian city-states Lagash and Umma, for example, negotiated perhaps the oldest known conditions of peace around 3100 BCE. Similarly, the pact Ramses II and Hattusili II agreed upon in 1279 BCE remains one of the few written records of a military alliance such as the Egyptians and Hittites frequently concluded. In  China, Confucius promoted the Grand Union of ­Chinese States (551–479 BCE), an ideal that sought to unite warring states into an enlightened and benevolent  China. Around the same time, Greek citystates also made peace, sought allies, and established confederations among themselves. They offered asylum to refugees, arbitrated disputes, and protected personal liberties and property. Equally important in ancient civilizations was the formulation of codes of conduct. The Hindu Code of Manu (100 BCE) and the Book of Deuteronomy in Jewish law specified rules under which one ought to behave in war. Even if these codes could not always be enforced, they nonetheless testify to the importance of diplomacy in governing relations between communities and in different political constellations. Like other empires in the ancient world, the Romans treated conquered peoples as tributaries and vassals. But they left a legacy of civil law that medieval and early modern European jurists would later turn into

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principles of international law. Rome applied the concept of just war, for example, to justify the punishment of disobedient vassals; not to wage war with other nations. Likewise, jus gentium was in essence private law applied to Roman citizens and noncitizens belonging to the Roman state. The concept of just war, in particular, gained prominence in the Middle Ages. The medieval ideal of res public Cristiana sought universal peace among Christians. But the growth and emergence of a wide variety of monarchies and papal institutions and the coexistence of different kinds of law, civil (Roman), customary (German), and ecclesiastical (Christian), impeded the development of international law. The crusades, on the other hand, offered both Latin Christendom and Islam an opportunity to redefine holy war and jihad as wars justified on religious grounds and carrying, in both cases, a degree of redemption and inner renewal. Just war thus infused Latin Christendom and Islam with a cohesive doctrine on war. The crusades also established commercial and diplomatic relations between Islamic and Christian civilization. Islamic rulers allowed Venetian merchants in the eastern Mediterranean to establish communities and self-govern these according to their own laws and customs. The founding principles of these so-called nations continued when the Ottoman Empire granted a large degree of autonomy to Christian ambassadors and consuls residing in the Levant. The sultan’s permission (capitulations), even if unilateral, offered a model for extraterritoriality and the inviolability of diplomats as Renaissance Italy dramatically changed diplomatic practices. In the late 15th century, Italian city-states replaced the desire for Christian unity with pragmatic considerations for preserving the state’s interests. They turned diplomacy into a rationalized, political enterprise by appointing resident ambassadors tasked with gathering intelligence and negotiating arrangements that benefited the state, not pax Cristiana.

Modern Formation The rise and quick dissemination of resident embassies throughout Europe in the 1500s reinforced early modern state building. The conference at Westphalia (1648) reflected the efficiency of maintaining an interstate system of embassies and heralded an age in which ­European states refrained from waging war over religion ever again. The newly formed balance of power reflected the principles of jus gentium, a Roman law that early modern scholars had redefined from a domestic into an international concept. The Roman private law concept of dominium, for example, now applied to territorial expansion. In the 17th and 18th centuries, however, diplomacy gained new meaning in a colonial

context. Besides appropriation and occupation (dominium), treaty making became a vital tool for European states to establish relations with sovereignties overseas. Treaties often entailed commercial and military alliances that, on the surface, breathed consent and reciprocity. In the long run, however, they often turned coercive and legitimized colonial intervention. Differently ranked agents played a crucial role in establishing contact and negotiating these pacts. In contrast to the formation of the perfectly versatile and skilled resident ambassador active in Europe, agents overseas, often in the Americas, “went native” by adjusting to customary practices of the other party to soften negotiations. In the Far East, however, Europe’s law of nations as a partnership between “equal” sovereign states often clashed with other geopolitical systems, such as the Chinese, which was based on hegemony. When Europe’s grasp over the world’s continents reached its apotheosis in the late 19th century, former colonies and independent states adopted the resident embassy as the model of the diplomatic institution. The 19th century also witnessed a reconfiguration of diplomatic relations within Europe. The Congress of Vienna (1815) ended the age of revolutions and established a balance of power (the Concert of Europe) that employed Realpolitik as the desired strategy to prevent war and keep conservative authorities in power. At the same time, the crystallization of nation-states and their bureaucracies stimulated the increasing professionalization of diplomatic institutions. Foreign offices emerged, often led by trained diplomats. The body of professional diplomats and civil servants grew dramatically, as did diplomats’ abuse of privileges. On the other hand, 20th-century violence by states and nonstate actors ­ alike raised questions about the inviolability of diplomat and embassy. The 1961 Vienna Convention settled the matter by specifying the privileges of a diplomatic mission that ensured immunity from coercive and hostile hosts. (By April 2014, 190 states had ratified this foundational international framework.) The Vienna Convention reflected the changing character of diplomacy in the post–World War II period. The rise of mass communication and the increasing influence of the public in steering national politics meant diplomacy had also gained a public audience that demands accountability. For example, Amnesty International used its consultative status (under the United Nations Charter) to name and shame in public the abusers of human rights. Furthermore, diplomacy was no longer the prerogative of the nation-state. By the late 20th century, the rapid emergence of nonstate actors, that is, nongovernmental organizations (e.g., the United Nations), civil society organizations (e.g., Greenpeace), and international corporations (e.g., Microsoft, Toyota), began to

Diplomacy

pressure and augment the global diplomatic apparatus. Diplomacy was no longer a tool to promote the interests of the state, but became a rich and diversified vehicle to embrace cultural, economic, and numerous other interests of today’s global citizens.

Multilateral Practices Despite these rapid advances, some argue that there has been a marked decline in the importance of formal ambassadors. Nowadays, ambassadors communicate through an increasing number of cables and instructions as well as secure challenges on the Internet (e-mail). This has led more states to take a more hands-on approach or what has come to be known as summit diplomacy, in which top policy-makers negotiate with one another directly. Similarly, when policy-makers send special envoys to negotiate, they engage in what many refer to as shuttle diplomacy. This latter type of diplomacy reached a state of high art in the 1970s, when Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state of the United States, sent envoys to numerous places in Latin America and Asia. However, with increasing interdependence among states and the emergence of a global international society, more states have come to rely on a multilateral style of diplomacy. This style underscores the complexity of negotiations in various issue areas, including arms control, trade regulation, nuclear proliferation, legal accountability, and terrorism. Here, the United Nations (UN) and other intergovernmental organizations hold periodic conferences to address problems of food shortages, population growth, the environment, and other issues of global concern. This multilateral forum has paved the way for greater consensus and cooperation on an international level. For example, the UN helped institute the venue for voting on the institutionalization of a new International Criminal Court (ICC), in which 168 states convened in Rome in 1998 to establish a legal mechanism that would hold accountable the worst perpetrators of gross human rights atrocities (and end the protection of these perpetrators under national amnesty laws). However, so far the ICC has only convicted African political leaders, which has led critics to argue that Western political leaders are too powerful to fear prosecution by the ICC.

Theories of Coercion Diplomatic outcomes are reached through a range of measures and strategies. Many of these are stipulated in Chapter VII of the UN Charter, including blockades, economic and trade sanctions, embargoes, and precision air strikes. Implementing such measures reflects the costs and benefits of calculated threats, or ex ante demands.

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The ex ante mix of punishment and inducements, in this case, can take the form of either a carrot-and-stick or titfor-tat approach. States that seek to force other states into negotiations typically issue an ultimatum to induce the coercer to comply with their demands. Coercive diplomacy, as it is called, relies heavily on the credibility of threats issued by the coercing state. According to ­Lawrence Freedman, credibility involves the deliberate and purposive use of overt threats to influence the strategic choice of another state. Strategic coercion, in this sense, is based on two main objectives: (1) to study the forms of punishment needed to reverse or stop the action of the adversary; and (2) to assess the responsiveness of the coerced to the coercer’s threat, or the different ways in which the target constructs its views of reality. Both objectives, in Freedman’s view, require a deeper understanding and appreciation of the strategic dynamics of coercion. His concept of strategic coercion, then, stresses the range of options available to the target. These are options that form the basis of Alexander George’s approach to coercive diplomacy. Like ­Freeman’s approach, his theory of coercive diplomacy stresses the need for inducements and punishments to convince the enemy that the costs of noncompliance will outweigh the costs of compliance. It frames the task of coercive diplomacy as one of dissuading the enemy from continuing to do what it is doing. Compared with George’s theory, coercive diplomacy itself is derived from Thomas Schelling’s concept of compellance. Compellance refers to the use of military capabilities or punishment to force the enemy to comply with the coercer’s demands. By favoring the benefits that come with the actual display of force, compellance is intended to deny the coerced state either the available opportunities or time to counter the tactics of the coercer. In short, compellance is about forgoing the costs of inducements associated with coercive diplomacy. Robert Pape, for instance, argues that denial (e.g., the threat to launch a massive ground force invasion) creates in the enemy the rapid loss of will or morale to resist the coercer. Similarly, a shock-and-awe option, as illustrated during the early stages of the Iraq War when the U.S.-led alliance bombed the headquarters of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, represents a form of brute, ­overwhelming force. Like denial, it relies on the use of military force to win an early surrender. The danger, as one might expect with such strategies, is that brute force is never infallible. The coercer, for instance, may underestimate the extent and degree of the enemy’s resistance, thereby exposing the excessively high costs of using excessive force. Indeed, as some have argued, the main problem with compellance is that it accepts the risk of severe consequences, should the target choose to resist the coercer’s offensive threats.

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George bases his research on several prominent cases of crisis, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ­Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, and the Iraq War. While it is often difficult to assess the degree of success in these cases, partly because of the high human and economic costs associated with military coercion, it is widely agreed that the Kosovo War was a successful case of coercive diplomacy. Likewise, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 illustrates how U.S. president John F. Kennedy forced Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, to reverse his decision to install missile launchers and warheads in Cuba. Only later would it be revealed that Kennedy had withdrawn American long-range warheads and launchers from Turkey as a carrot, or inducement, to Khrushchev to reverse his action.

Normative and Practical Challenges In today’s multilateral diplomacy, therefore, states need to coordinate among themselves to address the increasingly complex sources of threats, including human rights atrocities. In the case of the war in Kosovo (1999), the multilateral diplomatic efforts to stop human rights abuses were designed to induce compliance with human rights norms. However, in the end, they showed how the use of ultimatums could also facilitate the outcome of war, one in which political leaders and policy-makers came to rely on the ultimatum to justify the waging of war on an enemy of human rights. The problem, then, with coercive diplomacy in this area of international relations is that morality can become the precursor to war, anticipating the difficulties of reconciling military force with the political objectives of ending the war. Accordingly, the use of military power underscores the ambivalence toward the threat of military power. If anything, this should require us to treat this problematic function as a limit of what we might call a hard power approach used by states and institutions to force negotiations. For Joseph Nye, this is why we need to further prioritize the “soft power” of institutions. A soft-power diplomatic approach refers to the process of cultivating the admiration and trust of others in order to gain influence through means other than coercion or military force. It represents a shift in the way one thinks about the outcomes of multilateral diplomacy, insofar as it stresses how the rules, principles, and procedures can be applied to secure peaceful outcomes for all sides involved in various issue areas in international relations. Despite the rise of Islamic Jihad and the current war in Syria (2011–), soft power still remains a dynamic and fluid approach for resolving various international issues. Steven C. Roach and Erica Heinsen-Roach

See also Allegiances; Disengagement; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Energy Competition; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Political Apologies; Reconciliation; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution; Saber Rattling; StateSponsored Terror; United Nations; United Nations Security Council

Further Readings Frey, L. S., & Marsha, L. (1999). The history of diplomatic immunity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. George, A., & Simons, L. (1994). The limits of coercive diplomacy (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gordon, C., & George, A. (1990). Force and statecraft (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kennan, G. (2012). American diplomacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kissinger, H. (1994). Diplomacy. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Mattingly, G. (1955). Renaissance diplomacy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Nussbaum, A. (1958). A concise history of the law of nations (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: Macmillan. Nye, J. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics. New York, NY: Public Affairs. Sharp, P. (1999). For diplomacy: Representation, and the study of international relations. International Studies Review, 1, 33–57. Watkins, J. (2008, Winter). Toward a new diplomatic history of medieval and early modern Europe. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38(1), 1–14.

Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Direct democracy, in contrast to representative democracy, describes political decisions of factual issues by voters themselves. In a representative democracy, politicians in parliament and government formulate and pass laws on behalf of the voters who have elected them. Voters’ political will is thus transformed in representative democracy; for example, by the deliberations taking place in parliaments and parliamentary committees, such that it only indirectly influences political outcomes. In direct democracy, voters directly shape political decisions.

Instruments of Direct Democracy Historically, direct democracy took place in town meetings, for example, in the Athenian democracy and the Germanic Thing (assembly). Still today, town meetings exist in the United States and in Switzerland, the two

Direct Versus Indirect Democracy

countries most widely using instruments of direct democracy. In two Swiss cantons, Appenzell Inner Rhodes and Glarus, cantonal meetings still exist. There is debate as to what extent town meetings meet requirements of modern democracy such as secret and free voting given that voters openly raise their hands in such meetings. Modern instruments of direct democracy are referendums and initiatives. In referendums, voters decide on laws and statutes (statutory referendum) or on constitutional amendments (constitutional referendum) that have been prepared, formulated, and passed in government and parliament. The referendum thus offers a veto possibility and serves as a brake in the political process. There are mandatory and optional referendums. In the first case, government and parliament are required to hold a referendum. In the second case, voters can demand a referendum collecting a prespecified number of signatures in a prespecified time. The requirements are laid down in the constitution or in similar documents of public law. These referendums and procedures are binding such that everyone can adjust in advance. Initiatives provide voters with an instrument to propose laws or constitutional amendments directly after they have managed to collect a prespecified number of signatures. If the initiative is on the ballot and passes, it becomes law. Frequently, the government or the parliament has to formulate legally precisely such laws or constitutional amendments afterward, but without changing the meaning of the initiative. Initiatives thus work like a gas pedal, pushing political issues not adopted by representatives. They may also provide veto power whenever used to unbundle political packages agreed upon in legislative deals. In addition, initiatives shift agenda-setting power from representatives to voters. Both, initiatives and referendums, supplement representative democracy such that pure direct democracy seldom exists today. In plebiscites, government or parliament demands that voters decide directly on particular political issues. In contrast to referendums, there is no prespecified right of voters to decide. The use of plebiscites remains at the discretion of representatives. This discretion changes the outcomes, as representatives can use plebiscites whenever they think it serves their purposes. Referendums and initiatives, however, allow for a control of political outcomes in well-specified procedures. The control function of plebiscites is at best blurred; at worst, plebiscites are used to lever out checks and balances.

Information Versus Control Theoretically, the main trade-off regarding direct versus representative democracy is the one between information and control. Following a division-of-labor argument,

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politicians specialize in politics such that their decisions are based on broader information. Representative democracy has an information advantage. A closer look reveals that this comparison is more complicated. First, voters in direct democracy are better informed than voters in representative democracy. They need to know more to make proper decisions and thus have incentives to gather information. Second, the kind of specialization that representatives offer is a comparative advantage in doing politics, finding compromises, bargaining efficiently, and so on. It does not necessarily involve knowledge in particular policy areas. This additional knowledge is generated in parliament by a further step of specialization in committees. In government, the administration (the bureaucrats) generates additional knowledge. Thus, there is an information advantage of representative democracy, but it is lower than usually supposed, and it is generated through further steps of specialization. The additional specialization leads to a vulnerability of representative democracy to special interests. Interest groups may concentrate their activities, in particular campaign spending, on pivotal representatives in committees or capture regulatory agencies. Referendums and initiatives provide possibilities to control such behavior and induce political outcomes to be closer to voter preferences. The arguments in favor of direct democracy are not uncontested. Already James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 argues against direct democracy, fearing that it leads to decisions for the few instead of the many because interest groups (“factions”) have an impact on voter decisions. Indeed, campaign financing by interest groups is present in referendum campaigns as in elections for Congress or other parliaments. Studies show that such campaign spending induces a higher chance of a proposal’s being defeated at the ballot box in referendum campaigns, but it cannot turn decisions in its own favor if a proposal needs to pass. Overall, there is no convincing evidence comparing the intensity of interest group influence on policy outcomes in direct and indirect democracies. However, there is convincing evidence that political outcomes in direct democracy are closer to voter preferences.

Differences in Policy Outcomes Being closer to voter preferences does not necessarily imply that policy outcomes are better in direct democracies in a normative sense. For example, there may be a conflict between direct democracy and the rule of law if minority rights are insufficiently observed. The court system must ensure the protection of minority rights in direct as in representative democracy.

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Regarding economic and fiscal policy outcomes, direct democracy has a rather positive effect overall. Direct democracy is associated with lower public spending and revenue, lower public debt, a higher government efficiency, more targeted income redistribution (with less funds required), higher gross domestic product per employee, and a higher satisfaction of voters. The evidence providing such results has mainly been obtained for the United States and Switzerland. There is not much contradicting evidence. Only in the case of Germany, higher spending results from the initiative mainly because that subfederal system allows for externalizing the financing of local public goods to other jurisdictions. Lars P. Feld See also Democracy; Dictatorship; Elite Theory (Pareto); Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership; Voting, History of

Further Readings Asatryan, Z. (2016). The indirect effects of direct democracy: Local government size and non-budgetary voter initiatives in Germany. International Tax and Public Finance, 23, 580–601. Asatryan, Z., & De Witte, K. (2015). Direct democracy and local government efficiency. European Journal of Political Economy, 39, 58–66. Feld, L. P., & Kirchgässner, G. (2006). Fiscal policy and direct democracy: Institutional design determines outcomes. In A. F. Ott & R. J. Cebula (Eds.), The Elgar companion to public economics: Empirical public economics (pp. 215–241). Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar. Lupia, A., & Matsusaka J. G. (2004). Direct democracy: New approaches to old questions. Annual Review of Political Science, 7, 463–482. Matsusaka, J. G. (2004). For the many or the few: How the initiative process changes American government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Matsusaka, J. G. (2010). Popular control of public policy: A quantitative approach. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 5, 133–167. Olken, B. (2010). Direct democracy and local public goods: Evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia. American Political Science Review, 104, 243–267.

Discrimination Discrimination refers to biased actions that harm and disadvantage people on the basis of their group membership. Notably, discrimination is distinct from

(but related to) stereotyping (i.e., beliefs, associations, and attributions about the characteristics of groups and their members) and prejudice (i.e., emotions, evaluations, and attitudes toward groups and their members). Discrimination is an important aspect of  intergroup relations and occurs not only at an interpersonal level (between individuals) but also at the institutional and organizational levels (e.g., policies that perpetuate different outcomes for different groups). This entry contrasts blatant and subtle discrimination, discusses several psychological processes involved in them, provides real-world examples of discrimination, and concludes with observations on why psychological processes are important in understanding discriminatory political behavior.

Blatant Versus Subtle Discrimination In the United States, blatant discrimination (explicit forms) is not as common as it once was (e.g., women are no longer restricted from voting; interracial marriages are no longer illegal). Although blatant discrimination has been mostly relegated to the past, subtle discrimination (implicit forms) remains pervasive. For instance, a college professor may treat first-generation students (i.e., students who are the first in their family to attend college) differently owing to low expectations, or an employer may not hire women who apply to maledominated settings (e.g., construction, business boardrooms). Subtle discrimination is often less obvious and arguably less intentional than blatant discrimination.

Psychological Causes of Discrimination Social-cognitive theories, such as social identity theory or self-categorization theory, posit that people gain positive self-esteem from the social groups they identify with, and thus may favor their own groups (in-groups) over other groups (out-groups). People with strong ingroup preferences are not necessarily motivated to disadvantage others, but their motivation to advantage their in-group can indeed result in discriminatory behaviors. For instance, a White man with strong ingroup preferences may vote for another White man ­(in-group member) instead of a Black woman (­ out-group member), not necessarily because he feels negatively toward Black women, but rather, because he wants to advantage the group he identifies with. Social dominance theory posits that a multitude of forces, ranging from human evolution to individual ­differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy and inequality (i.e., social dominance orientation [SDO]), influences the extent to which one supports ­hierarchy-enhancing ideologies (e.g., racism) and thus

Disengagement

discriminates against members of other groups. Rightwing authoritarianism (RWA)—the extent to which one supports social conservatism, obedience to authority, and punitiveness toward those who violate social norms—also plays an important role in understanding discrimination. Whereas SDO is important for understanding discrimination when there are conflicts over material resources and existing group boundaries, RWA is important for understanding discrimination when there are cultural conflicts. For instance, someone high in SDO may dislike a minority group member moving into a managerial position because it threatens the existing hierarchy, whereas someone high in RWA may also dislike the minority individual moving into a managerial position, but for the reason that the person is perceived as bringing in values and beliefs that are in opposition to those of the dominant group. Taken together, situations consisting of clearly defined and highly salient groups, as well as perceptions of economic and value conflict, often provide a context for discrimination.

Examples of Discrimination Although scholars have outlined how discrimination has changed over time (from blatant to more subtle), and have identified a myriad of sources that underlie it, much research shows that discrimination continues to be a universal issue that can result in severe group-based inequalities. For instance, teachers who have low expectations for girls are less likely to encourage them to pursue technical careers, which can lead to girls being underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Likewise, physicians who hold subtle anti-Black biases (e.g., the belief that Black patients are not compliant) are less likely to treat the ailments of Black patients, which can lead to race-based health disparities. As additional examples, in the housing and retail markets, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to have mortgage loans rejected, which prevents them from entering the middle class. In the labor market, older job applicants are assumed to be less competent, and job applicants with Black-sounding names are assumed to be less qualified, and they therefore receive fewer callbacks for interviews than younger applicants or applicants with White-sounding names. Although blatant, violent discrimination is arguably less prevalent in modern society, examples of such discrimination remain common. In the United States, Black Americans are often seen as more aggressive and violent than White Americans, which makes Black Americans more likely to experience school expulsion, incarceration, and even death sentencing. In China and India, because of traditional preferences for male children,

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female fetuses are disproportionately aborted. Economic conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu peoples led to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which approximately 800,000 Tutsi people were killed by Hutu militias. Thus, blatant discrimination persists, even if discrimination often manifests in more subtle forms.

Implications for Political Behavior Forms of discrimination have changed over time, but subtle forms of discrimination can nonetheless lead to inequality between social groups in health, education, and occupational status, to name only a few highly consequential domains. Likewise, discriminatory political behavior (e.g., discriminatory law enforcement and voting patterns) remains commonplace and is critically influenced by cognitive and social motivations, such as in-group favoritism, SDO, and RWA. Political behavior, like any other behavior, is influenced not only by the political landscape, but also by processes internal to the minds of individuals. Thus any effort to understand discriminatory political behavior must take into account sociopolitical context, personality and individual differences, and their interplay. Steven Othello Roberts and Arnold K. Ho See also Affirmative Action; Authoritarian Personality; Citizenship; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Equality of Opportunity; Ethnicity; Voter Disenfranchisement

Further Readings Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2010). Intergroup bias. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 5, 5th ed., pp. 1084–1121). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Disengagement Disengagement refers to the varied mechanisms of ­individual demobilization from civic or political commitment within voluntary groups (parties, unions, nongovernmental organizations, social movements). ­ Literature that more or less directly broaches the question of disengagement emerges from life-course ­ sociology, especially concerning the question of the social effects of aging; from social psychology, concerning the social functioning of small groups and

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sociability networks; and the sociology of roles, in the Mertonian or interactionist tradition, especially in the literature on cults, divorce, and the professions, but also more recently on political activism and militancy.

to society’s readiness to grant those who leave an alternative social identity.

Varieties of Disengagement Process

The lion’s share of the literature dealing with disengagement refers to the biographical consequences of activism, with a focus on the fate of former 1960s activists, mainly in the United States, but also elsewhere, in Europe, in Latin America, and in the Arab world. They are largely based on survey questionnaires, more rarely accompanied by a qualitative section. The most promising and persuasive studies in this field are those linking individual characteristics and opinions before and after activist involvement, since without having access to earlier information on activists, it is difficult to determine the extent and significance of changes brought about by participation. Overall, despite the varied methodology employed, research is generally consistent on at least three elements. These are the long-term effects of activism, the determinants of the process of disengagement, and the typology of ways of leaving and forms of career change. All the studies agree in emphasizing that life trajectories are considerably shaped by the activist experience, primarily in three areas: political participation, family life, and professional life. In terms of political participation and ideological orientation, there is a strong chance that ex-activists are permanently oriented toward the left and more interested and active in politics than those who have never participated. The family life of ex-activists is characterized by a late entry into adult life and the roles associated with it, and a greater instability of couples, with a higher divorce rate than that of the control groups. Finally, their academic careers were more likely to be interrupted or cut short. They were concentrated in the social welfare sphere and middle-ranking or upper intellectual professions. Consequently, incomes are not very high. Their careers are also characterized by greater professional instability, notably due to their late entry into active adult life and their more frequent changes of employment. Nonetheless, it is very difficult to determine whether activism has produced a reorientation of trajectories or whether, on the contrary, it is by virtue of the same initial dispositions that the individuals studied participated, had a more distant relation with their families and to marriage, and finally chose one profession over another. The only certainty is that the choice of career which does not enter into contradiction with an activist disposition is probably related to the individual’s continued involvement. This last point brings us to the

The process of disengagement produces singular trajectories which may include any of a wide diversity of forms and determinants, according to what causes it, the cost of defection, the manner in which it takes place and, therefore, what becomes of those who leave, which raises the question of the biographical consequences of activism. Individual demobilization is not always voluntary. It may also result from a collective decision to dissolve an organization, from the decline of an ideology, from exclusion, from deprogramming, or from being sidelined due to forced exile or a prison sentence. The modalities of individual defection vary. It may be isolated or collective, on the occasion, for example, of an organizational split, or when groups with a certain affinity leave together. One classically distinguishes between defectors, who leave in a negotiated manner; apostates, who become professional enemies of their organization; and ordinary leavers, who disappear without their withdrawal representing a significant cost, for either themselves or the organization. This is a typology which needs to be completed by adding all forms of passive defection, but also all the cases in which withdrawal is followed, and sometimes provoked, by joining another organization. Nonetheless, in every case, the vast majority of the ordinary people who leave remain invisible. Finally, the cost of the individual departure is related first to the way in which organizations impose various constraints on defections. The psychological or material cost of the defection and, therefore, its probability, are traceable to many factors. These include the extent of the sacrifices accepted to join the group (initiation rites, tests, hierarchization, and the compartmentalization of groups); the degree of socialization within the group, which reinforces emotional attachment, related to the extent of renunciation of social relations outside of the group (networks of families and friends); and, finally, the rules governing defection, sometimes made impossible by material dependence or the threat of being hunted down as a traitor. To these barriers, we must also add the existence of opportunities to reconvert acquired resources, the possibility of reconnecting with alternative sociability networks, and, finally, the social legitimacy of defection. This is linked to the social acceptance of departure, as well as

Biographical Consequences of Activism

Distributive Justice

tricky question of the overlapping of factors possibly leading to disengagement.

A Processual Approach to Disengagement Contemporary research has moved from retrospective questionnaires to using the life story as the best way to approach the issue of how activism could have been experienced in the past and to take into consideration the order in which a withdrawal occurs. More recently, scholars started to combine life stories with life history calendars and sequence analysis, which allow the systematic study of populations of biographies. The method that resulted from recourse to sequence analysis accounts at the same time for the three basic dimensions of biographies: the nature of the successive positions or statuses held by individuals, the order in which they occur, and their duration. This evolution of investigative techniques is related to the renewal of the sociology of activism inspired by interactionist approaches and, more broadly, life-course sociology. In such an approach, the focus is on the processes leading to withdrawal rather than on its determinants or what happens to those who withdraw. From this perspective, withdrawal is seen as resulting from the three interdependent levels: exhaustion of the rewards of involvement, the loss of ideological meaning, and the transformation of relations of sociability. Attention to the variability of rewards involves examining the reasons for which, at a particular stage of the life course, involvement in protest activity becomes problematic, and determining under which conditions the benefits experienced from involvement are maintained or exhausted. The impetus for individuals to reevaluate the associated rewards must be examined. Withdrawal may also be observed in the erosion of acquired beliefs within groups, which may lessen the sacrifices one is willing to make for the cause. Finally, disengagement may be interpreted in terms of the transformation of relations of sociability within groupings. Indeed, the manner in which groups support these relations both inside and outside the groups reveals an array of significant factors affecting withdrawal. For example, when individuals are part of multiple networks, they are more likely to leave the organizations; when groups are underrepresented in an organization, they experience tensions and are generally excluded from informal friendship networks created in the course of their activism. So, overall, individual withdrawal is often inseparable from tensions observable among generations of activists. Olivier Fillieule

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See also Civic Engagement; Decision Making; Elite Decision Making; False Consciousness; Indoctrination; New Left; Patriarchy; Positioning Theory; Rational Choice; Tokenism; Voter Identification

Further Readings Abbot, A. (1995). Sequence analysis: New methods for old ideas. Annual Review of Sociology, 21, 93–113. Becker, H. (1966). Outsiders. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Fillieule, O. (2010). Some elements of an interactionist approach to political disengagement. Social Movement Studies, 9(1), 1–15. Fillieule, O., & Neveu, E. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Activists forever? The long term impact of political activism in various contexts. European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR). Fuchs-Ebaugh, H. R. (1988). Becoming an ex: The process of role exit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, D. (1988). Freedom summer. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Whalen, J., & Flacks, R. (1989). Beyond the barricades: The sixties generation grows up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Distributive Justice Distributive justice is a major preoccupation for political and social psychology, not because it constitutes a major theory itself, but because it surfaces in virtually every politically relevant psychological theory, including social identity theory, social dominance orientation, relative deprivation theory, and system justification theory, to name a few. Distributive justice is fundamental to all successful human relations, be they interpersonal or intergroup. The main focus for distributive justice is how resources are, and how they ought to be, distributed among individuals, among subgroups within a larger group, and among groups themselves. Resource distribution is clearly a psychological issue in the sense that there is no independent, objective, universal answer to questions of resource distribution. Resource distribution is critically important because perceptions of an unjust distribution are associated with potentially dramatic outcomes ranging from helplessness, to anger, violence, and social movements. For example, if members of a disadvantaged minority group perceive that there is an unfair distribution of resources, then minority group members may experience any number of emotions. These can range from internally

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focused feelings such as depression, anxiety, or resignation, to externally focused emotions that may result in aggression, violence, and collective action. The next section summarizes five forms of distributive justice, with a special emphasis on equity theory. The entry continues with a discussion of three important public policies that are perceived as violating equity, and concludes by describing how distributive justice and procedural justice are related but distinct dimensions of justice that jointly contribute to perceptions of fairness.

Five Forms of Distributing Justice Social and political psychologists have found it useful to distinguish five principles to guide the just distribution of resources: equity, equality, power, need, and responsibility. Equity, together with its related concepts of “deserving” and “meritocracy,” is based on a simple proposition by equity theory: The ratio of inputs to outcomes for two actors, be they individuals or groups, must be perceived as equal. Thus, one actor might be rewarded far less than another, but the outcomes are equitable as long as the less rewarded actor made proportionally fewer inputs. The resources to be distributed at the individual or collective level may be positive, such as money, status, and power, or negative, including being fired or even tortured. Whether the outcome is positive or negative, equity requires that outcomes be proportional to inputs. If a person or group commits a crime, participants and observers expect the harshness of the punishment to fit the crime. Similarly, individuals who become chief executives, and nations who have veto power in the United Nations, are judged to be those who proportionally made the greatest inputs. The equality principle of distributive justice postulates that everyone should receive identical resources independent of input. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are two domains where an equality principle is paramount. However, some theorists would argue that equality is but a special case of equity, where all individuals have the same input and hence deserve the same outcome. In terms of the law, the only relevant input is citizenship, not wealth or power. In a similar vein, voting laws in many countries dictate that all citizens, regardless of income or status, have the same right to vote. When power is the principle defining distributive justice, powerful people receive more resources than people with less power. Since power and status are often intertwined, the power form of distributive justice also implies that individuals of higher status deserve more of the outcome. Again, equity theorists would suggest that

if a group collectively agrees that power and status are valued inputs, then it is only equitable that persons or groups of high power and status receive proportionally more resources. For example, during the era of apartheid in South Africa, many White South Africans believed they deserved more resources than other groups in society merely because they had more power and status. The application of a needs principle of distributive justice requires that resources be distributed in such a way that more resources are given to those with more urgent needs. That is, the greater the need, the more resources are allocated. The needs principle is often evoked when analyzing the relationship between mothers and children, political jurisdictions that engage in welfare programs, and nations that provide aid to struggling nations. Equity theorists would suggest that while benefactors do not receive concrete outcomes, they do receive proportional outcomes in the form of emotional, ideological, and moral outcomes. A country that offers financial assistance to a state that just experienced a catastrophic natural disaster receives the admiration and recognition of the global community. Finally, with a responsibility principle, it is the person or the group with the most responsibility that controls and distributes the resources to those who have less responsibility. From an equity perspective, the power given to prime ministers, presidents, or royalty to disburse resources is a major positive outcome in and of itself.

When Equity Is Violated Since equity is so fundamental to interpersonal and intergroup relations, people react strongly when social practices and policies are implemented that violate equity. Three such controversial measures include systemic discrimination, affirmative action, and zero tolerance. Systemic discrimination and affirmative action programs are two examples that designate group membership, be it age, gender, ethnic, or other ascribed ­grouping, as the input that warrants a differential outcome. In the case of systemic discrimination, group membership is widely rejected as a valid input that should determine outcomes. When companies, socie­ ties, or individuals are accused of having engaged in discriminatory practices, the message they receive is that group membership is an illegitimate and invalid input for determining a person’s outcomes. Affirmative action policies are designed to address a legacy of systemic discrimination by giving equal or more favorable opportunities to minorities that have been disadvantaged by discrimination. However,

Districting

affirmative action policies remain controversial in part because they violate equity by assigning positive outcomes on the basis of ascribed characteristics usually associated with group membership. Since group membership is not deemed to be a valid or relevant input meriting a preferential outcome, affirmative action is often resisted and judged to be unfair. Finally, with zero tolerance, there is a violation of equity because one’s punishment (or input) is independent of the gravity of the crime (or outcome). Under zero tolerance, a child bringing a plastic knife to school to cut a tomato receives the same severe punishment as a child who brings a gun. A policy of zero tolerance may be necessary in dire circumstances where more equitable policies have failed. If a school experiences pervasive and ongoing violence, in desperation the extreme measure of a zero tolerance policy may be implemented to protect students. However necessary a zero tolerance program might be, there will always be resistance because equity has been violated.

Toward Justice in the Distribution of Resources Distributive justice generated a vast amount of theory and research in the latter half of the 20th century. During much of this period, equity theory remained uncontested as the framework for understanding distributive justice. Clearly equity is an extremely important principle in terms of guiding the just distribution of resources. However, equity theory began to be criticized for several reasons, the most important being that equity theory has been unable to objectively define the value to be assigned to every input and outcome in a relationship. These values are psychologically defined in that they involve a consensus among group members about what inputs and outcomes are relevant, and the values to be assigned to each. Despite its importance in the field, equity theory did not address how exactly such a consensus is achieved nor which inputs match which outcomes. By the 1980s, many researchers believed that the concept of distributive justice should not be the exclusive domain of equity theory. Furthermore, research began highlighting how relational and social norms play an important role in the way people perceive resources to be distributed fairly. Most importantly, however, social and political psychology turned its attention to procedural justice: Was the resource distribution decision taken in a fair way, following a just procedure? Fair resource distribution can arise even if the procedure is unfair, and a fair procedure does not guarantee a fair distribution. Proponents of procedural justice originally proposed that even if individuals do not necessarily receive the

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resources they feel they deserve, they may find the situation to be fair if they believe the process was just. A myriad of studies in group settings, using experimental methodologies, have demonstrated that procedural justice and distributive justice are separate yet intrinsic aspects of justice. The implications of distributive and procedural justice in real life are clear: Only by having a fair process that ensures resources are fairly distributed will participants and observers arrive at a sense of genuine justice. Roxane de la Sablonnière, Diana Cárdenas, and Donald M. Taylor See also Affirmative Action; Equity Theory; Justice Motive; Procedural Justice

Further Readings Adams, J. S. (1963). Towards an understanding of inequity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 422–436. doi:10.1037/h0040968 Deutsch, M. (1985). Distributive justice: A social-psychological perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Forsyth, D. R. (1994). Group dynamics (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Jost, J. T., & Kay, A. C. (2010). Social justice: History, theory, and research. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1122–1165). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Skitka, L. J., Winquist, J., & Hutchinson, S. (2003). Are outcome fairness and outcome favorability distinguishable psychological constructs? A meta-analytic review. Social Justice Research, 16, 309–341. doi:10.1023/A:10263 36131206 Taylor, D. M., & Moghaddam, F. M. (1994). Theories of intergroup relations: International social psychological perspectives (2nd ed.). Westport, CT: Praeger. Tyler, T. R. (1994). Psychological models of the justice motive: Antecedents of distributive justice and procedural justice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 850–863.

Districting Districting is the process of establishing the areas that are represented in a legislative body or some other multimember assembly. Although some multimember elections are conducted on an at-large basis, where every eligible voter participates in a single contest, such as members of several national parliaments elected by proportional representation (e.g., the Israeli Knesset and the Dutch House of Representatives), in most

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legislative bodies, such as the U.S. House of Representatives and the British House of Commons, it is seen as desirable for those elected to represent people living in a particular geographic area. Dividing a country or state into districts ensures that the representatives chosen can claim to speak for the voters of the area who elected them, and can ensure that the interests of rural voters are not drowned out by those in urban areas. Districting can, however, lead to arguably unfair election outcomes where some people are overrepresented relative to their numbers, and the process of drawing district boundaries can be manipulated to give an advantage to politically favored groups.

“Rotten Boroughs” and Malapportionment One historic, persistent problem with districting is that districts can be drawn in such a way that some voters have a greater say in the overall outcome of the election than others. Until the middle of the 19th century, the British House of Commons was composed of seats that represented boroughs (towns and cities) and counties. Over time, many of these boroughs had lost population but retained their representation in Parliament, while other communities had grown from tiny villages into large towns as the result of urbanization and industrialization yet lacked any representation in the Commons at all. The result was that many of the borough constituencies were “rotten” because they had only a few remaining voters, who often were under the influence of a wealthy aristocrat, giving these voters and their patrons unequal power in Parliament. Although these “rotten boroughs” were gradually abolished in Britain during the Victorian era, the processes of urbanization and suburbanization have led to similar problems elsewhere; in the United States, boundaries of districts that were set in the 1920s were still being used to elect members of Congress and state legislatures well into the 1960s. This malapportionment— districts having a substantially different number of people within them—was challenged in the courts in the 1960s, leading to a series of Supreme Court decisions that required district boundaries to be revised at least once per decade based on the decennial census or other population counts to ensure that voters generally have equal influence over the outcome of elections, regardless of where they live. Even today, however, some voters may have disproportionate influence due to rules that create special cases in districting. For example, in Canada, residents of Prince Edward Island are represented by three members of the federal House of Commons, while the same number of residents would have to share one MP if they lived in Ontario. Similarly, today in Wyoming one

representative represents the 584,000 residents of that state in Congress, even though the average member of the U.S. House of Representatives has 742,000 people in his or her district.

Gerrymandering An important consequence of regular redistricting in the United States has been an increase in the use of gerrymandering—the manipulation of districts to the political advantage of a particular group or political party—to try to manipulate the overall outcome of elections to Congress and state legislatures. Using increasingly sophisticated computer tools and more accurate data, it is easier than ever for interest groups and political parties to design districts that will favor the election of their preferred candidates, either to protect powerful incumbent politicians or to give one party an unfair advantage in representation. For example, although nearly 40% of South Carolina’s voters are Democrats, only one of the seven U.S. representatives from the state is a Democrat; without gerrymandering, voters would likely have elected one or two additional representatives who are Democrats. Some gerrymandering has been implemented, however, for more noble ends. Since the 1980s, the U.S. Voting Rights Act has required states to make efforts to ensure that minority voters have an opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. In most cases, including elections to Congress and state legislatures, the approach that has been used is the creation of majority-minority districts, which are legislative districts where a majority of the population is from a historically disadvantaged minority group (typically African American and/or ­Hispanic). Creating districts that encompass a sufficient number of voters from a minority group involves the use of the same tools and techniques used for partisan gerrymandering, just to achieve a different end.

“Fair” Districting The perceived problems of gerrymandering have led in recent years to efforts to depoliticize the redistricting process in the United States. In recent years, several states have adopted “independent” redistricting commissions or rules designed to make it harder for state legislatures to adopt maps that will favor members of their own party, with some success to date. Another potential solution to the problem of fair districting is the use of more complex electoral systems. Since 1949, the German federal parliament (Bundestag) has been elected using a system usually referred to as mixed-member proportional representation (MMP). Under the German MMP system,

“Do No Harm” as a Code of Action

298  members of parliament are elected from ­single-member districts, just like elections to the U.S. Congress or British House of Commons; the candidate who receives the most votes in these elections wins. However, at least 298 seats are also filled on a proportional basis nationwide to “top-up” representation and equalize the outcome so the national performance of the political parties is reflected in the overall composition of the Bundestag (parties that fail to get 5% of the national vote, or do not win at least three single member seats, do not get proportional seats). Any effort to gerrymander the Bundestag to the advantage of a particular party would effectively be canceled out by the proportional top-up seats. New Zealand has since adopted a very similar system for elections to its national parliament. Christopher N. Lawrence See also Electoral Systems; Political Campaigns; Political Participation; Representative Democracy; Term Limits; Voting, History of

Further Readings Bullock, C. S., III. (2010). Redistricting: The most political activity in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cox, G.W., & Katz, J. N. (2002). Elbridge Gerry’s salamander: The electoral consequences of the reapportionment revolution. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Miller, W. J., & Walling, J. D. (2013). The political battle over congressional redistricting. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Shugart, M. S., & Wattenberg, M. P. (Eds.). (2000). Mixedmember electoral systems: The best of both worlds? Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

“Do No Harm” as Code of Action

a

Do No Harm (DNH) is an ethical principle as well as a decision-making approach, which requires humanitarian agencies and their individual representatives to try to minimize the “harm” they may be doing while providing assistance. It is understood that this harm is most often unintentional. Derived originally from medical ethics, DNH is ultimately about decision making in complex environments. Complex environments are characterized by constant change, complexity, and unpredictability. These complex environments may

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include large-scale emergencies such as tsunamis, violent uprisings, or armed conflicts. Beginning in the early 1990s, a number of donor agencies, United Nations organizations, and international and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) collaborated through the Local Capacities for Peace Project (LCPP) to learn more about how aid that is given in conflict settings interacts with the conflicts. Based on gathering and comparing the field experience of many different NGO programs in many different contexts, this study aimed to address the question “How can we provide assistance without exacerbating tensions or conflict?” The lessons learned from this work have had a widespread impact on a variety of fields and are now used by not only aid agencies but  also a broad range of development ­organizations, peacebuilders, advocates, corporations, militaries, and other practitioners working in complex environments. The DNH approach recognizes that intervention strategies and policy choices, such as humanitarian aid, state building, or peace-building efforts that aim to create change and improve the lives of the people, often become part of the context by shaping it and being shaped by it. However, experience shows that despite the best intentions, intervention programs can also unintentionally create, reinforce, exacerbate, and prolong conflicts. Every profession entails risks and potential for harm, even if it is effective in achieving its intended goals, promoting development, and saving lives. While some harm may be unintentional and accidental, in other cases, harm may be inevitable, and some harm may even be necessary to successfully intervene in a situation, as is the case in medical surgery. In other instances, decision makers may be faced with two different harmful intervention strategies for a greater good. Emergency situations are often characterized by fluid, unpredictable, and volatile ­ complexities and may entail difficulty to address moral dilemmas. On the other hand, harm may be a result of systemic issues such as sociocultural, political, and economic structures, or even different value systems. For example, democratic elections held immediately after a conflict—without carefully assessing local political, demographic, and sociocultural dynamics—may breed further violence if certain groups feel threatened or marginalized by the election results. In these instances, decision makers may have to consider curbing competitive elections and establishing a power-sharing mechanism in order to avoid further bloodshed. The DNH approach acknowledges that although intervention efforts aim to have a positive impact, they might have unintended negative outcomes. This is

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because it is very difficult to know and predict everything in complex environments. Still, potential benefits of an intervention do not remove the responsibility of the decision makers to do everything in their power to reduce the risks and probable harm and develop systematic ways to learn how to address them. Therefore, the DNH approach provides a framework to understand the interaction between decisions and context and offers a tool to develop strategies to minimize harm and increase benefits of these efforts. The DNH perspective identifies two types of driving forces of social dynamics, which characterize all contexts. The first group of driving forces are the dividers, which are the issues, factors, and elements in societies that serve as sources of tension and tend to divide people and ­communities. The second group of driving forces are the ­connectors, which are those elements, factors, and issues that connect people and communities and serve as local capacities for peace. Although intervention efforts and policy decisions by themselves do not cause conflict, they can have a significant impact on the conflict and intergroup relations, as they will always interact with both dividers and connectors. An intervention is considered to have a negative impact if it aggravates and worsens the dividers or undermines or delegitimizes connectors, such as increasing the likelihood of conflict or undermining the ability of people to address and resolve the conflict. An intervention is considered to have a positive impact if it strengthens and reinforces the connectors and reduces dividers. For example, an intervention may increase trust and collaboration between divided communities and enhance their capacity to mitigate their conflict. This would be considered a positive impact. If an intervention increases mistrust, competition, and hostility between groups, this would be considered a negative impact. The DNH approach recognizes that intervention efforts and policies are a series of choices before they become actions and activities. Decision makers make choices about who they will work with, where, and when. They make decisions on how to select partners, and how to interact with local authorities, structures, and partners. They also decide what resources they will bring into a context and how to deliver them. These choices determine the actions and behaviors that will have an impact on the context. Therefore, according to the DNH perspective, details of an intervention matter because the details are where impacts come from. Additionally, the DNH perspective acknowledges that all interventions involve actions and behaviors that interact with one another, and focuses on the two main ways in which interventions affect conflict ­environments—how they divide or connect communities. These include resource transfers and implicit ­ethical messages.

Effects of Interventions in Conflict Environments Resource Transfers The DNH approach observes that intervention strategies involve transfer of resources into the environment. These resources may include material or nonmaterial resources such as food, shelter, money, health care, and improving infrastructures, know-how, and capacitybuilding trainings, among others. It is through these resource transfers that an intervention strategy has most direct impacts on the context. Intervention efforts often involve decisions regarding what resources will be provided, who they will be provided for, and how they will be distributed. These decisions affect the economy of war and intergroup competition or collaboration. As these resources represent both economic wealth and sociopolitical power, groups involved in conflicts often have an interest in controlling them. According to the DNH approach, these resource transfers affect the intervention context in five predictable ways. Theft Theft is one of the most widely recognized ways by which intervention strategies, such as aid, feed into conflict. Material resources introduced by intervention efforts become attractive targets for various groups in conflict. Militant groups or other vigilantes may steal or tax resources such as food, vehicles, and communication systems, among others, to support their causes and buy arms or other supplies. As such, it heightens dividers. Market Effects Violent conflicts distort economies by altering patterns of production, employment, and trade. This change in the economic structure of the society often enriches some people and impoverishes many others. Intervention strategies may reinforce these distortions or even add new ones as resources introduced by the intervention create its own industries by generating opportunities for making profits and influencing wages and prices, thus feeding the war economy. Distribution Effects Intervention strategies usually benefit some people and not others. For example, providing assistance to one group according to their needs can reinforce distinct group identities and competition between groups. There are good reasons to target certain groups to receive aid and support. However, when the included and excluded groups match or overlap with those in

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conflict, these intervention efforts may further exacerbate divisions within the context and fuel the conflict.

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weapons to determine who gets access to resources, and that security and safety derive from weapons. As such, they reinforce armament in conflict.

Substitution Effects When international agencies and actors assume responsibility for civilian survival in conflict areas by providing food, shelter, safety, and health services, among others, they can free up resources that may be used by local groups for their pursuit of war and conflict. In some cases, political leadership and warlords may use these released resources to define their responsibility and accountability in terms of military control. This often further boosts conflict dynamics. Legitimization Effects How intervention is undertaken legitimizes some people and some activities and delegitimizes others. This can happen when intervention efforts are perceived to be using their resources to support a political faction or governing authority. For instance, intervention efforts may require permission to work in certain territories, which may be controlled by various groups including armed groups, or they may have to comply with the rules of these groups and make payments to them. These impacts can reinforce warfare or nonwarfare. However, not complying with them can have dire consequences for the organizations. For example, agencies operating in areas controlled by factions and warlords might have to get permits, pay taxes and fees to these groups, or trade with them to be able to work in these areas. Failing to do so may make them targets of theft, threats, and even attacks. However, paying them in order to gain access may reinforce the power and legitimacy of these groups.

Implicit Ethical Messages A second means through which interventions affect the conflict environment are implicit ethical messages delivered via their content, style, and modes of communicating values. These messages can deepen divisions within communities, reinforce conflict drivers, and prolong the conflict, or they can strengthen connectors, inspire trust and collaboration, and in this way support peace building. The DNH approach identifies seven implicit ethical messages through which intervention efforts and decisions can negatively reinforce conflict. These include the following:

Disrespect, Mistrust, and Competition Among Agencies Due to limited funding or ideological and political differences, intervening actors and decision makers do not often cooperate with each other. However, competition between these actors sends out a message of competitiveness to the conflicting parties. Such messages undermine cooperation, which is critically needed in conflict environments. Impunity of Agency Staff Agency staff who are working in these contexts often use resources and support systems for their own purposes and entertainment. This sends the message that if you control resources, it is permissible to use them for personal benefit without accountability, which advances cultures and practices of impunity. Different Value for Different Lives When agencies adopt differential policies for two different groups, such as planning emergency evacuation for the international staff but deciding to leave the local staff behind in times of danger, it sends the message that some lives are more valuable than others and further divides the communities and fosters mistrust. Powerlessness When agency staff do not take responsibility for the impacts of their decisions and programs, it sends the message that individuals in complex environments cannot have much power and that individuals do not have to take responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions and actions. Belligerence, Tension, and Suspicion When agency staff members are nervous and worried for their own safety and thus approach sensitive situations, such as checkpoints, with suspicion, tension, and mistrust, it sends the message that power is the broker of human interactions. This normalizes suspicion and belligerence between people. Such behaviors and attitudes reinforce hostility in conflict environments.

Arms and Power When intervening agencies hire armed guards to protect their staff and resources, they are in fact sending the implicit message that it is legitimate for arms and

Publicity When agencies intervening in conflict environments use publicity pictures that emphasize the horrors of

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warfare and the victimization of one of the parties, they may overlook the fact that in conflicts both sides may be potentially perpetuating atrocities and both parties may be suffering. By focusing on one of the parties, agencies may send the message that only one group is the victim and may cultivate demonization of one side. This may further make it difficult for the parties to work together and resolve their differences.

Do No Harm in Practice Guided by the principle that puts the well-being of the people at the center of decision-making efforts, the DNH approach aims to assist intervening actors and decision makers to think of different ways of operation to minimize negative impacts and increase benefits. Hence, the overall goal of the DNH approach is to improve the decision-making ability of actors who are intervening in constantly changing dynamic environments and to help them deal with the real complexities of intervention in conflicts with less frustration and more clarity. The DNH approach also understands that there are always options, and by understanding the impact of actions and behaviors, decision makers generate options that will reduce harm and increase benefits of their intervention efforts and policy decisions. It provides a holistic perspective that focuses on both harm and benefit of an intervention strategy and policy choice and reflects on alternatives that would help reduce the potential of harm and increase the benefits of the proposed intervention strategy or policy choice.

Seven Steps of the DNH Approach The DNH approach upholds that much harm can be avoided through awareness, appropriate preparation, and sound ethical standards as well as a critical, reflective standpoint. This perspective prompts decision makers to reflect on possible intended and unintended as well as positive and negative consequences of their decisions and intervention strategies. This leads them to explore a variety of options to minimize their harm and enhance their benefits. In order to assist decision makers to understand their potential impact in complex environments and to make better informed choices, the DNH approach offers a seven-step analytical framework based on field experience. Step 1: Understanding the Context The first step of the DNH framework involves a thorough context-sensitive analysis that takes into consideration the cultural, political, economic, social, and historical realities of the context. This analysis should

also include a careful consideration of difficult-toaddress dilemmas and contradictions, which may at times challenge the normative orientations and agendas of decision makers. Step 2: Analyzing Dividers and Tensions and Capacities for War The second step of the DNH analytical framework involves an analysis of what divides people, what are the sources of tension between them, and what capacities of war and conflict exist. Some of these tensions may be rooted in deep-seated, historical injustice (root causes) while others may be recent, short lived, or manipulated by subgroup leaders (proximate causes). They may arise from many sources including economic relations, geography, demography, politics, or religion. Some may be entirely internal to a society; others may be promoted by outside powers. Understanding what divides people is critical to understanding, subsequently, how intervention efforts feed into, or lessen, these forces. Step 3: Analyzing Connectors and Local Capacities for Peace The third step includes an analysis of how people, although they are divided by conflict, remain also connected across subgroup lines at times of conflict. In every context, there are those elements such as markets, infrastructure, common experiences, historical events, ­ symbols, shared attitudes, and formal and informal ­associations that continue to connect people. Similarly, the DNH approach finds that all societies have institutions and individuals whose task it is to maintain intergroup peace. These can include justice systems, police forces, elders, teachers, clergy, or other respected and trusted figures (although in certain cultural contexts, some or all of these figures might fall from grace and not be trusted). Understanding these connectors is important to assess how intervention efforts can strengthen these. Step 4: Analyzing the Intervention Efforts Each intervention effort consists of a number of decisions, answering questions about who will receive assistance, what kind of support will be appropriate, and where it will be given. Therefore, the fourth step of the DNH approach includes an analysis of the intervention efforts. This analysis includes considerations such as where and why assistance is offered; who are the staff (external and internal and how they were hired); who are the intended recipients of assistance and by what criteria are they included; and what is provided, who decides, and how assistance is delivered, warehoused,

“Do No Harm” as a Code of Action

and distributed. Analyzing the intervention effort helps in understanding how these decisions will impact the context. Step 5: Analyzing the Impact of Intervention Efforts on Dividers and Connectors The fifth step involves an analysis of the intervention efforts on the dividers and connectors of the conflict by focusing on the resource transfers and implicit ethical messages. This analysis considers questions such as what resources the effort is bringing into the context, and what messages are given through actions and behaviors. For example, an intervention effort that aims to provide psychosocial support to former child soldiers may offer counseling programs, peer-group support, and family unification. While this intervention may be quite important, programs focusing solely on these children may have negative impacts on their reintegration into the society. One reason for this is that children who are part of these programs often have access to opportunities, food, and medicine that is not available to others. Consequently, this may create resentment among the rest of the community and may further stigmatize and marginalize these children. Step 6: Considering Options The sixth step of the DNH framework involves considering various different options that could enhance local capacities for peace and diminish tensions and dividers. Based on the analyses conducted before, the aim of this step is to see if there were any connectors that were overlooked and to redesign the intervention efforts and policy choices to capture opportunities for peace. For example, if the intervention strategy includes delivery of goods, which can be stolen by factions and can feed into the war economy, decision makers may explore a variety of options to prevent that. These options may include delivering goods unannounced so that thieves do not know when they will be delivered; announcing them broadly so that communities can hold the thieves accountable if they do not receive them; and consciously lowering the resale value of the goods without damaging their use-value to undermine the incentive of thieves. Each of these options needs to be assessed to determine their potential risk of harm or their potential to contribute to peace. Step 7: Testing Programming Options and Redesigning the Project The seventh step involves rechecking and evaluating the impacts of the new policy designs and intervention efforts. This can be done by routinely monitoring

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and evaluating the intervention and making adjustments during its implementation to reduce risk of harm. For example, if the intervention is reinforcing the war economy or causing tension and division among different ethnic groups rather than promoting unity and cooperation, decision makers need to analyze the reasons behind this and make the necessary adjustments.

Conclusion: Benefits of DNH Many fields that involve decision making in complex environments are now incorporating a DNH perspective by assessing ways in which they might do harm and exploring strategies to reduce potential harm and increase benefits of their programs and efforts. As a code of ethics informing decision-making processes in complex environments, the DNH approach has various benefits. First, this approach provides an early warning mechanism by prompting decision makers to identify early on the risks and conflict exacerbating impacts of their decisions and intervention strategies. It heightens an awareness of power relations and intergroup dynamics, as well as how interventions will impact these in conflict environments. Furthermore, it reveals links between their decisions, actions, and behaviors, and how they impact the context. This approach helps decision makers to balance potential risks and benefits in a conscious effort and provides a common reference point and a framework to address moral dilemmas embedded in the context. Finally, the DNH approach enables ­policy-makers and intervening actors to explore possible options to increase the benefits of their efforts by providing a useful tool to analyze how different strategies may impact dividers and connectors in contexts they work in. S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana See also Civil Wars; Corruption; Discrimination; Hearts and Minds Approach; International Criminal Court; Moral Dilemmas; Pacifism; Powerlessness; Retributive Justice; Tragedy of the Commons

Further Readings Anderson, M. B. (1999). Do no harm: How aid can support peace—or war. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner. CDA Collaborative Learning Projects. (2004, April). The “do no harm” framework for analyzing the impact of assistance on conflict: A handbook. Retrieved from http:// cdacollaborative.org/publication/the-do-no-harm-framework-foranalyzing-the-impact-of-assistance-on-conflict-ahandbook/

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Dogmatism

Stadler, H. A. (1986). Making hard choices: Clarifying controversial ethical issues. Counseling and Human Development, 19, 1–10. Wallace, M. (2015). From principle to practice: A user’s guide to do no harm. Retrieved from http://cdacollaborative.org/ publication/from-principle-to-practice-a-users-guide-to-dono-harm/ Wessells, M. G. (2009, November). Do no harm: Toward contextually appropriate psychosocial support in international emergencies. American Psychologist, 64, 842–851.

viewpoints were inherently associated with a right-wing ideology and ethnic prejudice (i.e., fascism). In contrast, Rokeach made a distinction between belief content and the cognitive structure of dogmatism, arguing that dogmatism is not necessarily associated with right-wing political attitudes. From this standpoint, dogmatism and open-mindedness can be observed among adherents of virtually any perspective or view—rigid communism as well as rigid anticommunism, for example—even dogmatism regarding art and academic disciplines.

Measuring Dogmatism

Dogmatism Dogmatism refers to a closed-minded cognitive style that is often associated with authoritarianism and intolerance. It is opposed to open-mindedness: a willingness to listen to and consider a variety of viewpoints, even those that contradict one’s own prior opinion. Dogmatic individuals are convinced that their attitudes and beliefs are correct and derived from authority, and see little value in arguments or sources that challenge these beliefs. As well as being a personality trait, dogmatism is a temporary state. Situational conditions can move people in the direction of being more or less dogmatic. This entry briefly introduces dogmatism as it has been described and studied in political psychology.

Rokeach’s Foundational Research Social psychologist Milton Rokeach wrote highly influential papers on dogmatism in the 1950s and 1960s. Rokeach described dogmatism as a cognitive system marked by narrow focus, internal inconsistencies, and biased cognition. People with dogmatic belief systems focus on one “sub-part” of their beliefs at a time, rather than perceiving beliefs as belonging to an interdependent system. Because each belief is held in relative isolation, dogmatic belief systems can easily be internally inconsistent. For example, dogmatic persons may espouse a strong belief in individual freedom, but also believe that large portions of the population should be imprisoned. Dogmatic people are also biased in their interpretation of new information: When information contradicts their beliefs, they dismiss it as absurd or insist that the information source is biased. Dogmatic individuals strongly prefer information that supports their preexisting beliefs, and may be more prone to ignore or forget information that contradicts their views. Early research by Theodor Adorno, Gordon Allport, and others suggested that dogmatic, authoritarian

Some measures of dogmatism link a rigid, dogmatic cognitive style with a right-wing political orientation, by, for example, asking questions both about how unquestionably certain one is about his or her beliefs (closed-mindedness), and how he or she feels about, for example, homosexuality (an ideologically charged opinion). These scales may make people appear dogmatic, simply because they endorse conservative viewpoints. The Fascism scale (or F-scale) and Right Wing Authoritarianism scale constitute well-known examples of this approach. Believing that scales of this nature needlessly confound dogmatism with right-wing political beliefs, Rokeach (1954) developed the Dogmatism scale. This scale assesses dogmatism in a more neutral manner. Indeed, Rokeach identified a small number of left-wing radicals and communists who scored high on dogmatism. More recently, Erika Price and colleagues created and validated the Open-Minded Cognition scale. ­Similar to the Dogmatism scale, this scale assesses openversus closed-mindedness, rather than adherence to any specific ideology.

Dogmatism, Authoritarianism, and Ideology Measurement issues notwithstanding, some, such as Theodor Adorno and colleagues, believe dogmatism is part of a family of tendencies that occur together: authoritarianism (staunch deference to authority), intolerance for minorities and out-groups, and political conservatism. This “rigidity of the right” hypothesis ­ presumes that a right-wing political orientation is inherently associated with a rigid cognitive style. Consistent with this hypothesis, research reveals that conservatism is positively correlated with dogmatism—even when using measures of dogmatism or open-mindedness that are designed to be ideologically “content-free” (see, e.g., Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Price, Ottati, Wilson, & Kim, 2015). However, the correlation is not perfect, and sometimes small. Thus, some liberals are dogmatic, and some conservatives are open-minded.

Dominant Power Politics

Dogmatism, Tolerance, and Prejudice Dogmatism is unquestionably associated with intolerance toward opposing viewpoints—and those who hold those opposing viewpoints. Research suggests it is connected with more general forms of intolerance and prejudice as well. Across several studies, people who score high in dogmatism also tend to have more negative and stereotypical views of gays and lesbians, Black people, and people with mental illness. While these correlations tend to be stronger when using the more ideologically tinged measures of dogmatic attitudes (e.g., right-wing authoritarianism), they nevertheless are also found when using more ideologically neutral scales (e.g., dogmatism, open-minded cognition).

Situational Malleability of Dogmatism Dogmatism also possesses a malleable component that varies across domains and situations. Preliminary evidence, according to Price and colleagues, suggests dogmatic cognition is higher in the religious domain than political domain. In addition, individuals exhibit high levels of open-mindedness when they encounter plausible arguments that are compatible with conventional values, but can exhibit a dogmatic refusal to openly consider arguments that are extremely implausible or that contradict conventional values. Dogmatism also varies across social roles within a situation. Because ordinary individuals possess limited political knowledge, social norms dictate that they should listen in an open-minded fashion. In contrast, because political experts possess extensive knowledge, social norms dictate that they are entitled to adopt a more dogmatic cognitive orientation. Consequently, individuals are more politically dogmatic in situations that make them feel that they are high in political expertise. Paradoxically, perceptions regarding the desirability of open-mindedness are “biased,” serving (in part) to justify the individual’s personal attitudinal convic­­ tions.  Open-mindedness is preferred over closedmindedness when exhibited by a member of the political out-­ group (e.g., when a liberal-democrat evaluates a conservative-republican). However, this preference for ­ open-mindedness can be eliminated when individuals ­ evaluate a member of the political in-group (e.g., when a liberal-democrat evaluates a liberal-democrat). Individuals tolerate dogmatism among members of the political in-group, presumably because dogmatic in-group members promote the individual’s political convictions. Victor Ottati and Chase Wilson See also Authoritarianism; Dictatorship; F-Scale; Motivated Reasoning

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Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375. doi:10.1037/00332909.129.3.339 Ottati, V., Price, E. D., Wilson, C., & Sumaktoyo, N. (2015). When self-perceptions of expertise increase closed-minded cognition: The earned dogmatism effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 131–138. doi:10.1016/ j.jesp.2015.08.003 Price, E., Ottati, V., Wilson, C., & Kim, S. (2015). Open-minded cognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 1488–1504. doi:10.1177/0146167215600528 Rokeach, M. (1954). The nature and meaning of dogmatism. Psychological Review, 61, 194–204. doi:10.1037/h0060752 Wilson, C., Ottati, V., & Price, E. (2016, January). Open-minded cognition: The attitude justification effect. Journal of Positive Psychology, 47–58.

Dominant Power Politics Dominant power politics refers to a semiauthoritarian political system in which one ruling party minimizes political competition while simultaneously enabling state-building reforms. It is a political system within the “gray zone” between a democracy and a dictatorship. This entry introduces the concept of dominant power politics by examining the dimensions of this political system, its key characteristics, and the challenges of ending dominant power regimes.

The Emergence of the Term The term dominant power politics was first presented by Thomas Carothers in an article published in the Journal of Democracy in 2002. Carothers identified that most countries that were previously considered “transition countries”—that is, countries that were not dictatorial or autocratic but assumed to be moving toward democracies—were not necessarily in transition at all. Instead, he suggested that such countries may be experiencing their own unique political “gray zone.” He offered two mutually exclusive frameworks to theorize the gray zone: feckless pluralism and dominant power politics. Unlike feckless pluralism where the state is persistently weak, shallow, and unstable, dominant power politics offers the presence of stable democratic institutions. The defining feature of dominant power politics is that despite basic institutional forms of

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democracy, one political group—a political party, a single leader, a movement, a family, or an extended family—dominates state power and undermines true political contestation.

Characteristics of Dominant Power Politics In dominant power politics, the line between the state and the ruling political force (in whatever form it takes) is blurred. The judiciary, executive, and legislative branches of the government tend to be biased toward the ruling party’s political agenda. State resources, including law enforcement, public information, the media, capital, jobs, the economy, and the administration of regulations are also typically used in direct service of the group’s own partisan purposes. However, elections are still held. By definition, these elections are not fair and free; they are symbolic rather than real opportunities for political contestation. Elections are orchestrated by the ruling party to ensure its own victory by swaying the electoral playing field, while gaining the approval of the public and the international community. Contexts where elections continue to hold a lot of significance, despite being subject to pervasive manipulation in favor of power holders, are referred to as electoral authoritarian systems. Electoral authoritarian systems are one form of dominant power politics. For any ruling party within a democracy or autocracy to maintain its power, elites, such as regional political figures, emerging or aspiring politicians, business leaders, or key professionals, are integrated into state governance. In dominant power systems, elites are often effectively integrated into state operations to build cohesion and normalize the political context, thereby ensuring the regime’s stability. Training, surveillance, and ­discipline may be aspects of the elite’s indoctrination. In return, elites have access to some actual or latent institutional benefits or political resources. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1918 through the 1980s provides a clear illustration of this coercive governance force: ruling parties actively provided strategic supervision and management of state sectors through and for the elite. In this example, state enterprises and factories were subject to a centralized ministerial chain of command that included supervision, discipline, and police and party control to ensure that businesses and factories were meeting their target outputs. Deficiencies, losses, and abuses were signaled to management, providing an additional (and trusted) level of administration. Compared with other authoritarian regimes, the elite’s endorsement and commitment are key mechanisms to ensure the durability of dominant power systems. In contrast, citizens of dominant power states tend to be removed from all political participation beyond their

symbolic participation in voting. Opposition political parties that may exist often do not garner public credibility because they exist only on the political margins. Opposition to the ruling regime often occurs through civil society groups only. These advocacy and media groups grapple with the government’s usually tenuous record of corruption, human rights, and other public issues primarily because, over time, the controlled power of one ruling party typically produces political and financial corruption throughout state institutions. The absence of an equal playing field for political power and access ensures that accountability for these violations is limited. Dominant power politics has emerged predominantly in three regions: the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Oft-cited examples are Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia in United Russia; Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Burkina Fasco in Africa; and Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and Iran in the Middle East. Outside these regions, dominant power systems are less common but continue to operate in a few countries within Asia and Latin America. Overall, dominant power systems vary in their degrees of political direction and freedom, and analyses of national politics within this paradigm are contested and challenged. While some dominant power systems are close to being autocracies, others provide more forms of (limited) freedom. The enduring feature involves the political forces’ long-term control of power.

How Regimes of Dominant Power End The political system of dominant power is typically stable. When effective, the ruling party allows enough political transparency to mediate public, political, and international pressure. Although nations do not usually move out of these systems without major political upheaval, movement, toward either dictatorships or liberal democracies, is possible. Some scholars hypothesize that democratization is a likely outcome, since semiauthoritarian states do still provide elections which, even if manipulated, may at some point offer a venue to create a power shift between incumbents and the opposition. This viewpoint remains controversial. Daphne Jeyapal See also Feckless Pluralism

Further Readings Berglund, C. (2014). Georgia between dominant-power politics, feckless pluralism, and democracy. Demokratizatsiya, 22(3), 445–470.

Drones Carothers, T. (2002). The end of the transition paradigm. Journal of Democracy, 13(1), 5–21. Reuter, O. J. (2010). The politics of dominant party formation: United Russia and Russia’s governors. Europe-Asia Studies, 62(2), 293–327. Roberts, S. P. (2012). Putin’s United Russia Party. London, England: Routledge.

Drones Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, are used for civilian, law enforcement, and military purposes, as well as for intelligence gathering and surveillance. This entry focuses on drones used in a military context, particularly the targeting of specific individuals identified as “legitimate targets.” Following the attacks on U.S. territory of September 11, 2001, the United States has increasingly relied on drones when targeting suspected terrorists away from areas of active military engagement. Under President Obama, U.S. drone policy has been robust in accordance with a Department of Justice “White Paper.” Implementation of a drone policy predicated on the rule of law suggests that decision makers define terms including legitimate target, imminence, self-defense, threat, and pre-emption. In the United States, the criteria for determining the legitimacy of a particular target are largely unclear, with a broad application of legitimate target and imminence. The failure to articulate— and implement—narrow definitions of these terms has raised concern regarding criteria in determining when to authorize a drone attack. Concern has been voiced regarding the lack of external review of executive decision making; suggestions to address this have included establishment of a “drone court,” reflecting the spirit of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s comment regarding the perils of an “unfettered executive” and its ability to undermine democratic institutions. Those favoring broader executive discretion posit the theory of the “unitary executive” as rationale for executive decision making devoid of external review or restraint. Narrow application of these terms suggests limited implementation of drones, whereas broad application of these terms results in widespread use of drones. The effectiveness of present U.S. drone policy is unsettled, subject to wide-ranging perspectives and opinions. Similarly, the morality of government acting as “judge, jury, and executioner” has been the subject of much discussion, particularly when the identified target is a citizen of the attacking country. This raises

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important due process questions that have been unresolved.

Proponents In advocating enhanced use of drones, proponents emphasize the positive consequences of minimizing the presence of ground forces. The argument reflects concern regarding possible harm to soldiers and civilians due to the consequences of exchanges of fire between soldiers and terrorists, and the concomitant increases in the probability of collateral damage. Furthermore, proponents of robust use of drones in operational counterterrorism argue drones are more effective in targeting a specific individual because they can observe an area for an extended time and gather significant amounts of intelligence before engaging the target. This argument reflects an assumption that drones are more accurate than weapons used by ground forces, as they utilize precision-based missiles.

Opponents In voicing their concern regarding robust drone usage, opponents emphasize significant collateral damage resulting from drone attacks. According to opponents, the consequences of collateral damage are significant, casting the policy’s long-term effectiveness in doubt. In addition, opponents of U.S. drone policy raise concerns regarding its morality, focusing in particular on the lack of clearly articulated criteria. Furthermore, opponents argue drone attacks violate additional international law principles including sovereignty, proportionality, alternatives, and military necessity.

Other Countries Israel implemented a targeted killing policy in response to Palestinian terrorism, and was the first state to openly acknowledge such a policy in November 2000. The Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, has twice ruled on the policy’s legality. The Court focused its attention on questions of imminence, alternatives, and who can be considered a legitimate target. The Court’s exercise of robust and rigorous judicial review is an essential aspect of executive decision making regarding the implementation of a drone policy. The combination of judicial review and strict criteria in determining when it is legal to engage a “legitimate target” significantly distinguishes the Israeli model from the U.S. policy.

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Duverger’s Law on Elections

Looking Ahead Most experts concur that future wars will be characterized by an increasing use of drones. While the ­advantages—from the perspective of minimizing harm to soldiers—are apparent, the risks are significant and may outweigh the benefits. Given that operational counterterrorism has largely replaced traditional warfare, it is foreseeable that an increasing number of nations will adopt drone warfare as a preferred means of engaging suspected terrorists. Doing so requires balancing self-imposed limits on state power with recognition that terrorists pose a threat to national security. As the retired president (Chief Justice) of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, noted in a widely quoted remark, “National security is not a magical phrase.” As such, the protection of national security requires sensitivity to the rule of law, morality-based decision making, and honest analysis of the effectiveness of the use of drones. Amos N. Guiora See also Asymmetric Warfare; Counterinsurgency; Decision Making; International Security; Islamic State; Rule of Law

Duverger’s Law

on

Elections

A theory proposed by French sociologist and jurist Maurice Duverger, which has since become known as Duverger’s law, provides an explanation for why singlemember district plurality electoral systems (i.e., electoral systems where the candidate with the most votes, not necessarily a majority, is the one person elected in the district) generally feature two-party competition. Such is the case whether featuring strictly two parties or competition revolving predominantly around two major parties. This is complemented by Duverger’s hypothesis, which holds that multiparty systems may form in electoral systems electing more than one person per district or using different electoral formulae. Because evidence supporting Duverger’s argument, historically, has been so commonplace, it has taken on law-like status. Duverger’s law is important to understanding elections and election outcomes because it shows how institutional incentives can influence mass political behavior, and in turn, explain party systemlevel outcomes. For instance, Duverger’s law helps to explain why the overwhelming majority of congressional elections in the United States—held under singlemember district plurality rules—feature only two ­parties (the Democrat and Republican).

Further Readings Finkelstein, C., Ohlin, J. D., & Altman, A. (2012). Targeted killings: Law and morality in an asymmetrical world. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Guiora, A., & Brand, J. (2015). Establishment of a drone court: A necessary restraint on executive power. In S. Barela (Ed.), Legitimacy and drones: Investigating the legality, morality and efficacy of UCAVs. Abingdon, England: Ashgate. Heyns, C. (2013). Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions (ReportA/68/382). Geneva, Switzerland: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Kaplan, E. H., Mintz, A., Mishal, S., & Samban, C. (2005). What happened to suicide bombings in Israel? Insights from a terror stock model. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 28, 225–235. doi:10.1080/10576100590928115 Mayer, J. (2009, October 26). The predator war: What are the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program? Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/26/thepredator-war Melzer, N. (2008). Targeted killing in international law. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Office of Legal Counsel. (2011, November 8). Lawfulness of a lethal operation directed against a US citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al-Qa’ida or an associated force (White paper). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Woods, C. (2015). Sudden justice: America’s secret drone wars. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Duverger’s Law and Voters Third parties are disadvantaged in single-member district plurality electoral systems, because only one party wins in each seat and because one only needs a plurality of the vote to win the seat; third parties—even those winning sizable vote shares—will lose every seat if none of their district-level vote shares constitutes a plurality in the district. As a result, voters face incentives not to vote for third parties. Assuming voters care about the outcome of the present election, have clearly ordered party preferences, and have sufficient information regarding each party’s chance of winning in their respective districts, voters will not vote for third ­parties—even if they are their first preference. If voters’ most preferred party places third in their district, and if their second most preferred party has fewer votes than their third preference, supporting their first preference will result in electing their third preference. In this case, voting for a third party produces the worst possible outcome for these voters. If third-party supporters vote tactically for their second preference instead, this may give enough votes to their second preference to prevent the election of their third preference. While not as satisfying as if their most preferred party (the party placing third in their district) had won, preventing their third

Duverger’s Law on Elections

preference from winning would avoid their least preferred outcome. Thus, Duverger’s law holds that voters will strategically desert their first preferences—in favor of tactically voting for their second preferences—if voting sincerely for their first preference results in electing their least preferred party.

Duverger’s Law and Party Elites This strategic behavior among voters influences the behavior of party elites. Recognizing the incentives favoring tactical voting, third parties will strategically exit electoral contests in which they will place third—or never enter these races in the first place. As regularly happens in congressional elections in the United States, third parties like the Libertarian and Green parties often choose not to contest districts because they know they will not displace the Republicans or Democrats as one of the top two parties in the district. If parties care most about the outcome of the present election, and if they possess accurate information about their chances of winning their district, then third parties will strategically exit contests in which they will place third (or worse), resulting in only two parties competing in any one district. It is important to note that Duverger’s law applies at the district level and not at the national level because strategic calculations by voters are made with regard to the candidates in their districts. Although voters may care about the outcome of the election nationally, their ballots only count locally. While two parties may dominate nationally, third parties may be one of the two largest parties in some districts, crowding out one or more of the two largest nationally competitive parties. As a result, voters in these districts will vote tactically based on district-specific patterns of competition featuring a “third” party as one of the two viable parties in that district. This helps to explain how third parties can be elected in elections held under single-member district plurality electoral rules: While a party may come in third in the national vote and seat totals, it may feature as the largest party in some districts, possibly benefitting from tactical voting to get elected.

Limitations Relaxation of any of the assumptions noted above— including changes in the institutional structure—may

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produce multiparty competition (assuming sufficient motivation and resources are available to support new parties). For example, on the institutional side, electing two or more people per district or using different electoral formulae (e.g., requiring parties to win with a majority of the vote or awarding seats on the basis of proportional representation) increase the chances third parties could be elected, thereby decreasing the incentives to vote tactically for less preferred parties. From the perspective of voters, lacking accurate information about whether a party will place third may lead to nontactical voting for a third party that, had voters possessed sufficient information, would have resulted in a tactical vote instead. Christopher D. Raymond See also Electoral Systems; Mass Political Behavior; Party Systems; Polling; Public Opinion; Rational Choice; Third Party; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Chhibber, P., & Kollman, K. (2004). The formation of national party systems: Federalism and party competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clark, W. R., & Golder, M. (2006). Rehabilitating Duverger’s theory testing the mechanical and strategic modifying effects of electoral laws. Comparative Political Studies, 39(6), 679–708. Cox, G. W. (1997). Making votes count: Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Cox, G. W. (1999). Electoral rules and electoral coordination. Annual Review of Political Science, 2(1), 145–161. Duverger, M. (1954). Political parties. London, England: Methuen. (Original work published 1951) Fey, M. (1997). Stability and coordination in Duverger’s law: A formal model of preelection polls and strategic voting. American Political Science Review, 91(1), 135–147. McKelvey, R. D., & Ordeshook, P. C. (1972). A general theory of the calculus of voting. In J. F. Herdon & J. L. Bernd (Eds.), Mathematical applications in political science, VI (pp. 32–78). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rae, D. W. (1967). The political consequences of electoral laws. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riker, W. H. (1982). The two-party system and Duverger’s law: An essay on the history of political science. American Political Science Review, 76(4), 753–766.

E The standard survey questions that tap into these judgment dimensions, as asked in the American National Election Study (2012), read as follows:

Economic Judgment Economic judgment refers to how people evaluate their personal financial well-being and the economic situation in their community or nation. These judgments assess how conditions have changed over time and what people expect will happen in the future. Citizens might also compare the situation in their country with how well the economy in other countries is doing. This entry provides an overview of economic judgments, how we measure them, and how they impact government approval and voting behavior. One of the earliest works to recognize the importance of economic judgments on voters’ decisions is The American Voter by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes. In it, they develop an economic outlook index that combines voters’ assessments of their family situation now and in the future, business conditions in the past and future, and a 5-year forecast of the nation’s economic health. These questions launched later research that would examine the components of the index separately to see if certain judgments have a larger impact than others. Economic judgments have different targets and time horizons. First, in terms of the target, do voters consider their household financial situation, the national economy, or both? Household financial assessments are often referred to as pocketbook evaluations, while evaluations of the national economy are termed sociotropic evaluations. Second, what time horizon do voters use when making their judgments? Do they consider how the situation has changed in the recent past, or do they rely on expectations for the future? Past assessments are referred to as retrospective evaluations, while future expectations are labeled prospective evaluations.

Pocketbook and Retrospective: “We are interested in how people are getting along financially these days. Would you say that you are better off or worse off than you were a year ago?” Pocketbook and Prospective: “Now looking ahead, do you think that a year from now, you will be better off financially, worse off, or just about the same?” Sociotropic and Retrospective: “Now thinking about the economy in the country as a whole, would you say that over the past year the national economy has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?” Sociotropic and Prospective: “What about the next 12 months? Do you expect the economy, in the country as a whole, to get better, stay about the same, or get worse?”

This battery of economic judgment survey questions has been asked in election surveys conducted in a variety of democracies. The dominant theory that political scientists test using these measures is the “reward-­ punishment” hypothesis. This argues that voters judge the economy and reward the country’s leader with support when times are good or shift their support to the ­opposition when times are bad. Over time and across countries, we observe quite consistent results in terms of which judgments matter most for presidential or prime ministerial approval and vote choice. D. Roderick Kiewiet, in his book Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues, offers an extensive look at how retrospective pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations affect voting in U.S. presidential and

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congressional elections. He finds that sociotropic effects are much stronger than personal financial ­evaluations, even when controlling for factors such as party identification. This result has held up over time in numerous studies of U.S. elections. Michael S. LewisBeck, in his book Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies, extended the analysis of how economic judgments affect vote choice in Europe. In his study of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, he tests all four of the economic evaluations and finds that the retrospective sociotropic evaluations have the strongest impact. Research on countries in Africa and Latin America has come to ­similar conclusions. While there is consensus in the literature that ­evaluations of the national economy prevail over personal finances in voting decisions, the results are less consistent when we compare retrospective versus prospective economic judgments. In terms of pocketbook effects, scholars do not find much support for either their ­ retrospective or prospective effects. However, when measuring sociotropic evaluations, retrospective assessments typically dominate, but some scholars have uncovered prospective sociotropic voting in certain elections. Ultimately, of the four measures with different targets and time horizons, the strongest and most consistent effect comes from the retrospective sociotropic judgment. Another type of economic judgment that political scientists started considering in the early 2000s involves comparing the country’s economic performance with that of nearby countries or trading partners. For example, Kasper M. Hansen and his colleagues show that Danish voters compare their country’s performance with that of Sweden. If the Danish economy is doing worse than Sweden’s, they are more likely to vote against their leaders at the next election. If they are performing better than Sweden, support for the Danish leadership will likely increase. This type of economic judgment has been labeled a relative performance judgment, a yardstick comparison, or benchmarking. Mary Stegmaier and Michael S. Lewis-Beck See also Attitudes; Economics and Political Behavior; Mass Political Behavior; Public Opinion; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American voter. New York, NY: Wiley. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Fiorina, M. P. (1981). Retrospective voting in American national elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hansen, K. M., Olsen, A. L., & Bech, M. (2015). Cross-national yardstick comparisons: A choice experiment on a forgotten voter heuristic. Political Behavior, 37(4), 767–789. Key, V. O. (1966). The responsible electorate. New York, NY: Vintage. Kiewiet, D. R. (1983). Macroeconomics and micropolitics: The electoral effects of economic issues. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lewis-Beck, M. S. (1988). Economics and elections: The major western democracies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Stegmaier, M. (2000). Economic determinants of electoral outcomes. Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 183–219. Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Stegmaier, M. (2013). The VP-function revisited: A survey of the literature on vote and popularity functions after over 40 years. Public Choice, 157, 367–385. Norpoth, H. (1996). Presidents and the prospective voter. Journal of Politics, 58(3), 776–792.

Economic-Based Voting Blocs Economic-based voting blocs are groups of people who share common economic interests based on their ­position in the economy. For these groups to become “voting blocs,” political parties must distinguish themselves in their economic policy positions, and a party must appeal to the interests of the group. When this happens, scholars study whether the economic bloc is in fact more likely to vote for the party representing the interests of the group than for other parties. When this occurs, the economic group becomes a voting bloc. In the United States and other democracies, these blocs can be composed of people identifying with certain social classes, professions, and types of wealth. In postcommunist democracies, scholars have observed distinct voting patterns among people who were financially successful in the economic transition and the people who became worse off. We know much about how economic groups behave politically. At times, the relationship between the group and the party they support is strong, but the strength of the relationship can wax and wane with changes in society. For example, if people’s identification with a social class weakens or the number of people belonging to certain economic-based groups declines, the strength of the group as a voting bloc will decrease. This entry considers some key economic-based ­voting blocs and their support for parties representing their interests. As will be shown, economic-based groups have distinct political views that are taken up by

Economic-Based Voting Blocs

political parties, and some of these relationships are enduring, while others have had shorter lives.

Social Class Of economic-based voting blocs, social class has been the most studied. The origins date back to the work of Karl Marx, who emphasized the distinction between workers and those who controlled the workers and owned the means of production, and Max Weber, who argued that classes are distinguished by their economic interests in the market. Because these groups have different positions in the economic structure of a country, political parties work to appeal to their distinct interests. Early empirical studies of class-based voting relied on survey data, which remains a common approach today. The typical survey question is a subjective ­measure of an individual’s class identity. It asks respondents if they consider themselves members of a social class and if so, which of the following they identify with: lower, middle, working, or upper class. While a majority of Americans say they belong to a social class, around one third report that they do not think of themselves in these terms. In their classic work on American voting behavior, published in 1960, Angus Campbell and associates introduced the funnel of causality. In the funnel, social characteristics, including social class, are the initial set of factors that influence partisanship, issue positions, and evaluations of candidates and ultimately vote choice. They found that people in the working class would gravitate toward the Democratic Party, while the middle- and upper-class identifiers would support the Republican Party. As an update to this research, the authors of The American Voter Revisited (2008) analyzed American National Election Studies data from the 2000s and found that class continues to structure party support. Specifically, in the 2004 election, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry won 60% of working-class votes and just 47% of the middle-class vote. Furthermore, they found that voters from labor union households were 18% more likely to vote Democratic than voters from nonunion households. This link between labor union membership and the Democratic vote reflects an ongoing if diminishing pattern. Also, it shows the more general influence that group economic attachments can wield over the vote choice. Although we observe this basic distinction in how classes vote when considering class and vote by themselves, once we create a full voting model that accounts for income, party identification, economic evaluations, and candidate evaluations, the power of social class in

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determining vote choice diminishes. For example, a recent study of the 2012 U.S. election by Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier assesses a battery of socio-demographic characteristics and how they impacted support for President Obama. Social class did not contribute to understanding support for the president, but gender, church attendance, marital status, home ownership, and race/ethnicity did. In essence, when we account for a multiplicity of factors that influence vote choice, social class differences often fade into the background. Surveys can also be used to create summary measures of class-based voting. One common measure is the Alford Index, which measures the difference between the percentage of manual and nonmanual workers that vote for left parties. For example, if 75% of manual workers and 25% of nonmanual workers support the left, the index is 50. Russell Dalton in his book Citizen Politics analyzes the trends in class voting using the Alford Index in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France. From 1960 to the present, the decline is pronounced in all four countries. Great Britain is a case in point. The British political parties, the Labour and Conservative parties, were established along class lines. Labour represented the interests of the manual workers, while the Conservative Party represented the educated, middle, and upper classes. The class voting division in the 1960s was apparent. The Alford Index showed that the difference between the working- and middle-class vote for the Labour Party was more than 40 percentage points. By 2010, it had dropped to a value of 10. Some scholars have suggested that the Alford Index is no longer as accurate a measure of class voting as it once was due to societal change and the evolution of parties. The rise and expansion of the middle class, a group that does not fit into the Marxist dichotomy of the laborers or owners, has caused the clear distinction of the traditional class lines to blur. Political parties have adjusted to this by changing their appeals, further muddling class-based voting. Other related factors may also be weakening the impact of social class as an ­economic voting bloc. Citizens in many democracies are more educated than ever before, and thus they have the skills to analyze political information and make political decisions on their own rather than relying strictly on social-class appeals. With increased education, we also see increased social class and occupational mobility, meaning that people are no longer tied to their social class as they once were. Finally, postmaterialist issues, such as environmental protection and gender equality, may cut through class lines, dividing what had been cohesive voting blocs. These societal changes have led some scholars to predict the end of class-based voting. This claim has

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received much attention. Whether social class still matters for voting seems to depend on what measures are used and the sophistication of the study. Some scholars have argued that measures linking class to party support should be more nuanced. For example, the ­ Alford Index considers the dichotomous class and party divides. It does not account for specific parties in multiparty ­ systems, nor does it account for other class divisions. We can draw on Germany for an example of this. Russell J. Dalton presents the distribution of workingclass and new middle-class votes for the five main ­German parties in the 2009 election. Thirty percent of working-class voters supported the largest left party, the Social Democrats, as did 22% of the new middle class. This is what we would expect. However, the Greens, a smaller ecological party on the left, garner less support from working-class voters than from middle-class voters. This is the opposite of what we would expect in terms of support for a left party. Thus, by observing differences in support for specific parties, which the Alford Index prevents, we can develop a more precise understanding of class-based voting.

Farmers Farmers and the agricultural sector represent an ­economic-based voting bloc that does not fit neatly into the manual/nonmanual class divide. National and international agriculture policy decisions and trade ­ agreements directly affect the livelihoods of farmers, perhaps more so than employees in many other economic sectors. A chapter in The American Voter ­ assessed the participation and interests of American farmers in the 1950s and found that at that time, they were not politically engaged in an organized manner. However, by the 1970s and 1980s, they had become one of the most attentive groups in politics in the United States. In European countries with strong agricultural sectors, farmers are also quite powerful in politics. ­ Some countries, such as Poland, have parties that represent agrarian interests. The Polish People’s Party, for example, supports state intervention in the agricultural sector and national health care while holding conservative views on moral issues including opposition to gay marriage and abortion. Another example can be found in the Norwegian Centre Party, which has been steadfast in its opposition to membership in the European Union. The decline in the numbers of farmers over the past few decades has impacted social science research and the political parties that represent their interests. In national election studies, countries like the United States

have too few farmers in the survey to conduct reliable analysis of their political behavior. In Europe, many agrarian parties that existed in the 1950s have withered away, while others have stayed alive by expanding their appeal beyond rural agrarian interests.

Patrimony—the Investor Class Another way of considering people’s position in the economic system is according to the financial and ­physical assets they own. In the United States, economists have observed a large increase in the percentage of Americans who own stock since the 1980s, which has increased the size and power of the investor class. This group prefers probusiness policies such as low capitalgains and income taxes and minimal business regulation that would help the value of their stock increase. John V. Duca and Jason L. Savings analyze mutual fund data and U.S. House of Representatives elections and find that growth in the investor class has increased the popular support for Republican candidates. Stock ownership is just one aspect of asset ownership that affects voting behavior. Richard Nadeau and his colleagues consider a broader range of assets, also referred to as “patrimony,” and the levels of risk associated with them. They argue that people who own risky assets will be more likely to support parties that support deregulation and less government economic intervention, while those owning less-risky assets will hold the opposite view. Low-risk assets include savings accounts and ownership of housing, while high-risk assets are ownership of businesses, rental property, and stocks. Because individuals holding more risky assets could benefit more from laissez-faire economic policies, they should be more likely to support political parties on the right. Those who have low-risk assets should seek the safety of a regulated economy and therefore should ­support the policies of parties on the left. Nadeau and colleagues analyzed survey data from three French election studies and found that, indeed, high-risk asset holders are more likely than low-risk asset holders to say that the “state should give private enterprises more freedom.” This ultimately translates into an effect on the vote. The more high-risk assets a French voter owns, the more likely he or she will vote for a party on the right, even when other factors such as worker status, education, and income are controlled for. While studies show that high-risk asset owners in France and Britain are more likely to support parties of the right, it seems that holding low-risk assets does not have a consistent effect on party support. Thus, the ­patrimonial vote is among those who have risky assets: business, rental property, or stocks.

Economic-Based Voting Blocs

Winners and Losers in Economic Transitions The political and economic transitions that took place in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s after the collapse of communist regimes resulted in a distinct ­ type of economic voting bloc based on how the reforms affected individuals. The “winners” are those who fared well in the economic transitions, while the “losers” fell behind. These two groups had divergent political ­interests reflected at the ballot box. Under the communist regimes, the goal was to create a working-class society. The government guaranteed jobs for everyone, pensions for the elderly, and other social welfare programs to provide for the young and old. The government also set wages and dictated the price of goods. An emphasis was placed on the quantity of outputs rather than on quality or innovation. The rapid introduction of the free-market economy in the early 1990s resulted in dramatic social and ­economic upheaval. In the new environment in which competition and profits dictated business decisions, redundant or unnecessary jobs were eliminated, and companies sought motivated and skilled employees who could easily adapt to the new business environment. This often meant that older and less-educated workers lost their jobs and had difficulty finding work, because employers perceived them as being more set in their ways and difficult to retrain. The economic liberalization meant that prices for many goods increased due to market forces. People who relied on social welfare programs, such as the elderly who received their pensions from the state, could barely afford basic goods. Governments did not have the funds to increase pensions at the rate of inflation and, in ­addition, had debt problems, forcing them to trim other social welfare programs. Thus, recipients of these ­programs endured great financial hardship. The economic impacts these changes had on society created “winners” and “losers.” Joshua Tucker introduced the transitional identity theory, which identified parties in Russia and Central Europe as “Old Regime” or “New Regime.” The Old Regime parties were ones that had ties to the previous communist regime, while the New Regime parties were ones that supported the democratic and economic transitions. He found that regions prospering under the new economic conditions had higher support for proreform New Regime parties. Regions that were suffering economically had higher support for the Old Regime parties, even when those parties were in power. Thus, the “winners” and “losers” in the postcommunist transition expressed distinct interests on the direction of economic reforms at the ballot box.

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Now that the initial phases of the economic t­ ransitions are well in the past and some postcommunist countries have joined the European Union, the links between the winners and losers and the parties’ ­transitional identities have evolved. Few viable parties call for a return to communist economics (the Czech Communist Party is a notable exception), though we do observe parties advocating for the economic interests of these groups. In some Central European countries, this ­relationship between the haves and have-nots has come to resemble the traditional class-based voting found in established democracies.

Conclusion The preceding sections have reviewed some of the key economic-based voting blocs. For there to be a meaningful connection between the economic group and parties, the group must have a common set of economic interests, and there must be a party that appeals to these interests. When these factors are in place, the relationship can flourish. However, as noted throughout this article, the power of economic voting blocs can ebb and flow with societal changes. When a group decreases in size or its interests become less cohesive, political parties will adjust by shifting or broadening their appeal. This creates a dynamic interplay between such groups and the parties. These changes can be observed as we look at trends over time. The continued evolution of economic-based voting blocs will lead to further research on the topic. As trends within and across countries are examined, scholars will consider how globalization enhances or diminishes the links between economic groups and parties, whether terrorism and security issues cut across economic group lines, and how increases in economic inequality alter the relationship between parties and voters. Mary Stegmaier, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Samuel C. Dicke See also Attitudes; Economics and Political Behavior; Mass Political Behavior; Public Opinion; Rural Voters; Social Class; Social Stratification and Inequality; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American voter. New York, NY: Wiley. Dalton, R. J. (2014). Citizen politics: Public opinion and political parties in advanced industrial democracies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

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Duca, J. V., & Saving, J. L. (2008). Stock ownership and congressional elections: The political economy of the mutual fund revolution. Economic Inquiry, 46, 454–479. Evans, G. (2000). The continued significance of class voting. Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 401–417. Lewis-Beck, M. S., Jacoby W., Norpoth, H., & Weisberg, H. (2008). The American voter revisited. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Stegmaier, M. (2008). The economic vote in transitional democracies. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 18, 303–323. Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Stegmaier M. (2016). The Hispanic immigrant voter and the classic American voter: Presidential support in the 2012 election. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2(3), 165–181. Nadeau, R., Foucault, M., & Lewis-Beck, M. S. (2010). Patrimonial economic voting: Legislative elections in France. West European Politics, 33, 1261–1277. Oddbjørn, K. (2007). The decline of social class? In R. J. Dalton & H.-D. Klingemann (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political behavior (pp. 457–480). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Tucker, J. A. (2006). Regional economic voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, 1990–1999. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Economics Behavior

and

Political

Economic conditions are quite consistently found to affect citizens’ behavior and their voting behavior more specifically. Economic conditions do so in three different ways. First, voters’ opinions on what economic policies should be pursued guide their choices in the polling booth. Second, citizens’ personal economic situation is correlated to their vote choice. Third, voters reward and punish incumbents according to (changes in) the state of the economy, indicating the use of the vote as a mechanism to hold governing politicians accountable for their performance in office. This entry gives an overview of the theories with regard to each of these dimensions that link economics and voting behavior, although the focus is mostly on economic voting as a mechanism of accountability. The entry further offers a description of ways in which this link has been studied as well as a summary of the most important research findings in this field.

Different Dimensions of Economic Voting The economy can be linked to citizens’ party preferences and their vote choices in a number of ways. And each of

these dimensions of economic voting has an independent effect on the vote choice, as Michael Lewis-Beck, Richard Nadeau, and Martial Foucault, for example, have argued. It is of foremost importance to distinguish between these different dimensions of ­economic voting before summarizing the scientific evidence in this field. A first way in which economics and vote choices are linked is through citizens’ opinions on what economic policies should be pursued. This type of economic ­voting is also referred to as policy oriented; that is, with her vote, a voter signals what policies she would like to see pursued. A voter chooses the party that takes an economic position that resembles her own opinion on what economic policies should be pursued. For example, a voter who is personally in favor of redistribution policies would—according to the directional theory of economic voting—prefer a party that is situated to the left economically, a party that proposes levying taxes as a way to redistribute income. This policy-oriented dimension of economic voting implies that the economy affects the vote choice in much the same way as do other positional issues: voters’ choices are determined by the extent to which citizens personally agree with the positions and proposals of parties and candidates. A second dimension of economic voting relates ­citizens’ personal economic conditions and their material interests to their voting behavior. In essence, work along these lines has argued that citizens’ income, their social class, and even the property they own affect what parties or candidates citizens vote for. A rich literature on class voting, for example, has shown a relation between social class and vote choice. For example, in many democracies, working-class citizens tend to vote for parties on the left, while middle- or upper-class voters prefer rightist parties. In addition, scholars focusing on the concept of “patrimony” argue that citizens’ material interests shape their voting behavior. Wealth and having high-risk assets—such as stocks—in particular are then shown to correlate to preferring a party to the right. Most work on economic voting, however, belongs to a third dimension and is based on a reward–punishment model. Work in this field considers the economy a valence issue, that is, an issue on which everyone agrees. This agreement relates to the fact that economic prosperity is quite universally regarded as a good thing. Incumbent politicians, therefore, are expected to deliver in terms of economic growth and to allow for the economy to prosper. Upon voters rests the task of evaluating how well incumbents have performed and of rewarding and punishing them accordingly in the voting booth. In line with this basic expectation, incumbents in a wide and varied set of democracies worldwide are effectively found to do better when running for

Economics and Political Behavior

reelection in a context of economic growth or when unemployment rates are low. In the remainder of this entry, the focus is on this classic and most extensively investigated dimension of economic voting as a rewardand-punishment mechanism.

Objective and Subjective Measures of the Economy Even focusing on economic voting in terms of a reward-and-punishment model only, there are different ways in which one could measure economic conditions and different approaches to investigating the rewardand-punishment mechanism. First, aggregate-level studies examine the link between economic conditions on the one hand and the incumbent’s vote share on the other. Such studies, which focus either on a series of elections within a country or on elections in a pool of countries, make use of objective economic indicators of the state of the economy. For example, they rely on gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates and hypothesize that as the economy grows more strongly, the incumbent will receive a larger share of the vote. When using unemployment rates as an indicator, in contrast, the expectation is ­that higher unemployment rates (or a stronger increase in unemployment rates) harms the incumbent on ­election day. Second, a good deal of the literature on economic voting consists of individual-level studies in which scholars examine economic voting by means of an analysis of respondents’ reported vote choice. Research along these lines investigates the impact of the economy on an individual’s probability of voting for the incumbent. When performing such an analysis within a single country and by means of a single election study, objective indicators of the national economy cannot be relied on. The reason therefore is that, in the context of a particular election, the state of the national economy is a constant. As an alternative, scholars studying the individual-level mechanisms of economic voting within a single election make use of subjective economic measures. The key independent variable in such analyses is a respondent’s evaluation of the state of the economy. Such perceptions vary from one individual to another. Some individuals can judge an economy as prosperous, while others perceive the economy to be deteriorating. This variation is what scholars of economic voting are interested in, and the expectation guiding their work is that individuals who evaluate the economy more positively are also more likely to vote for the incumbent. Subjective measures of economic conditions are not uncontested, and some have claimed that they suffer

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from an endogeneity bias; those who intend to vote for the incumbent will evaluate the incumbent’s performance positively and will hence perceive the economy to be in good shape as well. Overall, however, regardless of whether scholars focus on the aggregate level or on individuals’ probabilities of voting for the incumbent and regardless of whether the economy is measured objectively or by means of subjective evaluations— research quite consistently shows evidence of a link between economic conditions on the one hand and how the incumbent fares on the other.

Sociotropic and Egotropic Economic Voting Focusing on economic voting in terms of a reward-andpunishment model only, and having decided the level of analysis as well as whether to measure the economy objectively or by means of subjective evaluations, there are still different ways in which one could judge economic conditions. A crucial distinction relates to whose economic situation is being evaluated: a citizen’s personal economic condition or the state of the national economy? Kinder and Kiewit have elaborated on this basic distinction between personal and collective financial conditions. Voting shaped by a judgment of one’s personal financial conditions (the pocketbook) is what they refer to as egotropic economic voting, while they refer to voting on the basis of the state of the national economy as sociotropic economic voting. Election surveys regularly include questions asking respondents to evaluate their personal financial conditions as well as the state of the national economy, which allows an assessment of their relative importance. For example, the surveys of the Latinobarometer project include the following questions: Egotropic: Do you consider your economic situation and that of your family to be better, about the same, or worse than 12 months ago? Sociotropic: Do you consider the current economic situation of the country to be better, about the same, or worse than 12 months ago?

Research that takes both egotropic and sociotropic measures into account and that examines economic voting by means of survey items as these generally finds sociotropic evaluations to matter more. That is, respondents’ evaluations of national economic conditions are affecting the probability of voting for the incumbent more strongly than do respondents’ evaluations of their personal financial situation.

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Individual-Level Heterogeneity in Economic Voting Research generally finds the economy to affect vote choices, and individual-level analyses report significant effects of economic evaluations or objective economic indicators on voting for the incumbent. While the ­pattern of economic voting is quite generally observed, scholars have also drawn attention to sources of ­individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting. For some voters, the economy has more of an impact on the choices they make than what holds for other voters. This section focuses on three sources of heterogeneity: partisanship, political sophistication, and how important an issue one thinks the economy is. First, scholars have drawn attention to the role of partisanship, indicating that for citizens who are attached to a party, this attachment functions as a “perceptual screen” that influences how they evaluate and judge politicians’ performance. By means of a series of survey experiments, James Tilley and Sara B. Hobolt have found that when informed that economic conditions are deteriorating, government partisans are less likely to attribute worsening conditions to the incumbent than what holds for opposition partisans. As a consequence, government partisans are less likely to punish the incumbent in times of economic downturn. Conversely, opposition partisans are less likely to credit the incumbent for a prosperous economy. The role of partisanship as a perceptual screen thus implies that economic voting is weakened among those who have strong party attachments. Second, research on economic voting has pointed to heterogeneity in terms of citizens’ level of political sophistication—that is, how politically informed and knowledgeable they are. The argument of this stream of literature is that economic voting is quite information and skill intensive; one has to monitor the state of the economy, know who is in office, and cast ballots accordingly. As a consequence, high sophisticates in particular are expected to be economic voters. Even though voting according to a reward-and-punishment mechanism is generally thought of as less demanding than voting according to one’s issue and policy preferences, the results of previous research indicate that in terms of economic voting as well, political sophistication is an important facilitator for voters who have to make up their minds. Third, empirical work has pointed toward substantial variation in the extent to which voters consider the economy an important issue and take it into account when deciding whom to vote for. While the economy is without doubt one of the most important issues affecting the vote choice and elections overall, for some voters, the state of the economy is a more important factor

than for others. Self-evidently, for those voters who think of the economy as a more important issue, economic voting is stronger as well.

Cross-National Variation in Economic Voting Much of the literature on economic voting has examined economic voting within countries and analyzed variation in the strength of the economic vote between individuals, but a significant part of the literature on economic voting is comparative. These studies—whether they make use of aggregate-level data or a pool of individuallevel survey data from different countries—have pointed toward important variation in economic voting between countries. The most influential study in this field is G. Bingham Powell and Guy D. Whitten’s comparative study of aggregate-level patterns in economic voting in 19 industrialized democracies. Powell and Whitten argue that the strength of economic voting is dependent on the “clarity of responsibility.” For example, economic voting should be stronger in countries where a single party governs than what is the case in a context of coalition government—where multiple parties share responsibility for the state of the economy. Powell and Whitten’s analysis effectively indicates that patterns of economic voting are stronger in high-clarity contexts than what holds for countries and contexts where the clarity of responsibility is muted.

Temporal Trend in Economic Voting Finally, in the context of rapid and sometimes profound societal and political changes, it is important to consider temporal trends in economic voting as well. Two processes of change in particular are relevant, their impact being in opposite directions. On the one hand, political scientists have pointed out that in a number of established democracies, partisanship is decreasing over time. This pattern is obvious from decreasing numbers of partisans, increasing levels of volatility, and the fact that electorates decide increasingly late what party to vote for. Weaker a­ ttachments to parties imply that the role of partisanship as a perceptual screen is weakened as well, which in turn implies that economic voting should be strengthened. A comparative study of economic voting in E ­ uropean democracies that Mark Andreas Kayser and Christopher Wlezien conducted on this issue does indeed show that the economic vote is stronger in contexts of weak partisan ties. A trend toward weaker partisan attachments should thus be associated with more economic voting.

Ecopolitics

On the other hand, trends of economic globalization and more political integration imply that national governments are increasingly less capable of shaping national economic conditions. Some scholars argue that citizens are aware of these policy constraints and do not hold national incumbents accountable for economic conditions if these are out of their control. The ­aggregate-level study that Timothy Hellwig and David Samuels conducted, for example, shows that economic voting is weaker in more open economies. According to this work, the over-time pattern of globalization should weaken the national economic vote. With both of these trends developing concurrently— weaker partisan attachments as well as a trend of ­globalization—scholars of economic voting are uncertain how the economic vote fares over time. Whether the economic vote is becoming stronger, is weakening, or remains quite stable over time remains to be seen. Ruth Dassonneville See also Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills; EconomicBased Voting Blocs; Electoral Systems; Motivated Reasoning; Party Identification; Representative Democracy; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Hellwig, T., & Samuels, D. (2007). Voting in open economies: The electoral consequences of globalization. Comparative Political Studies, 40, 283–306. Kayser, M., & Wlezien, C. (2011). Performance pressure: Patterns of partisanship and the economic vote. European Journal of Political Research, 50, 365–394. Kinder, D. R., & Kiewiet, D. R. (1981). Sociotropic politics: The American case. British Journal of Political Science, 11, 129–161. Lewis-Beck, M. S., Nadeau, R., & Foucault, M. (2012). The compleat economic voter: New theory and British evidence. British Journal of Political Science, 43, 241–261. Powell, G. B., & Whitten, G. D. (1993). A cross-national analysis of economic voting: Taking account of the political context. American Journal of Political Science, 37, 391–414. Tilley, J., & Hobolt, S. B. (2011). Is the government to blame? An experimental test of how partisanship shapes perceptions of performance and responsibility. Journal of Politics, 73, 316–330.

Ecopolitics The term ecopolitics refers to an ideological perspective that positions the ecological as central to political concerns. Proponents of ecopolitics promote ecological

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awareness and advocate for the politicization of environmental issues. There are two assumptions integral to the ecopolitical perspective: (1) analyses of political systems and development of political policies must be approached with ecological awareness to be comprehensive and effective; and (2) political judgment is an essential aspect of ecological awareness. The emphasis on a politicized and centralized ecological awareness positions ecopolitics in direct opposition to the dominant global ideology of neoliberalism that currently influences the economic and political decision making of nation-states and corporations worldwide. Neoliberalism privileges economic needs over political and environmental issues and perceives the ­ advancement of economic growth and development as an effective way to address all sociopolitical and ecological ills. In promoting ecological awareness, ­ ­ecopolitics thrusts ecological concerns to the forefront of debates on global economics and politics and thereby challenges the neoliberal privileging of economic ­systems over all others. Ecopolitical perspectives stress the need to acknowledge the interdependent relationship between the economic and ecological spheres. Unlike neoliberals, ecopolitical proponents recognize and stress that the potential and scale of economic growth are already dependent upon the availability of ecological resources and sites needed for growth to occur. Similarly, the survival and sustainability of ecological systems are dependent upon the type and implementation of economic policy as well as the impact of development upon established human communities and cultures, unique ecosystems, and nonhuman species. In politicizing the ecological sphere and then exposing the interdependence of economic and ecological systems, ecopolitical perspectives effectively also politicize the economic sphere. As a result, in addition to describing an ideological perspective that politicizes ecology, the term ecopolitics refers to the politicization of economics. Numerous cultural critics and philosophers have criticized the construction of global economic systems, in particular the free market, as an apolitical agent within the neoliberal cultural imaginary. When the economic sphere is simultaneously privileged above all other spheres and constructed as a neutral force, it becomes imbued with benevolence and omniscience. Neoliberal policies and practices that inspire economic development and growth are seen as essential to the creation of capital. The profits of development are thought to trickle naturally down through the social strata in order to be invested in new ventures and increase purchasing power. As a result of increased investment and purchasing, social and environmental conditions are improved, allowing for further economic

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Ecopolitics

development and growth that repeats the cycle. For neoliberals, the continued repetition of this cycle ­provides the possibility of infinite growth and regeneration despite the finiteness of the land and resources upon which such growth relies. Ecopolitics challenges dominant ideological assumptions by reminding neoliberals that infinite growth is not possible when the ­environmental resources upon which such growth relies are finite.

The Roots of Ecopolitics The emergence of ecological awareness in academe can be correlated to the publishing of Rachel Carson’s landmark ecocritical text Silent Spring (1962). Carson employed interdisciplinary methods to effectively expose the unintended and unrecognized consequences of DDT use on U.S. songbirds. While skeptics and detractors criticized her use of literary imagery to present well-researched and accurate scientific data, ­ Carson’s text has been deeply influential in both scientific and literary fields. Through the construction of an idyllic rural scene that has been silenced as a result of the pervasive use of a poisonous pesticide, Carson not only emphasizes the environmental impact of DDT use but also illustrates the flaw in humans’ relentless drive for productivity and growth which, when unregulated, can have disastrous ecological effects. Ecopolitics owes its emergence to academic pioneers such as Carson who were willing not only to contest assumptions of the establishment but also to use innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to expose ­ and politicize pressing ecological issues. The roots of ecopolitics can be traced back to Silent Spring among other poststructural texts produced as part of the intellectual ­ revolution and political debates throughout industrialized ­ countries that challenged conventional systems thinking as well as definitions of the subject throughout the course of the late 1950s and following decades. Despite its concurrent/coetaneous roots in the disciplines of ecology and social geology, ecopolitics— ecological awareness in general—developed in academe not as a result of shifts or evolutions in any one specific scholarly discipline but out of a search for new theories to explain the relationship of humankind to the world. Such theories ­ transcended boundaries that limit ­academic fields. Two key concerns arose in the 1960s, both of which are reflected by Carson in Silent Spring. The failings of promises of modernity inspired critics to develop ecopolitical perspectives with which to examine the impact of industry and technology on contemporary society, the loss of idyllic pastoral scapes, and the alienation of human labor. While somewhat nostalgic in its view of

both the nature of and interaction between humans and their environments in past eras, critics of modernity opened up spaces in which to discuss the complex relationships between economic development and ­ democracy within an ecological context. The second concern that inspired both scholars and activists to embrace an ecopolitical ethic arose as scientific assessments of environmental issues predicted a dim future not just for humans but for all nonhuman life on Earth should the ecological sphere be subjugated to the desire for economic growth and the ever growing wants of consumers. Despite the existence of ecopolitical agendas since the mid-20th century, the term ecopolitics was not employed by academics until the turn of the century. The term itself is most commonly attributed to ecofeminist scholar Verena Andermatt Conley, who, in Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (1997), provides the first definition of ecopolitics and lays the groundwork for the evolution of both the term and the ideological framework it represents. Like Carson, Andermatt Conley’s work is fundamentally interdisciplinary and can be described as part of a larger tradition of ecocriticism that emerged out of literary studies but bridges multiple scholarly disciplines. Andermatt Conley also expresses concern about the marginalization and depoliticization of ecology, questions projects of modernity, and reminds readers that ecological concerns supersede all other international political agendas. She calls for a return to a moment when theorists acknowledged the indissoluble relationship between poststructural thought and ecology. Through her reading of French poststructural theory, she demonstrates the need for cultural critics and philosophers to cultivate both environmental consciousness and an ecology of thought. In addition, Andermatt Conley identifies poststructural environmentalists as complicit in the erasure of ecology, thereby furthering the neoliberal agenda. She also asserts that, in academe, ecology has become unnamable in humanistic inquiry and locates her ecological agenda within the context of other humanistic agendas relating to human culture, plurality, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. Ecopolitics can be situated as part of the ecocritical tradition but furthers ecocritical agendas in presenting an ecofeminist perspective on ecopolitics. Ecocriticism is a poststructural field of study that grew out of scholarly interest in literary and cultural representations of both nature and the relationship between humans and the environment. Infused with green morality and informed by an environmental political agenda, ecocriticism is closely related to philosophy and political ­science theories. Ecofeminism is an area of knowledge

Ecopolitics

within the field of ecocriticism that emerged when ­feminist scholars, disturbed by the dominance of White male ecocritical perspectives in the field, attempted to draw parallels between the oppression of women and nature. Ecofeminists exposed how an uncritical and underpoliticized ecocriticism leads to the perpetuation of the very patriarchal system that subjugates the ­ecological sphere as it does women. While on one hand unveiling the processes of depoliticization of the ecological sphere, ecofeminists also worked to repoliticize ecology in the very same way that feminists were politicizing other sites of erasure and subjugation, including the female body, the private or domestic sphere, and women’s experience. In this way, ecofeminists further the ecocritical agenda but construct an ecopolitics that is situated within debates surrounding power, democracy, equity, and degrowth.

Social and Environmental Justice: A Vital Link Since the publishing of Ecopolitics in the late 1990s, a number of scholars have responded to Andermatt ­Conley’s call to develop ecological consciousness, and, as a result, the field of ecocriticism has evolved significantly. Recently, globalization and postcolonial scholars have worked relentlessly to explore previously unexamined issues of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity in relation to environmental catastrophes. Such work is paramount given not only the prospect of environmental catastrophes but also the fact that the most vulnerable and impoverished populations are also the most susceptible and least prepared for ecological disasters. Through their work on environmental racism, ethnic displacement and disenfranchisement global politics, corporate trade regimes, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and conflict (for example), such scholars have expanded ecopolitical perspectives to include, help render visible, and politicize some of the globe’s most marginalized and vulnerable populations, species, biospheres, and land masses. Such academic work, frequently supported and furthered by both local and global activists working to disrupt hegemonic political and global economic systems in order to create more equitable social relations, illustrates the interconnectedness of social and environmental justice issues and has led to an increase in collaborations between social and environmental justice workers. Ecopolitical perspectives consistently reiterate the need to cultivate environmental awareness by emphasizing the interdependence of economic and ecological spheres. In their analyses of global economic policy and practices, ecopolitical scholars and activists emphasize the finite nature of the ecological resources upon which

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any and all economic growth relies and demonstrate the unsustainability of infinite economic growth. They thus challenge dominant neoliberal assumptions and the privileging of economics over ecological and political spheres/concerns. Contemporary ecopolitics can be defined as an ideology that challenges dominant ­neoliberal ideologies and the logic of endless economic development by politicizing the economic and ecological spheres. However, a more radical yet more complete ecopolitics would also recognize the intrinsic links between economic and ecological spheres and the social and cultural sphere. Arguably ecopolitics cannot effectively contest neoliberal ideological perspectives unless ecopolitical ­ perspectives recognize the interwoven nature of all spheres and ecopolitical practitioners develop frameworks, methods, policies, and practices that politicize not only human and nonhuman systems but also the interstices that connect them. While not fully articulated, such a radical oppositional ideology is indeed possible, as is made evident by advocates of degrowth. The core principle of degrowth requires a reenvisioning of hegemonic notions of progress and a rejection of the homogeneous consumer ­culture that allows corporations and owners of capital to determine structures of and relations between all human and nonhuman systems on the globe. In practice, degrowth means the use of sustainable methods to scale back economic development projects and a reduction in the production and consumption of unnecessary and luxury commodities. The aims of degrowth are ecopolitical. H. Louise Davis See also Alienation; Capitalism; Civic Engagement; Command of the Commons; Democracy; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Energy Competition; Feminism; Hierarchy of Needs; Liberalism; Neoliberalism; Social Movements

Further Readings Conley Andermatt, V. (1997). Ecopolitics: The environment in poststructuralist thought. New York, NY: Routledge. Davis, H. L., Pilgrim, K., & Sinha, M. (Eds.). (2016). The ecopolitics of consumption: The food trade. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Litfin, K. T. (1997). Sovereignty in world ecopolitics. Mershon International Studies Review, 41(2), 167–204. doi:http:// dx.doi.org/10.2307/222667 Nepal, P. (2004). Ecopolitics and ideology: Relocating green themes in modern ideological thinking. The Indian Journal of Political Science, 65(4), 603–619. Available at http://www .jstor.org/stable/41856079 Stoett, P. J. (2012). Global ecopolitics: Crisis, governance, and justice. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

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Egocentrism

Egocentrism The concept of egocentrism was introduced and described by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget as a lack of differentiation in some area of subject–object interaction and a negative by-product of any emergent cognitive system. This entry describes the emergence of egocentrism during the adolescent phase of human development, ­ presents the views of researchers and theorists on how gender affects the way in which egocentrism is manifested, and explains the connection between egocentrism and adolescents’ engagement in high-risk behaviors. The entry concludes with a discussion of political behavior and egocentrism, sometimes expressed in what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud characterized as narcissism, an extreme form of the trait. David Elkind elaborated on the concept of egocentrism and used the term adolescent egocentrism to describe the phenomenon of adolescents’ inability to distinguish between their perception of what others think about them and what others actually think in reality. This lack of differentiation takes a unique form and is manifested in a unique set of behaviors at each stage of mental development charted by Piaget. Adolescent egocentrism is characterized by the capacity to take account of other people’s thoughts. As Elkind describes, “It is this belief that others are preoccupied with his appearance and behavior that constitutes the egocentrism of the adolescent” (Elkind, 1967, p. 1030). Adolescent egocentrism emerges in the form of two expressions, (1) imaginary audience, characterized by the inability to differentiate between the object of thought, leading to the thinking that others are preoccupied with you because you are preoccupied with yourself; and (2) personal fable, characterized by a new ability to think about one’s and others’ thoughts, leading to pervasive unrealistic beliefs in one’s uniqueness (a sense that one is the focus of attention for others and that others cannot understand what one feels or experiences), omnipotence (an increased sense of self-worth and a belief that one’s actions are particularly informative or influential), and invulnerability to harm (a sense that the risks of actions are less for oneself than for others). Evangelia Galanaki maintains that the imaginary audience and personal fable expressions account for a large number of typical adolescent behaviors, such as self-consciousness, daydreaming, shyness, desire for aloneness, tendency to conform to group norms, exhibitionism, keeping of a diary, and risk-taking behavior.

Developmental and Gendered Aspects of Adolescent Egocentrism Elkind postulated that egocentrism is a developmental phenomenon that emerges during early adolescence (age 11–12), peaks around 13 to 15 years, and steadily

declines with age and consolidation of formal operations. However, this postulation has been contested by multiple researchers, who have demonstrated through research (a) that increase in age was not inversely proportional to the measurement of adolescent egocentrism (Lapsley et al., 1993); (b) that scores of egocentrism were not significantly different between adolescents and young adults (Frankenberger, 2000); and (c) a lack of association between formal operations and adolescent egocentrism (Lapsley et al., 1986). Therefore, the age-related emergence and dissipation of adolescent ­ egocentrism has largely been dismissed. Empirically, it has been found that the emergence of adolescent egocentrism will manifest differently in males and females. A large number of studies have shown that females tend to exhibit more imaginary audience ideation than males (see studies by Elkind and by Luc Goossens), with only a handful of studies ­concluding the opposite (i.e., that males have higher imaginary audience and personal fable scores than females; see Alberts et al., 2007; Greene et al., 2000). However, a few others have also reported no gender differences. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the evidence on how egocentrism manifests differently in males and females remains equivocal.

Egocentrism and Risk Taking in Adolescents Among multiple theories of why adolescents engage in high-risk behaviors, one that has been used frequently is the belief that adolescents and young adults engage in risky behaviors partly because of their false sense of invulnerability to injury, harm, or danger. The traditional egocentrism perspective that has also been ­validated in a number of studies of high-risk behaviors considers the invulnerability dimension of personal fable as a lamentable feature of adolescent development because it impairs judgment in critical situations. The different health risk contexts in which egocentrism has been examined includes disordered eating and anorexia nervosa, cigarette smoking, unsafe sex, and substance use. Adolescents’ felt invulnerability to injury, harm, and danger is considered to be the primary driver that predicts engagement in risky behaviors. This invulnerability is the result of pervasive optimism bias when individuals assume more favorable outcomes for self than for others, which makes them more likely to take risks—for instance, chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease or getting pregnant when having unprotected sex. Lapsley and Patrick L. Hill (2010) present the alternative view that adolescent egocentrism may not be just a negative by-product of cognitive development. They explain that invulnerability has “two faces,” that is, predicts risk behavior certainly but also adaptation,

Egocentrism

coping, and resilience in adolescents. Contexts such as making a friend, learning a new skill, going for study abroad, applying for employment or university admission, and asking for dates are some instances that require taking chances when failure is a potential option and self-image is potentially at stake. Therefore, not all risk taking is maladaptive; in fact, invulnerability in adolescents may prompt them to be better equipped to take on the normative, age-appropriate challenges that characterize mature development. The concept of i­nvulnerability and, in general, adolescent egocentrism presents shades of both adaptive and maladaptive behaviors and merits further attention, ­ particularly to examine decision making along the development trajectories of adolescence and going into adulthood.

Egocentrism and Political Behavior The concept of egocentrism, as described by Piaget, has also been applied to political behavior. The manifestation of egocentrism in adults who are in the political limelight takes the form of epistemological centration, described by Piaget as a characteristic of childish thought (that may never go away), whereby the individual believes that he or she shares the point of view of others but is in fact stuck in his or her own point of view. This centration of thought upon oneself does not allow for introspection and self-knowledge because egocentrism operates at an unconscious level. As noted by Harold Lasswell, egocentric individuals often struggle to communicate, often lack empathy for others because they can only see the world from their own perspective, and are often unable to fully understand other people’s opinions. An example of a political figure widely considered to be egocentric is Donald Trump, whose behaviors and actions as the 2016 Republican presidential candidate were seen by some psychologists (see Ashcroft, 2016) to fit the mold of an egocentric personality, with an inability to fully appreciate the thoughts, perspectives, and ideas of others. In fact, many clinical psychologists, mental health professionals, and scholars (e.g., ­Ashcroft, 2016; Cruz & Buser, 2016; Dutton, 2016; Immelman, 2016; Jonason, Webster, Schmitt, Li, & Crysel, 2012; Tracy, 2013; Visser, Book, & Volk, 2017) have speculated and presented evidence to support the argument that Donald Trump is an egocentric individual with extreme streaks of the personality trait, causing him to be often characterized as a narcissist (the more extreme form of egocentrism leads to narcissism; see Sigmund Freud). Whereas egocentrism is viewed as the more banal form of a personality that leads to a greater preoccupation with self, narcissism is understood as a more extreme form, described as a personality disorder in individuals. As described by Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology and the director of the Foley Center

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for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, presented in his review article in The Atlantic (2016, n.p.): For psychologists, it is almost impossible to talk about Donald Trump without using the word narcissism. Asked to sum up Trump’s personality for an article in Vanity Fair, Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard, responded, “Remarkably narcissistic.” George Simon, a clinical psychologist who conducts seminars on manipulative behavior, says Trump is “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example” of narcissism. “Otherwise I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”

The proliferation of such comments by mental health professionals led to a reminder from the ­American Psychiatric Association in August 2016 that the profession’s ethical code allows public discussion by members about psychiatric issues, but not the diagnosis of people they haven’t treated. From the standpoint of political behavior, a focus on the egocentric personality trait in those who hold high public office may be an area ripe for future research, especially given the implications for how government policies are shaped and the effects of those policies on the general population, on the environment, and in the arena of international relations. Smita C. Banerjee See also Authoritarian Personality; Dogmatism; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Ethnocentrism; Genocide; Irrationality; Psychodynamic Theory; Tragedy of the Commons

Further Readings Aalsma, M., Lapsley, D. K., & Flannery, D. (2006). Narcissism, personal fables, and adolescent adjustment. Psychology in the Schools, 43, 481–491. doi:10.1002/pits.20162 Alberts, A., Elkind, D., & Ginsberg, S. (2007). The personal fable and risk-taking in early adolescence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36, 71–76. doi:10.1007/s10964-006-9144-4 Arnett, J. (1992). Reckless behavior in adolescence: A developmental perspective. Developmental Review, 12, 339–373. doi:10.1016/0273-2297(92)90013-R Ashcroft, A. (2016). Donald Trump: Narcissist, psychopath or representative of the people? Psychotherapy and Politics International, 14, 217–222. doi:10.1002/ppi.1395 Cruz, L., & Buser, S. (2016). A clear and present danger: Narcissism in the era of Donald Trump. Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications. Dutton, K. (2016). Would you vote for a psychopath? Scientific American Mind, 27, 50–55. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican mind0916-50 Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38, 1025–1034.

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Elkind, D., & Bowen, R. (1979). Imaginary audience behavior in children and adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 15, 38–44. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.15.1.38 Frankenberger, K. D. (2000). Adolescent egocentrism: A comparison among adolescents and adults. Journal of Adolescence, 23, 343–354. doi:10.1006/jado.2000.0319 Freud, S. (1999/1914). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (Vol. 14, pp. 73–103). New York, NY: Vintage. Galanaki, E. P. (2001). The imaginary audience and the personal fable in relation to risk behavior and risk perception during adolescence. Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society, 8, 411–443. Goossens, L. (1984). Imaginary audience behavior as a function of age, sex, and formal operational thinking. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 7, 77–93. doi:10.1177/ 016502548400700106 Greene, K., Krcmar, M., Walters, L. H., Rubin, D. L., & Hale, J. L. (2000). Targeting adolescent risk-taking behaviors: The contributions of egocentrism and sensation seeking. Journal of Adolescence, 23, 439–461. doi:10.1006/jado.2000.0330 Greene, K., Rubin, D., Hale, J., & Walters, J. (1996). The utility of understanding adolescent egocentrism in designing health promotion messages. Health Communication, 8, 131–152. doi:10.1207/s15327027hc0802_2 Immelman, A. (2016, October). The political personality of 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump (Working Paper No. 1.0). Collegeville and St. Joseph, MN: St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics. Retrieved from Digital Commons website: http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/ psychology_pubs/103/ Jonason, P. K., Webster, G. W., Schmitt, D. P., Li, N. P., & Crysel, L. (2012). The antihero in popular culture: A life history theory of the dark triad. Review of General Psychology, 16, 192–199. doi:10.1037/a0027914 Lapsley, D. K. (1993). Toward an integrated theory of adolescent ego development: The “new look” at adolescent egocentrism. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 63, 562–571. doi:10.1037/h0079470 Lapsley, D. K., & Hill, P. L. (2010). Subjective invulnerability, optimism bias and adjustment in emerging adulthood. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39, 847–857. doi:10.1007/ s10964-009-9409-9 Lapsley, D. K., Jackson, S., Rice, K., & Shadid, G. E. (1988). Selfmonitoring and the “new look” at the imaginary audience and the personal fable: An ego-developmental analysis. Journal of Adolescent Research, 3, 17–31. doi:10.1177/ 074355488831003 Lapsley, D. K., Milstead, M., Quintana, S. M., Flannery, D., & Buss, R. R. (1986). Adolescent egocentrism and formal operations: Tests of a theoretical assumption. Developmental Psychology, 22, 800–807. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.22.6.800 Lasswell, H. D. (1977). Psychopathology and politics. New York, NY: The Viking Press.

McAdams, D. P. (2016, June). The mind of Donald Trump. The Atlantic. Retrieved on December 20, 2016, from https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/ the-mind-of-donald-trump/480771/ Piaget, J. (2000). Commentary on Vygotsky’s critical remarks of language and thought of the child and judgment and reasoning in the child. New Ideas in Psychology, 18, 241–259. doi:10.1016/S0732-118X(00)00012-X Tracy, J. L. (2013). The seven deadly sins: Pride and power. Scientific American Mind, 24, 64–68. doi:10.1038/ scientificamericanmind1113-64 Visser, B. A., Book, A. S., & Volk, A. A. (2017). Is Hillary dishonest and Donald narcissistic? A HEXACO analysis of the presidential candidates’ public personas. Personality and Individual Differences, 106, 281–286.

Egoistical Relative Deprivation Egoistical or individual relative deprivation (IRD) is defined as a judgment that one is disadvantaged compared with a relevant referent; this judgment evokes feelings of anger, resentment, and entitlement. IRD is distinct from group relative deprivation (GRD), the judgment that one’s reference group is relatively disadvantaged, which is accompanied by feelings of anger, resentment, and entitlement. IRD predicts mental and physical health, deviance, and political attitudes. IRD is most likely to occur when people easily can contrast their current situation with a more positive experience that “ought” to have occurred (a version of the simulation heuristic). By detaching people’s subjective evaluations from their objective circumstances, IRD explains why even “objectively advantaged” people can feel deprived. If people feel that they are entitled to have more in comparison with what they have, they will feel deprived, regardless of how many resources or other advantages they may possess. In contrast, “objectively disadvantaged” people may appear to tolerate their circumstances because they compare themselves with ­ those who have even fewer resources.

Concept History Samuel Stouffer drew upon IRD to describe unexpected relationships that emerged from surveys of World War II soldiers. For example, Stouffer and his colleagues argued that air corpsmen reported more frustration with a relatively faster rate of promotion in comparison with the military police because they knew more peers who had been promoted. During the following decades, scholars incorporated IRD into larger models of social comparison, equity, and causal attribution equity theory. In one important model, Faye Crosby proposed that IRD requires (1) the

Egoistical Relative Deprivation

desire for what one does not have and (2) the feeling that one deserves whatever it is one wants but does not have. In a second important model, Robert Folger proposed that people’s current situations form a ­ ­narrative or story to which they compare different alternative stories. People will evaluate their current outcome negatively and feel resentful and angry if they can imagine (1) much better alternative outcomes, (2) more legitimate contingencies and procedures that might have led to better outcomes, and (3) that the ­current situation will not improve in the near future.

IRD Reactions IRD predicts individual-focused attitudes and behaviors including an interest in professional development, ­gambling, turnover, absenteeism, and other counterproductive work behaviors. Most researchers define IRD as an interpersonal comparison between the comparer and another person, but people also can compare themselves to a past or future self and experience IRD. People who compare their present self to a past, more privileged self also report less self-esteem and more emotional distress. Given the range of ways that people can respond to IRD, it is crucial to determine when people will accept their situation, undermine the system or organization, actively challenge the injustice, or try to escape. One way to discriminate among these possibilities is to identify the discrete emotions that mediate between upward disadvantaged comparisons and people’s reactions. For example, anger, fear, and sadness all represent negative emotions, but they each serve a different adaptive function. Anger motivates people to attack, sadness ­ motivates people to withdraw, and fear motivates ­people to escape. If people respond to an undeserved situation with anger, they should be more likely to attack the source of their deprivation—they might join a strike against their employer or steal office supplies. But if they respond to an undeserved situation with sadness, they should be more likely to withdraw—they might miss work meetings, social events, or entire workdays. True IRD experiences require justice-related affect, in particular angry resentment. Angry resentment is distinct from envy, jealousy, or more generic forms of anger. Unlike envy, resentment is a publicly shared ­justice-related emotion that elicits a focus on the system that produced the inequity. Importantly, resentment is unlikely to be as ephemeral as other anger-related emotions, which can explain why IRD successfully predicts such a large range of attitudes and behavior.

Mental and Physical Health Impact IRD also can adversely affect people’s physical and mental health. For example, faculty members who

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reported more IRD in response to a 10% pay cut also reported worse physical and mental health. Similarly, Icelanders who reported that the 2010 financial crisis hurt them more than other Icelanders reported higher levels of depression in comparison with Icelanders who reported that their (objectively poor) situation was no worse in comparison with their neighbors. Research on subjective social status documents similar patterns including evidence that people who report lower subjective social status (a proxy for IRD) are more susceptible to the common cold. However, the real health risk might not stem from IRD but from how effective a person’s response to an undeserved disadvantage is. If a person’s response is successful and circumstances change, that response buffers them from possible health costs. But if they are unsuccessful, the health costs to them might increase. It also may not be a single IRD experience that leads to poor physical and mental health but cumulative e­ xperiences of IRD over many years that lead to poor outcomes. In fact, Arline Geronimus and colleagues describe a “weathering effect” in which the effects of social inequality on health increase as people get older. For example, the difference between the allostatic load (a product of various physiological markers of stress) for African Americans and European Americans is greater for middle-aged respondents in comparison with younger respondents—a pattern that is not explained by differences in poverty. Instead, this earlier physical aging appears to reflect the costs incurred from coping with repeated discrimination and other obstacles.

Conclusion Relative deprivation (RD) is a classic social psychological concept. It postulates a subjective state that shapes emotions, cognitions, and behavior, an approach that is shared by a number of other social science concepts and theories that employ relative comparisons including reference group theory, status crystallization, social exchange theory, equity theory, and social comparison theory. RD also challenges conventional wisdom about the prime importance of absolute deprivation. It is no surprise there are hundreds of references to RD in ­academic papers. Heather J. Smith and Desiree Ryan See also Attribution Theory; Deviance and Control; Distributive Justice; Equity Theory; Group Relative Deprivation; Prejudice; Procedural Justice

Further Readings Callan, M. J., Ellard, J. H., Shead, N., & Hodgins, D. C. (2008). Gambling as a search for justice: Examining the role of

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personal relative deprivation in gambling urges and gambling behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(11), 1514–1529. doi:10.1177/0146167208322956 Geronimus, A. T., Hicken, M., Keen, D., & Bound, J. (2006). Weathering and age patterns of allostatic load scores among blacks and whites in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 96(5), 826–833. Osborne, D., Smith, H. J., & Huo, Y. J. (2012). More than a feeling: Discrete emotions mediate the relationship between relative deprivation and reactions to workplace furloughs. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 628–641. Ragnarsdóttir, B., Bernburg, J., & Ólafsdóttir, S. (2013). The global financial crisis and individual distress: The role of subjective comparisons after the collapse of the Icelandic economy. Sociology, 47(4), 755–775. doi:10.1177/0038038512453790 Smith, H. J., Pettigrew, T. F., Pippin, G. M., & Bialosiewicz, S. (2011). Relative deprivation: A theoretical and meta-analytic review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(3), 203–232. doi:1088868311430825

Election Rigging A rigged election can be understood as one that departs from the set of principles or characteristics that ­constitute an ideal election. Because there is no definitive consensus about what constitutes an ideal election, the concept of election rigging does not have sharp boundaries, and there is room for disagreement, ­especially at the margins. The following set of principles captures prominent ideas in scholarship on democracy and in the practice of democracy promotion about what constitutes an ideal election (see, e.g., Bjornlund, 2004; Dahl, 1971; Schedler, 2002):

1. Universal franchise



2. Insulation of the voter and the vote from bribery, coercion, or violence



3. Equal weighting of the votes (“one person, one vote”)



4. Honest counting of the votes



5. Unrestricted (or broad enough) choice of candidates



6. Availability of plural and public sources of information about candidates



7. Ability of winners to access office and wield power

The quality of an election depends on the degree to which it satisfies these or a similar set of principles. An election that violates one or more of these is said to be rigged, manipulated, fraudulent, corrupt, lacking in integrity, low quality, or not free and fair. The extent of the violations matters, of course, when judging electoral quality.

The approach just presented considers process, not election results. This point deserves emphasis, as it is often a source of confusion. In practice, elections of dubious quality have at times received third-party validation on the grounds that the results “reflect the will of the people”—in other words, that the winning party is that which would have won in a clean election. The identity of the winner, however, is conceptually distinct from the election’s quality. Just as a tiny amount of r­igging can potentially change who wins an election (e.g., in a tight race), massive amounts of rigging can potentially fail to change who wins (e.g., when various parties engage in rigging, neutralizing much of each other’s efforts). Confusion can also arise when legality is taken as the standard for judging election-related behavior. In much of the world, the law is made or adjusted in order to arbitrarily enfranchise or disenfranchise groups of citizens, to manipulate mass media, or to disqualify rivals. Conversely, practices that are often legal, such as the redrawing of district boundaries (gerrymandering) or certain campaign finance laws, can be considered instances of rigging. The tactics of election rigging are manifold. Common ones include bribing, intimidating or engaging in violence against candidates and voters, fabricating or destroying ballots, altering voter lists, miscounting the totals, manipulating the media, and manipulating electoral authorities. Tactics have been categorized in a number of ways, for instance according to whether they take place before, on, or after election day (some tactics fit into more than one of these temporal categories). Why and under what circumstances one specific tactic is chosen over another remains an open question and an area of active research. Quite often, various different tactics are used together. This observation recommends that rigging tactics might be productively studied together rather than in isolation from each other. Measuring election rigging remains an important challenge. A wide variety of techniques have been utilized, none perfect but all informative. Sources of ­ information include the reports of international and domestic election monitors, surveys of citizens, field experiments (Hyde, 2007), historical sources, and forensic techniques. Election forensics is the search for suspicious patterns in official election statistics, such as an unusually large proportion of precincts with rates of voter turnout of exactly 80.0%, 90.0%, or 100.0% ­(Myagkov et al., 2009). Election rigging has been documented in a wide range of time periods and in all regions of the world. It has also been documented in nonpolitical elections such as those held within private corporations. Incentives for rigging elections are of various kinds. The most obvious reason for rigging is changing who wins. But incentives relating to information also exist. Displaying power and intimidating would-be opponents are common reasons for rigging in imperfect

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democracies. Regional politicians may also rig in their localities in order to impress higher-ups and advance their political careers. When the purposes of rigging are informational, it can make perfect sense to rig far beyond the point where doing so increases the chances of winning. Electoral supermajorities obtained through rigging, therefore, are not necessarily wasteful. Moreover, different electoral rules and institutions have been argued to create different incentives for rigging. A little rigging in a winner-takes-all contest, for example, can make the difference between being in or out of power, while the same amount of rigging in a proportional representation (PR) system might amount only to an extra seat in a legislative body. Ballot design and electronic versus paper voting have also been found to influence voting patterns. In general, however, it is not possible to understand incentives for rigging on the basis of the electoral rules only. Frequently it is also necessary to consider preexisting levels of support for the different parties, the strength of the rule of law, the public’s expectations and beliefs, and international pressures, among other things. Election rigging has been argued to cause mistrust in elections and democracy. This effect is especially pronounced when the rigging is substantial and leads to overwhelming margins of victory, as in Russia since 2004 or in 20th-century Mexico under the PRI ruling party. In other cases, such as the Colored Revolutions of post-Soviet regions, election rigging has ostensibly led to popular upheaval. Some ideas relevant to election rigging run against the grain of current normative standards. For example, Richard Posner and Glenn Weyl have suggested that markets for votes could be welfare enhancing or that foreclosing possibilities for election-day rigging could provoke substitution toward alternative forms of manipulation that could cause harm beyond the electoral arena. These ideas have so far not gained mainstream acceptance. As elections have become the modal form of allocating political power, research on election rigging has experienced a boom. Many interesting questions remain open, making it a promising area for scholarly advances and policy innovation.

Dahl, R. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hyde, S. D. (2007). The observer effect in international politics: Evidence from a natural experiment. World Politics, 60(1), 37–63. Myagkov, M., Ordeshook, P., & Shakin, D. (2009). The forensics of election fraud. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Posner, R., & Weyl, E. G. (2015). Voting squared: Quadratic voting in democratic politics. Vanderbilt Law Review, 68, 441. Schedler, A. (2002). The menu of manipulation. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 36–50. Simpser, A. 2013. Why governments and parties manipulate elections: Theory, practice, and implications. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Alberto Simpser

Electoral systems around the world can be classified into four categories (see Table 1). First, under majoritarian systems, the candidates who received a majority of votes get elected, while under proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, votes are translated ­proportionally into seats. A smaller number of representatives are elected from an electoral district under a majoritarian system than a PR system. As a consequence, where a majoritarian electoral system is adopted, the parliament tends to be less fractionalized because smaller parties tend to have greater difficulty obtaining parliamentary seats.

See also Business in Politics; Civic Engagement; Clientelism; Corruption; Democracy; Dictatorship; Lobbying; Morality and Politics; News, Television; Political Crimes; Political Morality; Social Stratification and Inequality; Voting, History of

Further Readings Bjornlund, E. C. (2004). Beyond free and fair: Monitoring elections and building democracy. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Election Turnouts See Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts

Electoral Systems An electoral system is a set of rules that regulate an election. It is an important political institution because electoral outcomes can differ depending on the type of electoral system. For instance, candidates representing a small party tend to have great difficulty getting elected as a member of parliament under a single-member district plurality system, whereas they can get elected more easily under a proportional representation electoral system. The four important components of an electoral system are electoral formula, district magnitude, ballot control, and ballot structure. This entry provides an overview of diverse electoral systems around the world and a description of the four components of electoral systems and the mixed-member electoral systems for parliamentary elections.

Overview

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Electoral Systems

Table 1  Four Types of Electoral Systems Majoritarian

Proportional Representation

Party-Centered

Independents disallowed

Closed-list PR

Candidate-Centered

Independents allowed

Open-list PR

Second, under a party-centered electoral institution, party leaders have tight control over access to the ballot and voters vote for a party, while under a ­ candidate-centered institution, party endorsement is ­ not required to appear on the ballot and voters vote for a candidate. As a result, where a candidate-­centered electoral system is adopted, politicians tend to have stronger incentives to cultivate personal reputations with constituents by delivering individual and local benefits, which spurs pork-barrel politics or political particularism. Most majoritarian electoral systems are candidate centered because independent candidates who are not endorsed by a party are allowed. In contrast, most PR systems are party centered because they employ the closed list whereby party endorsement is required and voters vote for a party. Under an open-list PR, however, voters vote for a candidate, although independents are disallowed.

Electoral Formula After votes are cast and counted, citizens need to know who has won the election and entered the parliament as their representative(s). An electoral formula is the method of how winners are determined, or how votes are translated into seats. Normally electoral systems are categorized as majoritarian or PR electoral systems, depending on the electoral formula. Under majoritarian electoral systems, the candidates who receive a majority of votes win an election. That is, votes are translated into a seat only when the number of votes that a candidate garners reaches a fairly large amount. Under PR, however, votes are translated into seats proportionally. For instance, when a party receives 20% of the votes, that party obtains about 20% of the seats in the parliament.

Majoritarian Electoral System Majoritarian electoral systems can be divided into the plurality rule and the majority rule, depending on how many of the votes a candidate is required to receive in order to win an election. Under the plurality rule, a candidate who receives more votes than the

other candidates wins the election—that is, the one who obtains a simple majority of votes becomes the winner. The plurality rule is also called the first-pastthe-post system (FPTP). Under the majority rule, ­however, the winner must receive more than 50% of the votes, or the absolute majority of votes. If there is none who obtains over 50% of the votes, a runoff or second-round election takes place, where only top two or three candidates participate. Whoever wins the most votes in the runoff becomes the final winner. Thus, the majority rule is also called a runoff or two-round electoral system. In Table 2, three parties—A, B, and C—compete in three districts under a plurality rule. Because Party A received more votes than the other parties in Districts 1 and 2, A wins two seats; B wins one seat (District 3). Assuming that there are only three seats in the parliament, A obtains 67% of the seats from 40% of the votes (120 out of 300); B obtains 33% of the seats from 33% of the votes; and C obtains no seats despite 27% of the votes. The difference between a party’s seat share and its vote share is that party’s seat bonus. In this example, the seat bonus of Party A is 27%, that of Party B is 0%, and that of Party C is 27%. Under the plurality rule, a party’s seat bonus tends to increase as the size of the party increases. Thus, smaller parties such as Party C tend to have great difficulty in obtaining a seat in the parliament. If the elections were held under a majority rule (two-round system), however, Party A wins only District 1 in the first round of the elections (see ­ Table 2). Because none received more than 50% of the votes in Districts 2 and 3, Parties A and C (District 2), and B and C (District 3) will advance to the second round if only the top two candidates participate in the runoffs. In the second round, who will win the elections depends on who smaller parties support. In District 2, for instance, if B supports A, A will win the runoff; if B supports C, C will be the winner. If B and C build a coalition, C will win District 2. In that case, C can obtain a parliamentary seat, in contrast to the fact that C gained no seats at all under the plurality rule. Thus, the majority rule tends to induce more parties to enter the parliament compared with the ­ plurality rule.

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Table 2  Electoral Results Under Plurality Rule Party A

Party B

Party C

Winner

District 1

51

35

14

A

District 2

38

30

32

A

District 3

31

35

34

B

120

100

80

Total

For example, the plurality rule is used in U.S. c­ ongressional elections, while the majority rule is used in the French National Assembly elections (both lowerhouse elections). There are only two parties in the U.S. legislature, whereas there are two coalitions of multiple parties—more than 10 parties in total—in the French counterpart.

Proportional Representation Electoral System Under PR, seats are allocated to each party in proportion to its vote share. Hence the seat bonus for a large party is minimized, and small parties can easily enter the parliament. Even if a party received a tiny amount of votes (e.g., 2%), that party will obtain 2% of the seats. Unlike the majoritarian system in which votes for small parties are wasted, PR tends to boost turnout of voters because it translates almost every vote into a seat. As a consequence, however, PR tends to fractionalize a parliament by encouraging a large number of small parties to compete for seats. If a parliament consists of 100 seats, for instance, 50 different parties will share those 100 seats if each party receives 2% of the votes under PR. Where a parliament is highly fractionalized, it is difficult for many parties to reach an agreement over some important policies. Thus, to avoid extreme fractionalization of the parliament, most countries ­ employing PR set a threshold as the minimum vote share for a party to obtain a seat. If a country set a threshold at 3%, for instance, no seats are allocated to the parties whose vote shares are below 3%. As the threshold is raised, it becomes more difficult for small parties to enter the parliament, and the parliament thus becomes less fractionalized.

District Magnitude District magnitude, denoted as M, is the number of representatives elected from an electoral district. When one representative is elected from a district (M = 1), it is called a single-member district system (SMD); when

more than one representative is elected (M > 1), it is a multimember district system (MMD).

Single-Member District System Under an SMD, because only one candidate is elected, small-party candidates have great difficulty winning an election. As a result, the SMD tends to ­minimize the fractionalization of the parliament. It is common that majoritarian electoral systems (plurality/ majority rules) adopt an SMD.

Duverger’s Law Maurice Duverger stated that an SMD plurality system (SMDP) leads to a two-party system. He argued that two effects of the electoral institution cause the result. First, the electoral formula of SMDP affects the survivability of small parties (mechanical effect). As Duverger put it, “when electoral systems are disproportional, the mechanical effect punishes small parties and rewards large parties.” Second, the electoral formula and district magnitude of SMDP encourage the strategic behavior of voters and politicians (psychological or strategic effect). Because SMDP punishes small parties, voters who support a small party often vote for a larger party in order not to waste their votes (strategic voting), and politicians with a small party are likely to switch to or merge with a larger party knowing that their ­supporters often engage in strategic voting. Eventually, therefore, only two large parties tend to survive in every district, which leads to the emergence of a two-party system.

Multimember District System A few majoritarian electoral systems such as the single nontransferable vote system (SNTV) and all PR electoral systems adopt an MMD, in which two or more representatives are elected from an electoral district. Under SNTV, for instance, after parties nominate a number of candidates up to the district magnitude (M)

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Electoral Systems

for each district, voters cast one ballot for one ­candidate. Then the M number of candidates who received more votes than the others get elected. Because not only the first-place winner but also runners-up can be elected under MMD, small parties have better chances of ­winning an election, compared with under SMD. Hence MMD is likely to increase the fractionalization of the parliament. In Taiwan, for example, an SNTV was used until the 2004 Legislative Yuan elections; an SMDP replaced the SNTV from the 2008 elections. In 2004, there were four parties obtaining at least 5% of the seats; that number decreased to three in 2008, to two in 2012.

Ballot Control In order to be a candidate in an election, someone has to appear on a ballot. Electoral systems contain the rules on ballot control that regulate who can appear on the ballot and who can nominate (and rank) candidates. In some electoral systems, independents are ­disallowed; hence, only those who are endorsed by a party can appear on the ballot. In others, however, because i­ndependents are allowed, those who do not receive party endorsement can appear on the ballot. Besides, in some electoral systems, party leaders nominate and rank candidates on their party list, while in others party leaders nominate but do not rank candidates on the list. In some, it is voters who nominate candidates.

Strong Ballot Control by Party Under most PR and a few majoritarian electoral systems, independents are disallowed, and party endorsement is thus required for a candidate to appear on the ballot. Moreover, under a closed-list PR, party leaders not only nominate but also rank candidates on their party list. Under such electoral institutions, even when a candidate is nominated, the electoral chances of that candidate will be small if she is ranked low on the party list. Assume that there are 10 seats in the parliament, for example, and only two parties—A and B—compete for those seats under a closed-list PR. Each party nominated and ranked 10 candidates on its party list. If A receives 60% of the votes and B the rest, six seats will be allocated to A and four seats to B. Those from rank no. 1 through no. 6 on A’s list and from rank no. 1 through no. 4 on B’s list will enter the parliament. Those who are ranked no. 9 or 10 will have almost no chance of ­getting elected. Thus, under the electoral systems in which party leaders have strong control over the ballot, politicians tend to be highly disciplined and loyal to their party leaders.

Weak Ballot Control by Party Under a few PR and most majoritarian electoral systems, independents are allowed, and party endorsement is not required for a candidate to appear on the ballot. Under most SMDP, for instance, those who failed to get endorsed by a party often run for parliamentary seats as independents. In primary elections it is not party leaders but voters who nominate candidates. Under an open-list PR, party leaders nominate but do not rank candidates on their party list. The ranking of the candidates is determined by popular votes instead. In the aforementioned example, if it were under an open-list PR, A’s top six and B’s top four candidates would be the ones who received more votes than their copartisans. Under the electoral systems where party leaders have weaker control over the ballot, such as the primary and open-list PR, politicians tend to be less disciplined and loyal to their party leaders, because their electoral chances depend more on the voters than on the leaders.

Ballot Structure An electoral system contains the rules that regulate how voters cast ballots. In some electoral systems, voters cast a ballot for a candidate, while in others, voters cast a ballot for a party. Also, in some systems, voters cast a single vote, while in others, voters cast multiple votes. In some voters express a series of preferences.

Voting for Candidates Under some MMD systems, such as SNTV and open-list PR, voters vote for a candidate. Under the open-list PR of Brazil, for instance, after parties submit a list of candidates, voters cast a ballot for a candidate on a party list. Under such electoral institutions, because voters choose a candidate instead of a party, personal reputations of individual politicians are more likely to affect their electoral chances than are party reputations. Thus, electoral competition tends to be candidate centered rather than party centered, which, in turn, leads rank-and-file party members to be less disciplined and loyal to their party leaders. Moreover, politicians usually distribute individual and local benefits to voters to cultivate their personal reputations with their constituents. As a result, pork-barrel politics tends to be more rampant in the countries where more candidatecentered electoral systems are adopted.

Voting for a Party Under the closed-list PR and party block vote electoral systems, voters cast a ballot for a party instead of

Electoral Systems

a candidate. Under the party block vote system of ­Singapore, for instance, after parties submit a list of candidates, voters cast a ballot for a party. The party that receives the most votes then takes all seats in the district. Under such electoral systems, because voters select a party, party reputations of the candidates tend to have larger impacts on their electoral chances than do their personal reputations. Accordingly, party-­ centered electoral campaigns are more common, and rank-and-file party members thus tend to be more ­disciplined and loyal to their leaders. Because electoral competition is centered on parties, politicians tend to promote policy differences between the parties. As a consequence, under such party-centered electoral institutions, pork-barrel politics tends to be less prevalent.

Casting a Single Vote Under most SMD and all PR systems, voters are allowed to cast a single vote (for a candidate or for a party). Among MMD majoritarian systems, voters cast a single vote under SNTV. Because candidates compete with their copartisans for voter support, SNTV is a highly candidate-centered electoral institution.

Casting Multiple Votes Under a few SMD and most MMD majoritarian electoral systems, voters can cast multiple votes for multiple candidates. Under the block vote system of ­ Thailand, for instance, each party can nominate as many candidates as the district magnitude (M), and voters can vote for up to M candidates within a party or across parties. The top M candidates who received more votes than the others get elected. The block vote may encourage copartisans to collaborate with each other during electoral campaigns, because it is possible that voters simply vote for all candidates from the same party. The block vote is thus less candidate centered than SNTV. The approval voting is an SMD in which voters can cast multiple votes. Under the system, voters are allowed to choose as many candidates as they approve to be their representatives. Then the candidate who received the most (approval) votes wins the election.

Expressing a Series of Preferences Under some electoral systems like the Borda count, voters can rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference. Under the Borda count (M = 5), for instance, voters may rank candidates from 1 to 5. Then reverse points are assigned to each selection, such that one’s first priority would receive a point of 5, her second priority would receive a point of 4, and so on. After all

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points are added up for each candidate, the candidate with the most points gets elected.

Mixed-Member Electoral Systems In some countries, different electoral systems are mixed to elect representatives. In South Korea, for instance, about 80% of representatives in the national assembly are elected under SMDP, while the rest are elected under PR. Roughly, there are two types of mixed-member electoral systems: mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) and mixed-member proportional (MMP) systems.

Mixed-Member Majoritarian System Under MMM, a majoritarian system such as SMDP is used to elect a certain portion of representatives, and a PR is used to elect the rest. Voters have two votes: one for a candidate at the district level (majoritarian) and the other for a party list in a higher level (PR). The total seat share of a party in the parliament is simply the sum of the party’s seat gain under the majoritarian system and that under PR. For instance, if a party wins 50 seats in SMDP and 30 seats in PR, the party will be allocated 80 seats in the parliament. Because a party’s seat gain under one electoral system is not affected by the party’s seat gain under the other system, MMM is also called the independent mixed-member electoral system. A majority of the countries that adopt mixed-member electoral systems, including Japan, South Korea, and Ukraine, use MMM.

Mixed-Member Proportional System MMP is different from MMM in the method of allocating seats to parties. Unlike MMM, in which the party seat share in PR is independent from that in the majoritarian system, under MMP, a party’s seat gain in PR is dependent on the party’s seat gain in the majoritarian system (dependent mixed-member electoral system). This is because the total seat share of a party in the parliament is determined by the party’s vote share in PR. In a country where there are 100 seats in the parliament, for instance, if a party received 50% of the votes in PR, the party will be allocated 50 seats in the parliament. If that party won 40 seats in SMDP, the remaining 10 seats will be allocated from the party list in PR. The countries that use MMP include Germany and New Zealand. Jae Hyeok Shin See also Civil-Military Relations; Corporatism; Electoralism; GetOut-the-Vote Efforts; Identity Politics; Mass Communication; Parliamentarism; Party Systems; Political Campaigns

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Electoralism

Further Readings Carey, J. M., & Shugart, M. S. (1995). Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: A rank ordering of electoral formulas. Electoral Studies, 14(4), 417–439. Chang, E. C. C., & Golden, M. A. (2006). Electoral systems, district magnitude and corruption. British Journal of Political Science, 37(1), 115–137. Clark, W. R., Golder, M., & Golder, S. N. (2012). Principles of comparative politics (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Cox, G. W. (1997). Making votes count: Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Farrell, D. M. (2011). Electoral systems: A comparative introduction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gallagher, M., & Mitchell, P. (Eds.). (2005). The politics of electoral systems. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hicken, A. D., & Kasuya, Y. (2003). A guide to the constitutional structures and electoral systems of east, south and southeast Asia. Electoral Studies, 22, 121–151. Jones, M. P. (1995). A guide to the electoral systems of the Americas. Electoral Studies, 14, 5–21. Lijphart, A. (1990). The political consequences of electoral laws, 1945–85. American Political Science Review, 84(2), 481–496. Shugart, M. S., & Wattenberg, M. P. (Eds.). (2001). Mixedmember electoral systems: The best of both worlds? New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Taagepera, R., & Shugart, M. S. (1989). Seats and votes: The effects and determinants of electoral systems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Electoralism Electoralism involves a government’s adoption of some electoral procedures, although this is done in order to avoid any full transition to liberal democracy. In this configuration, regular and even somewhat competitive elections are held. But they are constrained by prior limits on civil liberties and sundry manipulations of institutions. The political systems that emerge can be conceptualized in different ways. Depending on their degree of competitiveness, they have been variously understood as hybrid regimes, single-party dominant systems, semi-authoritarianism, and semi-, pseudo-, or even electoral democracy. But while the workings of these regimes may vary, they hold in common their practice of electoralism, obstructing any level playing field in a way that the incumbent government is reliably returned to power. This entry addresses questions of why this regime type might be chosen by governments, how their institutions are manipulated, the ways in which they can strengthen incumbency, and, over time, their likely fate.

Why Do Governments Practice Electoralism? During the 1960s and 1970s, most of the new democracies that had formed in developing countries after World War II collapsed. Several kinds of authoritarian regimes emerged, including “hard” or “closed” regimes like military governments and personal dictatorships and “soft” regimes, usually hybrid systems. Beginning in the 1970s, however, for a variety of reasons and through different transitional processes, redemocratization commenced around the world, gathering in what was labeled as democracy’s “third wave.” In addition, during the 1990s, with the cold war having ended, the United States appeared as the world’s only superpower, enabling it more freely to promote democratic change. Hence, pressures for democracy and the prestige that it attained rose markedly. Indeed, by the late 1990s, the “end of history” was famously proclaimed. In this global context, hard forms of authoritarian rule grew much costlier to operate. Accordingly, very few military governments or personal dictatorships have survived (although juntas have reappeared in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and in Thailand). Yet even if democratic change advanced in many dozens of ­countries, some autocratically minded governments cut transitions short or rolled back progress, finding new equilibrium in hybrid systems and electoralism. Russia under Vladimir Putin; Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro; Iran under the Guardian Council; Turkey under Recep Erdogan; Cambodia under Hun Sen; and Algeria, Kenya, and ­ Tanzania today are often cited as contemporary exemplars of electoralism. Historical cases include Mexico, long dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and Taiwan by the Nationalist Party. Singapore under the People’s Action Party and Malaysia under the National Front are also classic cases that have persisted for more than four decades. Myanmar also seems destined to settle into some form of hybrid regime. In these countries, then, governments have sought to structure their political systems in order to more efficiently perpetuate their power, replacing blunt coercion with electoralism. According to some scholars, then, the third wave has in reality made hybrid systems the most prevalent regime type today.

How Do Governments Practice Electoralism? Autocratically minded governments that seek efficiently to perpetuate their incumbency often resort to electoralism. But how do they ensure that the elections that they hold will be competitive enough that their iterated

Electoralism

victories are convincing but not so competitive that they risk their own defeat? These governments typically begin by limiting civil liberties—freedoms of speech, press, and assembly—in order to weaken civil society organizations and opposition parties. In doing this, they make arbitrary and partisan use of institutions like legislative assemblies, judiciaries, and police forces, drafting and enforcing legislation in ways that sanction their own standing while greatly hindering opposition. Sedition laws, penal codes, cyberlaws, security ordinances, and nebulously worded criminal charges fill the toolkits of such governments. Under Malaysia’s hybrid system, for example, dissidents are often charged—with great irony—for “activities detrimental to parliamentary democracy.” In settings like these, where the rule of law is weak, scholars refer to the prevalence of “rule by law.” After weakening civil society and opposition parties in these ways, autocratically minded governments hold regular elections, even somewhat competitive ones. Opposition parties are thus able to mobilize voters and even win legislative seats. But in articulating its electoralism, the government also calibrates competitiveness in ways that prevent opposition parties from winning enough votes to form a new government. Manipulations take many forms but typically include highly distorted districting, first-past-the-post systems, partisan access to state facilities and finance, skewed voter rolls, and feckless poll monitors. Further, although under electoralism, incumbent governments avoid outright cheating in vote counting and reporting, they typically retain control over mainstream media outlets while resorting tactically to vote buying and intimidation, behaviors left unchecked by pliable election commissions.

How Does Electoralism Strengthen Incumbency? Autocratically minded governments that practice electoralism benefit most clearly by gaining some legitimating cover for their perennial incumbency. Though opposition parties stand little chance of winning, they often campaign vigorously. This enables the government to declare, with some plausibility, that it is favored by a majority of citizens. Further, in its own campaigning, the government, through its dominant party, is far ­better able to revitalize its social bases than military governments or personal dictatorships usually are. At the same time, while mobilizing its own constituents, the voting patterns that appear, especially when revealed through a vast network of small counting centers, enable the government to identify strongholds of opposition support. The government can afterward revisit such districts, incentivizing voters with sweeteners like new developmental projects. Or it can deter them by taking funding

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away. One example involves the regular housing upgrades that are subsidized by the government in Singapore. During an election campaign, a former prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, warned districts that leaned toward the opposition that their upgrade programs would be withdrawn. These areas, he intoned, “will become slums.”

The Future of Electoralism Electoralism is not without risk for autocratically minded governments. Despite extensive manipulations, governments that practice electoralism occasionally lose in “stunning” elections. Commonly cited examples include the Philippines in 1986, Chile and Poland in 1989, and Nicaragua in 1990. Governments that have been defeated may try to steal elections afterward. However, such glaring evidence of cheating may succeed only in provoking citizens further, thus precipitating greater civic unrest. As uncertainty mounts, what might motivate governments, then, finally to abandon electoralism in favor of hard forms of authoritarian rule? Many scholars observe that with the third wave ­having long since ended, democracy is today mired in recession. In these circumstances, the prestige of democracy and the supremacy of the United States have been weakened. Meanwhile, the influence of China, charting a highly authoritarian pathway to modernization, has grown. The need for autocratically minded governments, then, even to practice electoralism may be diminishing. Military governments that hold no elections at all have resurfaced in Thailand and Egypt. Personal dictatorships may soon reappear in countries such as Cambodia. Worryingly, the forces driving democracy into recession may eliminate the need even to keep up electoralist appearances. William Case See also Electoral Systems; Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts; Identity Politics; Mass Communication; Parliamentarism; Party Systems; Political Campaigns

Further Readings Bogaards, M. (2009). How to classify hybrid regimes? Defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism. Democratization, 16(2), 399–423. Diamond, L. (2002). Thinking about hybrid regimes. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 21–35. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Magaloni, B. (2006). Voting for autocracy: Hegemonic party survival and its demise in Mexico. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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Elite Decision Making

Schedler, A. (Ed.). (2006). Electoral authoritarianism: The dynamics of unfree competition. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Schmitter, P., & Karl, T. L. (1991). What Democracy Is . . . and Is Not. Journal of Democracy, 2(3), 75–88. Snyder, R. (2006). Beyond electoral authoritarianism: The spectrum of nondemocratic regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner.

Elite Decision Making Elite decision making refers to a collective decisionmaking process that focuses on the instrumental quality of laws, public policies, and political decisions it ­produces. Since the process aims at producing outcomes of considerable substantive quality, it organizes the existing capacities within a political community to achieve the desired outcome, thus giving greater (or even all) political power to a small group of people (i.e., experts) who are considered to be better at producing correct political decisions. This term has been a central issue in numerous discussions for the last 2,500 years and still represents a relevant political idea because of its strong influence regarding which political system we can see as legitimate. This entry briefly introduces the rationale for elite decision making and discusses various forms elite decision making can take in democratic and nondemocratic systems. The entry concludes with a few influential objections raised against elite decision-­ making procedures.

Rationale for Elite Decision Making For most citizens, most political issues are complex and remote. Citizens generally lack the relevant knowledge about nuclear energy, genetically modified organisms, or climate change, yet they recognize that these are very important issues and want to have correct laws and policies that regulate these issues. Since some citizens (experts) have the relevant knowledge, they should be authorized to rule and to make political decisions about these complex issues. Besides the relevant knowledge, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Alex Hughes, and David Victor (2013) point out that members of such a decisionmaking elite possess a number of other qualities and competences: experienced elites are better at risk management and less prone to loss aversion; they use heuristics more effectively when processing complex information; and they are better in strategic interaction and might even be more cooperative. The argumentation for elite decision making rests on three premises: (1) there are correct or incorrect (good

or bad) political decisions, (2) there are some people who are better at producing correct (or good) decisions, and (3) (only) those who are better at producing correct political decisions should participate in the collective decision-making process. Elite decision-making procedures can be realized and implemented in nondemocratic but also (at least to some extent) in democratic systems.

Elite Decision Making in Nondemocratic Systems Elite decision making can lead to epistocracy, a rule of experts in politics. Plato famously argued that the political community should be ruled by wise philosopherkings and used the ship analogy to further support this claim. Men ignorant of navigation cannot successfully command the ship; it takes certain skills to be able to do that, and a few people (e.g., captains) have these skills. Similarly, it takes certain skills to be able to successfully command the state, and most people lack these skills. Ignorant people (those lacking the relevant skills) should not command the state just as they should not command the ship. This argumentative strategy has been used many times throughout history, and even nowadays some (religious) citizens use it to claim that political authority comes from the understanding of God’s will (or some other comprehensive doctrine), thus ascribing all political power to their religious or ideological leaders.

Elite Decision Making in Democratic Systems The idea that experts’ knowledge should somehow be included in the democratic decision-making process is as old as modern democracy itself. Of course, since democracy is characterized by formal equality of all citizens in the process of making and authorizing collective decisions, it is not naturally compatible with the idea that some people should, because of their expertise, have greater political power and authority. Anthony Dawns recognizes that political issues are becoming increasingly complex and that common people cannot possibly have sufficient knowledge to properly deliberate about them. His solution is a form of representative democracy, one in which citizens select their political representatives, who are then authorized to make p ­olitical decisions regarding these complex issues. Similarly, Thomas Christiano argues that citizens should define key values and aims the society is to pursue, while it is the task of experts to devise means by which these aims can be achieved. Though Dawns’s and Christiano’s p ­ositions rely on experts’ competences in the decision-making process, it is

Elite Theory (Pareto)

important to emphasize that experts’ political authority does not come from the mere fact of their expertise (as Plato would have it) but from the fact that experts are recognized and authorized to make decisions by all members of a political community.

Objections to Elite Decision Making Many objections have been raised against nondemocratic elite decision making: political authority simply does not follow from expertise (expert-boss fallacy), and even if it would follow, reasonable people would disagree on who the experts are, thus making it impossible to have a government of experts all could consent to. Democratic elite decision making is able to avoid the aforementioned objections, though there are still some objections raised against it. Experts and elites are more prone to overconfidence and often tend to underestimate the contribution some nonexperts could give in solving the problem at hand. For example, in 1986, a group of British scientists had to make a prediction regarding the danger level of radioactive cesium that had been deposited by rain after the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown. Disregarding the advice of local shepherds, they failed to take into account several ­ important factors (e.g., the structure of the local terrain), thus giving a wrong prediction. Furthermore, experts and decision-making elites can be subject to biases and have some epistemically latent features, especially when they come from the same social class or have the same educational background. Ivan Cerovac See also Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills; Decision Making; Elite Theory (Pareto); Judicial Review; Oligarchy; Political Deliberation

Further Readings Christiano, T. (2012). Rational deliberation among experts and citizens. In J. Parkinson (Ed.), Deliberative systems: Deliberative democracy at the large scale (pp. 27–51). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Gilens, M., & Murakawa, N. (2002). Elite cues and political decision making. Political Decision Making, Deliberation and Participation, 6, 15–49. Hafner-Burton, E. M., Hughes, D. A., & Victor, D. G. (2013). The cognitive revolution and the political psychology of elite decision making. Perspectives on Politics, 11(2), 368–386. Tetlock, P. E. (2006). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Elite Theory (Pareto) Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) was an Italian aristocrat and social scientist. His contributions to economics and sociology include, among others, a welfare measure (Pareto optimality), a measure of income inequality (Pareto’s law), and a theory of elites. According to Pareto, people in every society have always been and will always be dominated by an aristocracy (which he called the “best”), the elite. Pareto’s theory of elites was developed in four main publications, three of which are available in English translation: Rise and Fall of Elites, Les Systèmes Socia­ listes, Manual of Political Economy, and A Treatise on General Sociology. In this entry, we will review Pareto’s early theory of elites, his mature theory of elites, his conception of the circulation of elites, and various ­critiques of his theories of elites.

Pareto’s Early Theory of Elites Pareto’s early writings about elites, for example in his Les Systèmes Socialistes, were part of his critique of socialism. His conception of the elite was contrary to the socialist vision of a classless society. For Pareto, this elite includes the powerful, the most capable members of society, and is effective in bringing about good or evil. However, Pareto argues, a particular elite does not remain in power forever. A dominant elite tends to exhibit humanitarian sentiments over generations of time and is then replaced by another, more ruthless elite. As it is rising to power, this new elite is opaque about its intentions. It proclaims that it wants to lead the oppressed—not for its own interests but for the interests of the many. Human history, says Pareto, is the history of the circulation of elites. As with the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal nobility, so will be the victory of the proletariat over the capitalists; this will inevitably lead to the rise of a new elite within the socialist society. In each and every case, Pareto maintains in his early theory of elites, the dominant elite tends over time to become skeptical of the legitimacy of its rule; this precipitates a religious crisis, a failure of faith. Meanwhile, the rising elite promotes a new religion that advances its cause. In the case of the French Revolution in 1789, this took the form of a social, patriotic, and anti-Christian religion. Pareto says that socialism at the beginning of the 20th century was also a religion. Patriotism had likewise become a religion—imperialism in England, jingoism in the United States, and so forth. Pareto, espousing his anticlerical viewpoint, argues that “the religious ­sentiment” penetrates all aspects of human activity.

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The established elite comes to embody a self-­ contradiction, combining humanitarian sentiments toward the oppressed masses with the most venal and corrupt p ­ractices to increase the exploitation of the masses. These two conditions, Pareto insists, inevitably lead to a revolutionary catastrophe whereby that elite perishes. The increasing weakness of the ruling elite contributes to the rising fervor of the new religion. And the catastrophic outcome, according to Pareto, will ­reestablish the social equilibrium. The rising elite is, in its practice, as corrupt and venal as the old elite. Pareto, who was a fervent advocate of the “free market,” gives several examples. He points to workers who restrict labor market entry through their craft union tactics. He points out that many of the leaders of the socialist parties and the trade unions have been bourgeois, although he acknowledges this may change as the workers become more educated. Pareto points to the emergence of a “labor aristocracy” that will tend to replace those bourgeois socialist leaders. He points to the trade union practice of dismissing alcoholic and other unreliable workers from the union ranks; this practice was already giving rise to a new proletariat, set over against the labor aristocracy, even before the seizure of power from the old, bourgeois elite. Pareto’s earlier theorizing about the elite and the circulation of the elites was moderated by his acknowledgement that insufficient scientific knowledge severely limits one’s understanding of form and that one can have scarcely any idea of content of these social processes and social structures.

Pareto’s Mature Theory of Elites In his early writings on elites, Pareto merely assumed that elites have “power” and “honor” and that elites always govern. That was acceptable to Pareto insofar as the topics in these early writings were the circulation of elites and a critique of socialism, not the theorization of elites per se. But this was less acceptable when the topic of elites was to be theorized in a general sociology, as he did in his Treatise on General Sociology. Pareto begins his discussion of elites in his Treatise by providing an exact theoretical definition. He proposes that each individual in a society should be assessed in terms of a set of indices that range between 0 and 10, which represent the individual’s abilities in every branch of human activity. One can express ­Pareto’s definition formally: the individual I will have a list of n predicates P1(I), P2(I), P3(I), . . . Pn(I),

with each predicate P being an index of the ability of I such that

0 < Pj < 10.

Pareto continues that a proper subset of the set of all individuals in that society can then be constructed. That proper subset includes every individual who has been rated as 10 in some branch of activity, and the members of that subset will be named the “elite” for that society. It is characteristic of a proper subset that some individuals will not be included in that subset. How many branches of human activity are there, according to Pareto? In his terms, to each of these branches—Pareto’s examples include the legal profession, prostitution, chess playing, and so on—there corresponds a “social group” (lawyers, prostitutes, ­ chess players, etc.). Formally, how many predicates ­pertain to each individual; how large is n? Pareto provided an answer to this question. In his Les Systèmes Socialistes, Pareto had stated that “there are an infinite number of groups which have different interests.” In his Treatise, he acknowledges that “it is impossible fully to treat the diversity of the multitude of social groups” that moreover interact in “numberless fashions.” In somewhat more formal terms, where n = the number of groups, n → ∞.

Pareto proposed to “reduce as much as possible the numbers of groups.” Likewise, he had proposed to place together “those phenomena that seem to be similar in some fashion.” But he nowhere indicates how this reduction is to be theoretically accomplished other than to acknowledge, in a long footnote, that “it is necessary to have an idea of the quantitative effect of influences [upon a given phenomenon such as elite domination] and then go on to consider particularly those elements whose influence is considerable.” He nowhere indicates how these “influences” or “elements” are to be assessed or to have their relative significance determined. It should be noted that in his Les Syste´mes Socialistes, Pareto had commented that those who have influence and political and social power also have wealth. “Classes called superior are also generally the most wealthy.” He had earlier claimed that the elite is defined by “a set of qualities [i.e., the set Pj , j = 1, 2 . . . n] which favor one class’ prosperity and domination in the society.” Such a criterion would have accomplished the required subsumption, but Pareto did not pursue these leads. There are several possibilities. First, the number of social groups might be reduced by some process of random selection. Second, the number could be reduced by a process of aggregation. Third, a systemic criterion might be employed, in which case that criterion itself must be theorized. Pareto does not seem to advocate such a sampling procedure, such an

Emotions and Political Decision Making

aggregation process, nor does he engage in appropriate theorizing at this point.

Pareto on the Circulation of Elites The circulation of elites is a crucial aspect of Pareto’s theory of elites. He assumes that this circulation involves the movement of groups of individuals or families out of the dominant positions in a society, to be replaced by other groups of individuals or families into positions of dominance. Again, this can be stated formally; Pareto assumes in Les Systèmes Socialistes that there are several proper subsets of the individuals that make up a given society. He labels them A and B, where A is the old, dominant elite, while B is the rising elite in a society, where the remainder of the population is labeled C, and where there is little or no overlap between the two subsets: A ∩ B → Ø. (This takes into account the possibility of “class renegades” mentioned above—the bourgeois leaders of socialist parties, etc.) The old elite A will resist the intrusions of B into their sphere of dominance. On the one hand, if A’s opposition is effective, B will not be able to seize power. On the other hand, if B succeeds and seizes power, a new rising elite D will form—presumably out of C—and will play, with regard to B, the same role that B played in relation to A, and on and on.

Critiques of Pareto’s Theory of Elites The critiques of Pareto’s theory of elites point to two major areas of weakness, including both methodological problems and theoretical problems. On the methodological side, (a) Pareto assumes that human activities can be reliably and scientifically measured as ­continuous, or at least ordinal, variables. He acknowledges that one must substitute “the approximation of discontinuous variables” for the more rigorous continuous variables. He assumes that an elite can be defined as the top decile of individuals engaged in specific social activities. While this may be true of some of the myriad elements that influence domination, there are other elements which are only present or absent. (b) Pareto does not indicate how his concepts can be operationalized, simply assuming that a formal definition will be adequate. (c) Pareto considered the historical events and literary passages he referred to as evidence rather than illustrations of his theorizing. On the specifically theoretical side, Pareto assumes that (d) a social position embodies a single skill and that persons can be ranked by their social positions rather than directly by their individual traits. This suggests that a changing distribution of skills might not result in a circulation of elites. (e) Pareto seems obsessed by the notion of an ahistorical and universal theory, where

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society is taken as the analogue of a mechanical system. (f) If the numbers of predicates and groups are indefinitely large, then it is likely that there is no proper ­subset of the total population that makes up an elite (or a counter-elite); it is likely that every individual is a member of the elite in some branch of human activity or other. This has implications for both Pareto’s theory of elites and his theory of the circulation of elites; they may be vacuous. Gordon Welty See also Counter-Elite; Elite Decision Making; Free Market; Proletariat and Capitalism; Socialism and Communism

Further Readings Dahrendorf, R. (1959). Class and class conflict in industrial society. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Osipova, E. (1989). The sociological system of Vilfredo Pareto. In Igor Kon (Ed.), A history of classical sociology (Ch. 12). Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. Pareto, V. (1902). Les Systèmes Socialistes [The Socialist Systems]. Paris, France: Giard and Brière. Pareto, V. (1963). A treatise on general sociology. New York, NY: Dover. [Original work published 1917] Pareto, V. (1968). Rise and fall of elites. Totowa, NJ: Transaction. [Original work published 1901] Pareto, V. (1971). Manual of political economy. New York, NY: Macmillan. [Original work published 1909] Parry, G. (2005). Political elites. Colchester, England: ECPR Press. Scott, J. (2012). Pareto and the elite. In J. Femia & A. Marshall (Eds.), Vilfredo Pareto: Beyond disciplinary boundaries (pp. 9–19). Farnham, England: Ashgate. Stark, W. (1963). In search of the true Pareto. British Journal of Sociology, 14(2), 103–112.

Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions matter in politics. These mental states of ­feeling are expressed in different forms such as enthusiasm, anger, and anxiety. Enthusiastic supporters m ­ obilize votes to elect candidates. People who are angry form protest groups and march on the street. Anxious citizens back policies to keep themselves safe from harm. In much of the academic political science literature, however, emotions are often ignored or seen as a threat to democracy. Emotions may lead people to engage politically in ways that differ from traditional understandings of politics, whereby people are often seen as making

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decisions based on reason and maximizing their p ­ ersonal benefit. In practice, emotions affect what information people look for, who they listen to, and what policies they support. For example, anxious citizens tend to seek out information that may reinforce their fears and make them even more anxious. Angry supporters may only listen to people who agree with them. Enthusiastic actors may support policies based on their feelings of support for a candidate rather than the substantive evaluation of their merits. This entry begins with an overview of emotions and how they have traditionally been regarded by the social sciences. It then goes on to explore what we know about emotions and politics.

Overview Emotions are states of subjective feeling that can vary in intensity. Emotions are triggered when people have a reaction to something that affects them, leading to changes in perceptions, behavior, and physiology. ­Emotions are thought to consist of five separate components: (1) an appraisal or evaluation of the situation, (2) a physiological reaction, (3) a change in cognitive activity, (4) an action tendency, and (5) a subjective feeling state. Emotions not only are a central feature of people’s social experiences but also influence political thoughts and motivate behavior. Emotions make us feel something and also encourage us to act. Emotions are distinct from mood and affect. Moods are not attached to any particular objects and tend to last longer than emotions. Because moods are not tied to a specific stimulus, they involve less thinking than emotions but can shift how we think (or what is known as cognition). Compared with moods, emotions are generally more intense, shorter, and triggered by a specific cause. Affect is often used as a broader term that encompasses emotions, mood, and other things such as likes and dislikes, pain, and stress.

Historic Views of Emotions In classic political theory, emotion often plays a negative role in conceptions of what it means to be a citizen and how societies are governed. In Plato’s simile of the cave, humans are trapped by desire and prevented from engaging in reason. For Plato, the emotional disorder of democratic leaders creates an instability that will eventually lead to tyranny, or to rule by fear. For Thomas Hobbes, emotions are universal and fundamental to the foundations of governance. In Hobbes’s view, the need for survival is a motivating emotional force in political life that compels individuals to back a government to protect them from anarchy and death. Anxiety thus leads people to support a sovereign who

can ensure public safety, though she may not be elected or accountable. American political philosophers early in the nation’s history also saw emotion as damaging and destabilizing. Throughout the Federalist Papers, the discussion focuses on institutions that can limit the force of passion on the new American government. In Federalist 71, Alexander Hamilton argues that government should only respond to the true opinions of the community, not to “every sudden breeze of passion or to every ­transient impulse which the public may receive from the arts of men who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” In the 20th century, scholars such as Harold Lasswell and Walter Lippmann warned about the role emotions played in the rise of totalitarianism, fascism, and the atrocities of two world wars. They worried about how emotions could be cued and manipulated by political propaganda and trigger damaging mass behavior. In the contemporary era, theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and James Fishkin, who value deliberation above all, consider emotions as impediments to reasoned argument. Until recently, empirical social science tended to ignore emotion, focusing on cognition—what citizens know or do not, how citizens learn about politics, and how they utilize information in making political ­decisions. The rational-choice perspective, for example, focuses on how individuals weigh costs and benefits in making political choices and rarely considers the role emotions may play either in inhibiting or improving decision making. The cognitive revolution in psychology also undervalued emotions for decades by focusing on perception and memory as distinct from emotion. If emotions do not matter, this underemphasis might make sense, but more recent work shows emotions are important in politics.

What Do We Know About Emotions? Emotions have not been ignored by psychology or research on political behavior. In cognitive psychology, Robert Abelson developed the concept of “hot cognition” in the 1960s to refer to how emotions might lead to motivated reasoning, where people hold on to false beliefs in the face of contradicting evidence. In the 1980s, Robert Zajonc argued that individuals inevitably use emotions to judge the world around them. In more recent scholarship, social scientists have observed the role of emotion in a wide variety of areas including information processing, candidate evaluation, voting, the way issues are framed, and public opinion. Research has shown that emotion may be a useful and constructive part of political life. More contemporary findings in psychology, neuroscience, and political science suggest that emotion may be integral to learning,

Emotions and Political Decision Making

the formation of political attitudes, and even how people reason. Some political theorists such as Bryan Garsten also see emotion as beneficial and conducive to deeper reflection. Emotions serve to coordinate responses to circumstances that individuals confront, and their effects often persist past the original event that triggers the emotion. Emotions evolved to assist humans in negotiating a complicated and sometimes dangerous environment. Herbert Simon claims that emotions act as an alarm system, encouraging people to redirect plans and efforts to priority goals. Scholars such as Leda Tooby and John Cosmides see emotions as integral to the human experience since they have evolved to help people adapt to their environments. Emotions, in this framework, direct other bodily processes including attention, perception, learning, physiology, and reflexes as well as how to behave, communicate, allocate one’s energy, and assess likely probabilities. They are also important in regulating one’s self-esteem. Emotional reactions provide individuals feedback about how urgent different environments and problems are. Positive emotions can signal a safe situation, whereas a negative emotion can trigger the need for a more careful evaluation of the environment. The ­detection of risk can be rapid and unconscious and reinforce more conscious reasoning processes. That said, emotions are not always accurate or appropriate for the situation at hand. In early work on emotion by political scientists and psychologists, scholars focused broadly on two things, the “valence” that ranges from pleasant to unpleasant and the “arousal” dimension that ranges from calm to excited. Through valence models, researchers showed how positive or negative evaluations of candidates, groups, or issues affect attitudes and also serve as information shortcuts. People might base their evaluations on positive or negative feelings about groups affected by a policy rather than use memories or explicit thoughts about policies. Other theories of cognitive appraisal focus on how perception of the environment affects the formation and application of emotions. Some theories focus on how certain events may be emotionally relevant when they harm people’s interests or goals, including their societal ideals as well as their own personal situation. In such circumstances, emotions can determine other responses, even when the evaluation process is unconscious and potentially inaccurate.

Different Kinds of Emotions and Politics A variety of emotional states can have an effect on political attitudes—anxiety, anger, sadness, disgust, and

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shame among them. Anxiety occurs when individuals appraise a situation as being unpleasant, highly threatening, uncertain, and potentially outside of their control. Political scientists are increasingly interested in how anxiety affects political life. For example, in the week of the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States, scholars highlighted the important role of anxiety. The role of anxiety on political attitudes has been extended to other areas including immigration attitudes, health behaviors, and environmental risks. Anxiety differs from other negative emotions such as anger, sadness, and disgust. Anxiety involves uncertainty, whereas anger involves certainty that obstacles stand in the way of reaching a desired goal. Sadness comes from an inability to achieve goals and the loss of valued objects and people. Both anxiety and sadness often cause actors to look for information. For sadness, this information search is often nostalgic and reflective rather than aimed at problem solving in the future. Disgust and shame are other relevant emotions. ­Disgust is a reaction to noxious conditions such as rotting food or excrement. Disgust may emanate from an evolutionary urge to remain clean and safe. Shame comes from the recognition of one’s inability or unwillingness to meet certain standards. This emotion ­motivates people to hide but also potentially to enforce such standards on others. An influential theory of emotion within political science is the theory of affective intelligence (AI) by George Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen. AI theory focuses on three major emotions— anxiety, enthusiasm, and anger/aversion. They argue there are two emotional systems, one “dispositional” and the other based on “surveillance.” Both help citizens organize the political environment. The dispositional system regulates how people carry out learned behavior and react to stimuli from the environment to form habits. The surveillance system ­ provides people with warnings about new situations and threats, signaling that an adaptive response is required. When the surveillance system senses a threat, this suggests citizens need to pay more attention and seek more information. Most of the time, people rely on political habits to guide decisions unless made anxious. AI theory thus implies that when people become anxious, they are motivated to learn, pay more attention, and base political decisions on information rather than custom and habitlike partisanship. More recent work by Bethany Albertson and Shana Gadarian notes that anxious citizens may indeed be motivated to learn, but their search processes for information may be biased to reinforce their fears and to potentially support “protective” policies that will keep

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Emotions and Voting

them safe, even if they are potentially problematic from an effectiveness or normative point of view. This research, based on evidence from a variety of substantive areas including security, health, the environment, and immigration, has more ambiguous implications for the role anxiety plays in fostering deliberation and democratic governance. Political campaigns have two main goals: (1) to ­persuade voters and (2) to boost turnout, and emotion is central in both. Our most famous political advertisements in American politics trigger emotional reactions— Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 Daisy ad showed a nuclear explosion and inspired fear (“these are the stakes”), while Ronald Reagan in 1984 proclaimed “It’s morning again in America” and offered hope. Why is emotion such a central feature of political campaigns? Ted Brader shows that political advertisements use music and ­evocative visuals to trigger emotional r­ eactions, and, ultimately, persuade people to support candidates and causes. ­Emotion also plays an important role in voter turnout. Nicholas Valentino and coauthors demonstrate that anger causes people to participate in politics.

Conclusion Any account of political behavior is incomplete without emotion. We expect that good citizens are informed and participate in politics, and in many ways, emotion helps citizens meet those standards. Emotions cause citizens to learn about politics, to show up at the polling place, to campaign on behalf of their candidates and issues, and to protest when they’re dissatisfied. Emotion might also lead citizens to support policies that deny others rights in times of crisis and support leaders who may continually provoke anxiety to maintain power. Emotion’s role in democracy is complex, and no account of democratic life is complete without it. Bethany Albertson and Shana Kushner Gadarian See also Emotions and Voting

Further Readings Albertson, B., & Gadarian, S. K. (2015). Anxious politics: Democratic citizenship in a threatening world. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Banks, A. J. (2014). Anger and racial politics: The emotional foundation of racial attitudes in America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Brader, T. (2004). Campaigning for hearts and minds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Druckman, J., & McDermott, R. (2008). Emotion and the framing of risky choice. Political Behavior, 30, 297–321.

Marcus, G. E., Neuman, W. R., & MacKuen, M. (2000). Affective intelligence and political judgment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Neuman, W. R., Marcus, G. E., Crigler, A. N., & MacKuen, M. (Eds.). (2007). The affect effect: Dynamics of emotion in political thinking and behavior. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Redlawsk, D. P. (Ed.). (2006). Feeling politics: Emotion in political information processing. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Valentino, N. A., Brader, T., Groenendyk, E. W., Gregorowicz, K., & Hutchings, V. L. (2011). Election night’s alright for fighting: The role of emotions in political participation. Journal of Politics, 73, 156–170. doi:10.1017/S0022381 610000939 Zeitzoff, T. (2014). Anger, exposure to violence, and intragroup conflict: A “lab in the field” experiment in southern Israel. Political Psychology, 35, 309–335. doi:10.1111/ pops.12065

Emotions

and

Voting

Research on emotions and voting examines features of human cognition and social contexts in which voters formulate judgments about politics. The recognition of the importance emotions have in politics gained a­ ttention as they emerged as prominent characteristics defining several presidential election cycles in American politics. This entry briefly introduces the components of emotions and voting and the contexts in which emotions are prevalent, and concludes with a brief overview of current knowledge of the role emotions have in politics. As a cognitive instrument, emotions contribute a sense of meaning for human existence and serve a vital function in social life, as well as for interpreting one’s surroundings and navigating the environment. Based on this awareness about the role of emotions in human social and cognitive development and functioning, it is commonly understood that emotions perform similar functions in political contexts. Early misgivings about the cognitive function of human emotions led to assumptions that emotions, in the role of decision making, led to irrational conclusions and choices. Such expectations resulted in considering feelings as an undesirable element of voting because feelings were thought to invoke irrational biases that could yield negative policy consequences.

Theories on Emotions and Voting In American democracy, voting conveys a citizen’s preference about political leadership and policy proposals.

Emotions and Voting

Politics are inherently emotional, as evidenced by accounts from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day. Political history is replete with accounts of bitter divisions, passionate oratory, and the dramatic behavior of political players. Several established theories have shaped contemporary understanding of how human emotions influence decision making. Conventional expectations of voters in American politics assume that citizens make decisions based on a critical calculus predicated on utilitarian motivations. Classic democratic theory depicts an average citizen as constrained by a binary choice between rational and emotional predispositions. The expectations of classic democratic theory are grounded in two themes. The first is the concept of a rational public, a theory of social behavior; and the second investigates the notion of the emotional citizen, a cognitive theory of behavior. The rational public theme investigates the rationality of aggregated political choices, and much of the research is situated in automatic information-processing models. The emotional citizen theme represents a recent trend of redefining the role of emotions as less irrational, more complex, and a reasonable element within political decision making. Feelings are presented in this research as politically valid and a significant aid to voters as they negotiate the complexities of contemporary campaigns. Feelings play a potentially useful role in helping voters judge political candidates when confronted with overwhelming amounts of information about a political issue or a candidate for public office. The theory of affective intelligence, or affect-asinformation, situates emotion as a cognitive “state of being” rather than a procedural step in mental information processing. The theory purports that all cognition is situated in an emotional context. In U.S. politics and electoral cycles, campaigns provide the emotional context.

federal elections. Given that rational-choice theories explain that voters’ motivation to vote must overcome select opportunity costs, a political campaign functions as a means to persuade a voter that the payoff from voting exceeds any incurred costs. A campaign’s context is shaped by several factors that come together to make up a larger landscape voters must negotiate and may be referred to as the campaign reality. This reality is made up of the electorate’s opinions and mood, mass communications from entertainment and news media, the candidate’s personal traits, the posturing of the political parties, and the perceived success or failure of government policies. Emotional cues are deliberately loaded onto these factors, activating a voter’s emotional predisposition that will influence his or her choice.

Measuring Emotion The measurement of human emotion is commonly performed by the use of public opinion surveys, which have demonstrated success with measuring respondents’ emotional reactions to a variety of topics. More recent research has utilized mixed methods to capture and measure emotions. Research demonstrates a nuanced range of human emotion as captured through survey instruments and experimentation. Research on emotions and voting has determined the function of positive and negative emotions in politics. Additionally, four common emotional indicators are identified as hope, pride, anger, and fear. Other important research on emotions and voting includes the study of anxiety and disgust on political behavior and policy outputs. Current knowledge on the role of emotions on voting has yielded greater comprehension of the distinct nuances of human emotion (e.g., how pride differs from hope and how anxiety differs from fear) and how such nuanced emotions influence voting preferences in U.S. elections. Heather E. Yates

Emotions and Political Campaigns Campaigns for public office utilize calculated and targeted strategies designed specifically to appeal to voters’ emotions. Emotions are a durable feature of American campaigns and elections. In contemporary contexts, emotions are on display through the use of patriotic symbols, symbolic imagery, and speech presented to the mass audience of spectators through communications technology. Emotional cues are not only delivered via mass media but transmitted through the increasing amount of self-selected content delivered by the advent of the Internet and social media. This observation is predicated on the assumption that political campaigns matter in the pursuit of the elective office, especially in

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See also Emotions and Political Decision Making; Partisanship; Political Campaigns; Political Ideology; Political Participation; Public Opinion; Social Cognition

Further Readings Demertzis, N. (2013). Emotions in politics: The affect dimension in political tension. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Green, D., Palmquist, B., & Schickler, E. (2002). Partisan hearts and minds: Political parties and the social identities of voters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Marcus, G. (2000). Emotions in politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 221–250.

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End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama)

Marcus, G. (2002). The sentimental citizen: Emotions in democratic politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Neuman, W. R., Marcus, G. E., Crigler, A. N., & MacKuen, M. (Eds.). (2007). The affect effect: Dynamics of emotion in political thinking. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Redlawsk, D. P. (2006). Feeling politics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) The decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite communist states brought a heady sense of euphoric triumph to supporters of Western and particularly American capitalist democracy. Celebrations of the collapse of communism included predictions that all the countries of the world would now develop in the same direction, toward liberal democracy. This sentiment was best captured in a 1989 essay, “The End of History?” in which Francis Fukuyama argued that the ideological evolution of humankind has reached its end and Western liberal democracy represents the final form of human government. The essay was expanded and published in 1992 as a best-selling book, The End of History and the Last Man, republished in revised form in 2006. The main assumption underlying the “end of h ­ istory” thesis is shared by classic Marxism: that the development of human societies inevitably takes place toward a particular end goal. For Marx, the “end of history” comes in the form of the classless society, after the proletariat has successfully overcome false consciousness, confronted the capitalist class, established and passed through a dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally transformed human consciousness in such a way as to make government as we know it redundant. In opposition, Fukuyama sees the end of history as capitalist ­liberal democracy. Fukuyama views the international system through a lens of competing ideologies in which there exists only one victor: economic and political liberalism. To demonstrate his point, Fukuyama first draws from the works of Marx, Hegel, and Kojève to build upon similar earlier hypotheses to strengthen his argument ­stating the inevitability of history’s end. Second, the cases of China and Japan are discussed to illustrate the ideological evolution toward liberal democracy in even the most contradictory settings. Third, Fukuyama expands his premises to include a view for the future of state conflict and political ideologies. It is with this

latter portion of Fukuyama’s argument that critics most often take issue. Fukuyama credits Karl Marx with the propagation of the concept of a universal ideology through the lens of communism. Although touting a completely different ideological victor, Marx too envisioned a finality in the evolution of states in which the interplay of material forces would lead to an eventual communist utopia, resolving all prior contradictions. At the heart of both Marx’s and Fukuyama’s theses, however, is the concept of directional history, which originated from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel, the understanding of human stages of consciousness and their correspondence to progressing social organization—the transition from tribal to democratic societies, for instance—is inextricably linked to understanding humankind today. Most importantly, Hegel argued that history reaches an apex of rationality in both society and state and that such a point was reached in 1806 after Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena. Rounding out his conceptual foundation, Fukuyama draws from Alexandre Kojève. In agreement with Hegel, Kojève argues that 1806 represented the ­forefront of successful society, at which point the basic principles of liberal democracy had evolved to completion. Using these three trains of thought as a basis, ­Fukuyama applies this to the contemporary world. The ­principles of liberal democracy have even successfully infiltrated the societies of Japan and China. Japanese fascism, defeated by the military power of the Allies and transformed through the American occupation of defeated Japan, gave way to a unique grafting of liberal ideals and mechanisms onto traditional Japanese ­culture and institutions. The successful adoption of Japanese systems by developing countries in the region, F ­ ukuyama argues, exemplifies the inevitability of a universal homogeneous state of liberal democracy. In the case of China, a communist state has given way to liberal democratic institutions through its economic system; through the opening of the economy, liberal ideals are and will continue to infiltrate Chinese society, nullifying the last true threat to the expansion of liberal democracy. Despite his claim of inevitability, Fukuyama acknowledges that the end of history does not coincide with the end of conflict or differences between states. Although communism and fascism have been defeated (he claims), religion and nationalism remain to threaten liberal democracy. Fukuyama argues, however, that neither ­ideology can fully contradict liberal ideals. In the case of religion, there lacks a provision of peace and stability that only a state system can provide. In the case of nationalism, Fukuyama points out that nationalist ­ ideology is an amalgamation of many

End of History Thesis for Corporate Law

phenomena—cultural nostalgia, for example—that do not inherently disrupt the liberal system. Therefore, Fukuyama agrees with Hegel’s endpoint of history being 1806; since the American and French Revolutions, the baseline for societal and political organization has not, in any notable manner, changed. Looking forward, however, Fukuyama predicts that the majority of the Third World will remain entrenched in history, instigating conflicts for the foreseeable future. In response to the realist school of thought (arguing that interstate conflicts will continue based on great power politics and national interests), Fukuyama argues that interests are actually driven by ideologies; states having reached the end of history and ideological evolution will thus not be engaged in large-scale conflict. Although such a statement seems positive on its face, Fukuyama takes a sober tone. Domestic tensions, specifically of an ethnic and nationalist nature, will remain high. Fukuyama’s end of history thesis has a number of flaws, the three shared by Marx being, first, the assumption that history has an inevitable direction; second, the assumption that history has an end; and third, the assumption that “progress” will be made by all societies. All three of these assumptions seem naive, and, in the case of “liberal democracy” being the end of history, a ­product of Western and particularly American euphoria over the collapse of the Soviet rival. In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, S­amuel Huntington explores several of Fukuyama’s faulty assumptions, starting with the ­ expectation of harmony. Arguing that the end of the cold war created only an illusion of harmony, Huntington goes one step further to claim that Fukuyama’s vision of progress is in no way inevitable. Supporting this claim is the juxtaposition of the seminal American Dream and the sobering state of socioeconomic affairs in the United States today. James Truslow Adams first described the ­American Dream in The Epic of America, published in 1931, as the vision of a country in which all citizens have equal opportunity to improve their lives in accordance with their achievements. In contrast to this vision of optimism, Robert Putnam presents statistics showing trends of high-scoring students from low-income backgrounds having a lower likelihood to attend a prestigious school than wealthy students with low test scores (Putnam, 2015, p. 190). On a more global level, Fukuyama’s argument is also flawed, according to John Mearsheimer. In a debate hosted by Cornell University in 2014, Mearsheimer countered Fukuyama’s expectation of harmony with regard to military engagement, using the case of the United States as an example. Arguing that the United States has been addicted to conflict since the end of the cold war, he shows that the paradigmatic liberal

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democracy contradicts Fukuyama’s application of democratic peace theory on a global scale. Myrthe Doedens and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also American Exceptionalism; Clash of Civilizations; Command of the Commons; Democracy; Dictatorship; European Union; Free Market; Globalization; Liberalism; Marxism; Self-Help Ideology; Utopia

Further Readings [Cornell University]. (2014, December 2). Francis Fukuyama and panelists debate alternatives to democracy. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzqkXhd00qc Fukuyama, F. (2006). The end of history and the last man. New York, NY: Free Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. Putnam, R. D. (2015). Our kids: The American dream in crisis. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

End of History Thesis Corporate Law

for

The end of history thesis for corporate law denotes a particular characterization of a long-standing debate over the function of corporations and their directors’ method of discharging their corporate duties. It was developed by legal academics Henry Hansmann and ­Reinier Kraakman in their 2001 article of the same name. The end of history thesis occupies a notable and controversial place within corporate law discourse. Since its advent, it has become the central point around which most arguments about corporate functionality law have been constructed.

Prelude: Corporate Purpose and Directors’ Duties The primary function of corporations (other than notfor-profit corporations) is to make a profit. Directors establish the corporate policies, agendas, and methodologies by which corporations seek to earn profit. Directors are fiduciaries who owe duties of good faith and loyalty to their corporations and must pursue the corporations’ best interests. In discharging their fiduciary duties, directors do not possess discretion over whether to pursue profit on behalf of the corporations they control but only the method by which corporate profit will be pursued.

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End of History Thesis for Corporate Law

Corporate law commentators all agree that corporations exist to make a profit, and directors establish the basis by which corporations earn profits. Commentators differ, however, in their understandings of the extent to which corporations must dedicate themselves to profit making and directors’ need to be responsive to affiliated stakeholder interests. In discharging their duties, directors face considerable pressure from shareholders, the primary investors in the corporation, some of whom hold power to elect the directors and share in corporate profits. Shareholder power to elect or remove them renders directors’ continuing tenure dependent on maintaining share­ holder goodwill. Thus, directors may become conflicted by their obligations to pursue the corporation’s best interests while maintaining shareholder approval. Other pressures may also derive from employees, creditors, and other corporate stakeholders.

The Corporate Purpose Debate Before the “End of History” Since the dawn of the modern corporation in the latter part of the 19th century, commentators debated the purpose and function of corporations, the roles of directors, and other foundational corporate issues. This debate eventually narrowed into a competition between two primary theories of the corporation: shareholderprimacy theory, or contractarianism, and communitarianism, also known as stakeholder theory or progressive corporate law. Shareholder primacy theory states that directors have a duty to maximize corporate profits for the ­primary purpose of distributing those profits to shareholders. Other purposes are distinctly secondary to these goals. Communitarianism states that corporations’ profit motive is not absolutist. Corporate profits are to be pursued in light of the legitimate interests of various corporate stakeholders and the corporation’s other valid purposes. These stakeholders may include shareholders, employees, creditors (banks, suppliers, utilities, etc.), government, the communities in which the corporations conduct business, and the environment. Other legitimate corporate purposes might include corporate philanthropy or pursuing endeavors that contribute to the corporation’s role as a member of society. The debate between shareholder primacy theory and communitarianism is most notably illustrated in the exchange between Adolf Berle and Merrick Dodd in the Harvard Law Review during the 1930s. Berle and Dodd staunchly maintained their respective positions, although Berle later accepted Dodd’s communitarian approach near the end of his life.

The End of History Thesis The end of history thesis is premised on an adherence to shareholder primacy theory. It asserts that the debate over corporate purpose and directors’ function in facilitating that purpose had ended and that shareholder primacy had been entrenched as the undisputed basis of corporate purpose. Hansmann and Kraakman’s thesis contends that arguments favoring communitarian models of corporate governance no longer merit consideration. Mounting pressure to increase benefits to shareholders already controlled worldwide corporate governance practices and brought the same pressures to bear upon corporate law. This worldwide convergence in corporate theory led toward the unitary vision of corporate purpose founded on shareholder primacy. Hansmann and Kraakman assert that “as a consequence of both logic and experience,” the best means to obtain widespread social welfare is “to make corporate managers strongly accountable to shareholder interests and (at least in direct terms) only to those interests” (p. 14). They identify five basic characteristics of the corporate form—(1) “full legal personality, including welldefined authority to bind the firm to contracts and to bond those contracts with assets that are the property of the firm, as distinct from the firm’s owners”; (2) “limited liability for owners and managers”; (3) “shared ownership by investors of capital”; (4) “delegated management under a board structure”; and (5) “transferable shares”—which, they maintain, “provide, by their nature, for a firm that is strongly responsive to shareholder interests” (pp. 5–6). These core characteristics create particular efficiencies in organizing corporations but do not dictate how nonshareholder stakeholder interests are to be accommodated. Hansmann and Kraakman indicate, however, that accommodating those interests is unnecessary because noncreditor stakeholders benefit from protections existing outside of corporate law, such as labor law, tort law, or antitrust; corporate law exists only to prioritize and protect shareholder interests unaddressed through these other means. Hansmann and Kraakman’s end of history thesis gathered considerable attention because the corporate purpose debate was reinvigorated in the 1980s by the infusion of law-and-economics theories of the corporation and the rebirth of communitarian theories of corporate purpose under the title “Progressive Corporate Law.” Hansmann and Kraakman intended to marginalize that debate by insisting that any meaningful debate over corporate purpose had already ended. Ironically, they fostered a dramatic resurgence in communitarian responses and critiques whose very ­

End to Terrorism, Theories of

existence demonstrated the incorrectness of their end of history thesis. In subsequent writings, Hansmann and Kraakman admit their claim of the end of history thesis for corporate law was meant to be provocative and promoted more criticism and controversy than they intended. While they maintain the correctness of its principles, they also acknowledge that the claim was premature. Leonard I. Rotman See also Capitalism; Decision Making; System Justification; Values

Further Readings Berle, A. A., Jr. (1931). Corporate powers as powers in trust. Harvard Law Review, 44, 1049. Berle, A. A., Jr. (1932). For whom corporate managers are trustees: A note. Harvard Law Review, 45, 1365. Dodd, E. M., Jr. (1932). For whom are corporate managers trustees? Harvard Law Review, 45, 1145. Dodd, E. M., Jr. (1935). Is effective enforcement of the fiduciary duties of corporate managers practicable? University of Chicago Law Review, 2, 194. Hansmann, H., & Kraakman, R. (2001). The end of history for corporate law. Georgetown Law Journal, 89, 439. Available at http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard_olin/280 Rotman, L. I. (2010). Debunking the “end of history” thesis for corporate law. Boston College International & Corporate Law Review, 33, 219.

End

to

Terrorism, Theories

of

There is much less research on how terrorism ends than on how it begins. More elaborate attempts to map this question started in the early 2000s. The research on the end of terrorism has two main lines of inquiry: first, studies on how and why individuals disengage from ­terrorism; and second, studies on how terrorist campaigns end. In both cases, the research is still largely in the stage of explorative mapping of processes toward ­disengagement and the end of terrorism.

End of Terrorist Campaigns Empirical studies show that terrorist campaigns tend to be short-lived. Audrey Kurth Cronin has estimated that the average life span of a terrorist organization is 5 to 10 years. Her calculation includes only groups that have shown some longevity. A large number of terrorist groups apparently disband during their first year of

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existence. Even if the demise of a particular group does not always end a terrorist campaign, as splintering is a common phenomenon among terrorist groups, the ­campaigns do not appear to be significantly more long lasting either. The studies have explored the end of terrorist campaigns from two main angles: how campaigns end and why they end. Most typically, terrorist campaigns tend to end because they fail to continue their existence. This can be, for example, because the group dissolves in the face of strong countermeasures or because it loses its public support and fails to attract new recruits. Some terrorist campaigns have ended through a political process, typically negotiations. The end of terrorism does not necessarily lead to the end of violence. In rare cases, terrorist campaigns end because they have reached their strategic objectives. However, it is not always very clear whether success was achieved because of or despite the use of terrorist tactics. Moving away from terrorism can also mean that the group adopts another kind of violent tactics, for example guerrilla warfare. The escalation of violent tactics has often been the long-term objective of groups that have used terrorism. It is also possible that a group abandons its political objectives but continues its existence as a criminal organization. Most researchers seem to agree that the key factors that influence the development of terrorist campaigns are strategic choices made by the terrorist group, its internal dynamics, counterterrorism measures, and the development of public support. It is also clear that a combination of different approaches is needed to explain the end of terrorism. Following the instrumental approach for explaining terrorist behavior, terrorist campaigns would end when the costs involved in using terrorism become greater than the benefits. Terrorism may also be abandoned if other, more beneficial alternatives become available. The instrumental approach, however, has its limits in explaining terrorist behavior because its drivers tend to change over time and organizational survival becomes a priority. Following the organizational approach, terrorist campaigns continue as long as they help to maintain the organization. Important for organizational survival is the organization’s ability to maintain unity and offer incentives and rewards for participation. The role of public support and countermeasures in the decline of terrorism is not straightforward. While the loss of public support can both be demoralizing and make the continuation of terrorism difficult, sometimes it has led to the conclusion that escalation of violence is needed to polarize the society and become more relevant again. Repression alone has seldom ended terrorist campaigns, and its effects seem to be conditioned by

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Energy Competition

factors such as the extent and mobilization of a terrorist group’s support and the resources at its disposal.

Individual Disengagement Research on how individuals leave terrorism behind has shown that it is important to distinguish between behavioral and cognitive disengagement. Behavioral ­ disengagement refers to the discontinuation of an ­individual’s involvement in terrorist activities. Besides voluntarily leaving a terrorist organization, it may also result, for example, from an individual’s being imprisoned or expelled or being assigned to a different role in the organization. Cognitive disengagement, on its part, refers to what is often also called deradicalization, the abandonment of radical beliefs and ideological views by an individual. It is not uncommon that cognitive disengagement is rather a consequence than a cause of the behavioral disengagement even when the latter happens voluntarily. John Horgan, who has been the pioneer of studying individual disengagement from terrorism, has identified several factors that may contribute to the disengagement process. One of them is disillusionment. Over time, an individual may become increasingly critical of the objective or methods of the terrorist campaign. Another common reason is the negative intensity that being involved in a terrorist group entails. Limited possibilities to maintain social relationships, the isolation, and constant pressure, often take their toll in the long run and may start to weigh more than the positive aspects of being involved, such as feelings of comradeship, sense of purpose, and positive status. The decision to leave terrorism behind may at least partly result from changing priorities, for example willingness to start a family, as the individual gets older. The process leading to individual disengagement from terrorism is often lengthy. It may take years from the emergence of the first seeds of doubt until an individual makes a decision to leave. Empirical evidence also shows that behavioral and cognitive disengagement do not always go hand in hand. Behavioral disengagement can happen without cognitive disengagement and vice versa. For example, an individual may stop being involved in terrorist attacks but still retain radical ideological beliefs or remain involved even after having lost faith in the tactics and ideology. There is also evidence that behavioral disengagement can be facilitated by government policies that make exit and reintegration easier. Leena Malkki See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Cognitive Dissonance; Disengagement; Political Psychologies of Terrorism; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings Bjørgo, T., & Horgan, J. (Eds.). (2009). Leaving terrorism behind: Individual and collective disengagement. London, England: Routledge. Crenshaw, M. (2011). Explaining terrorism: Causes, processes and consequences. London, England: Routledge. Cronin, A. K. (2009). How terrorism ends: Understanding the decline and demise of terrorist campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horgan, J. (2009). Walking away from terrorism: Accounts of disengagement from radical and extremist movements. London, England: Routledge.

Energy Competition Energy competition can be defined across the following two dimensions. At an international level, energy ­competition refers to the situation in which different countries’ strenuous efforts to gain energy security mutually conflict. At the domestic level, energy competition refers to the domestic energy market situation in which multiple energy providers compete for increasing market share or enhancing energy efficiency.

Complex Meanings of Energy Even though there is general agreement that energy is an indispensable part of our daily lives and a fundamental factor in economic growth, the definition of energy differs in major ways across different academic disciplines and even organizations. For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) defines energy as “the capacity for doing work as measured by the capability of doing work (potential energy) or the conversion of this capability to motion (kinetic energy),” which is closer to a scientific perspective on energy or the technical meaning of energy. Meanwhile, how to define energy can be a much more complicated task among social scientists who analytically deal with human activities. Energy per se has multiple forms by nature, which is the very reason it is difficult to synthesize these various meanings of energy. Instead, a more specific term—­ primary energy—may be more helpful to conceptualize energy in the reality that social scientists deal with. The United Nations (UN) explains that “primary energy refers to energy sources as found in their natural state (as opposed to derived or secondary energy, which is the result of the transformation of primary or secondary sources).” In addition, the UN emphasizes that it is necessary to separate primary energy (new energy entering the system of national energy supply) and secondary

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energy (the energy transformed within the system) in order to avoid double counting in energy statistics. In brief, primary energy is composed of fuels and electricity. Most fossil fuels are converted with relative ease, whereas electrical energy is not. For example, crude petroleum, a complex mixture of a number of chemical compounds, can be fractionated for each purpose, from liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to Bunker C oil. On the other hand, electrical energy is usually not transformable other than its mode of storage, such as in batteries. However, electricity can be generated through various different sources, from renewables like solar and wind to others like nuclear power.

advanced economies that can export higher-valueadded products. From this perspective, resource-rich countries can be exploited and easily victimized by international energy competition, and/or their domestic politics may be more volatile due to the allure of their resources. This explanation warns that resources may be a curse rather than a blessing to developing ­countries. Liberal theorists, by contrast, emphasize the necessity of international cooperation and good governance in order to minimize the negative effects of overcompetition or market failure fostered by monopoly or Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ­ (OPEC)–like cartels.

Energy Competition at an International Level

Energy Competition at the Domestic Level

When establishing the definition of energy competition at an international level, focusing on the concept of energy security, which is relatively clearer, may be more elucidating because it provides a mirror image of energy competition. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy security is “the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price.” Conversely speaking, energy competition can be defined as the strenuous efforts to obtain energy security. How to perceive energy competition at an international level can also be different according to international relations (IR) theories. Realists often highlight the highly competitive nature of international relations, as well as the physical conditions of countries such as size and geopolitical location. Also, they advance the notion of self-help as the fundamental way to secure a country’s survival. From this realist state-centric point of view, energy resources like oil and gas, major components of primary energy, belong to the home country where those resources exist. However, other countries will also try to gain access and control over those resources. It would be fair to say that much of the literature on “resource war” is based on this perspective. According to Michael Klare, competition or even conflicts surrounding natural resources, especially oil, are likely to be greater in the future due to increasing demand from emerging market countries, and consequently those resources will become scarcer, a conjecture which inspired the so-called peak oil thesis. Roland Dannreuther points out that many debates on international politics of energy implicitly follow these realist views. Meanwhile, according to Marxist dependency theory or Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, the periphery—where developing countries that mainly export raw materials are located—is largely economically dependent on the core and is unable to move on to

Similarly, economic liberals often criticize monopolies or cartels within domestic energy markets because they often reduce efficiency and inflate energy prices. For example, in South Korea, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), launched as a public corporation in 1982, has continuously maintained its monopolistic status in the Korean electricity market. Even though it spun the business off into six power-generation subsidiaries in 2001, KEPCO is still the only one in charge of power transmission and the final sale of power. Critics often claim that KEPCO’s monopoly obstructs energy market reform or innovation in related sectors like the electric vehicle market. Eunjung Lim See also Capitalism; Command of the Commons; Ecopolitics; Environmental Skepticism; Hierarchy of Needs; Stag Hunt

Further Readings Calder, K. (2012). The new continentalism: Energy and twentyfirst-century Eurasian geopolitics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dannreuther, R. (2010). International relations theories: Energy, minerals and conflict. POLINARES working paper no. 8. Klare, M. (2008). Rising powers, shrinking plant: The new geopolitics of energy. New York, NY: Henry Holt.

English-Only Movement The English-only movement is composed of two organizations, U.S. English and ProEnglish. U.S. English was established in 1983 by Dr. John Tanton, who had been associated with the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth and was a founder of the Federation for

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American Immigration Reform (FAIR), along with U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa (R-CA). But in 1986, a highly controversial memo by Tanton surfaced during the Arizona official English referendum campaign and was published in the Arizona Republic newspaper, which prompted Walter Cronkite (longtime anchor on CBSTV evening news) to resign from the advisory board of U.S. English along with its president, Linda Chavez. In turn, Tanton and other former U.S. English associates founded ProEnglish in 1994, whose key objective was to defend the 1988 referendum-passed English-Only constitutional amendment in Arizona. It failed, insofar as a federal district judge ruled in 1990 that Article XXVIII of the Arizona State Constitution was an unconstitutional infringement on the free-speech guarantees in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 2006, voters, by a 74% margin, approved another constitutional amendment that designated English the official language of Arizona but with caveats designed to accommodate the previous judicial objections.

State English-Only Laws Both organizations count thirty-one states as having official English-language laws as of 2015 (proponents of the English language prefer to be known as Official ­English rather than English-only advocates), but other analysts code somewhat fewer qualifying statutes or constitutional provisions. Clearly some are historical artifacts that long predated the modern English-only movement, namely Louisiana (1812), Nebraska (1920), Illinois (1969), Massachusetts (1975), and Hawaii (1978). Congress mandated English in Louisiana as a condition for statehood, and both enactments in Nebraska and Illinois were the direct result of the nativist backlash that followed in the wake of World War I. Italians, Bohemians, and Germans were the target of the 1920 Nebraska law, while in Illinois, a 1923 law actually mandated that “American” be the state’s official language, this legislation being an anti-English backlash sponsored by an Irish-American in the state legislature. After a long diatribe against England and the argument that national identity is tied to a distinctive language, the law resolved that “The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the ‘American’ language, and not as the ‘English’ language.” In 1969, that law was amended by substituting “English” for ­“American.” Hawaii could actually be considered a bilingual state insofar as Section 4 of the Hawaii Constitution of 1978 stipulated that “English and Hawaiian shall be the official languages of Hawaii” but with the caveat that “Hawaiian shall be required for public acts and transactions only as provided by law.” However,

including the 1975 Massachusetts constitution is problematic, if not constitutionally suspect, because English is not designated an official language; instead, Article XX of the Articles of Amendment states that “No person shall [have the right to vote, or] be eligible to office under the constitution of this commonwealth, who shall not be able to read the constitution in the English language, and write his name” though exceptions are allowed. The roots of the modern English-only movement predated the founding of U.S. English. In 1980, 59% of Dade County, Florida, voters approved a referendum (which survived until its repeal in 1993) that barred the use of public funds for bilingualism and stipulated that all public meetings and documents utilize the English language. The first state official English law was enacted in Virginia in 1981 (amended in 1986; also 1996), after which 13 states followed its example. Most laws are a simple declaratory sentence, like Mississippi’s: “The English language is the official language of the State of Mississippi.” Some designate English as the language of all official public documents, records, or meetings, while the most restrictive laws (like Arizona’s, which a federal court struck down) seek to prohibit the use of any language but English. Besides Virginia, similar legislation was passed during the 1980s in Arizona (1988, but judicially nullified; also 2006), Arkansas (1987), California (1986), Colorado (1988), Florida (1988), Georgia (1986; also 1996), Indiana (1984), Kentucky (1984), Mississippi (1987), North Carolina (1987), North Dakota (1987), South Carolina (1987), and Tennessee (1984). Since then, legislative successes have slowed markedly, with similar laws enacted by seven states in the 1990s (Alabama 1990; Alaska 1998; Missouri 1998, also 2008; Montana 1995; New Hampshire 1995; South Dakota 1995; and Wyoming 1996) and five more since the turn of the century (Idaho 2007; Iowa 2002; Kansas 2007; Oklahoma 2010; and Utah 2000). Conspicuously absent are states in New England (except New Hampshire) and the Northeast, the upper Midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Washington and Oregon in the Northwest corridor.

Public Opinion Virtually every national poll taken on this subject showed that large majorities of Americans favor establishing English as the official language of their state or the nation. The latest was a June 2006 CNN poll that found 75% in favor of “making English the official language of the United States,” a level of public support matching those recorded in a February 2000 General Social Survey (73%) and an April 1996 Gallup poll

Environmental Skepticism

(82%). A detailed statistical analysis of the 1992 presidential election showed that 65% favored English-only when asked “Do you favor a law making English the official language of the United States, meaning government business would be conducted in English only, or do you oppose such a law?” Majorities of every category of respondent except Hispanics voiced support for that legislation, but those demographic or partisan attributes were found to be much less important than a simple attitudinal explanation. That is, the strongest predictor of support for official English was the respondents’ opinion that speaking English is the essence of being a good American. Raymond Tatalovich See also Assimilation; Citizenship; Discrimination; Human Rights; Social Movements; Symbolic Racism

Further Readings Baron, D. (1990). The English-only question: An official language for Americans? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frendreis, J., & Tatalovich, R. (1997). Who supports English-only language laws: Evidence from the 1991 and 1992 National Election Studies. Social Science Quarterly, 78, 354–368. Tatalovich, R. (1995). Nativism reborn: The official English language movement and the American states. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Environmental Skepticism Environmental skepticism is the perspective that global environmental problems are either unreal, not related to human activities, or unimportant and which therefore advocates against political behavior to regulate environmental problems. The most prominent position in environmental skepticism is the rejection of mainstream climate science, referred to variously as climate skepticism or climate denial. The Associated Press stylebook suggests the use of the term “climate doubters” for those who reject mainstream climate science.

Terminology The terminology used to label this perspective is debated both by scholars and by people who hold this perspective. The word skepticism is said to imply the normal healthy skepticism that is foundational to everyday science, yet environmental skepticism rejects aspects of everyday environmental science, and individual “skeptics” are not generally waiting for new evidence to

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make a determination; meanwhile, those who hold this perspective often have an unquestioned faith in technology, industrial science (sometimes referred to as “production science”), and free-market capitalism. Thus, some argue the label “skeptic” is inappropriate because the “skepticism” in this case is explicitly ideological. “Denial” is also contentious. While environmental skepticism denies the Earth is being warmed dangerously by humans or that biodiversity loss is an important reality, some commentators believe the word “denial” has an unfair association with those who reject the reality of the Holocaust—Holocaust deniers. Ironically, scholars of Holocaust denial have shown that denial is a general historical regularity not isolated to the Holocaust. Denial is regularly used to protect a threatened ideological movement that often uses experts with dubious credentials or affiliations to cast confusion and obscure the program’s true objectives, and each of these facets is found in the environmental skepticism program. These similarities do not imply that environmental skepticism and Holocaust denial are equivalent whatsoever, only that the use of the term “denial” is not expressly reserved for the denial of the Holocaust.

Political History Environmental skepticism originates in the United States, and its strongest, best-funded organized ­defenders are found in the United States and the United ­Kingdom, with lesser adherence in the other Anglophone countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. A very small number of supporters and organizations are found in Continental Europe, but environmental skepticism is almost unheard of in the poorer countries of the Global South. The geographic asymmetry and the ideological nature of environmental skepticism indicate that environmental skepticism is not a scientific objection but a political position. The first indications of environmental skepticism were published in a handful of books starting in the 1970s, with a few more in the 1980s; however, environmental skepticism grew rapidly in the 1990s due to the organization of a social “countermovement” organized by conservative think tanks (CTTs). A social movement typically is organized at the grass roots to agitate for policy change, but often a countermovement organizes if the first movement threatens to succeed. The people most invested in the status quo are elites, and countermovements are often organized by elites to challenge the original social movement. In the case of environmental skepticism, the first skeptics were not organized even if they were normally conservative in orientation. In the 1980s, one of the more important environmental skeptics, Julian Simon, wrote a number of books, such

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as The Ultimate Resource (1981), challenging the ideas of environmental scarcity. Simon specifically challenged figures like Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and author of many works warning about overpopulation and a limited planet. Simon argued that the market would solve problems of resource scarcity but that most of the warnings about scarcity were not true. Simon’s argument provided a template for future environmental skeptics to challenge the reality of a proposed environmental problem, argue that the market will efficiently solve any real problem, and therefore regulation of environmental problems in the market is damaging to economic growth, profits, human welfare, and even Western progress and power superiority on the global stage. Since most environmental skeptics are from two world powers, the United States and the United ­Kingdom, skeptics often also warn that environmental regulation meant to solve “mythological” environmental problems will harm the power of the United States or the United Kingdom (depending on the author’s home country) in the world through a feared world government, not to mention constrain individual ­freedom to use property and resources. These concerns resonated with neoliberals (conservatives in the United States and “liberals” in the United Kingdom) who wish to remove most government obstacles in the market and shift power in society to the marketplace. The most important concern for the conservative movement during the 1970s and 1980s, however, was attacking communism. Thus, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there was a vacuum of purpose in the movement. The next year, the Rio “Earth” Summit was held and attended by nearly every head of state in the world alongside huge demonstrations from civil society groups, like environmental and Indigenous organizations. The event announced the arrival of global environmentalism. Conservative leaders like Fred Smith, founder and head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute; Paul Weyrich, founding president of the ­Heritage Foundation; and Dixie Lee Ray, former conservative governor of Washington State, attended the summit and warned that the conservative movement should shift from combating the “Red Scare” to the emerging “Green Scare” of environmentalism. In their minds, both had the priorities of putting Marxistsocialist sympathizers in charge and closing down free enterprise. Thus, in the 1990s, CTTs mobilized a countermovement against global environmentalism in the form of organized environmental skepticism through publications, lobbying, and other efforts.

Framing the Public Interest Unlike other anti-environmental movements, the environmental skepticism countermovement does not

first challenge values, like clean water, because history had demonstrated that the public perceives clean water to be a true public interest that should not be opposed. Consequently, the countermovement achieves its goals by challenging the trust in scientific claims, even though it does so outside normal production of scientific work and review. Trust in science and prudence are also public interests that have more supporters than direct opposition to clean water; and, in this way, the countermovement has succeeded in obstructing environmental policy by making environmental regulation a divisive partisan issue, at least in the United States. Peter J. Jacques See also Conservatism; Free Market; Social Movements

Further Readings Jacques, P. J., Dunlap, R. E., & Freeman, M. (2008). The organization of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism. Environmental Politics, 17(3), 349–385. Kysar, D. (2003). Some realism about environmental skepticism: The implications of Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist for environmental policy and law. Ecology Law Quarterly, 30, 223–278. McCright, A. M., & Dunlap, R. E. (2010). Anti-reflexivity: The American conservative movement’s success in undermining climate science and policy. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2–3), 100–133. doi:10.1177/0263276409356001 McCright, A. M., & Dunlap, R. E. (2011). Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change, 21(4), 1163–1172. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011 .06.003

Equality

of

Opportunity

Equality of opportunity is a theory in which personal responsibility plays a central part in determining whether a social system is just. Individuals are held responsible for some characteristics, called efforts, and not responsible for other characteristics, called circumstances. Marc Fleurbaey and Walter Bossert point out that this results in two principles: On the one hand, differences in outcomes that are due to differences in circumstances are objectionable. On the other hand, effort should be adequately rewarded. The former is called the compensation principle, the latter the reward principle. The three dominant theories about what people are responsible for are responsibility for choice,

Equality of Opportunity

responsibility for preferences, and responsibility for control. This entry explains these theories, what they mean in terms of equality of opportunity, and how they propose to measure inequality of opportunity. It discusses recent empirical applications and how they link with theories of responsibility. Finally, further issues associated with theories of equality of opportunity are pointed out.

Theories of Responsibility A first theory, responsibility for choice, maintains that individuals are responsible for the choices they make from the options they can choose from. This is often referred to as an ex-ante principle, as it evaluates individuals’ options, the situation before they make their choice. A second theory is responsibility for preferences. It says that, in the evaluation of each individual’s wellbeing, the trade-offs between different goods, for instance between health and income, must be based on the individual’s own relative valuation of these goods. This is an ex-post principle, as the purpose is to evaluate the actual situation of each individual once he has chosen. A third theory, responsibility for control, holds individuals responsible for what they control, such as the number of cigarettes they smoke or the number of hours they work. This principle is also ex-post. Circumstances are then defined as characteristics that are not efforts. Gender, ethnic origin, and parental background frequently figure as prominent circumstances. Evidently, for each of the theories, what they take as effort can be partly determined by circumstances. What individuals choose from a given set, their trade-offs between different goods and the number of cigarettes they smoke, are at least partly determined by their circumstances. This need not be a problem for responsibility for choice or preferences—it makes sense to hold individuals responsible for their choices or preferences even if these are determined by their ­ ­circumstances—but, as stressed by John Roemer, it is problematic for the control view. As individuals have no control over their circumstances, they cannot be responsible for the effect of these circumstances on their efforts, such that normatively relevant efforts have to be independent from circumstances. John Roemer proposes to hold an individual responsible not for his effort as such but for the relative rank of his effort within the distribution of effort of all those that face exactly the same circumstances as he does. Suppose we have 100 descendants from blue-collar and 50 from white-collar parents and that this is the only circumstance we consider. In that case, the proposal is that the blue-collar descendant that smokes the 50th-highest number of cigarettes of all blue-collar ­ descendants and the white-collar descendant that

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smokes the 25th-highest number of cigarettes of all the white-collar descendants have the same normatively relevant effort as far as smoking behavior is concerned.

Equality of Opportunity With a responsibility-for-choice theory, the focus of attention becomes the set of options individuals can choose from. Equality of opportunity prevails only if all individuals can choose from the same set. Individuals might make different choices from this set, such that they end up with different outcomes, but, as they are responsible for their choice, the resulting differences in outcomes are to be accepted. With a responsibility-for-preference theory, the focus of attention becomes the quantities of goods individuals have. Marc Fleurbaey and François Maniquet argue that respect for the different trade-offs individuals make between goods is obtained when, for all individuals, their actual combination of goods is exactly as good as another particular combination of goods. For example, in a world with only two goods, health and income, equality of opportunity based on responsibility for preferences is obtained if all individuals find their actual combination of health and income exactly as good as a reference level of health (e.g., perfect health) and a level of income that is the same for everyone. When individuals make different trade-offs between both goods, equality of opportunity can occur even though they have different actual combinations of health and income. A responsibility-for-control theory can be applied to almost any outcome. Roemer argues it is applicable to individuals’ well-being, measured, for instance, by their income, as well as with a partial or more pragmatic view, where the focus is, for instance, on access to education or health or obtained level of education or health. Here equality of opportunity prevails if all those that exercise the same normatively relevant efforts have the same outcome, irrespective of their circumstances. As a result of differences in efforts, again equality of opportunity and inequality of outcome can occur simultaneously.

Measuring Inequality of Opportunity To assess the amount of inequality of opportunity with responsibility for choice requires us to collect, for each individual, data of all the options he can choose from. This exercise is plagued with difficulties. First, one can typically observe only the options actually chosen by someone. Second, comparison of unequal sets is difficult. Suppose Ann can choose between “a blue Ferrari” and “going to Rio de Janeiro,” while Bob can choose

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between “a red Ferrari” and “a blue Ferrari.” Both have two options. Yet one could argue that Bob’s options are very similar and so do not offer a lot of choice. This argument loses force if both Ann and Bob agree that the only thing that makes life worthwhile is possession of a “red Ferrari.” Responsibility for preferences requires us to collect, for each individual, data on his preferences. Fleurbaey and Maniquet advocated the following way to measure the value of the actual combination of goods an individual has and that respects his preferences. Fix, for all goods except one, a reference value (such as perfect health). Determine his equivalent quantity of the remaining good (income), which is such that the reference value of health and this quantity of the remaining good is exactly as good as his actual combination of goods (health and income). This equivalent quantity is then a measure of the individual’s well-being, and inequality of opportunity is measured by the inequality in the ­distribution of equivalent quantities. Few surveys systematically ask respondents for their preferences between different goods. Moreover, obtaining reliable information on an individual’s preferences is difficult. These are the main reasons applications of this method are rare, but Koen Decancq and Erik Schokkaert have recently applied the method successfully. Responsibility for control can be applied to any outcome and requires information on this outcome and individuals’ efforts, as the goal is to measure inequality between people that have the same efforts. Often surveys lack information on efforts. Remember Roemer’s proposal that an individual’s normatively relevant effort is determined by his relative rank within the effort distribution of those that face exactly the same circumstances. Suppose, in addition, that the outcome is a strictly increasing function of effort. His normatively relevant effort can then be identified, without observing efforts, by his relative rank within the distribution of outcomes of those that face exactly the same circumstances as he. After having identified individuals’ normatively relevant effort this way, one can calculate the outcome inequality between those that have the same normatively relevant effort and aggregate these inequalities.

Empirical Applications Since the work by François Bourguignon and his coauthors, there has been an explosion of empirical work that measures inequality of opportunity. The most frequently used empirical method is based on the ex-ante principle of responsibility for choice. The basic assumption is that the options an individual can choose from are determined by his circumstances, and all individuals that have the same circumstances can choose from the

same options. Next, either one assigns a well-being value to each option, for instance the income it generates, or one borrows from the pragmatic approach advocated by Roemer in the context of responsibility for control and focuses on the quantity of a particular good in each option. The average well-being or the average quantity of the good obtained by those that share the same circumstances is taken as a measure of the value of their opportunity set. The inequality in the distribution constructed by assigning to every individual this value of his opportunity set is then a measure of ex-ante inequality of opportunity. Observe that the average well-being or quantity of the good is computed after individuals have made their choice such that it takes into account the effect of circumstances on choices. As a result, this effect influences the inequality between the averages in the constructed distribution and thus measured inequality. Hence, in this approach, individuals are not held responsible for the extent to which their choices are determined by their circumstances. To apply this method, one has to select circumstances. Selected circumstances typically include parental background (education or occupation), gender, ethnicity, and region of birth. This choice is usually ­ motivated by saying that these characteristics are beyond the control of the individual, although it would be more consistent with the ex-ante view to say they are not chosen by the individual. Paolo Brunori, Francisco Ferreira, and Vito Peragine compare estimates of inequality of opportunity for income based on the method outlined here for different countries. Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, and Sweden) have the highest equality of opportunity, followed by continental European countries. Next come the Anglo-Saxon countries (Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and the highest inequality of opportunity is found in Turkey, India, Latin ­American countries, and South Africa.

Further Issues Apart from the decision about what to hold individuals responsible for, there are several other issues when thinking about equality of opportunity and responsibility. A first issue is at which point in their lives we start to hold people responsible. Is there something like a canonical moment, such that individuals are not responsible for anything before that moment and are fully responsible after it, or is responsibility something that gradually develops? The latter is probably more reasonable, but accounting for it is fraught with problems, as individuals develop at different rates, which can be hard to determine.

Equity Theory

A second issue is that equality of opportunity can conflict with other values and that respecting the efforts of one generation leads to unequal opportunities for the next. The autonomy of the family, which requires that one should abstain from coercively interfering with the consensual relations within the family, is generally acknowledged. Moreover, from the theories about responsibility, it follows that one should respect parental choices, preferences, or actions taken to help their children. Some parents, however, have more means to do so than others. An opportunity-egalitarian perspective implies we should not accept the inequalities that arise for the next generation from the autonomous functioning of the family or from the help parents give to their children. A third issue is whether equality of opportunity is all that society should be concerned about. Equality of opportunity and individuals ending up with very bad outcomes can coexist. Some people make bad choices, willingly take risks, and see their lives threatened or end up in poverty. Can one really justify not helping them with the argument that they are responsible for their choices or for putting their lives in danger? Several authors propose versions of equality-of-opportunity theories that soften the sometimes harsh conclusions it can lead to. Finally, responsibility for control requires that individuals have control over some behaviors and thus assumes the existence of free will, which is something not accepted by some neuroscientists. Dirk Van de Gaer See also Discrimination; Distributive Justice; Equity Theory; Liberalism; Meritocracy; New Left; Procedural Justice; Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness

Further Readings Bossert, W. (1995). Redistribution mechanisms based on individual characteristics. Mathematical Social Sciences, 29, 1–17. Bourguignon, F., Ferreira, F. H. G., & Menendez, M. (2007). Inequality of opportunity in Brazil. Review of Income and Wealth, 53, 585–618. Brunori, P., Ferreira, F. H. G., & Peragine, V. (2013). Inequality of opportunity, income inequality, and economic mobility: Some international comparisons. In E. Paus (Ed.), Getting development right (pp. 85–115). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Decancq, K., & Schokkaert, E. (2016). Beyond GDP: Using equivalent incomes to measure well-being in Europe. Social Indicators Research, 126(1), 21–55. Fleurbaey, M. (1994). On fair compensation. Theory and Decision, 36, 277–307.

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Fleurbaey, M. (2008). Fairness, responsibility, and welfare. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Fleurbaey, M., & Maniquet, F. (2008). Fair social orderings. Economic Theory, 34, 24–45. Roemer, J. E. (1993). A pragmatic theory of responsibility for the egalitarian planner. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22, 146–166. Roemer, J. E. (1998). Equality of opportunity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roemer, J. E. (2012). On several approaches to equality of opportunity. Economics and Philosophy, 28, 165–200.

Equity Theory Equity theory has become one of the most widely accepted motivational theories and predictors of human behavior in the social sciences. It is based on a cornerstone of many international cultures—the expectation of individuals that they will be treated with “fairness” by others. According to equity theory, the accepted ­measure of “fairness” of treatment is the ratio of the rewards (outcomes) received over the efforts (inputs) of individuals—in comparison with other individuals in ­ similar situations. Employees, for example, expect to be treated equitably, measured by their own rewards/efforts in comparison with the ratio of rewards/efforts of other employees, within an organization, as well as others who perform similar work in other organizations.

Overview Sociologist J. Stacey Adams first proposed the concept of an “equity norm” in the early 1960s, and decades of research on the topic have supported it and expanded it as one of the basic predictors of human decision making and performance in the workplace. Adams proposed that workers expect an overall “equity norm” in which organizational rewards (outcomes) and efforts (inputs) are considered. These organizational rewards include but are not limited to pay, promotion, level of responsibility, and recognition. The organizational efforts generally include individual quantity and quality of work performance, motivation, attendance, creation of new ideas, and cooperation with others. Adams believed that individuals generally expect an “equity norm” from the workplace—that is, the ratio of their own outcomes/ inputs is perceived by them to be approximately equal to that of others. However, in addition to possible perceived equity, an individual may perceive inequity under certain conditions. First, individuals may believe their ratio of outcomes/inputs is less than that of others— and thus feel underrewarded for their efforts. Second,

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they may believe their ratio of outcomes/inputs is greater than that of others and thus feel overrewarded (which in reality seldom occurs). Thus a person feels one of three possible equity perception situations: Equity: Own Rewards/Efforts = Others’ Rewards/Efforts Inequity (underrewarded): Own Rewards/Efforts < Others’ Rewards/Efforts Inequity (overrewarded): Own Rewards/Efforts > Others’ Rewards/Efforts

If people perceive they are experiencing either the first or third situation—equitably treated or ­overrewarded—they likely are experiencing a perception of general job satisfaction. However, if they ­perceive they are experiencing the second situation— underrewarded—then they are likely to experience ­tension and low job satisfaction and will try to remedy the problem by one or more of the following actions:

1. Remove themselves from the perceived inequity by quitting their job.



2. Try to work harder and thus increase their rewards.



3. Reduce their work effort and thus achieve equity.



4. Choose a different comparison person whose ratio of rewards/efforts is more similar to their own and thus achieve perceived equity.

Although a person in an organization may choose any of these four methods of restoring perceived equity, in reality, most choose the first option—they begin to look for another job (inside or outside the organization) where they believe they will be treated more equitably or the third option—they are absent more often, reduce their efforts, and so on. Decades of research on workers in organizations has confirmed that when workers feel inequitably treated in comparison with others, especially if raises and promotions are the rewards being given, they will seek a way to restore their perception of equity. Any of these actions by employees can be costly to an organization because they affect productivity, since those workers either reduce their efforts or leave the organization. And the employees most likely to leave are the best performers, because they are the most marketable! The immortal baseball great Babe Ruth is credited with responding to the question as to why he made more money than the president of the United States: “I had a better year!” Thus he was defending his receiving greater rewards based on his greater efforts— perhaps a broad adaptation of the equity norm!

Resolving Perceived Inequity A great deal of psychological laboratory research and field research has focused on the primary issue of equity theory that is of concern to organizations— which is how individuals will most likely attempt to resolve perceptions of inequity. Studies overwhelmingly support two primary methods individuals in organizations utilize to achieve the resolution of perceived ­inequity and thus restore their perception of equity in the workplace. The first is by reducing levels of input or work effort, and the second is by withdrawing from the situation—either temporarily or permanently. For example, in situations in which individuals believe they are underpaid compared with others performing the same or similar work, they will reduce their quantity and/or quality of work, and thus achieve perceptions of equity. In other research, individuals placed in situations in which they perceived they were inequitably treated, if withdrawal from the situation was possible many simply decided to remove themselves from the situation, most often by looking for a job elsewhere. Perhaps for managers of organizations, the most important field studies of equity theory are those that show that ­turnover is highly related to perceptions of inequity by service and manufacturing employees alike.

Equity Theory in Professional Sports In addition to findings that support equity theory in service and manufacturing organizations, people often readily identify others in highly publicized cases that utilize equity theory in their own personal situation. For example, one highly publicized case of perceived inequity in professional sports involved Eric Dickerson, then a star running back for the Los Angeles Rams. After four seasons with the Rams, Dickerson’s contract was up for negotiation. He had become the most successful running back in the National Football League but was only the eighth-highest player on the Rams team in terms of salary. Dickerson demanded that he be paid similar to other franchise players—and named his “comparison others”—John Elway of the Denver Broncos, Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins, and ­ Brian Bosworth of the Seattle Seahawks. When the Rams refused to offer a salary similar to that of other franchise players, Dickerson applied equity theory by first publicly predicting that his running game might be affected (reducing his efforts), and when the Rams still didn’t meet his salary demands, he followed another equity theory prediction—he left the Rams to play for the Colts, who met his equity salary demands. In Major League Baseball salary disputes, the central issues of equity theory have been in play since 1973,

Equity Theory

when the collective bargaining agreement between the players’ union and the owners began using final-offer arbitration to resolve salary disputes. When unable to reach an agreement on salary, the two sides submit a final salary offer to a three-person arbitration panel. The panel then uses certain criteria to choose one of the two final offers as most equitable or fair. One of the key criteria, and most likely the most important, is ­“compensation of comparative players at the same ­position”—thus the most equitable because it compares the salaries (rewards) of other players with comparable statistics (inputs), as equity theory would prescribe. The system of final offer arbitration has been so successful in resolving player salary disputes that it has not been substantially changed in more than 43 years!

Dimensions of Equity Since the early work of J. Stacey Adams, research has determined not only that the “equity norm” is an overall perception of rewards/efforts but also that ­ workers perceive seven different dimensions of equity or fairness. If a person perceives any one of the dimensions as causing a perception of inequity, then he or she may try to achieve perceived equity by one of the methods s­ uggested by equity theory. The seven dimensions of equity, as determined by Michael R. Carrell and John E. Dittrich, include the following:

1. Pay Rules. The fairness of one’s pay relative to that of one’s coworkers, especially organizational policies and practices affecting pay raises and promotions.



2. Pay Administration. The fairness of supervisors in administering pay rules—especially performance reviews.



3. Work Pace. The fairness of supervisors in assigning work and maintaining an equitable pace among workers in a department or job.



4. Pay Level. The fairness of one’s pay compared with that of others in similar jobs in other organizations.



5. Distribution of Work. The fairness of supervisors in distributing duties to workers in a department or job.



6. Rule Administration. The fairness of supervisors in applying work rules and applying discipline.



7. Latitude. The degree to which workers receive a fair amount of decision making about their jobs.

Analysis of these seven dimensions indicates that organizations seeking to avoid employee perceptions of inequity, and thus undesirable outcomes, should focus

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on certain aspects of human resource management. They should (1) strive to achieve internal pay equity by reviewing the pay levels of jobs; (2) strive to achieve external equity by conducting regional and industry wage surveys and comparing the results with internal pay levels; (3) train supervisors to distribute work fairly; (4) conduct objective performance reviews; (5) apply discipline according to policy in an evenhanded manner; and (6) provide employees as much latitude as possible in decisions affecting their own work. The field research on equity theory in organizations has strongly supported the early laboratory research of Adams and others. For example, one longitudinal research study focused on the employee perceptions of equitable treatment in a large organization both before and after some of the employees (55%), but not all, were given cost-of-living pay raises. The employees’ perceptions of equitable treatment on all seven dimensions just described were measured before the raise was announced and given—and the perceptions of both groups were the same on all seven dimensions. Then, 3 months after the pay raises were given, the same measurements showed a significant difference in the perceptions of the two groups! The group receiving the raise had a much higher perception of equity on two ­dimensions—Pay Rules (#1) and Pay Administration (#6). Thus, receiving greater rewards had in fact increased the perception of equity by those employees who received the pay increase—supporting the basic premise of equity theory. However, when the same employees’ perceptions of equity were measured for a third time, 9  months later, there was no difference in the perceptions of the two groups on any dimension—suggesting that organizational efforts such as pay increases may have only a temporary effect on employee morale and perceptions of equitable treatment! Thus the old challenge “What have you done for me lately?” may apply. Demographic factors may play a role in determining a person’s perception of equitable treatment. Gender and age, in particular, may affect a person’s perception of equity. People are more likely to choose a person of the same gender and age as their comparison person rather than someone of the opposite gender or in a ­different age-group. Overall, however, people generally do not compare their own rewards and efforts with those of another specific person but instead develop an internal, socially derived standard comparison person.

The Equity Norm in Negotiation When people negotiate in their personal lives, for example in buying a house or a car, or in their professional lives, such as with a prospective employer, they often rely on one or more societal norms in the process. Any

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of several commonly employed negotiation norms are utilized. Richard Shell, director of the Wharton Executive Negotiation Workshop, believes that in a negotiation process, a strong, basic human psychological drive is the desire to be reasonable, fair, and consistent in the negotiation. This need to appear reasonable and fair has been called the “fairness norm” or “equity norm” in negotiation situations. Shell identifies four commonly accepted “fairness norms”: (1) equity; (2) equality; (3) need; and (4) status quo. When negotiating, people use one or more of the norms to affect the outcome. A negotiator may get the other party to accept an offer because he or she will frame the offer with one of the norms. A negotiation frame refers to the justification provided with an offer, or context of the offer, and is critical in getting the other party to accept an offer. For example, in negotiating how three sisters should divide the proceeds from the sale of their mother’s estate, the first sister suggested that they split the money evenly three ways (33%–33%–33%), thus using the equality norm. The second sister suggested that instead they give her a greater portion of the money because she had cared for their ill mother for several years, thus using the equity norm. The third sister insisted that she receive a larger portion because she was poor and lived on Social Security, and the other two sisters were quite wealthy; thus, she used the need norm. Finally, their attorney suggested the sisters maintain the same process they used in settling their father’s estate and give all 18 living family members a share based on their age, thus using the status quo norm established by the previous estate settlement. The fairness norms are also commonly applied in other negotiation situations that do not include money. For example, in hundreds of cases, when pairs of college students are given the task of dividing between them 10 points that will be added to their course grade, the following results have been reported and validate the norms. The first pair is given instructions that they have 10 points to divide between them “any way they can both agree on.” Almost 100% of the time, the students, within seconds, agree on a 5/5-point split. Why? When asked, they respond it was equally fair for both—the equality norm! The second pair is given a simple task— one student researches a topic and writes a 10-page paper, and the second one proofreads it. When given instructions that they have 10 points to divide between them “any way they can both agree on,” the second pair will debate the split—the one who wrote the paper will demand more than half of the 10 points and, in almost 100% of the cases, gets from 7 to 9 points. Why? When asked, even the student receiving fewer points concedes it is a fair division, owing to the greater effort of the first student—the equity norm! The third pair of students is told that they have 10 points to divide between them

“any way they can both agree on” and that one student needs 8 points to receive an “A” in the class, while the second student only needs 2 points to earn an A in the class. In almost 100% of the cases, the two students agree on the 8/2 split of the points. Why? When asked, they respond that the split gives both what they need in the class—the need norm!

Normative Leverage A negotiator who effectively utilizes a norm can easily gain what Shell refers to as normative leverage over the other party, especially if the other party is inexperienced and doesn’t utilize norms. In such situations, some people might argue that the experienced negotiator who gains leverage by effectively utilizing a norm is taking advantage of the novice negotiator, and thus the result may not be the “fairest” outcome. However, it is important to remember that reasonable people will often differ on what exactly is a “fair” or “just” settlement, and both parties are likely to use facts, norms, and tactics to serve their purpose. In the classic negotiation book Getting to Yes, authors Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton strongly argue that using the equity norm or another norm effectively in a negotiation can assist both parties in their mutual goal of reaching an agreement in three ways: (1) making a decision based on the equity norm is easier and more socially acceptable than reaching a decision based on a number randomly tossed out in the process because it gives the second party a justification for accepting the offer; (2) an offer based on the equity norm is more persuasive and thus causes the other party to give it more serious review than a random demand; and (3) it is easier for a person to accept an offer from another because that person is in fact accepting a principle, not just a pressure tactic. For example, is one partner more likely to accept an offer from the second partner because he simply puts it on the table with no explanation, or if he or she frames it with “I recorded the hours we both put into this case, and I have 80 more hours than you, thus I should receive a greater share of the net” (the equity norm).

Equity Theory in Western Culture One of the cornerstones of Western culture is the basic premise of equity theory—fairness or justice in the workplace and society as a whole. Many social movements have incorporated the premise of equity theory— the labor movement standard of “equal pay for equal work,” for example—and common organizational pay schemes that reward workers based on their inputs of hours worked, or output such as number produced. Profit-sharing plans, for example, introduced by United Automobile Workers president Douglas Frasier in the

Essentialism

1940s but then resisted by management, became commonplace in many large manufacturing companies because they base at least a portion of the annual net corporate profits on the productivity of the e­ mployees— the more they make, the more they receive. This concept is commonly called “pay for performance” and takes many forms in today’s organizations—all of which incorporate the basic concept of equity theory—that the rewards should be shared based on the proportional efforts of those involved. Michael Carrell See also Affirmative Action; Blaming the Victim; Equality of Opportunity; Justice Motive; Morality and Politics; Powerlessness; Self-Help Ideology; Social Welfare; Weber's Protestant Ethic

Further Readings Adams, J. S. (1963). Toward an understanding of inequity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 422–436. Carrell, M. R., & Dittrich, J. E. (1978). Equity theory: The recent literature, methodological considerations, and new directions. Academy of Management Journal, 3, 202–210. Carrell, M. R., & Heavrin, C. (2008). Negotiating essentials: Theory, skills, and practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall. Clinebell, S., & Clinebell, J. (1992). Equity theory in action: Examples from the world of sports. Journal of Management Education, 16, 181–189. Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (1981). Getting to yes. New York, NY: Penguin. Shell, G. R. (1999). Bargaining for advantage. New York, NY: Penguin.

Essentialism Essentialism as employed in the philosophical literature refers to the notion that there is an underlying reality or true nature that, although unobservable, gives rise to true identity and is responsible for the similarities that category members share. While essentialism as a philosophical understanding appears to be largely untrue, it so happens that most people are intuitive essentialists. Essentialism provides a convenient way to make sense of the world, and this way of thinking is especially evident in how people understand issues of identity and causality; that is, what makes something what it is and how it came to be that thing. Essentialism, as a form of common thinking, can be found in ordinary belief systems, language, and cultural practices and captures a “doggedly realist view of the world, presupposing a

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reality beyond the phenomenal” (Gelman, 2003, p. 11). According to Douglas Medin, when people rely on essentialist thinking, they “act as if things (e.g., objects) have essences or underlying natures that make them the thing that they are” (1989, p. 1476). This approach to essentialism—as a theory of how people think rather than a theory of how the world is—has been termed “psychological essentialism” (Medin & Ortony, 1989). Psychological essentialism provides important insights into how people categorize the world and the ways in which they structure those categories. Specifically, essentialist thinking promotes a view of surface-level similarities as arising from deeper properties that define a particular category. From this perspective, things that look the same probably are the same in some deeper and more important way. Importantly, however, essentialist thinking is likely to influence our perception of some categories more than ­others. Take for instance “tigers.” Knowing that something is a tiger tells us a lot about what it will do and how it will behave. Why? Well, it would appear that tigers share important underlying genetic qualities (essences) that make them look and behave in the ways that they do. Tigers, therefore, tend to be understood based on essentialist thinking about their genetic ­attributes. Contrast this with “chairs.” Knowing that something is a chair may tell us very little about what it will look like—even a wooden box can be referred to as a chair if it serves the function of providing somewhere for someone to sit. As such, we don’t tend to think of chairs as having some deeper shared essence that makes them what they are. Essentialist thinking is, therefore, rarely evident in how we understand chairs. What is important about this distinction is that it can help us to understand how people think about human groups. We tend to think about some groups—like race or gender—in the same ways that we think about tigers (as sharing some deeper essence, probably genes), while other groups—like occupational ­affiliations—we tend to think about like chairs. Of course, people of different race and gender do share some genetic markers; however, these tend to be of little relevance to predicting meaningful behavior or social roles, and yet many often rely on these minimal cues as if they do. Psychological essentialism captures the extent to which people overlay social categories, like race and gender, with a cognitive structure that makes the differences between them appear natural, deep, informative, and fixed (like the differences between tigers and lions, in effect like difference in species). This is important because the ways in which the differences between people are understood have significant implications for prejudice and discrimination. There is now a large body of work highlighting the implications of essentialist thinking within the social

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Essentialism

domain. Viewing group differences as reflective of underlying (biological) realities tends to increase prejudice, reduce a desire for intergroup contact, and even inhibit the motivation to reduce racial inequalities. Yet essentialist thinking is not uniformly associated with prejudice, and some forms of essentialist thinking are even associated with reduced prejudice. For instance, viewing mental illness as arising from biogenetic markers (biological essences) tends to provide a reasonable explanation for behavior but also promotes perceptions of dangerousness and unpredictability, feelings of fear, and a desire for social distance. Critically, essentialism affects not only how people view other groups but also how they understand their own groups and therefore their own identities. For instance, bicultural individuals who hold essentialist beliefs about race experience difficulty passing between their ethnic culture and the host culture identities. Just so, minority group members may be less likely to identify and assimilate into a new host culture, clutching instead to their ethnic identity. More generally, essentialist thinking leads people to rely more heavily on social categories for guiding intergroup behavior. Although essentialist thinking is often found in the context of race and gender or other categories for which genetic or biological similarities can be easily inferred, it has also been examined in a range of broader contexts. For instance, research shows that people may also think that social factors such as upbringing and background determine a person’s essential character, and other work suggests that people may sometimes employ essentialistlike thinking in their concepts of good and evil. Essentialist thinking exists wherever people see membership within different categories as natural, fixed, historically invariant, and discrete and may determine how people engage with and make sense of their worlds in a variety of important ways. Essentialism appears to be a largely false view of the world, yet it appears to be alive and well in how people think about the world. Applied to issues of intergroup relations, psychological essentialism provides a powerful tool for understanding the underlying cognitions and beliefs that may entrench intergroup conflict, prejudice, and inequality. Brock Bastian See also Absolutism; Anti-Semitism; Blaming the Victim; Closure, Need for; Genetic Essentialism; Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of; Race and Ethnicity; Tokenism; Women and Leadership

Further Readings Bastian, B., Bain, P., Buhrmester, M. D., Gómez, Á., Vázquez, A., Knight, C. G., & Swann, W. B. (2015). Moral vitalism: Seeing

good and evil as real, agentic forces. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4, 1069–1081. Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2007). Psychological essentialism and attention allocation: Preferences for stereotype-consistent versus stereotype-inconsistent information. The Journal of Social Psychology, 147, 531–541. Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2008). Immigration from the perspective of hosts and immigrants: Roles of psychological essentialism and social identity. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 11, 127–140. Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., & Koval, P. (2011). Essentialist beliefs predict automatic motor responses to social categories. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 1, 559–567. Brewer, M. B. (1979). In-group bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive-motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 307. Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same and different at the same time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475–482. Brown, R. J. (1984). The effects of intergroup similarity and cooperative vs. competitive orientation on intergroup discrimination. British Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 21–33. Chao, M. M., Chen, J., Roisman, G. I., & Hong, Y. Y. (2007). Essentializing race: Implications for bicultural individuals’ cognition and physiological reactivity. Psychological Science, 18, 341–348. Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Haslam, N., & Levy, S. R. (2006). Essentialist beliefs about homosexuality: Structure and implications for prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 471–485. Haslam, N., Rothschild, L., & Ernst, D. (2000). Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 113–127. Haslam, N., Rothschild, L., & Ernst, D. (2002). Are essentialist beliefs associated with prejudice? British Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 87–100. Hogg, M. A., & Abrams, D. (1988). Social identifications: A social psychology of intergroup relations and group processes. London, England: Routledge. Keller, J. (2005). In genes we trust: The biological component of psychological essentialism and its relationship to mechanisms of motivated social cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 686. Medin, D. L. (1989). Concepts and concept structure. American Psychologist, 44, 1469–1481. Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Comments on Part I: Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179–196). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. No, S., Hong, Y. Y., Liao, H. Y., Lee, K., Wood, D., & Chao, M. M. (2008). Lay theory of race affects and moderates Asian Americans’ responses toward American culture. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 991. Plaks, J. E., Malahy, L. W., Sedlins, M., & Shoda, Y. (2012). Folk beliefs about human genetic variation predict discrete versus

Ethics of Political Behavior continuous racial categorization and evaluative bias. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(1), 31–39. Rangel, U., & Keller, J. (2011). Essentialism goes social: Belief in social determinism as a component of psychological essentialism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 1056. Read, J., Haslam, N., Sayce, L., & Davies, E. (2006). Prejudice and schizophrenia: A review of the “mental illness is an illness like any other” approach. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 114, 303–318. Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 33, 1–39. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of inter-group behavior. In S. Worchel & L. W. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall. Turner, J. C. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A selfcategorization theory. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Williams, M. J., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2008). Biological conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 1033.

Ethics

in

Politics

See Political Morality

Ethics

of

Political Behavior

According to Lewis A. Froman, political behavior can be understood as “those activities that are not required as part of one’s organizational role but that influence, or attempt to influence, the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within the organization” (quoted in Latif et al., 2001, p. 199). Other theorists define this phenomenon as activities leading to the acquisition and use of power, through various tactics, for one’s own ends. The ethical issue in political behavior is thus seen as that of a strategy of behavior in regard to power for the purpose of gaining a certain degree of influence. The focus of this type of ethics consequently lies in cognitive strategies that are aimed at answering the following question: Why have I adopted such-and-such a political behavior? The reason that is provided can then be analyzed according to accepted moral norms and standards in a given society, in order to identify the underlying motivations. The ethics of political behavior thus refers to an individual’s attitudes about his or her power of influence based on certain prescribed moral standards. These standards are variable and various and are derived from a range of different ideologies, ­especially political ideologies (such as capitalism and Marxism). Since the issue here is largely that of the distribution of the power of a particular individual, ­

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research on the ethics of political behavior must concentrate on that individual’s moral intentions to increase that influence. The way a person experiences the notions of freedom or happiness may offer a means of explaining this ethical phenomenon. The source of the actor’s moral motivations can be found in the intentionality of that individual’s decisionmaking process in the face of a given situation. In moral philosophy, a number of thinkers have posited various sets of guiding principles for these motivations. In this field, the dominant currents of thought revolve around two main approaches: the teleological and deontological perspectives. The teleological approach, also known as the consequentialist viewpoint, maintains that human beings think and act ethically in accordance with the goals that they wish to achieve. This is the logic behind the adage “the end justifies the means.” The most important value, in terms of the consequences of our decisions and actions, is happiness. The search for happiness underpins moral conduct, and this happiness is judged according to the consequences that it produces. In this search for happiness, the principle of utility is seen as a basis of judgment and as the guiding principle for ethical actions. Among the best known of the teleological subschools is the utilitarian approach. This approach was defended by liberal thinkers in 19th-century England. In their view, the cost–benefit approach to moral choices was the best way of guaranteeing the most happiness for oneself and for the population as a whole. This ethical approach of rational calculation is very well suited to contemporary schemes in the spheres of both politics and management. From this perspective, in the ethics of political behavior, happiness is seen as the ultimate goal of ethical intention. In the case of political behavior, the behavioral strategies employed consider that happiness—both individual and collective—coincides with the acquisition or furthering of one’s power, and any calculation of social utility is oriented toward this objective. With this vision of the ethics of political behavior, we see a ­morally superior conception of human desires and, in particular, of pleasure and happiness. But is this quest for power through rational calculation so simple and without danger? The second, normative school of thought embraces very different postulates. The idea of duty is in fact the ultimate foundation of the deontological approach inspired by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. This theory of duty does not involve the simple application of rules and norms; the individual acts “out of a respect for duty” and not “in accordance with duty.” Kant maintains that morality is an experience of freedom and that the aim of ethical behavior is the expression of goodwill. This goodwill depends first and foremost on a respect for our obligations, which make us free, and not on our

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psychological or emotional inclinations, which make us dependent on them. Ethical behavior is above all rational behavior in which the categorical imperative—do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you—serves as an ethical compass. Freedom is clearly not happiness: freedom is the expression of our free will as expressed in our actions. Respecting our duties thus emancipates the individual from the emotions that could obstruct our free will in our ethical judgments. In political behavior, the duty of developing one’s skills or the duty of benevolence could thus become to some extent the ethics of power. The ethics of political behavior would consist in respecting obligations associated with the imperative of freedom for oneself and others. To Kant, moral obligations make us free and are the rational foundation for the practice of respect for others as the objective of freedom. Freedom can thus be conceived of as an autonomy of thought. Freedom could in fact come down to “wanting by oneself.” JeanPaul Sartre expands on this view of freedom as a pillar of ethical behavior. He explicitly denounced any moral determinism by maintaining that the only way of thinking completely freely is to face up to situations, even if they are ambiguous or paradoxical. On the contrary, we must apply our freedom in the context of situations in order to give meaning to our lives. We must face situations by becoming responsibly engaged, by forging a plan or a project, and, especially, by maintaining our authenticity in this. Freedom then becomes a positive force but one that is accompanied by anguish and the responsibility that it engenders. In sum, the ethics of political behavior can be understood and studied by considering these two principles derived from moral philosophy: happiness and freedom. An exploration of moral philosophy is a first step in the study of this phenomenon. A multidisciplinary approach (one that includes moral psychology, for example) could be especially helpful in this new research field. Benoît Cherré See also Distributive Justice; Equity Theory; Greed Versus Grievance; Human Duties; Human Rights; Justice Motive; Moral Hazard; Political Morality; Social Stratification and Inequality

Further Readings Dean, J. W., & Sharfman, M. P. (1993). The relationship between procedural rationality and political behaviour in strategic decision making. Decision Sciences, 24, 1069–1083. Froman, L. A. (1962). People and politics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Latif, A., Abideen, Z. U., & Nazar, M. S. (2011). Individual political behaviour in organizational relationship. Journal of Politics and Law, 4, 199–209. Neron, P. Y. (2016). Rethinking the ethics of corporate political activities in a post–Citizens United era: Political equality, corporate citizenship, and market failures. Journal of Business Ethics, 136, 715–728. Singer, M. S. (2000). Ethical and fair work behaviour: A normative-empirical dialogue concerning ethics and justice. Journal of Business Ethics, 28, 187–209.

Ethnic Revival Ethnic revival refers to one of the new social and political movements of the post-1960s period. From that time the terms ethnic and ethnicity have appeared in the social science literature and in common usage with their contemporary meaning, that is, referring to the phenomenon of social group belonging based on historical origins, previously glossed as “race,” and ways of life, or “culture.” Ethnic revival has two forms—identification and categorization. The former refers to individuals’ self-identification with an ethnically defined group. The latter refers to the political recognition of the ethnic group as a social category, a process associated with multiculturalism. Claims for political recognition and enhanced rights for minority, immigrant, and indigenous groups in Western nations led to various types of official multiculturalism, most notably the inclusion of ethnic categories in state institutions and the development of targeted policies such as affirmative-action programs. However, reviving ethnicity as a political strategy was not confined to Western nations. It was a global phenomenon of late-20th-century modernity, expressed as tribal, indigenous, linguistic, national, racial, and religious movements depending on local histories and conditions. However, multiculturalism as an official government policy was first adopted in Canada, followed by some other Western nations.

Liberalism and Culturalism Two contradictory but interdependent ideas justified classifying social groups according to culture and ancestry. A liberal human rights discourse used universal ideals of equality and social justice. In contrast, a culturalist discourse advocated for the recognition of foundational groups distinguished by language, values, beliefs, and social practices. The liberal justification derives from the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous individual. With the

Ethnic Revival

gradual expansion of democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, this rational self-determining individual acquired the status of the democratic citizen—that is, as the bearer of political and legal rights. Culturalism is similarly an ideology of the modern period but one that emphasizes the primacy of cultural forms such as language, knowledge, religion, and behaviors in creating the social relationships that structure social groups. An ethnic group’s distinctiveness is understood to emerge from the social relations and practices unique to the group. In turn, those distinctive social relations are attributed to a unique history. For groups claiming indigenous status, belonging to a specific territory is central to the historical narrative, while for groups with an itinerant past, religion or other forms of culture are emphasized as the means of social cohesion.

Group Rights Ethnic revivalism contains inherent contradictions that arise from conflating liberal and culturalist ideas. The concept of universal political rights is maintained, but there is a shift from these rights being borne by the individual to being rights held by the group. Identity and political interests that were associated with class and nationality during the period of 20th-century nation building are repositioned as ethnic group identity and interests. The emphasis on the ethnic group’s distinctive character justifies the view that its political interests are also distinctive and should be recognized accordingly. It is an approach that underpinned the political claim for ethnic group rights as a legitimate form of democracy. This ensured widespread support for ethnic politics and led to the ascendency of multicultural politics in the final decades of the 20th century.

Contradictions In the first decades of the 21st century, however, the inherent contradictions associated with ethnic revivalism have become increasingly visible in national politics and daily life. The antidemocratic cultural practices of some ethnic groups, particularly gender discrimination and birth-ascribed status, were justified as the right of a group to practice its own culture. Yet it was a right that could not be reconciled with the liberal premise that political and legal rights belong to the individual ­citizen. This led to claims that a fundamental incompatibility existed between ethnic revivalism and liberal egalitarianism. A second irresolvable contradiction centered on the terms ethnicity, race, and culture. Supporters of ethnic revivalism tended to promote cultural criteria such as religion and language rather than biological or “racial”

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criteria. However, the very concept of ethnic belonging required claims for a genealogical connection to a heritage group. Despite attempts to reject racism by using the term ethnicity instead of race, the unscientific belief that biological differences exist between social groups is maintained in the term ethnicity. A third contradiction arose from recognizing ethnic categories in government policy. On the one hand, official recognition enabled groups to challenge the inequalities of social stratification. On the other hand, such recognition served to essentialize the group as natural and unchangeable. This led in some cases to separation and boundary-making between groups. Visible markers of ethnicity using forms of appearance and social practices helped to consolidate these distinctions, tending to reinforce racial stereotypes and further perpetuate unequal stratification. At the most extreme, categorizing social groups according to ethnicity contributed to the genocide referred to as “ethnic cleansing,” most notoriously practiced in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Even in Western nations that used multiculturalism as a progressive strategy, the contradiction between an essentialized and immutable foundational group and the reality of social fluidity had the potential to consolidate difference rather than create social cohesion.

Why Did Ethnic Revival Occur? Ethnic revival was initially a response to and then a contributor to the economic and social instability that accompanied the shift from industrial to financial capitalism in the second half of the 20th century. The period was characterized by class reconfiguration, including the decline of working-class influence and the emergence of localized elites who justified claims for resources and power in ethnic terms. For ordinary people, a return to identifying with historical and cultural social groups provided psychological stability and social security in a period of fundamental change.

Consequences Reviving ethnicity as a form of social group identification appeared to offer a new form of progressive politics and a new way to achieve social cohesion in modern societies in which people often do not share a common history. However, deep-seated contradictions have led to unintended outcomes. These include the consolidation of social stratification between ethnically defined groups and reinforcing the reactionary belief that socially constructed groups are primordial “races.” Elizabeth Rata

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Ethnicity

See also Affirmative Action; Attribution Theory; Collective Action, Discrimination; English-Only Movement; Ethnicity; Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs; Ethnocentrism; Group Relative Deprivation; National Language; Omniculturalism; Race and Ethnicity

Further Readings Barry, B. (2000). Culture and equality: An egalitarian critique of multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fenton, S. (2003). Ethnicity. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Friedman, J. (1994). Cultural identity and global process. London, England: SAGE. Glazer, N., & Moynihan, D. P. (1975). Ethnicity: Theory and experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuper, A. (1999). Culture: The anthropologists’ account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rata, E., & Openshaw, R. (2006). Public policy and ethnicity: The politics of ethnic boundary making. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ethnicity Ethnicity is a dynamic, multidimensional concept, referring to the process of labeling oneself or others as belonging to specific ethnic groups. Whereas ethnicity refers to the classification process, ethnic groups are the outcome—the resulting groups to which individuals are assigned and with which they may identify. Definitions of ethnicity generally include two central components: a shared culture and a presumed common ancestry, though scholars differ in how broadly or narrowly they consider these components to be essential features of ethnicity. This entry begins by discussing definitions of ethnicity and the various ways in which ethnicity is construed, as well as how ethnicity relates to religion, “race,” and nationality. The entry then discusses theories of ethnicity, focusing on the basis of ethnic group formation. It turns next to a discussion of the measurement of ethnicity—essential for conducting research on the topic. The final section discusses the effects of assigning ethnicity to oneself and to others on a breadth of outcomes, ranging from self-esteem to ethnic conflict and violence.

Definitional Issues Most scholars agree that ethnicity involves the categorization or grouping together of people who subjectively identify with each other and are perceived by others to possess a set of common and distinctive characteristics. Where opinions differ is in the characteristics used to

assign ethnicity and, thus, the definition of the resulting ethnic groups. Some scholars have defined ethnic groups very broadly, contending that the following features may make up an ethnic group and tend to coexist in various combinations within ethnic groups: common geographic or national origin, race, physical attributes, language or dialect, religion, traditions and values, style of dress, settlement and employment patterns, food preferences, literature, and music. Other scholars have suggested that ethnic groups should be defined only on the basis of a common heritage and culture. These definitional issues make clear that ethnicity is related to other components of identity, behavior, and expression, with these relations at times subject to intense debate. Thus, the distinction between ethnicity and these other concepts requires clarification. The distinction between religion and ethnicity is particularly debated, with some scholars contending that religion and ethnicity are distinct and others arguing that religion and ethnicity are often intertwined, with religion frequently serving as one of the central building blocks of ethnic cultures. Generally, there is considered to be a degree of overlap between ethnicity and race, with both involving a sense of shared descent, genealogy, or ancestry. Nonetheless, race and ethnicity can be differentiated by their primary focus. Whereas the concept of race tends to focus on the perception of inherited physical and genetically based characteristics, the concept of ethnicity focuses more on the cultural practices that are transmitted across generations within a heritage community. As a result, ethnicity is considered a more neutral term than race, avoiding the biological essentialism of racial constructs. The concepts of ethnicity and nationality may also overlap, with both presuming a shared country of origin. However, nationality tends to have a legal aspect, tied to the identity and rights one obtains through country of birth, whereas ethnicity is more likely to be tied to common practices and behaviors. There has been much discussion in the literature of the contingent and fluid nature of ethnic group boundaries and the situational nature of ethnicity. Ethnic groups may be defined more broadly or narrowly, depending on the social context. Thus, for example, ethnic groups that were previously considered to be quite distinct in North America—such as Germans, French, British, Irish, Italians, and Polish—are now ­frequently identified under the common ethnic label of European Canadian or European American.

Theories of Ethnicity Theories of ethnicity tend to focus on the nature and basis of ethnicity, particularly the forces that create and sustain ethnicity. Whether ethnicity is inherited or

Ethnicity

constructed is a crucial distinguishing feature of these theories. Generally speaking, theories of ethnicity can be grouped into three schools of thought: primordialism, constructionism, and instrumentalism. Primordialism contends that ethnicity is an ascribed identity and requires a common origin. Thus, within this school of thought, ancestry is seen as the primary determinant of ethnicity, and people who belong to an ethnic group are seen as sharing common biological and/or cultural origins. As a result, ethnic boundaries are seen as fixed and immutable, and ethnicity cannot change. Scholars within this school of thought differ somewhat in the importance they place on kinship versus common culture in determining membership in an ethnic group but agree that a common origin is an essential feature of ethnicity. Constructionism takes a very different perspective on ethnicity, contending that ethnicity is a socially constructed identity that is created by society and its historical and structural forces. Within this school of thought, ethnicity is dynamic and constantly changing, constructed and reconstructed by internal forces (actions taken by members of ethnic groups themselves) and by external forces (e.g., social, economic, and political conditions within society). As a result, ethnic boundaries are seen as flexible and changeable. Finally, instrumentalism goes one step further, suggesting that ethnicity is primarily an instrument or tool for gain. This school of thought contends that ethnic identity is instrumental in that individuals identify with ethnic groups to the extent that these groups provide them with benefits. This process of identification can also end in the exclusion of individuals from an ethnic group for the purpose of controlling or acquiring greater access to resources. These benefits or resources may be tangible gains or more symbolic gains, ranging from moral and material support to political gains, which are often unequally distributed among group members. Irrespective, in this view, ethnic groups are interest groups and ethnicity is a means of advancing group interest. An extreme version of this perspective is that interests are the sole determinant of ethnic identity, and ethnic membership is motivated solely by a desire to obtain a comparative advantage. Under these conditions, we would expect ethnic identity to be situational and transient as the benefits of ethnicity shift. A more moderate view is that ethnicity combines affective ties with instrumentality so that, while modifiable, ethnic identity maintains some degree of stability over time. As is often the case, there may be a grain of truth to each of these perspectives and, thus, an integrated perspective has been proposed. This perspective builds upon and incorporates components of each of the three schools of thought. The main argument is that ethnicity is constructed partly on the basis of presumed common

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ancestry that suggests certain physical or cultural characteristics and national origins but also by society through the rules it forms for assigning people to ethnic groups. That is, though there is an assumption of presumed ancestry, the definitions of ethnic groups and the boundaries for group membership that are put into place are socially constructed. As evidence that this is the case, consider that the same category may be used differently in different societies and by different people, and group boundaries may change over time, with new groups also emerging and disappearing at different points in time. For example, the category Black is based primarily on ancestry in the United States but is based on skin color and social class in Brazil. The definition of who is Jewish also varies widely. This term may be used to define a religious group or an ethnic group or both. Not all Jewish people practice the religion, and whether secular Jews should be considered Jewish is a subject of debate. Among religious individuals, Judaism can only be passed down through the mother of a child, and having a Jewish father would not make one Jewish. Thus, the same ­category is not used in a consistent manner, and boundaries for inclusion in the group may be wider or ­narrower depending on who is doing the classification. Instrumentality also has a role to play in that when ethnic choice is available, the costs and benefits associated with ethnic group membership partly determine ethnic affiliation and identification.

Measurement of Ethnicity As a result of many of the issues raised in the previous sections, the measurement of ethnicity has proven to be challenging. Standard self-report measures of ethnicity in surveys and censuses have tended to present respondents with relatively crude, fixed options, ignoring the complexity and multiplicity of ethnic identity and the possibility of multiple affiliations. A lack of consensus and conceptual coherence in standard measures of ethnicity has exacerbated the problem. ­ Thus, for example, within the same measure, different categories may use different criteria for defining or ­ conceptualizing ethnicity. To illustrate, some groups might be defined by a common country of origin, others by a common language (i.e., ethnolinguistic ­ criteria), and still others by their indigeneity. Central to many of these concerns is the problem of trying to divide respondents into a set of mutually exclusive categories using a single question. A solution that has been proposed is to pay specific attention to question wording and context and to ask about ethnicity using a series of questions across multiple domains rather than offering only a simple category choice. To do so, one might first consider how one

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wishes to define ethnicity and how many of the potential dimensions of ethnicity (e.g., geographic origin, language, culture, religion), as discussed previously, one would like to include. Then asking about these individual dimensions would provide a more nuanced strategy for measuring ethnicity. These dimensions can then be utilized individually or in combination to provide one or more measures of ethnicity.

The Impact of Ethnicity Ethnic group membership can serve as an essential basis of self-definition and identity, as well as influencing one’s experiences and relationships with others.

Ethnic Identity Ethnic identity can be defined as one’s sense of belonging or attachment to a specific ethnic group and is associated with thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Individuals differ greatly in the extent to which they see ethnic groups as primary sources of identity, and the strength of their ethnic identity may also change over time, waxing and waning depending on needs and ­motivations as well as context. It has been proposed that ethnic identities are activated depending on the subjective perception of the situation in which one finds oneself and the salience attributed to ethnicity as relevant to the situation. During adolescence, a search for identity may lead youth to explore and assume a strong ethnic identity, allowing them to know “who they are.” The strength of this identity may or may not be maintained over time, depending on its value to the ­ individual and the extent to which it is reinforced by outside forces. The extent to which one holds a positive view of one’s ethnic group(s) is of central importance. Ethnic identity can be a source of self-esteem when one has a positive view of one’s ethnic group. Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that pride in one’s ethnic group is associated with better adjustment outcomes and can act as a buffer against stressors. In contrast, when one’s ethnic group is denigrated and these views become internalized, this may result in depression and anxiety, as well as rejection of ethnic identity. Of interest, however, negative views of one’s group by others, when differentiating “us” from “them,” do not necessarily translate into one holding and internalizing these negative views. At times, people are able to develop coping strategies that protect them from the negative views of others. One such coping strategy may be to look for support from members of one’s own ethnic group rather than basing self-evaluations on the negative views held by those outside of the group.

Ethnicity and Politics Ethnicity at times has a major impact on political participation, including representation in political leadership, effects on the propensity to vote in elections, and the parties and individuals for whom one votes. There is ample evidence that ethnic minorities tend to be underrepresented in political assemblies. Indeed, across countries, electoral systems and party recruitment and selection practices tend to lead to low levels of ethnic minority representation in elected assemblies. As a result, over the last decade, there has been increasing concern within democratic societies with the ethnic composition of legislative assemblies. In response, there have been efforts among political parties to increase their recruitment of ethnic minority candidates and to broaden their support among ethnic communities. For example, approximately 90% of African American voters supported Barack Obama for president in both 2008 and 2012. Differences in voting participation, including differences in registration and turnout rates, among ethnic groups can also result in low levels of representation for ethnic minorities. There is evidence to suggest that members of some ethnic minority groups tend to show a lower probability of voting in elections, in part due to a lower sense of belonging, trust in government, and civic awareness. It is important to note that, historically, there were also systemic barriers to voting (e.g., poll taxes for certain groups, literacy tests) and discriminatory policies that prevented certain ethnic groups from voting (e.g., Japanese Canadians were not permitted to vote in certain elections until 1949). In terms of voting behavior, members of ethnic groups may show a preference for one political party over another that cannot be explained by other demographic characteristics. For example, across four AngloAmerican democracies—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—there is evidence that ethnic minorities are more likely to prefer center-left parties and that majority-group members are more likely to prefer center-right parties. These party preferences seem to be somewhat tied to the parties’ stands on immigration and multiculturalism, with the left-leaning parties more likely to favor nondiscriminatory policies. In addition, members of ethnic groups may at times ignore party affiliations and vote for or against political candidates based on their ethnicity. This is why, in Canadian federal elections, for example, parties scramble to match their candidates with the predominant ethnic background of those living in particular ridings.

Ethnic Discrimination and Violence Though positive ethnic identity is beneficial for the individual, it can have negative consequences for those

Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs

who are not part of the ethnic in-group, in extreme cases leading to exclusion, violence, and even genocide. Ethnocentrism refers to a preference for one’s own ­ethnic group over others and a belief in one’s group’s superiority. A serious consequence is that members of one’s own ethnic group receive preferential treatment and other groups may be subjected to discrimination. Examples of this ethnic discrimination include the harsh treatment of Irish and Italian immigrants in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries based largely on religion and culture. Similarly, an examination of Canadian Immigration Acts from the early 1900s shows explicit bias against new ethnic groups coming to Canada. For example, the Immigration Act of 1910 ­ allowed the government to prohibit entry by immigrants “belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada, or of immigrants of any specified class, occupation or character.” The Immigration Act Amendment of 1919 allowed the federal cabinet to prohibit the entry of immigrant groups based on their “peculiar customs, habits, modes of life and methods of holding property.” Ethnic groups may also engage in intergroup conflict and violence. Such conflict may arise over such factors as claims to territory, access to resources (whether real or symbolic), and desire for group dominance. Many of the major confrontations at play in the world today can be described as based on such conflicts. Examples include conflicts occurring between ethnic groups in Africa over arable land, in the Middle East over religious dominance, in the former Soviet Union over territorial and political control, and in many regions of the world over oil. Ethnicity and ethnocentrism can also serve as a basis of dehumanization and attempted genocide. Salient examples include the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and the Tutsi in Rwanda. In both cases, ethnic groups came to see themselves as superior: Aryans in Germany, and the Hutu in Rwanda. Ethnic out-groups—Jews and Tutsi—were then identified as inferior to one’s own group, were dehumanized in that they were characterized as less than human, and were finally targeted for genocide. As we have discussed, ethnicity is somewhat difficult to define, and debate remains as to whether ethnicity is inherited, constructed, or used for gain, with an integrated perspective suggesting that ancestry, social construction, and a desire for resources may all play a role. Not surprisingly, then, agreement on the measurement of ethnicity has also been challenging. Nonetheless, there is likely agreement that ethnicity has a major impact on both everyday life and world affairs, with both positive and negative outcomes resulting. Victoria M. Esses, Leah K. Hamilton, Jennifer Long, and Anjana Balakrishnan

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See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Ethnic Revival; Ethnocentrism; Genocide; Nationalism; Prejudice; Race and Ethnicity

Further Readings Burton, J., Nandi, A., & Platt, L. (2010). Measuring ethnicity: Challenges and opportunities for survey research. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(8), 1332–1349. Esses, V. M., Jackson, L. M., & Abu-Ayyash, C. (2010). Intergroup competition. In J. F. Dovidio, M. Hewstone, P. Glick, & V. M. Esses (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (pp. 225–240). London, England: SAGE. Esses, V. M., & Vernon, R. A. (Eds.). (2008). Explaining the breakdown of ethnic relations: Why neighbors kill. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Medeiros, M., & Noel, A. (2014). The forgotten side of partisanship: Negative party identification in four AngloAmerican democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 47, 1022–1046. Oyserman, D., & Yoon, K.-I. (2009). Neighborhood effects on racial-ethnic identity: The undermining role of segregation. Race and Social Problems, 1, 67–76. Phinney, J. S. (1990). Ethnic identity in adolescents and adults: Review of research. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 499–514. Toft, M. D. (2003). The geography of ethnic violence: Identity, interests, and the indivisibility of territory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van de Vijver, F. J., Blommaert, J., Gkoumasi, G., & Stogianni, M. (2015). On the need to broaden the concept of ethnic identity. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 46, 36–46. Yang, P. Q. (2000). Ethnic studies: Issues and approaches. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Ethnicity-based voting blocs occur when individuals of the same ethnic group vote for a political candidate or party motivated first and foremost by their own ethnic identification. In any given society, the electorate is made up of a heterogeneous population divided by a whole host of variables, including income, social class, ethnicity, and political and ideological persuasions. Voters may choose to vote for a political candidate or party for a wide range of reasons, from ideological or party allegiance through to party manifestos and policies. Voting blocs refer to electoral mobilizations based around an overriding identity or issue that comprises the foremost focus for individuals, who act as part of a collective in terms of how they cast their vote at the ballot box. So,

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for example, a group of individuals whose principal aim when voting in an election is directed solely by their belief in gun control laws form part of a voting bloc around the issue of gun control. Similarly, individuals or groups whose patterns of voting are tied to their identity as blue-collar workers may constitute a voting bloc around a class-based identity. In an ethnicity-based voting bloc, ethnic identity determines electoral behavior and therefore dictates the political candidate or party that individuals who form part of the bloc will vote for. Ethnicity is defined broadly as descent from a common ancestry or a shared culture. Although ethnicity can be experienced as primordial, whereby ethnic identity is deemed innate and thereby rooted in inherent attachments, most scholars agree that ethnic identity is not fixed and unchanging but can alter over time and, as such, the boundaries of ethnic inclusion can be porous. Theoretically, an ­ethnicity-based voting bloc could also refer to the mobilization of an electorate (possibly even an ethnically diverse electorate) that comes together to vote for a political candidate chiefly on the basis of the ethnicity of the candidate. In such an instance, it is not the ethnic identity of the electorate that is the key mobilizing ­feature but the ethnic identity of the political candidate. Nevertheless, it is the case that the most common usage of the term ethnicity-based voting bloc refers to ­ethnicity-based silos among the electorate, who vote according to their own ethnic identity. Indeed, ethnic groups might not always be cohesive or even behave like a bloc at all. There may be huge variations within ethnic groups pertaining to such variables as social class, education, gender, and age, for example. These differences may mean that there are subsections within an ethnic group that have more in common (ideologically or in terms of lifestyle, for example) with other ethnic groups than with their ­coethnics. It is not necessarily the case that interests and motivations among individuals of the same ethnic group coalesce.

Relation to Politics and Democracy Ethnicity-based voting blocs shape political behavior and therefore have important implications for political outcomes in any given society. Elections are an essential part of the democratic process. Voting is a channel through which citizens of a polity communicate with those in power. By voting in elections, citizens lend legitimacy to the policies of governments, as well as providing a mandate to bring about social, political, economic, and legislative changes. By participating in elections, people have a means through which they can actively contribute to how the country is governed. The electoral process gives citizens a stake in society, and in

turn ensures the smooth running of society. However, ethnicity-based voting blocs can simply result in elections that merely reflect the demographic makeup of a population, with different ethnic groups vying for power and control, and this could be deeply problematic in terms of societal cohesion.

Examples of Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs A historical example of an ethnicity-based voting bloc is that of the Irish migrants to the United States of America in the late 1700s. These immigrants mobilized politically around their Irish identity and, as such, were able to provide an important political lobby that led to efficacious political representation. Another example was in the late 20th century and the early 21st century, when Pakistani immigrants to the United Kingdom mobilized around Pakistani ethnic identity and were able to secure the election of politicians at both the local and the national levels. This mobilization around Pakistani ethnic identity has been referred to as biraderi (kinship) politics, linking back to the importance of ethnic kinship networks. In both cases—the Irish immigrants to the United States and the Pakistani immigrants to the United Kingdom—migrant minority communities were able to influence the political process of the host society through ethnicity-based voting blocs.

Membership and Prevalence Membership of an ethnicity-based voting bloc can be through blood lineage or through self-identification with a specific ethnic group and its language, culture, ­values, and way of life, such as when an ethnic group identity is claimed by an individual through self-identification. Ethnicity-based voting blocs can occur in any society whose citizenry is made up of more than one ethnic group. However, the phenomenon of ethnicity-based bloc voting is more prevalent in societies in which ­ethnicity is important for the way society is organized, for example in those societies in which social solidarity is localized or mechanical. In societies that do not have an established national social infrastructure (judiciary, social welfare, nonpolitical organizations, etc.), ­ethnicity-based solidarity can be an important political resource. In some Asian and African countries, ethnicitybased bloc voting is a key feature of political life. In the Indian subcontinent, for example, kin-based networks of social belonging can constitute a voting bloc. So here, the ethnicity-based voting bloc is based on relationships of kith and kin, and political mobilization is around local kinship networks. Ethnicity-based voting blocs can also be found in more industrialized societies, where social solidarity is less mechanical and more organic. In

Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs

Northern Ireland, for example, voting patterns during the troubles in the 1970s were based on religious ­affiliations: the Protestant Unionist British bloc, served by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and the Catholic Irish Nationalist bloc, served by Sinn Fein (SF) and the Social D ­ emocratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Ethnicity-based voting blocs might be entrenched within a society or might be used as a temporary measure to secure political representation or to lobby for specific policies. Once representation has been achieved or specific issues resolved, voting among the individuals who make up the ethnicity-based voting bloc may go (back) to being based on other factors, such as political ideologies and issues or the political party/candidate.

Consequence of Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs By becoming part of a voting bloc, an individual relinquishes electoral and therefore political independence. However, this can be accounted for by the increased power the individual may attain by being part of a large group in terms of political lobbying or for getting the attention of the political elite. An ethnicity-based voting bloc can help an ethnic community become more internally cohesive by minimizing differences within the group for the greater good or for unity of political purpose. However, by highlighting the salience of ethnicity as a key defining feature of an individual or group identity, there is also the risk of heightening divisions between different groups, which can lead to social fragmentation. History is littered with examples of ethnicity-based conflict, from Rwanda and Bosnia to Northern Ireland and India. A further danger of ethnicity-based voting blocs is of course that the election can end up producing results that reflect the ethnic makeup of the society. In such an instance, voting is essentially an act of registering one’s identity as part of an ethnic group. However, in more problematic cases, such a use of the ballot box can lead to social fragmentation along ethnic lines and even to ethnic conflict and violence. This is because there is no deliberative recourse to try to reach an understanding across ethnic concerns. If political participation is viewed as a valuable and purposeful process in itself— bringing together dissenting ideologies and perspectives in some form of dialogue and ultimately and eventually some form of compromise—then it requires less mechanical forms of electoral participation than identity-based voting. Ethnicity-based voting blocs mostly focus on strengthening already-entrenched ethnic positions. In this circumstance, there is little possibility of dialogue or accommodation across ethnic groups.

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Effectiveness of Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs The effectiveness of ethnicity-based voting can be facilitated or constrained by the type of electoral system in place. In majoritarian electoral systems, such as firstpast-the-post polls, ethnicity-based voting blocs are most effective where there is a concentration of people from a particular ethnic group living within a specific area. If in an electoral constituency a significant proportion of the voting-age population comes from a specific ethnic community, this has the potential to significantly impact the election result. The ethnicity-based voting bloc will then command the attention of politicians and political parties vying for power. However, if an ethnic population is dispersed geographically across electoral constituencies, then its ability to act as a voting bloc in national elections will be reduced significantly. In more proportionally representative electoral systems, ­ethnicity-based voting can still be electorally effective even if the ethnic group is geographically dispersed. In diaspora communities, where an ethnic group ­constitutes the minority population, voting blocs are an effective way of pooling resources to have an impact in the political sphere. For the first generation of pioneer migrants, it is the case that they have limited political capital or resources save for their vote. Here, an ­ethnicity-based voting bloc can be utilized as a form of capital to be used to secure political leverage. In ethnically heterogeneous societies, ethnicity-based voting blocs can help marginalized ethnic groups to lobby the state.

Why Individuals Vote in Ethnicity-Based Blocs In attempting to theorize ethnicity-based bloc voting, it is possible to distinguish two sets of perspectives. One focuses on the “demand” side, whereby ethnic groups have particular characteristics and concerns they believe can be best served by certain politicians or parties. The demand side emerges from within the ethnic group itself to act as a voting bloc for a common aim. The other broad approach for understanding ethnicity-based voting blocs can be characterized in terms of the “supply” side. Here it is the politicians or political parties that seek to heighten differences among the population in terms of ethnicity, thereby mobilizing in ethnic terms.

Demand Side Individuals may choose to vote as part of an ethnicitybased bloc because it is an important symbol of belonging. Donald Horowitz, a strong proponent of “expressive voting,” has developed the view that individuals in the voting bloc use their vote as a way of expressing their

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identity and hence solidarity with their coethnics. They then affirm this identity by voting for their coethnics, and this has substantial psychological benefits. A second explanation for ethnicity-based bloc voting is particularly useful for helping to understand the behavior of ethnic minority communities. Smaller than the majority, the minority community may vote as a bloc to register its resistance to a possibly oppressive majority. If an individual in a minority ethnic community feels disadvantaged or persecuted for being a minority, he or she may seek to join together with coethnics as a way of expressing resistive solidarity. If an ethnic group feels persecuted or discriminated against because of its ethnic identity, mobilizing as one cohesive unit has the potential for it to be an effective lobby to combat prejudice and persecution. If an ethnic group is concentrated in a geographic locality, then it is easier for it to maintain its customs, its traditions, and its internal cohesion; it also becomes easier to mobilize itself. A third explanation for ethnicity-based voting blocs relates to the belief among individuals who are a part of the ethnic group that a particular party is more sympathetic to their needs, so that it will be in their best ­interest to vote for that party. This could be linked to patronage politics, whereby voters vote for a political party in the belief that they will be rewarded because that political party, in return for their vote, will dispense patronage to them in terms of either resources or favors. Ethnicity-based bloc voting can also be explained if it is taken that the coethnics share a common set of interests and grievances and so combine to lobby a party they believe will work in their interests. Individuals may also make the assumption that political dealings between coethnics will be easier than with individuals from different ethnic backgrounds.

Supply Side Political parties may also “supply” a politics that encourages ethnicity-based bloc voting. This can be done by directly appealing to the electorate on the basis of ethnicity and ethnic voting blocs. Ethnicity can be utilized to mobilize electoral support. Political parties or politicians who hold office or who are in powerful roles will dispense patronage on their “own people,” as characterized by kinship, language, religion or, more broadly, ethnic ties. However, this may often be a relationship of patronage, whereby support is given on the assumption that the “favor” will be returned and that ethnicity-based voting blocs will reward or punish political parties in subsequent elections on the basis of whether these favors have been delivered. Ethnicity-based voting blocs can be manipulated by politicians to push forward their own political agendas.

In extreme cases, this might be to advance the cause of separate nation-states, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Eventually this led to the creation of seven distinct political entities: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo.

Conclusion In societies where traditional structures of family and community care are important in social organization, ethnicity-based mobilizations have a strong role to play. In more industrialized societies, kinship ties have become less important or have been replaced by more organic mobilizations founded, for example, on workplace ties, whereby identities are based on and mobilized through trade unions, for example. However, in such societies, ethnicity-based voting blocs may still occur as a result of the composition of ethnically diverse diaspora communities. Joining an ethnicity-based ­voting bloc may be a rational decision taken by an individual to secure a voice in the corridors of power. This could be especially important if the individual is part of a minority ethnic community. At the community level, if an ethnic group is geographically concentrated, then it will be more able to maintain the interethnic ties, connections, and cohesiveness necessary to form a bloc. Ethnicity-based voting blocs allow individuals to express solidarity with coethnics, with whom they share a set of political ­concerns, and they will together vote for a party or candidate who they believe will work in their best interests. In return, it is logical for political parties and ­candidates to mobilize the electorate along ethnic lines by identifying and then focusing on the differences between ethnic groups if it suits their political agenda. Furthermore, in majoritarian electoral systems, geographic concentrations are a prerequisite to the success of an ethnicity-based voting bloc. However, this is less important in electoral systems that embody a more proportionally representative system. It is important to note that members of an ethnic group may not all have the same political values, attitudes, and interests. Indeed, ethnicity might not be the most salient feature of an individual’s political identity. Or ethnicity might be a salient feature of the political identity of an individual’s life course only at certain moments, meaning that the individual joins an ethnicitybased voting bloc in one election but not in another. Ethnicity-based voting blocs are not fixed and unchanging, just like the identities of those who will often dip in and out of them. Parveen Akhtar

Ethnocentrism See also Ethnicity; Identity Politics; Lobbying; Minority Voters; Partisanship; Pressure Groups; Religion-Based Voting Blocs; Resource Mobilization

Further Readings Chandra, K. (Ed.). (2012). Constructivist theories of ethnic politics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic groups in conflict. Oakland: University of California Press. Horowitz, D. L. (1993). Democracy in divided societies. Journal of Democracy, 4(4), 18–38. Horowitz, D. L. (2001). The deadly ethnic riot. Oakland: University of California Press. Kitschelt, H., & Wilkinson, S. I. (2007). Patrons, clients and policies: Patterns of democratic accountability and political competition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Wolfinger, R. E. (1965). The development and persistence of ethnic voting. American Political Science Review, 59(4), 896–908.

Ethnocentrism Ethnocentrism refers to a general predisposition that categorizes social life into in-groups and out-groups. It is a pervasive readiness to associate desirable qualities with in-groups. Ethnocentrism also involves a generalized hostility toward a broad range of out-groups. Recent scholarship empirically shows that ethnocentrism strongly predicts a wide array of public opinion dynamics. This entry provides an early definition and different conceptualizations of ethnocentrism, its causes, a summary of measurement strategies, and its relationship with public opinion.

Early Definitions Anthropologist William John McGee used the term ethnocentrism for the first time in 1900 to describe characteristics of nonindustrial societies. He associated ethnocentrism with prevalent egocentrism among ethnic groups in nonindustrial societies. McGee’s work had little impact on the scientific study of ethnocentrism. It was not until William Graham Sumner’s Folkways in 1906 that ethnocentrism became a popular topic of study among social scientists. Sumner defined ethnocentrism as ethnic-group selfcenteredness. It refers to an unquestionable attachment and devotion to one’s own in-group as the center of everything.

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Conceptualizations of Ethnocentrism Although early studies perceived ethnocentrism mostly as in-group love, subsequent researchers examined ethnocentrism’s influence on out-group dislike. For example, approximately half a century after Sumner’s work, Theodor W. Adorno and his colleagues used ethnocentrism primarily to study attitudes toward Jews and Blacks. Similarly, Bob Altemeyer’s definition of ethnocentrism also refers to dislike toward multiple racial and ethnic minorities in Manitoba, Canada. Finally, Thomas Pettigrew and his colleagues perceive ethnocentrism as a dynamic to explain negative attitudes toward out-groups living in Western Europe. As opposed to these out-group–based studies, several scholars insist on the original in-group conceptualization of ethnocentrism. The social identity theory emphasizes in-group love in defining ethnocentrism. Henri Tajfel and John Turner identify in-group bias as the defining characteristic of ethnocentrism that can be easily found in real-world settings. Unlike previous studies, scholars of social identity theory argue for independence of in-group love and out-group dislike. They show that one’s ethnocentric devotion to her own group would not necessarily lead to prejudice or hatred toward an out-group. Like the social identity scholars, Boris Bizumic and John Duckitt call for a return to the fundamental understanding of ethnocentrism as primarily an in-group phenomenon. Ethnocentrism, in their work, refers to ethnic group self-centeredness and self-importance that are enhanced by in-group preference, superiority, purity, exploitativeness, cohesion, and devotion. These contribute to the perception of an in-group’s importance in the eyes of its members. For Boris Bizumic and John Duckitt, ethnic self-importance and self-centeredness are distinct from out-group negativity. Ethnocentrism may lead to out-group hostility, but not necessarily. However, this is not an automatic expectation. Certain conditions such as fear, anxiety, and threat may turn ethnocentric attitudes into dislike toward out-groups. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam attempt to combine these different conceptualizations of ethnocentrism in their recent work. They argue that ethnocentrism refers to the readiness of both favoring in-groups and disliking out-groups. However, they also acknowledge that ethnocentrism does not mean out-group dislike. Kinder and Kam argue that ethnocentrism and prejudice are like cousins. They are closely related, but they do not refer to an identical psychological orientation. In fact, they find weak or no relationship between in-group favorability and out-group hostility. Depending on the social or political circumstance, ethnocentrism may refer to one’s devotion to her own in-group or dislike toward out-groups.

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Regardless of its different conceptualizations, scholars of ethnocentrism more or less agree that prejudice acts in an indiscriminate manner toward all out-groups. If a person is prejudiced toward one out-group, she is likely to hold negative attitudes toward other outgroups. People tend to hold a generalized opinion of out-groups. It may be positive, neutral, or negative, but it is not group specific. Research shows that dislike toward one minority group goes hand in hand with dislike toward another minority group. Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza find that anti-Black attitudes coexist with anti-Semitic prejudice among White Americans. Similarly, Kerem Ozan Kalkan and his colleagues find that prejudice toward Muslim Americans is best explained by ethnocentric prejudice toward Blacks, Latinos, Asians, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, and people on welfare. That is, when ethnocentric attitudes are activated against minority groups, they tend to target all out-groups rather than specific ones.

Americans, and immigrants. Those who hold negative attitudes toward one group tend to hold negative attitudes toward all out-groups. They named this generalized prejudice as ethnocentrism in their study. For Adorno and his colleagues, a high level of ethnocentrism is believed to be a psychological outcome of an authoritarian personality. That is, authoritarian tendencies may lead to a generalized hostility toward out-groups. It is important to note that many studies have challenged the causal direction from authoritarian personality to ethnocentrism. They are separate personality dynamics, but which causes which is still a question to be answered. Despite the causal vagueness, the theory of authoritarian personality provides a psychological explanation of ethnocentric attitudes.

3. Social Identity Theory: Tajfel and Turner explain environmental causes of ethnocentrism in social identity theory. Their main hypothesis is that in-group favoritism constitutes the essence of intergroup attitudes. This in-group favoritism does not necessarily lead to hostility against out-groups. But it may turn into ethnocentric prejudice under threat, fear, and anxiety. Social identity theory offers an in-group perspective of ethnocentrism that is in line with the original definition.



4. Natural Selection: This is probably the most notable theory Kinder and Kam identified as a cause of ethnocentrism. They rely on E. O. Wilson’s findings on the inheritability of behaviors across generations to explain the genetic aspect of ethnocentrism. Natural selection shapes key behavioral features of human behavior, and ethnocentrism is no exception to that. In other words, ethnocentrism is a predisposition that is formed and transmitted throughout generations of human history. Behavioral genetics explains the biological dimension of ethnocentrism.

Causes of Ethnocentrism There have been many theories that explain what causes ethnocentric attitudes. Bizumic and Duckitt argue that self-categorization theory provides the most comprehensive understanding of ethnocentrism. According to self-categorization theory, individuals transition from being separate entities to being group members through depersonalization. In other words, identification with the group becomes superior to individualistic preferences, ideas, tastes, and experiences. Strong group identification might lead to glorification of in-group norms and expectations and, in turn, intensification of ethnocentric attitudes. Kinder and Kam identify four complementing causal mechanisms to explain ethnocentrism:



1. Realistic Group Conflict: In-group solidarity is a core aspect of ethnocentrism. According to realistic group conflict, in-group solidarity gets stronger as conflict with another group intensifies. This group-based conflict may take such various forms as economic competition, social struggle, or an electoral campaign. According to this explanation, ethnocentrism is mostly a group predisposition that targets specific competing groups. It lacks the ability to explain the generalized and indiscriminate prejudice found among ethnocentric individuals. 2. Authoritarian Personality: One of the most significant findings of Adorno and his colleagues in their study of authoritarian personality was the coexistence of anti-Semitism with prejudice toward Blacks, the mentally handicapped, criminals, Filipinos, Japanese

Kam and Kinder argue that these theories complement each other in formulating a causal explanation of ethnocentrism. While realistic group conflict shows the group characteristic of ethnocentrism, authoritarian personality theory emphasizes ethnocentrism’s roots in psychology. Social identity theory highlights the importance of in-group favoritism as a core component of ethnocentrism, and natural selection argues for a genetic explanation of ethnocentrism.

Measuring Ethnocentrism Scholars have developed different ways of measuring ethnocentric attitudes. The strategy of measurement

Ethnocentrism

highly depends on their definition of ethnocentrism. For example, Bizumic and Duckitt measure ethnocentrism from an ethnic in-group perspective by using a multiitem scale. They differentiate between intergroup and intragroup ethnocentrism, and both concepts measure the feeling of ethnic self-centeredness and selfimportance. Likewise, a more recent study by James Neuliep and James McCroskey suggests an ethnocentrism scale that measures ethnic and cultural in-group favoritism. Adorno and his colleagues, on the other hand, developed a 20-item ethnocentrism scale (“E-Scale”) that measures generalized hostility toward out-groups. They focus on out-group prejudice in their measurement of ethnocentrism. Additionally, their scale goes beyond ethnic group prejudice. It includes items measuring attitudes toward Blacks, Jews, and other out-groups. ­ Similar to the E-Scale, an ethnocentrism scale developed by Kerem Ozan Kalkan and his c­ olleagues (“Bands of Others”) measures dislike toward multiple out-groups in contemporary American society. Unlike previous studies, Kinder and Kam combine both in-group favoritism and out-group dislike in their measure of ethnocentrism. They use stereotype questions about Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asian ­Americans. Although their scale is limited in scope and may not measure the generalized feature of ethnocentrism, it is highly reliable across different surveys and time periods.

Ethnocentrism and Public Opinion Ethnocentrism has important implications in public opinion that go beyond intergroup attitudes. Kinder and Kam show that ethnocentrism has profound empirical impacts on several issue attitudes, policy positions, and even voting behavior. Highly ethnocentric attitudes lead to an increase in more conservative attitudes. It explains spending attitudes, border control, national defense, and perceptions of wars at statistically significant levels of party identification, ideology, education, and authoritarianism. Similarly, ethnocentric individuals have higher levels of opposition against certain policies about ­homosexual rights like marriage, adoption, serving in the military, and protection against discrimination at work. The more ethnocentric a person is, the more likely she will oppose welfare spending, food stamps, and increased spending on Social Security and Medicare. More importantly, ethnocentrism is likely to increase opposition to policies that target racial discrimination at various places. In addition to these various policies, ethnocentrism also influences voting behavior. As ethnocentric

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predisposition increases, individuals become more likely to vote for conservative candidates. For example, in a 2012 article, Kam and Kinder show that ethnocentric Americans were more likely to vote for John McCain as opposed to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Its effect, though, disappeared after controlling for anti-Muslim sentiments. Therefore, it may be too early to establish a long-term link between ethnocentrism and voting behavior.

Conclusion It is important to note that ethnocentrism is not a binary phenomenon. Individuals exhibit different levels of ethnocentric attitudes. Research shows that ethnocentrism is found among both majority and minority groups at varying levels. Although the predominant portion of existing research examines in-group ethnocentrism and its influence on out-group attitudes, there is a clear scholarly need to turn the tables around and examine ethnocentrism among minorities. How does ethnocentrism among minorities toward mainstream groups influence policy positions, issue attitudes, and political behavior? Future studies will need to address this important research question to have a more complete picture of ethnocentrism and its relationship with public opinion. Is it possible to curb ethnocentrism among individuals? Yes and no. Education and socialization that respect and promote diversity in social and political life may have the potential to limit ethnocentrism. Research shows that as level of education increases, ethnocentric attitudes decline. However, the same scholars also find that ethnocentrism is a highly stable predisposition. Once it is developed during the early stages of life, ethnocentrism continues to influence our attitudes toward minorities, issues, and policies. Kerem Ozan Kalkan See also Anti-Semitism; Authoritarian Personality; Ethnicity; Group Ideologies; Prejudice; Public Opinion; SelfCategorization Theory; Social Identity Theory; Stereotypes; Symbolic Racism

Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers. Altemeyer, B. (2003). Why do religious fundamentalists tend to be prejudiced? International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 13(1), 17–28.

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Bizumic, B., & Duckitt, J. (2012). What is and is not ethnocentrism? A conceptual analysis and political implications. Political Psychology, 33(6), 887–909. Brewer, M. B. (1999). The psychology of prejudice: In-group love and out-group hate? Journal of social issues, 55(3), 429–444. Kalkan, K. O., Layman, G. C., & Uslaner, E. M. (2009). “Bands of others”? Attitudes toward Muslims in contemporary American society. Journal of Politics, 71(03), 847–862. Kinder, D. R., & Kam, C. D. (2010). Us against them: Ethnocentric foundations of American opinion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Neuliep, J. W., & McCroskey, J. C. (1997). The development of a US and generalized ethnocentrism scale. Communication Research Reports, 14(4), 385–398. Sniderman, P. M., & Piazza, T. L. (1995). The scar of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways. Boston, MA: Ginn.

European Union Political behavior in the European Union (EU) must be interpreted in the light of the atypical nature of the European political order. The EU does not correspond to any ideal type of governance. It is neither a purely supranational political entity nor merely an international intergovernmental organization but rather an evolving political construction that is simultaneously communitarian (in matters of economic integration) and cooperative (in matters of political union), federal and confederal: a result of the gradual rapprochement of the peoples of Europe after the Second World War, which has led to an overlap between identities and spaces of political representation.

Europe as a Historical Option In 1945, the priority of West European states was to reduce the risks of a new conflict arising by laying the foundations for a lasting peace, which meant ­normalizing relations between Western Europe’s two traditional foes: France and Germany. Realizing the need for reconciliation, the French government launched an initiative that would not only prevent conflicts between the two countries from then on but also allow them to modernize on the basis of mutual economic development. The Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, reflects the spirit that guided the first stage of European construction: the determination to frame Franco-­ German relations within the superior concept of community. This proposal, open to the other Western European states, involved using a method without precedent in international

relations: the consensual delegation of sovereignty, within specific decisive sectors, to common, independent institutions. This was not about political union or even overall economic integration but rather a first step toward a future European federation, taken within a well-defined setting bounded by a sectoral integration. This commitment to a sectoral integration of a limited nature was to be materialized in the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1951. The treaty founded the first European Community—the European Coal and Steel Community— thus marking a turning point in the historical path of European nations. It was the first act of a supranational Europe and of a new conception of relations between states, marked by the delegation of competences to varying degrees in economic matters and greater cooperation in the political arena: an unprecedented process that has since been consolidated by the Treaties of Rome (1957), the Single European Act (1986), and the Treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2000), and Lisbon (2007).

The Hybrid Nature of the EU Institutional System Since the beginning of the European construction, the dual identity of the European polity has found its expression in a hybrid system of government based on the antihegemonic principle of institutional equilibrium between two main levels of governance: the Community, with the Commission as representative of the general interest of the EU, and the member states, with the Council of the Union as representative of national interests. This diarchy has been complemented by the European Parliament as representative of European people’s interests and by the European Council, composed of the heads of states or governments of the EU, to form the superstructure of the whole political system since 1974. The distribution of competences among these ­institutions is complex and not easily compared with the Westphalian model. The European Council gives the direction and defines the general orientations of European policies. The Commission has the right of ­ initiative in the Community domain (economic integration), whereas the Council of the Union has this responsibility in matters related to the political union, such as the Common and Foreign Security Policy (CFSP). Traditionally, the adoption of decisions was a competence of the Council, the territorial chamber of the EU. Since the treaty of Lisbon, however, the Council shares this competence with the European Parliament, elected through direct universal suffrage since 1979. Indeed, the last treaty reform elevated the European Parliament to the category of colegislator of European law through the

European Union

generalization of the codecision procedure. This culminated a long quest to transform a European assembly that was originally merely consultative into a chamber with legislative power on a par with that of the Council of the Union. In principle, executive power is also a competence of the Council, but the latter delegates this responsibility, with certain guarantees, to the Commission through the system of comitology, a constellation of more than 250 sectoral committees made up of national government representatives that monitor the draft implementing proposals presented by the Commission.

An Indirect Mode of Political Representation The EU system of government combines presidential and parliamentary traits, albeit without reaching the category of a semipresidential system. The presidential nature of the European government is fundamentally expressed through the presidency of the European Council, a function that until the Treaty of Lisbon was exercised by the member states on the basis of 6-monthly rotations. Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Council presidency is exercised by a super partes representative elected by a qualified majority of heads of states and governments for a period of two and a half years, renewable once. The president is “elected” to that office by his colleagues of the European Council and, in practice, chosen from among the former members of the European Council. The presidencies of the Council of the Union and of the Commission are also based on indirect forms of political representation. The presidency of the Council, with the exception of the External Relations Council, which is directed for 5 years by the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security, is exercised by national governments on a 6-month rotating basis. As such it also depends on the configuration and fluctuation of the domestic electoral map and not on any ­specific election at the European level. Until the Treaty of Lisbon, the presidency of the European Commission presented a similar picture, as this office was also traditionally appointed by the member states, and there was accordingly no direct election by the European demos to that office. This situation started to change with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty which provided for the first time for an “election” of the president of the Commission by the Parliament, but still on the basis of a proposal made by the European Council. The main innovation resides in the fact that the European Council must take into account the results of the European elections to designate its candidate for the post of president of the community executive. This means that for the

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first time, there is the possibility of a direct relationship between the results of the European elections and the appointment of the president of the European Commission. Should the European Council decide to follow the mandate of the parliamentary majority, this would give the seal of approval to European semipresidentialism. Once designated, the president of the European Commission and his cabinet—the College of ­Commissioners— need majority support (376 votes out of 751) from the European Parliament in order to be invested. The introduction of this element of politicization into the functioning of the European executive system partially accounts for the exceptional interest generated by the first European elections of the post-Lisbon era, on May 25, 2015. European citizens have generally paid scant attention to the European elections. The Parliament’s political clout has traditionally been undermined by the weakness of the European system of parties, a multiparty system dominated by two (the European People’s Party and the European Socialist Party), and by the absence of a single electoral system. European elections are indirect, held in parallel in 28 different political spaces, and there are no European lists per se, but rather each country sets its own electoral coordinates: constituency, compulsory or noncompulsory voting, minimum thresholds for vote counting, preparation of lists, and so on. These peculiarities of the European system are probably part of the reason participation figures are notably lower than in any national elections, together with the fact that political behavior is strongly influenced by national contexts and concerns. The 2015 elections raised unique expectations, but it would be a mistake to overestimate the politicization effect that this way of parliamentarizing the community executive has on the role of the Commission. As guardian of the treaties and representative of the common interest of the Union, the Commission is by definition an integrative institution that stands above party battles. Changing the way in which the president of the Commission is designated does not alter the definition of functions nor the interests that this institution represents. As for the possible permeability of the members of the community government to this politicization, it should be noted that the members of the College of Commissioners do not make up a single homogeneous block in terms of ideology. Designated by the member states for a period of 5 years, they reflect above all the diversity of national political majorities at the moment of their appointment. Additionally, regarding interinstitutional balance and competition, election of the European Commission by Parliament does not per se alter the preeminent role played by the European Council within the European architecture. This is because, first, the change in the

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mode of designation has no direct consequences in terms of competences. The president of the Commission may gain in democratic legitimacy but not in attributes. Second, the multipolarity of the European presidential system does not remove the de jure and de facto hierarchy between both institutions. The European Council is the political center of gravity of the EU. Indeed, the Treaty of Lisbon raised this body to the rank of EU institution, and nowadays its president is the closest thing there is to a president of the EU itself. Nor does it seem that the politicization of the Commission through the mode of designating its president will have a significant effect on the relations between the Council and the Commission. Both institutions have been closely tied in terms of competences since the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht adopted in 1986 and 1992, respectively. As an example of this, they share responsibility in matters of implementation and coordination of European policies. As for relations between the European Parliament and the president of the Commission, the potential correspondence between the results obtained in the European elections and the designation of the Commission’s presidency is bound to strengthen ties between both institutions. Nevertheless, a single European electoral space still does not exist. In conclusion, when judging the impact of the ­European elections on the European political system as a whole, it should be borne in mind that the history of European institutions is characterized more by the gradual consolidation of existing processes and structures than by sudden changes of course. Concern about interinstitutional balances has been pushed into the background by the emergence of a new priority: ensuring the Union’s operating capacity in a Europe that has grown bigger and been hit hard by the crisis. Accordingly, it does not seem likely that the European elections will have a significant impact on the distribution and balance of power in the heart of the Union in spite of the introduction of new mechanisms, in particular the more active role of the European Parliament in configuring the European political system. The main challenge facing the European Union today is that of managing Brexit. The referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union, held on June 23, 2016, which resulted in a slight majority (52%) of the British people in favor of leaving, is the principal source of uncertainty facing the European integration process. There is uncertainty about precisely when the United Kingdom will leave (negotiations on disconnection cannot begin until the British government formally invokes Article 50 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union). And there is also uncertainty regarding decision making

in the European Union during the transition stage: the United Kingdom will still form part of the Council of the European Union, and its members can hardly be prevented from voting in the European Parliament. Allowing a state that still belongs to the EU to stop implementing European policies would entail yet further complications. Uncertainty also clouds the future of the relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom and the contagion effect that this first exit case could have on other member states in a context of growing populism and a return to nationalism in Europe. However, the vicissitudes currently hampering the process of European construction should not lead to the conclusion that the European house is about to collapse. Indeed, if the history of European construction can teach us anything, it is that moments of crisis like the Empty Chair Crisis in 1965 or the instability arising from the implosion of the Soviet bloc in 1991 and the war in the former Yugoslavia have served as catalysts towards creating more—much more—Europe. Ana Mar Fernández Pasarín See also Citizenship; Decision Making; Democracy; Free Market; Patriotism; Political Symbolism; Refugees; Trust; United Nations

Further Readings Dehousse, R. (2008). Delegation of powers in the European Union: The need for a multi-principals model. West European Politics, 31(4), 789–805. Hix, S., & Hoyland, B. (2012). The political system of the European Union. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Nugent, N. (2010). The government and politics of the European Union. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Stone-Sweet, A., & Sandholtz, W. (1997). European integration and supranational governance. Journal of European Public Policy, 4(3), 297–317. Van Middelaar, L. (2014). The passage to Europe: How a continent became a union. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Expected-Utility Model Expected-utility theory and its generalizations have provided economists with powerful tools to analyze ­ problems involving uncertainty. As a result, the EU model has found applications in fields as diverse as agricultural economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics, along with nearly all areas of microeconomic analysis.

Expected-Utility Model

Choice Under Uncertainty The outcomes of our actions commonly depend on uncertain factors outside our control. For example, a farmer choosing what crop to plant will get different returns depending on rainfall, frosts, pest infestations, and so on. The problem of uncertainty may be described in terms of the state-act-outcome model. The state of nature, denoted as s, encompasses all the external factors described already. Typically we suppose that a choice under uncertainty begins with a consideration of the possible states of nature, which may be listed as s = 1, . . . S. An action a, taken under uncertainty, can be described by the outcomes x1(a), . . . xS(a) that it yields in each possible state of nature. So acts are functions, relating states of nature to outcomes.

The Expected-Utility Principle If decision makers make choices in a suitably consistent fashion, then these choices can be represented by a simple three-stage process. First, the decision maker determines a probability ps for each state s, such that the probability of the state is the same whatever action is being considered, and that probabilities add to 1. Second, the decision maker attaches a utility u(x) to each possible outcome, again regardless of the action and state that have produced that outcome. Finally, the decision maker calculates the expected utility (EU) for each act under consideration. The act with the highest expected utility is the one that is chosen.

This three-stage process may be summed up by the expected-utility rule first proposed by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their path-breaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Given acts a and b, a decision maker should choose a if and only if EU[a] > EU[b], where EU[a] = ∑s psu(xs(a)).

The Savage Postulates The best known set of consistency requirements leading to the expected-utility rule are the postulates put forward by Leonard J. Savage in his classic Foundations of Statistics and numbered as P.1 to P.7. Some of Savage’s requirements are familiar from the usual theory of choice under certainty. For example, transitivity requires that if act a is preferred to act b, and act b is preferred to act c, then a must be preferred to c. Other

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requirements are essentially technical and won’t be discussed here. The important postulates are P.2, P.3, and P.4, which correspond (in reverse order) to the three steps described previously. P.4 requires that decision makers be consistent in their judgments about the probability of events, based on the idea that event E is more probable than event F if decision makers would rather bet on E than on F, regardless of the payoffs of the bets. P.3 is the requirement that judgments about the desirability of a consequence be consistent, that is, that such judgments not depend on the state of nature in which the consequence is realized or the action that produced it. P.2 is called the “sure thing principle” and is the central assumption distinguishing expected-utility theory from more general models of preferences. The idea may be explained most simply by considering a two-stage gamble, in which the resolution of a first-stage risk selects a ­second-stage risk that will determine the final outcome. Suppose that, however the first-stage gamble turns out, the second-stage gamble under choice a is preferred to the second stage under b. Then a is a “sure thing” compared with b and should be preferred.

To illustrate, a business might decide between entering one of two markets, a and b. In the event of a recession, the business would fail whichever market would be chosen. In the event of a boom, the returns to the business would depend on risky factors specific to the market in question. Suppose that the loss incurred from choice a in the event of a recession is no greater than from choice b and that the risky returns from choice a in the event of a boom are preferred to the returns from choice b in the same event. The “sure thing” principle says that, since a is at least as good as b in both recession and boom events, it must be preferred overall. Stated this way, the “sure thing” principle looks appealing. But there are many situations in which it turns out to be problematic. This has led to the development of generalized theories, some of which are mentioned in what follows. Most economic analysis of uncertainty deals with choices involving monetary payoffs. A crucial feature of expected-utility theory is the principle of diminishing marginal utility. This principle states that an extra dollar of income or consumption is worth more when income is low than when it is already high. For example, an extra hundred dollars would be life changing for someone on the global poverty line of a dollar a day, a nice windfall for an average person in a developed country, and insignificant to a billionaire. In the expected-utility model, risk aversion is represented by the assumption that the utility function u(x) is

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a concave function of money income. This in turn implies that risk-averse people will be unwilling to accept gambles that are “fair” in the sense that the expected return is zero. Rather, they will require that the expected return to the gamble include a positive “risk premium.” This simple fact has crucial economic implications. For investors, it leads to the principle of diversification, often stated as “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” For households, it explains the rationality of taking out insurance even though the expected payout from an insurance policy (the sum insured multiplied by the probability of a payout) is less than the premium. (It must be, if the insurance company is to pay its workers and make a return on the capital invested by its owners.)

Klibanoff, P., Marinacci, M., & Mukerji, S. (2005). A smooth model of decision making under ambiguity. Econometrica, 73(6), 1849–1892. Quiggin, J. (1982). A theory of anticipated utility. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 3(4), 323–343. Savage, L. J. (1954). Foundations of statistics. New York, NY: Wiley. Schipper, B. (2016). The unawareness bibliography. http://www .econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/schipper/unaw.htm Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Cumulative prospect theory: An analysis of attitudes towards uncertainty and value. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5(3), 297–323. von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Challenges Despite its elegance and theoretical appeal, expectedutility theory has been the subject of criticism ever since its emergence. Maurice Allais developed the idea that decision makers might place more weight on extreme low-­ ­ probability events than would be implied by the EU rule. This idea led to the development of rank-dependent utility theory, which was later incorporated into the Nobel award–winning cumulative prospect theory of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. One implication of this model is that it can be rational to purchase both insurance and lottery tickets, resolving a long-standing puzzle in EU theory. Daniel Ellsberg suggested that, in some cases, the information about a problem might be so ambiguous as to make it impossible to assign definite probabilities. This idea has led to the development of a range of models incorporating ambiguity. A more fundamental challenge to the EU approach arises from the fact that we cannot possibly be aware of all the contingencies relevant to a given choice. There are always “unknown unknowns.” In the last decade, a literature has developed around the idea of bounded or differential awareness. John Quiggin See also Corporatism; Economic Judgment; Keynesian Economics; Prospect Theory; Rational Choice; Social Contract

Further Readings Ellsberg, D. (1961). Risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 75(4), 643–669. Gilboa, I., & Schmeidler, D. (1989). Maxmin expected utility with non-unique prior. Journal of Mathematical Economics, 18(2), 141–153.

Extended Contact From wars and genocide to stereotypes and prejudice, the world is full of examples of group-based hostilities and biases. To counter these negative intergroup attitudes and behaviors, social psychologists have long since encouraged members of opposing groups to engage in face-to-face interactions with one another under optimal conditions, for example cooperating with one another to achieve shared goals. Decades of research have highlighted the positive impact of such intergroup contact on intergroup relations. The power of intergroup contact is exemplified by a relatively recent empirical development, referred to as extended contact. According to this approach, simply knowing or observing an in-group member who has a close relationship with an out-group member can be sufficient to improve intergroup relations. In this way, contact has a ripple effect, going beyond those directly involved in the interaction and affecting the attitudes and behaviors of onlookers. In the nearly 20 years since its formulation, the extended-contact hypothesis has received impressive empirical support. It has been shown to improve both explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) attitudes, increase feelings of trust, improve behavioral intentions, and lead to more positive interactions between group members. It has also been shown to reduce prejudice in many intergroup contexts, for example between groups differing on the basis of ethnicity, religion, immigrant status, weight, age, sexuality, mental health, and physical health. It has been used as a prejudice-reduction technique in a multitude of settings varying from seemingly meaningless groups created in the laboratory to warring ethnic and religious groups in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Rwanda. Extended

Extradition

contact has also been shown to be effective at changing intergroup relations not only among adults but also among school-age children. Crucially, extended contact has been found to be most effective in situations where direct contact is limited. Specifically, observing in-group and out-group members positively interacting with one another through various types of media has been shown to reduce prejudice. For example, this vicarious extended contact has been successfully utilized to improve intergroup relations using radio programs in Rwanda; TV shows such as Sesame Street; and reading books, including the Harry Potter novels. Indeed, one of the strengths of extended contact is that it allows individuals to ­benefit from the positive outcomes of contact in contexts characterized by high levels of segregation and intergroup conflict where direct contact is not easily achievable or advisable. So how does simply knowing about someone else’s relationship have such positive effects? In proposing the extended-contact hypothesis, Stephen C. Wright and colleagues suggested several processes that have since received substantial empirical support. First, the idea of intergroup contact can be anxiety provoking, which can undermine or deter people from engaging in such contact. But just watching others provides a positive example of contact, which reduces this intergroup anxiety, in turn generating more positive perceptions of intergroup interactions and out-groups more generally. Second, compared with face-to-face contact, during extended contact, the group memberships of those involved are more likely to remain salient. This is important because these group members are then seen to represent the typical intergroup behaviors and attitudes of their group. By interacting positively with one another, this conveys positive in-group and out-group norms that are accepting and encouraging of intergroup contact, which in turn predicts more positive intergroup perceptions. Last, extended contact is also thought to lead to what is termed inclusion of the other in the self. This mechanism leads individuals to see the out-group member, and the out-group more generally, as part of the self, which, in turn, encourages the individual to treat the out-group more like the self (i.e., positively) and therefore promotes more positive intergroup attitudes and behaviors. Research has also identified factors that increase the efficacy of extended contact: it is more likely to change attitudes and behavior if the observed intergroup relationship is perceived as positive, if the observer strongly identifies with the in-group, and the observed group members are viewed as being typical of their respective groups. Despite its significant benefits, extended contact has several limitations. First, research suggests that extended contact does not work as well for minority group

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members as it does for majority group members. Second, the effect of extended contact tends to be weaker than that of face-to-face contact in improving intergroup relations, in which attitudes are based on firsthand rather than secondhand experiences. Third, because the effect sizes are generally smaller, some have argued that extended contact is too weak to have a meaningful or long-lasting impact on intergroup relations outside of the laboratory. However, proponents of extended contact argue that it should not be viewed as an alternative to direct contact but instead as a highly practical and cost-effective prejudice-reduction tool in contexts in which direct contact is difficult or as a preparatory intervention to increase the likelihood and quality of future direct contact. Jenny L. Paterson, Lindsey Cameron, and Rhiannon N. Turner See also Attitudes; Clash of Civilizations; Contact Theory; Ethnocentrism; Language Death; Multiculturalism; Omniculturalism; Pluralism; Race and Ethnicity; Social Influence

Further Readings Cameron, L., Rutland, A., Hossain, R., & Petley, R. (2011). When and why does extended contact work? The role of highquality direct contact and group norms in the development of positive ethnic intergroup attitudes amongst children. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 14(2), 193–206. Hewstone, M., & Swart, H. (2011). Fifty-odd years of intergroup contact: From hypothesis to integrated theory. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50(3), 374–386. Turner, R. N., Hewstone, M., Voci, A., & Vonofakou, C. (2008). A test of the extended intergroup contact hypothesis: The mediating role of intergroup anxiety, perceived in-group and out-group norms, and inclusion of the out-group in the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(4), 843. Wright, S. C., Aron, A., McLaughlin-Volpe, T., & Ropp, S. A. (1997). The extended contact effect: Knowledge of crossgroup friendships and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 73.

Extradition Extradition and mutual legal assistance in criminal matters (MLA) are two essential forms of international cooperation. The extradition process involves the surrendering by one state, at the request of another, of a person who is accused of or has been sentenced for a crime committed within the jurisdiction of the requesting state. MLA is a formal process to obtain and

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provide assistance in gathering evidence for use in criminal cases, to transfer criminal proceedings to another state, or to execute foreign criminal sentences. In some cases, MLA can also be used to recover proceeds of corruption. Thus, both extradition and MLA are indispensable means of international cooperation in criminal law enforcement. International law does not impose any obligation on states to extradite. Nor does it set out any special procedure for handing over the person concerned to the requesting state—this has been made clear since the 1911 Savarkar case between France and Britain before the Permanent Court of Arbitration. An extradition treaty is bilateral in character and generally incorporates five principles. First, the principle of extraditable offenses lays down that extradition applies only with respect to offenses clearly stipulated as such in the treaty. Second is the principle of double criminality, which means that the offense for which the extradition is sought be an offense under the national laws of the extradition requesting state as well as of the requested country. Third, the requested country must be satisfied before requesting for extradition that there is a prima facie case made out against the accused. Fourth, the extradited person must be proceeded against only against the offense for which extradition was requested. And fifth, the accused must be accorded a fair trial, which is the requirement of international human rights law.

Extradition and International Law International extradition laws are majorly based on the doctrine of mutual legal assistance, which essentially makes the process more dependent on the executive wing of a state. International law does not make it mandatory for a state to extradite an individual to another state. A legal obligation exists only on the basis of bilateral or multilateral agreements. Some treaties impose an obligation on the state in case of some crimes either to extradite or prosecute. If extradition is refused for any reason, then the state has to prosecute the person requested by another state. This principle is popularly known as aut dedere or aut judicare. However, some international instruments, namely treaties related with human rights, refugee law, and humanitarian law prohibit extradition if there is a prima facie reason to believe that the extradited person will face torture once handed over to the requesting state. As a matter of fact, in a number of cases, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered the judgment and stayed extradition by the intended state. In a landmark case, Soering v. United Kingdom (1989), the ECtHR ruled for the first time that extradition of Jens Soering to the

United States by the UK government would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The judgment raised a number of legal issues, ranging from death row phenomena to state responsibility, and since then has become an important point for discussion on the subject of extradition. A few international and regional conventions have limited the scope of extradition by including certain grounds for refusal of extradition. This development may result in conflicts between national and international law. Some of the more recent regional and international conventions applicable to extradition have limited the scope of certain grounds for refusal, most notably the political offense exemption. In fact, to make these treaties effective, nations have become members to treaties governing mutual assistance in criminal matters. Therefore, it is further examined if states feel otherwise obliged under customary international law to extradite or prosecute generally and especially in relation to acts of terrorism. The existing jurisprudence as developed from state practices, practices by international organizations, and conflicting judicial decisions clearly points toward no presence of such obligation under customary international law. The emerging jurisprudence from criminal tribunals makes it clear that an act of terrorism in an armed conflict ­situation empowers the nations to exercise universal jurisdiction. There is not sufficient ­ generality of practice to indicate that states consider themselves obliged to implement legislation providing extraterritorial jurisdiction that would allow the ­operation of the extradite-or-prosecute obligation for a broader class of international crimes. The obligation to extradite or prosecute has still not attained the status of customary international law in respect of acts of terrorism whether in times of peace or in situations of armed conflict. India, however, has one basic law on extradition in addition to provisions related to extradition as found in other special laws. International law does provide suitable scope to each state to set up its national framework for extradition according to their conditions and requirements. Some states have declined extradition requests on the grounds that such offense has no equivalent in their jurisprudence, thereby failing the dual criminality requirement, an essential ingredient in bilateral extradition treaties. However, if the specific underlying activities of the offence in question constitute activities that are criminal offenses under the law of the foreign country concerned, it is possible that the qualifications of dual criminality would be met.

Laws Related to Extradition in India India’s exposure to laws regulating extradition has been fairly recent, in the sense that there is little mention of

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extradition practices recorded in history from ancient times. The development of laws relating to extradition began during British rule and took concrete shape after India attained its independence from British rule. ­Presently there are a number of laws that enable investigative agencies to seek surrender of individuals; in addition, there is primary legislation such as the ­Extradition Act of 1962, consolidating and amending the law relating to extradition of fugitive criminals as well as dealing with matters incidental thereto. A major challenge India currently faces is the threat of terrorism, which has increased manifold in the last four decades. In light of past and present looming terror threats, India has had a fair amount of experiments in drafting counterterrorism laws. The counterterrorism laws in India can be located in the form of special laws and in a scattered manner. The most significant statute is the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, amended significantly in 2008 and 2012 to meet the requirements as laid down by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373. Therefore, we see India securing extradition of individuals by citing international law through the route of special laws as well as ordinary provisions under the Indian Penal Code. On the international front, India has ratified the ­majority of the terrorism-specific United Nations conventions without any major reservation. Despite these initiatives, regional efforts to counter terrorism continue to face significant challenges as caused by gaps in institutional capacities and limited resources, shortage of counterterrorism legislation conforming to international standards, and lack of regional cooperation at the operational level. The failure of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in matters of cooperation in respect to internal security is also patent in the fact that India has extradition treaties with only three members of SAARC and one extradition arrangement with Sri Lanka, which came into effect back in 1978. As a matter of fact, India has extradition treaties with only three of the eight SAARC countries. The exposure of Indian courts to matters related to extradition law has been significantly less in light of terrorist activities. The Indian judiciary has adhered to giving purposive interpretation to the provisions of the Extradition Act and the counterterrorism laws as well while referring to jurisprudence as contributed by municipal courts of foreign jurisdictions.

Conclusion Many states have been effectively engaged at both the international and regional levels to create an effective system to deal with terrorism in a useful way and facilitate smoother extradition of fugitive criminals.

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India’s commitment is further strengthened by its being part of various international treaties dealing with acts of terrorism. India has also tried to develop consensus among the South Asian nations on issues of terrorism and mutual legal assistance by using SAARC as the forum for realizing such endeavors. It is equally true that despite the existence of international and regional instruments and mechanisms, the mutual distrust and suspicion among states have affected interstate cooperation. No doubt a large number of states have taken significant strides in implementing systems for extradition. At the national level, many states have adopted a detailed legal framework for effective implementation of extradition treaties. It has been also observed that several states have undertaken efforts to improve and modernize their laws and have also created specialized agencies for international cooperation, supporting adherence to extradition agreements. However, the success of such measures is essentially dependent on the political will of the concerned state to fulfill its treaty obligations due to lack of definite measures of sanction under international law. Manoj Kumar Sinha See also Deviance and Control; Diplomacy; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Moral Dilemmas; Nationalism; Patriotism; Powerlessness; Refugees; Values and Politics

Further Readings Bansal, V. K. (2008). Law of extradition in India. Wadhwa, Nagpur: Lexis Nexis. Bassiouni, M. C. (1974). International extradition and world public order. Chicago, IL: A. W. Sijthoff. Bedi, S. (1999). Extradition in international law and practice. New Delhi, India: Discovery Publishing House. Bedi, S. (2002). Extradition: A treatise on the laws relevant to the fugitive offenders within and with the commonwealth countries. New York, NY: William S. Hein. Elst, Richard van. (2000). Implementing universal jurisdiction over grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Leiden Journal of International Law, 13, 815–854. Gasser, Hans Peter. (2002). Acts of terror, “terrorism” and international humanitarian law. Review of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 84, 547–570. Gilbert, Geoff. (1998). Transnational fugitive offenders in international law: Extradition and other mechanism. Lieden, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Plachta, Michael. (1999). Aut Dedere Aut Judicare: An overview of modes of implementation and approaches. Maastricht Journal of European & Comparative Law, 6, 331. Rosand, E., Fink, N. C., & Ipe, J. (2009). Countering terrorism in South Asia: Strengthening multilateral engagement. Centre for Global Counterterrorism Cooperation. www.globalct

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.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/south_asia.pdf. Visited on September 13, 2016. Rosenstock, Robert. (1997). An international criminal responsibility of states? In International law on the eve of twenty first century: View from the International Law Commission (pp. 265–285). New York, NY: United Nations.

Savarkar Case, The (Great Britain, France). 2006. Reports of international arbitral awards. Vol. 11, pp. 243–255 (Case date February 24, 1911). New York: United Nations. Available at http://legal.un.org/riaa/cases/vol_XI/243-255.pdf. Visited on September 14, 2016. Shearer, I. A. (1971). Extradition in international law. Oxford, England: Oceana Publication.

F False Consciousness False consciousness is a concept originating from ­Marxist theory that characterizes the inability of people to perceive the economic, social, or political structures or relationships of society in their actual state of reality. In particular, it is nearly always conceptualized as a systemic process that occurs broadly throughout society but within the minds of individuals and serves to maintain the status quo. For Marxist theorists, this most importantly concerns the economic relationships between members of society, which are the source of social arrangements and political power. It also involves the inability to recognize one’s own social class membership and true interests, vis-à-vis the social class and interests of others. The actual form false consciousness takes varies by theory, from simple ignorance to deep-seated and systemic ideology that misdirects to willful self-­ deception motivated by personal psychological drives.

Overview There are circumstances or events that occur within the social world that are difficult to understand prima facie. The standing social order is imbued with some amount of inertial force and continues to remain despite the assertion of theorists and social scientists that many members of society could be better off if it were not so. For example, despite the modern welfare state, many democracies in contemporary politics remain characterized by high levels of inequality of wealth. This presents a puzzle, as when wealth is concentrated, the majority of the public would greatly benefit financially from redistribution, and in theory they have the superior numbers to go to the polls and demand just that. Indeed, this is the expectation of rational models of

democratic societies, such as that of economists Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard, but it is rarely borne out in political reality. In addition to providing insight into the lack of economic change demanded in response to inequality, theories based on false consciousness can also help to explain why the disparities in racial or ethnic group statuses often remain unchanged within societies. Indeed, often these disparities are in fact upheld in part by those they disadvantage most. Ideological beliefs serving to legitimize the status quo simultaneously help to assuage the guilt experienced by higher-status groups and provide lower-status groups with cultural explanations for their position in society. By exploring psychological processes that reinforce the status quo, theories of false consciousness can help to provide useful frameworks for understanding how such circumstances become so entrenched. This entry traces the evolution of the concept of false consciousness from its origins in Marxist theory to contemporary research in psychology and political science. Each theorist or school of thought presents a slightly different perspective, so it will be useful to highlight the key differences between each to underscore how the concept has developed over time. The entry concludes with a discussion of how false consciousness continues to be a useful theoretical tool for studying modern politics.

Origins in Marxist Theory Marxist theories as a general school of thought focus on understanding the social and political order as the result of the relationship between people and the economic structure of society. At the center of this story are two groups, or social classes. The first is the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, which refers to essentially anything that is required to create an economic good: land, tools, resources, and so 285

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on. The second group is the working class, or proletariat, which provides the input of labor to the economic process. The capitalist class is ever trying to achieve further profit and so works toward a state where it is paying the working class as little as possible for its labor, inevitably resulting in periodic economic collapse. The only way out of this cycle, according to Marxist thought, is a revolution by the working class and the creation of a classless society. However, this first requires the working class to collectively recognize both that which is in its best interest and the untapped power it could wield to achieve it—it must achieve class consciousness. False consciousness is the countervailing force to class consciousness. While different theorists even among Marxists disagree on what false consciousness is specifically, the commonality is that it results in misperceiving the structures of society and the source of society’s ills. For the earliest theorists, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves, false consciousness was restricted to the bourgeoisie—the working class could not misperceive their daily reality of deprivation. Later theories such as those of Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács expanded the concept of false consciousness to also take place within the working class, it being a suppressing force to a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist establishment. Contemporary theories within political science, psychology, and economics further expand on the psychological mechanisms at work within the minds of each individual.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin In classical Marxist theory, from Marx and Engels to V. I. Lenin, false consciousness is conceptualized as the relationship between where one stands in society and the beliefs that one holds about that society. This understanding was applied to the bourgeoisie who are, by the structure of society, isolated from the circumstance of the working class. In early work in Marxism, this most typically refers to the thoughts or unconscious actions of the bourgeois class itself, but also in particular to those of its intellectuals. Marx and Engels were reacting to the intellectuals of the time, one of their main charges being that these individuals were unable to grasp the true problems at hand because they were working from within the capitalist mindset. The working class, however, has no illusions about its existence. Their circumstance as a politically and socially isolated group being a daily reality, they well understand the true order of things. Marx and Engels therefore do not extend false consciousness to the working class. It should also be noted that Marx himself never actually used the phrase false consciousness, at

least in writing. Only Engels seems to have used it in print: Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness [emphasis added]. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. —Friedrich Engels, Letter to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893

Here again Engels is referring to the capitalist class, which does not fully understand its own actions because they are inherent to the economic system of capitalism. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Russian revolutionary and extensive writer on Marxist theory, began the process of expanding the idea of false consciousness to apply to the working class, whereas his predecessors had applied it to the capitalist class alone. According to Lenin, the grueling daily reality of a member of the working class under capitalism engendered a pragmatic, short-term perspective. These individuals had resigned themselves to their position within capitalist society. Rather than forcing a revolutionary overthrow of the system, they instead concerned themselves with trying to recover as much lost ground as they could from the capitalist class by engaging in strikes, protests, and other political activities of organized labor. For Lenin, it is not that the working class has a truly false or delusional view of its circumstances but rather a short-sighted view of its own self-interest, causing its actions to be hamstrung by continuing to act within the capitalist system.

Gramsci and Lukács The work of the Italian Marxist and politician Antonio Gramsci made a number of very meaningful expansions to the concept of false consciousness. First, Gramsci was focused on understanding the role of the state as a source of false consciousness. He observes that in socie­ ties ruled by the bourgeoisie through force, a majority of the population is generally opposed to the regime. When the lines of power are laid bare by overt oppression and violence, no room is left for false consciousness. By contrast, in a regime governed by hegemonic rule, the state—and so the bourgeois order—­maintains its sovereignty by legitimacy through the tacit approval of the people. This legitimate domination by the state on behalf of the people obscures the true underlying relations within society. Gramsci identifies this obfuscation as a source of false consciousness for the working class. Similar to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, however, Gramsci maintains

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that the working class’s beliefs were not delusional: they were a combination of an actual understanding of the reality of their circumstances under capitalism, misunderstandings regarding the origins of this standing order, and half-formed reactive action against the situation. The sentiment of oppression ran consistently throughout the working class, yet there existed neither an understanding of the underlying causes nor what actions were necessary to effect positive change, except in brief glimpses. The role of Marxism and the revolutionary vanguard party was therefore to educate people on the true state of affairs and the nature of the relationship between the working class and the bourgeoisie, particularly in identifying the state as a tool of enforcing bourgeois dominance. Gramsci effectively brought false consciousness to the working class. Unlike Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Gramsci suggested that while members of the working class likely understand the reality of their oppression, they do not have a grasp on the causes or probable solutions to it. The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács shared Gramsci’s formulation of false consciousness as something that prevents the working class from fully appreciating their circumstances and acting to change them. However, Lukács expands on Gramsci and suggests that false consciousness was produced not only by the aura of legitimacy surrounding the state but also by the bourgeois class itself in creating art, music, intellectual writing, and other forms of culture to validate the capitalist social order. Indeed, Lukács suggests that a false consciousness is acquired by the working class through its daily engagement with the capitalist economy, by “learning” from situations that, according to Marxists, are inherently misleading, such as goods having value separate from the people who make those goods. Gaps in this acquired “knowledge” can be filled through the dominant culture created by the capitalist class, a culture rife with explanations and justifications of why people hold the places in society that they do.

Contemporary False Consciousness Ultimately, the work of Marxist theorists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries created an idea of false consciousness that operated within both the capitalist and working classes, but understanding false consciousness at a psychological level was never fully within their purview. Instead, they were more concerned with theorizing about society as a whole and the relationships between the groups within it. However, understanding individual human beliefs, psychological needs, and behavior can be extremely useful for understanding groups and societies, in the same way that understanding the individual parts of a machine can help you

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determine how it functions. Contemporary work across multiple disciplines leverages theories of both social and cognitive psychology to expand upon these areas left largely unexplored by Marxist political theory.

Beliefs in a Just World One very influential theory in understanding the beliefs people hold about the causality of the events in their own and lives and those of others is the belief in a just world, which is most closely associated with the work of Melvin Lerner. The just-world hypothesis asserts that people have a cognitive bias toward believing that the world is a just place and that there is a causal link between people’s actions and the events that befall them during their lives. Just-world beliefs often serve as the basis for ex-post justification, such as in victim blaming, whereby victims are blamed for the crimes that were committed against them as a result of their perceived immoral actions. This is most commonly seen when women are blamed for their having been sexually assaulted as a consequence of their own provocative dress or actions. Importantly, even these victims can turn such beliefs on themselves and compound the traumatic events they have experienced with feelings of guilt and self-blame. Beliefs in a just world can serve multiple psychological purposes, including the reduction of guilt or discomfort from the immediate situation or imposing a sense of psychological control over an otherwise unpredictable world. Human beings have strong psychological inclinations toward understanding and pattern recognition of their environments. Situations that are aberrant can be very anxiety provoking. Meritocratic Beliefs Belief in a just world also serves as a psychological basis for justifying economic positions within society. In attempting to understand poverty, it is not uncommon to blame the poor for their station in life without any knowledge of their specific situation, even in the more social democratic countries of Europe. A man is poor; therefore he has done something to deserve his poverty. Prior to the industrial revolution, appeals were made to the divine to justify a lord’s proper place as ruler and a peasant’s proper place as ruled. As society advanced through industrialism into the modern era, it became increasingly common to attribute success solely to hard work or ability. This set of beliefs is known as meritocratic beliefs, stemming from the idea that those with the exemplary attributes of determination, ambition, and talent will be justly rewarded and rise higher in society. The converse of this is that those who are lazy and dull will sink, and thus the situation of the poor is

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often justified using a similar victim-blaming logic as in cases of sexual assault. In the United States, the American Dream mythos is a prime example of this set of beliefs widely applied and is one possible explanation offered for why the United States does not have as extensive a social welfare system as its European counterparts. Theoretically, meritocratic beliefs have two main psychological effects. For the wealthier members of society, the existence of poverty and inequality is a constant source of guilt and discomfort. Meritocratic beliefs allow one to diffuse guilt by reassuring oneself that one’s place within society was earned through hard work and talent and therefore deserved. Second, for the rest of society, meritocratic beliefs suppress political dissent by suggesting a sanctioned path to success. By providing a hypothetical road map, reinforced by cultural myths of those who have “made it,” meritocratic beliefs place the burden of responsibility for their situation on the individual rather than on social, political, or economic forces. Ultimately, this hinders lower-status members of society from recognizing their own economic self-­ interest and gathering in the name of collective action. System Justification Theory Another framework that incorporates and expands on just-world beliefs is system justification theory (SJT). SJT is the product of multiple decades of work by John Jost and colleagues to synthesize elements of cognitive dissonance theory and social identity theory, as well as false consciousness from feminist and Marxist theories. Overall, SJT maintains that people are psychologically motivated to justify the status quo and to view it as desirable. The most important of these motivations include the reduction of dissonance or guilt and the bolstering of self-esteem. In particular, system justification theorists identify three underlying and potentially competing psychological motivations. First, people have a need to maintain a positive image of themselves and to feel that they have value as human beings—known as ego justification. Second, people desire to maintain positive images of the social groups to which they belong. Known in SJT as group justification, this is also the main focus of social identity theory as originally developed by social psychologist Henri Tajfel. These groups could include race, class, gender, religion, and other affiliations both ascribed and selected. Finally, system justification characterizes the motivation that people feel to justify the status quo and see it as legitimate, natural, desirable, or inevitable. System justification theory holds that while these separate drives align for members of high-status groups within society, they can come into conflict for

low-status group members. Importantly, group status in SJT need not solely be based on economic factors, as is the focus of Marxism, though typically this is highly influential. For high-status group members, the system justifying motivation helps to offset negative affect or guilt that is produced by the degree of deprivation that is suffered by low-status groups. For members of lowstatus groups, the desire to view the system as legitimate is at odds with their motivations to hold positive images of their groups and themselves, resulting in an internal sense of dissonance. As perceptions of the legitimacy of the status quo grow stronger, so too does the sense of internal dissonance. Given the degree of legitimacy that the status quo enjoys in most modern democracies as being the result of “popular sovereignty,” it is difficult for low-status group members to view their group membership positively or to hold a positive self-image of themselves. Instead, they resolve their internal sense of dissonance by further strengthening their beliefs in the legitimacy of the status quo—their low status must be for a good reason. However, despite the resolution of dissonance, maintaining high levels of system justification as a member of a low-status group is associated with a host of negative psychological outcomes including decreased self-esteem and increased depression and neuroticism. This constant strain between ego and group justification and system justification produces a sense of false consciousness. Jost identifies six main forms that this false consciousness can take, none of which are necessarily mutually exclusive: denial of injustice or exploitation, fatalism regarding social change, rationalizing social roles, false attribution of blame, identification with the oppressor, and resistance to social change. These motivations are partially the reflection of mechanisms identified by Marxist theorists. For example, holding a sense of fatalism about the prospect of social change is akin to Lenin’s notion of the pragmatic “trade-union consciousness” in which the working class attempts to simply make the most of its bad situation. False attribution of blame and simple denial of injustice also illustrate Gramsci’s perspective on a lack of understanding within the working class of the cause, consequences, and solutions of their plight. Finally, rationalizing social roles is part of both Gramsci’s and Lukács’s stories regarding the influence of cultural myths in how members of the working class interpret their world. SJT also emphasizes the importance of stereotypes in propagating false consciousness. Stereotypes serve as powerful cultural explanations for the existing social order. For example, stereotypes that Blacks are lazy or that women do not make good leaders and executive officers justify the status quo of a society dominated by

Fascism

White male leadership. These stereotypes are not only relied upon by high-status group members to assuage their guilt but also internalized by low-status group members, who come to believe in their own inferiority and accept the consequences such as lower pay for the same work. The status quo can also be justified through compensatory stereotypes, which offset the negative traits of being low-status with seemingly positive ones, such as “poor but happy” versus “rich but miserable and/or dishonest.” SJT combines the work of previous scholars in both the tradition of Marxist-feminist theories and social psychological research to offer a more complete theory of false consciousness. This understanding centers on the psychological processes that take place at the individual level and how, once internalized, they form a subtle but powerful barrier toward self-interested political action. It also captures the complexity of a range of false-consciousness behaviors that includes the ideological indoctrination of absorbing cultural stereotypes of social groups but also seemingly more benign forms of false consciousness such as simple ignorance.

Future Directions False consciousness continues to represent a very fruitful vein of research for understanding the psychology of social class, the influence of cultural ideology, and selfinterested political behavior or the lack thereof. While the processes at work are much better understood than when Marx and Engels first put pen to paper, there is still much work to be done in understanding the variation in when false consciousness is present and when it can be suppressed. One direction leads toward understanding the individual differences between people, on which SJT offers some insight but in some ways falls short of a full profile of a “system justifier.” Perhaps more important are the less-understood contextual influences in people’s social environments that could strengthen or attenuate false consciousness. For example, Benjamin Newman and colleagues have found that the tendency to hold meritocratic beliefs does not differ significantly between rich and poor in more equal contexts. However, in highly unequal ones, meritocratic beliefs are rejected by the poor—termed activated disillusionment—while the rich double down on them—termed activated loyalty. The evidence suggests that the divergence in beliefs is “activated” by a heightened awareness of the social hierarchy when inequality in the local environment is high. Future work may continue to expand on how situational cues in addition to individual attributes can trigger or suppress false consciousness processes. Patrick L. Lown

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See also Cognitive Dissonance; Marxism; Meritocracy; Social Class; Social Identity Theory; Social Stratification and Inequality; Stereotypes; System Justification

Further Readings Eyerman, R. (1981). False consciousness and ideology in Marxist theory. Acta Sociologica, 24(1/2), 43–56. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds.). New York, NY: International Publishers. Hochschild, J. L. (1995). Facing up to the American dream. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jost, J. T. (1995). Negative illusions: Conceptual clarification and psychological evidence concerning false consciousness. Political Psychology, 16(2), 397–424. Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919. Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York, NY: Plenum. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1968). A critique of the German ideology. Progress Publishers, Online Version, Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org). Meltzer, A. H., & Richards, S. F. (1981). A rational theory of the size of government. Journal of Political Economy, 89(5), 914–927. Newman, B. J., Johnston, C. D., & Lown, P. L. (2015). False consciousness or class awareness? Local income inequality, personal economic position, and belief in American meritocracy. American Journal of Political Science, 59(2), 326–340.

Fascism As a colloquial term of abuse for the way someone is behaving, “fascist” is still widely used to describe actions seen as excessively authoritarian, reminiscent of a police state, or wantonly destructive. Thus Inspector Morse in the British TV detective series set in Oxford can declare in the famous quadrangle of the Bodleian Library, “What we are looking for here is the sort of person that slashes pictures, takes a hammer to ­Michelangelo’s statues, and a flamethrower to books; someone who hates art and ideas so much that he wants to destroy them: a fascist.” Even within academia, “fascism” was until the 1990s widely associated with extreme forms of militaristic and nationalistic dictatorship without any real ideology or ideals, but its precise meaning remained elusive to the point that at least one respected historian suggested it was so nebulous it

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should be scrapped altogether except in the context of Italian history. It is inconvenient for scholars of this persuasion that Oswald Mosley was one of several revolutionary nationalists in the 1930s who themselves appropriated the term as a positive classification to encapsulate the ideals of their movement by calling his the British Union of Fascists. The difficulty that self-declared fascists encountered when attempting to define the term, however, is illustrated by the two-part entry for it in the first edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana (1932) commissioned by the Fascist regime. Here the contrasting worldviews of its joint authors, the movement’s leader Benito ­Mussolini and its main philosopher Giovanni Gentile, resulted in perceptible tensions between the formulation of its “political and social doctrine” and its “fundamental ideas.” This fact is consistent with the primary emphasis that, in contrast to Marxism-­ Leninism, most fascist ideologues have placed on dynamic action rather than ideological coherence. As Mussolini puts it in his article, “The years which preceded the March on Rome [1922] were ones in which the continuous need for action precluded theoretical reflections or complete elaborations of doctrine.” This is a revealing statement in the context of this encyclopedia as well: the behavior of fascism’s adherents is often more revealing of its political nature than any abstract ideals. As a generic term used with negative connotations by opponents, the use of the term fascism goes back even further. Within months of Mussolini’s formation of the first Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, a name suggesting a militant league imbued with the fanatically patriotic spirit of the trenches, some Marxist commentators in Italy, notably Antonio Gramsci, already thought they recognized in Il Fascismo a new manifestation or mask of capitalism. Profoundly shaken by the chaos resulting from the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the spread of socialist militancy, the captains of finance capital and the bourgeoisie now looked to the heightened patriotism and right-wing militancy that had been incubated by the war to secure political hegemony against the advances of organized labor and the spread of Bolshevik onslaughts against the whole capitalist system. This approach led to some highly sophisticated Marxist analyses of fascism as class reaction in revolutionary guise. From this point of view, its populist ­political behavior—the shirts and uniforms, parades and piazza politics, the hate-filled rhetoric and theatrical displays of charismatic leadership—were a mere façade erected to conceal a destructive form of ultraconservatism concerned with preserving existing social and economic hierarchies by any means and intrinsically hostile to the “people,” however much it invoked

their support in its legitimation. For major German Marxist analysts of fascism such as Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, the claimed fascist revolution was thus at bottom no more than a calculated aestheticization of the violent regimentation of society. Its cynical camouflage concealed the economic exploitation and political repression it was bent on perpetuating at home and the brutal colonial expansion it was committed to abroad. So fruitful was this line of analysis that by the 1930s, several distinctive Marxist theories of fascism had emerged, and at least two antagonist schools of analysis, Bonapartist (associated with Leon Trotsky) and Comintern (associated with Georgi Dimitrov), all convinced axiomatically that fascism’s mechanisms of totalitarian social control, and in the case of the Third Reich, its state terror and persecutions of a wide range of demonized enemies, were intrinsic to its nature as an agent of aggressive class and imperialist war. It is a standpoint that sees the essence of fascism not in its rhetoric or claimed goals for society but in its behavior as a ruthless agent of repressive action carried out against not just communism but all attempts to organize labor into a political force, and humanity itself. Meanwhile, conventional liberal social scientists and historians were at a loss to discern any generic pattern in or explanation for the emergence of distinctly modern but highly ritualistic forms of right-wing militarism in country after country, not just in post-1918 Europe but also in Latin America, China, and Japan. Each nationalist antiparliamentary and anticommunist movement or regime had unique origins and features, making common denominators difficult to turn into a generic definition. Certainly the savage Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) crystallized the feelings of many liberals and socialists that the fate of Western civilization was being decided by a life-or-death struggle between ­fascism and communism, and Picasso’s famous painting ensured that the Nazi bombings in Guernica powerfully epitomized the political behavior of fascism in a deeply prescient way. Yet few non-Marxists could have offered a cogent definition of what fascism was, and its relationship to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, conservatism, or traditional military dictatorship remained obscure. As such, it seemed to be driven not by any sort of coherent ideology beyond an ultranationalist and ruthless will to power. Fascism had apparently come out of the blue and now threatened to sweep away everything that the Enlightenment, progress, and civilization itself stood for. What both antifascist camps had in common in the interwar period was the assumption that fascism was essentially destructive in its political behavior. Yet, as we have seen, its destructiveness was construed differently. For the Left, the main target of fascism’s paramilitary or

Fascism

state violence was socialism and the proletarian struggle for justice, whether revolutionary or reformist as interpreted by Marx and Lenin. For liberals of every complexion, fascists were a new race of Vandals intent on reversing many decades of struggle to secure social, intellectual, and political freedom from tyranny, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. Even after the Second World War, which had led to the deaths of as many as 80 million combatants and civilians, the bewilderment outside Marxism concerning the mainsprings of such a tide of inhumanity continued, despite a steady proliferation of conferences, articles, and monographs seeking to unveil fascism’s mysteries. Deep confusion reigned as to whether Nazism was a form of fascism so unique in its barbarity that it could fit into no generic category. The lack of precise criteria meant that the relationship to fascism of such regimes as Pétain’s Vichy France, Franco’s Spain, Dollfuss’s ­Austria, and Hirohito’s Japan remained obscure. It is typical of the lamentable state of fascist studies three decades after the defeat of the Axis powers that a report on them by the British Historical Association in 1981 concluded that fascism was an indefinable “conundrum.”

The New Paradigm in Non-Marxist Fascism Studies However, even as such a dispiriting conclusion was being drawn, the foundations of a fruitful new heuristic approach were being laid by two scholars based in the United States, George Mosse and Stanley Payne, the Israeli scholar Ze’ev Sternhell, and the Italian Emilio Gentile. By the late 1990s, a broad consensus was forming on fascism’s definitional traits and now flows through comparative fascist studies, being carried out with increasing vigor, creativity, and sophistication. Even countries that traditionally treated their experience of fascism as something too unique to fit a generic category, such as Italy, Germany, and France, are now producing scholars sufficiently unburdened by the traumas of the past and the prejudices of academic orthodoxy to be able to study their “own” native fascism or related phenomena dispassionately within a comparative context. The paradigm within which they work, sometimes referred to as “the new consensus” (a phrase still occasionally contested), has several defining characteristics that set it apart from earlier approaches. First, it recognizes explicitly that there can be no objective definition of fascism, since all generic terms are conceptual constructs, or what Max Weber called “ideal types.” Their academic function is to allow causal and comparative research to take place into generic phenomena despite their uniqueness and hence not in a definitive or

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exclusive spirit but a collaborative one that embraces methodological pluralism. Second, the ideal type of fascism in question is based on the principle of methodological empathy with the goals and ideals of fascists as they themselves experienced them. In other words, as in the case of nearly all political concepts, fascism is defined in terms that its own protagonists would recognize and not based on the actions of fascists as interpreted by opponents and victims. To return to the insights of Inspector Morse, if Nazis ridiculed, vilified, and even burned some modernist paintings, it was not because they were nihilists, psychopaths, vandals, or even antimodernist. It was because, as they themselves claimed, they saw themselves as fighting a heroic campaign to purge the world of decadence and inaugurate a cultural renaissance based on eternal Aryan values. Once interwar fascism is approached from the declared values and goals of its own protagonists, an ideological pattern quickly becomes unmistakable. Whatever their profound differences, all fascists see their nation (conceived as an organic, historically, culturally, and even biologically unique people or race) trapped in a state of decline and exposed to numerous existential threats that will lead to its annihilation if not energetically reversed. The task of fascism is to bring about (or further, if the regime has already been established) the total rebirth of the nation, not just in the sphere of politics, economics, and social organization, but, above all, in the political culture and physical vitality of the population. This can only occur when the new nation is purged of its ideological (and in some cases biological) enemies. The emphasis on total renewal in all spheres of society can lead to the conclusion that fascism’s political behavior was not just revolutionary but modernist in its determination to socially engineer a new world. In short, fascist political behavior is determined by the dictates of “creative destruction,” the need to neutralize or destroy the physical and spiritual threats to the nation or race at their roots through both paramilitary and state action. Only in this way can the task of rebirth and regeneration, of total palingenesis, begin. The extreme variety of fascist movements in the interwar period, only two of which, Fascism and ­ Nazism, exercised state power as the dominant political faction, is attributable to the very different national histories, ethnic cultures, and postwar situations. A nexus of factors led millions in Europe to experience a powerful sense of decadence or existential threat in the interwar period, in idiosyncratic ways determined by the conjuncture of factors affecting their country: the immediate geopolitical situation in which a nation found itself, the impact of the First World War, the narrative shape of national history which allowed ultranationalists to identify a phase of “glory” and “greatness” that

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was destined to be renewed. Each nation’s degree of economic and technological advance, the degree secularization and the residual power of established religion, the preexistence of racial and social out-groups, and the presence of “born leaders” able to exert influence over sizable groups of nationalist fanatics created particular situations that encouraged or precluded the formation of a charismatic and paramilitary movement of national regeneration and determined whether the ultranationalism that emerged embraced biological racism and even genocidal visions of a total rebirth.

The Political Behavior of the Two Fascist Regimes This heterogeneity of fascism is illustrated by the very different political behaviors of the only two fascist regimes. Italian Fascism, until its collapse in 1943, operated a historical concept of Italy as an organic entity destined to undergo an economic, technological, cultural, spiritual, military, and imperial palingenesis driven by the reawakening of the mythic spirit and values that had created the Roman Empire (hence the cult of Romanità). It courted the support of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, formed a secret police without a terror apparatus, attempted to pioneer a new corporativist economic system, and carried out its colonization of Ethiopia largely as a continuation of the 19th-­century scramble for Africa. Only in 1938, after its alignment with Hitler, did Fascism officially promulgate an antiSemitic and biological vision of the Italian nation, but never in a spirit radical enough to lead to negative eugenics and mass murder. In many respects, Fascism was successful in carrying out the modernization of Italy and the nationalization of Italians, but its Fascistization of the country and creation of a new Roman Empire largely failed. The extensive regimentation of life through mass organizations and the all-pervasive propaganda, the elaborate displays of ritual politics and pervasive leader cult could not Fascistize the vast mass of Italians. The regime’s nemesis was its involvement in the Spanish Civil War and alliance with the Third Reich, which revealed the gap between the rhetoric and reality of the Third Rome. In contrast, Nazi Germany pursued ideological goals that mass-produced atrocities on a far greater scale. Nazism took root in a highly industrialized, modernized, and nationalized country deeply traumatized by defeat in the Great War and the consequences of the 1929 Wall Street crash, with an established tradition of anti-Semitism and eugenics. As a result, it scientized theories of racial hygiene to undertake the task of purging Germany of its non-Aryan elements, whether physical, social, cultural, or ideological, and creating a vast

empire in a new Europe and Russia brutally cleansed of liberalism, communism, Jews, and all forms of physical and moral weakness. The attempt to realize the Nazi Revolution on these grounds inevitably required attempts to co-opt the Christian churches, the establishment of a tentacular terror state, the mass implementation of negative eugenics, and the radical militarization and mobilization of all productive elements of the nation on a scale unthinkable in Italy. This attempted national and racial revolution led to many millions of war crimes being committed throughout the occupied territories. It can be inferred from these two examples that the political behavior of any fascism that seized power would have been molded by the unique combination of factors that shaped its ideology and policies and that had more movements seized power, they would have all behaved in ways that reflected profound differences in national culture. Despite their profound differences, Fascism and Nazism in power exhibited a number of strikingly similar behavioral traits that would have almost certainly been generic to all the interwar fascisms successful after conquering state power. Both set about eliminating all sources of opposition, transforming all remaining organs of opinion, thought, culture, education, and ­science into vehicles of fascist social engineering and indoctrination. They crushed all liberal media and replaced the working-class movements with union organizations strictly subordinated to state dictates. Both celebrated militarism, violence, and war as the dynamos of historical change and axiomatically rejected pacifism, pluralism, and egalitarianism. Both nurtured profoundly patriarchal assumptions about the role and status of women. Yet on pragmatic grounds, both created new institutions of law and government to coexist with as much of the prefascist state and institutional apparatus as possible so as to maintain the illusion that an ordered and constitutional revolution was taking place. Both sought to coordinate all cultural production with the ethos of the new regime (though the Nazis were far more draconian and ruthless in the process of co-­ordination; Gleichschaltung) than the Fascists were in imposing what has been called their “hegemonic pluralism.” Both undertook vast public works, huge civic building projects (the Nazis using slave labor on a gargantuan scale), extraordinary technological and infrastructural improvements, and a massive program of rearmament, adopting a policy of autarky as the basis of a war economy.

Generic Fascism It is important to realize that, however duplicitous its propaganda and political maneuvering, and however

Fascism

insidiously they undermined the freedom of thought of their supporters, the regimes and movements of generic fascism were driven not by reaction, conservatism, or nihilism but by a revolutionary and modernist utopian­ ism. All were actual or potential “gardening states.” They were intent on using the resources of the modern state to shape the ideal national community out of the social and human raw materials they ruled, and their massive interventions in society were carried out in the spirit of social engineering, not social control. It was in this spirit that both poured enormous ingenuity, organizational force, and state resources into creating an elaborate “political religion” to a point where the nation and its new state were extensively sacralized, and the leader principle replaced the sovereignty of the people as the founding principle of politics and national life. Both created mass organizations for youth, students, and women and ensured that all associations were either aligned with the regime or abolished. Both strove to harness the reproductive and nurturing p ­ owers of women to the nation’s demographic expansion and social cohesion and for the no less mythic productive and warrior qualities of men to be assigned to ­making the nation “strong” in discipline and military power. To fulfill the anthropological revolution they longed for, both promoted athleticism, youth, gender stereotyping, and positive eugenics. Finally, all the behavior of all interwar fascisms and fascists, no matter how apparently irrational to an outsider or nihilistic to a victim, can be seen as results of a ruthless bid to achieve through their policies, actions, and targeted violence an alternative modernity rooted in a mythicized national past. They pursued visions of national greatness through the regimentation of society and military strength familiar since Roman times, but in their own minds they were progressive, pursuing the palingenetic project of creating the “new man” and the “new woman” who devoted their minds and bodies to the national revolution. All were instilled with a Manichaean mindset that celebrated cathartic violence and dehumanized all those outside the national community in the name of a higher morality and destiny. Fascist movements offered their converts a powerful sense of belonging and identity while inviting them to contribute to a deeply mythical sense of national eternity brought about by a temporal revolution within historical time. It is these elements that made fascist behavior so different from that associated with the many authoritarian regimes of the era and that separated fascism from the political behavior of other militarized regimes such as those of Franco, Salazar, Dollfuss, Pétain, Piłsudski, Hirohito, or Vargas, none of whom pursued a radical vision of national rebirth. In their distorted historical imaginations fascists saw themselves as true revolutionaries, even when

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they espoused the most apparently atavistic form of national revolution. This holds even for Corneliu Codreanu’s Legions of the Archangel Michael, which cultivated deep links with the peasantry and the Orthodox Church to bring about a resurrected Romania. The focus here has been on the two regimes that conquered state power sufficiently to engage in a sustained experiment in creating a new fascist order (although the Ustasha regime created in wartime ­Croatia also enjoyed a period of autonomy under Axis hegemony in which it displayed its palingenetic genocidal intent). It should not be forgotten, however, that almost every European nation hosted paramilitary, uniformed movements agitating for national rebirth modeled on elements of Fascism and Nazism (for example, the Irish Republic, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden). Some of them became important to the Nazis as the basis of collaboration (in Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Ukraine, the Slovak Republic, Croatia). Romanian fascism, expressed in a particularly virulent form of racist paramilitarism, developed largely independently of the Axis into a powerful contender for power until it was crushed on ­Hitler’s orders. Significant fascist movements also arose in South Africa, Chile, and especially Brazil. The initial success of the Axis influenced other movements of militaristic nationalism in Lebanon, India, China, and particularly Japan. Meanwhile, in Europe, a number of dictatorships established themselves that adopted some of the trappings of fascism without pursuing a radical social and economic revolution. It was in Portugal, Spain, Vichy France, Greece, Austria, and Hungary that this “parafascism” was most apparent.

Fascism’s Diversification After 1945 Fantasies of the nation’s, Europe’s, or the West’s rebirth through cultural, political, and racial regeneration did not die with Mussolini or Hitler. The Allies had finally defeated the Axis Powers, the crisis of liberal democracy had been overcome, the rhetoric of palingenetic nationalism had been extensively discredited by the unimaginable scale of Nazi atrocities, and Soviet imperialism, the archenemy of fascism, was contained by the cold war until it collapsed altogether in the late 1980s. With the radical loss of political space in which revolutionary nationalism could grow, the “era of fascism” was over. But palingenetic dreams for a nationalist or racial revolution had not been totally destroyed, though the small minority in every Europeanized country who nurtured them were forced to adopt a wide number of different strategies to keep them alive. As a result, postwar fascism has been forced to change its political behavior, largely abandoning mass rallies, uniforms, and displays

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of a political religion for more subtle and covert ways of keeping the faith. Certainly, some groups tried to reproduce the magic formula of Fascism and Nazism by forming political parties with paramilitary wings, militaristic displays of political religion, and would-be charismatic leaders, but they remained utterly marginalized in the immediate postwar era. However, the emergence in the Balkan Wars of nationalists who saw even the extreme racism of democratic politics as excessively moderate, the spectacular rise of Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary in the early 21st century, and the appearance of uniformed paramilitaries of the Svoboda during the crisis in Eastern Ukraine demonstrate that when sociopolitical conditions in a country approximate to interwar ones, fascism can quickly assume its classic forms. Such a conjuncture is very rare. The ethos of the postwar West has been toxic to large-scale fascist movements. The National Democratic Party failed to achieve traction for its repackaged Nazism in postwar Germany, the apparent challenge to democracy posed by the UK’s National Front evaporated when Margaret Thatcher came to power, and the largest neofascist party of the postwar era, Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano, which had decided to behave democratically for tactical reasons, was eventually dissolved into the moderate right-wing Alleanza Nationale in 1995. In such a hostile climate, the fanatics of national or racial revolution who would have joined fascist parties in interwar Europe now had to choose among several very different behavioral strategies to keep the faith and enact their creed: 1. Become active in a cultic fascist subculture with forms of organization adapted to the modern world, such as borrowing from skinhead culture, swaying to “white noise” heavy metal music laden with racist lyrics, or attending “Aryan Fests” in the United States to live out rituals of Nazi or Ku Klux Klan hatred 2. Carry out spontaneous violent attacks on hated minorities as a groupuscule, but no longer as part of a uniformed military formation attached to an organized party with a charismatic leader 3. Join the virtual community maintained by the everexpanding world of uncensored Web sites and social media that allow unadulterated nostalgia for the fascist past, expressions of racial hatred, and celebrations of “White supremacy” 4. Take refuge in radical but still democratic xenophobic and ethnocentric parties (known as “neopopulist”), such as the Front National in France

5. Attempt to create a vanguard of “political soldiers” representing a “third position” between communism and Americanization 6. Pour pseudoacademic effort into denying the Holocaust and producing crude or sophisticated “revisionist” apologias for the attempted Nazi and Fascist revolutions (again disseminated via the Internet) 7. Disappear from political space and withdraw into “metapolitics” by campaigning for “cultural rebirth” and “cultural difference,” the corollary of which is sustained rhetorical attacks on multiculturalism, globalization, and ethnic diversity, which produces the “differentialist racism” of the New Right

Paradoxically, then, the political behavior of the vast majority of modern fascists is rarely recognizable in the interwar sense at all, unless social and political conditions allow the mask to be thrown off and create space for a fully fledged movement of national or racial regeneration. It is minute groupuscules and the social Internet that conserve the fanatical patriotisms, racist hatreds, and revolutionary utopias that had such a catastrophic effect on the history of the 20th century. This is not to say fascism is a negligible political force. The New Right, for example, has been a major influence on the Russian ideologue; Aleksandr Dugin is an example of someone whose brand of Eurasianism helped provide the rationale for Putin’s political behavior on issues of foreign policy. An energized fascist subculture, increasingly concerned with globalization, mass migration, and Islamization as threats to racial purity or cultural homogeneity, has been responsible for attempts to “wake up” the dormant forces of nationalism through spectacular acts of violence with maximum media impact. The neo-Nazi and “black” terror campaigns carried out in Germany and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s and the bombings carried out by Timothy McVeigh and David Copeland had a huge impact on the national consciousness at the time but pale in significance when compared with the tide of war, extermination, and enslavement unleashed by the Third Reich. Just how far fascism has evolved tactically and ideologically from the interwar period is illustrated by the twin attacks on Oslo’s government quarter and young activists of the pro-immigrant Labour Party carried out in July 2011 by Anders Breivik in a futile attempt to inspire a European anti-Islamic “crusade.” Postwar fascism has shrunk to the status of a marginalized subculture in most countries. The “compendium” that he cut and pasted together and published on the Web shortly

Feckless Pluralism

before the attacks underscored the fact that fascism’s symptomatic political behavior remains the same as in interwar Europe: acts of violence against alleged symbols of cultural decadence, racial degeneration, or perceived threats to the purity of the national community. But the way Norwegian liberalism rallied in public condemnation of the attacks underlined the utter futility of fascist violence to change the status quo.

Conclusion What should have emerged from this necessarily brief overview of a complex issue is that, whereas the political behavior of fascism was extensively organized, regimented, and hierarchically controlled in the interwar period, it has now become extremely heterogeneous, diversified, and random in its manifestations. Yet such diversification should be seen as a symptom not of its strength but of its extreme weakness and marginalization. Nevertheless, as a ubiquitous and largely invisible virtual force wherever patriotic or ethnic sentiments can be fanned into fanaticism, it can still fuel pockets of xenophobia and racial violence, and as a terroristic force, even its sporadic and futile acts of destruction in the name of societal rebirth can still have a powerful impact. Joseph Goebbels warned that even if Nazism was destined to disappear, its last act would be one of terrible destruction: “If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.” Contemporary fascism has lost the strength even to push the door closed. Roger Griffin See also Absolutism; Authoritarianism; Civil Disobedience; Dictatorship; F-Scale; Obedience; Religiosity; Sultanism; Torture

Further Readings Borchgrevnik, A. (2013). A Norwegian tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the mon Utøya. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Gentile, E. (1996). The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Griffin, R. (2007). Modernism and fascism: The sense of a beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London, England: Palgrave. Hobsbawm, E., et al. (1995). Art and power: Europe and the dictators, 1930–45. London, England: Hayward Gallery. Iordachi, C. (2009). Comparative fascist studies: New perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Paxton, R. (2005). The anatomy of fascism. London, England: Penguin. Roversi, A. (2008). Hate on the net, extremist sites, neo-fascism on-line, electronic jihad. Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing. Russell, L. (1954). Scourge of the swastika: A short history of Nazi war crimes. London, England: Greenhill Military Paperback. Sbacchi, A. (1997). The legacy of bitterness: Ethiopia and fascist Italy 1935–1941. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. Stone, M. (1998). The patron state: Culture and politics in fascist Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yeomans, R. (2012). Visions of annihilation: The Ustasha regime and the cultural politics of fascism, 1941–1945. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Feckless Pluralism Feckless pluralism refers to political systems that fall short of democratic standards but contain contested elections and alternation of power between different political groups. It is a form of government that is neither democratic nor autocratic. Hybrid regimes of this sort caught the attention of political scientists in the wake of the third wave of democratization, as a number of countries in Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America seemingly got stuck along the road toward democracy. Some political regimes in the gray zone between democracy and autocracy are referred to as dominant power politics systems. This entry introduces Thomas Carothers’s concept of feckless pluralism and its relation to the wider notion of hybrid regimes. Hybrid regimes are not really new. Analyzing multiparty politics in Eastern Europe in 1900–1939, political scientists have found that incumbents seldom allowed themselves to lose elections. Undemocratic regimes, elected through multiparty elections, were also present in Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, and several Latin American countries during the 1960s and 1970s. The current debate on hybrid regimes developed against the backdrop of the transition paradigm. Transitologists expected transition processes, if managed correctly, to generate democracy. But there is considerable evidence that some hybrid regimes cannot be dismissed as transitional phenomena. Analyzing a worldwide sample of such hybrid regimes in 1989–2007, Leonardo Morlino (2009) finds no fewer than 26 “stable hybrid regimes,” in other words regimes that had been “partially free” for 15 years or more, and nine cases of “less persisting hybrid regimes” where the regime had survived for more than 10 years. Of these 35 hybrid regimes, only

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10 made transitions, most of them to democracy (7) and a few to authoritarianism (3). In order to better understand hybrid regimes on their own terms, Thomas Carothers diagnosed them as suffering from two syndromes, one of which is feckless pluralism. His description thereof deserves to be quoted at some length: Countries whose political life is marked by feckless pluralism tend to have significant amounts of political freedom, regular elections, and alternation of power between genuinely different political groupings. Despite these positive features, however, democracy remains shallow and troubled. [ . . . ] Political elites from all the major parties or groupings are widely perceived as corrupt, self-interested, and ineffective. The alternation of power seems only to trade the country’s problems back and forth from one hapless side to the other. [ . . . ] The public is seriously disaffected from politics, [even though] it may still cling to a belief in the ideal of democracy [ . . . ]. (Carothers, 2002, p. 10)

Feckless pluralism comes in many forms depending on the nature of the party system and the way in which opposition and incumbents relate to each other. In some cases, tensions between parties run so high that political parties use their time out of office to prevent their antagonists from governing. In other cases, the political parties collude to the extent that alternation becomes fruitless. Political competition may also run between deeply entrenched parties that operate as patronage networks, which are incapable of reforming themselves. In other cases, the alternation occurs between fluid political groupings, short-lived parties led by charismatic individuals, or temporary alliances. But whatever the format might be, the root of the problem remains the same. The political elites, Carothers argues, are “profoundly cut off from the citizenry, rendering political life an ultimately hollow, unproductive exercise” (2002, p. 11). The second type of hybrid regime identified by Carothers, which he labels dominant power politics, comes with a different set of problems: Countries with this syndrome have limited but still real political space, some political contestation by opposing groups, and at least most of the basic institutional forms of democracy. Yet one political ­ grouping—whether it is a movement, a party, an ­ extended family, or a single leader—dominates the system in such a way that there appears to be little prospect of alternation of power in the foreseeable future. (Carothers, 2002, pp. 11–12)

Although elections are the source of political legitimacy in countries characterized by dominant power

politics, the playing field is uneven. Incumbents utilize state funds to the benefit of their own political group and use police and prosecutors to dole out punishment and protection according to a partisan formula. Even the electoral process tends to be organized in a manner that more or less subtly tilts the outcome in favor of the ruling party. Certain problems are common in both dominant power politics and feckless pluralist systems. There is little participation beyond voting. Disaffection from politics tends to be widespread, and political elites are generally perceived as corrupt. Like feckless pluralism, dominant power politics also manifests itself in many guises. Some countries with this form of governance have very limited political space and are close to outright autocracy. Belarus and Russia would be cases in point. Others have a much wider political space and are more akin to feckless pluralism. An example is Georgia, where an electoral change of power took place in 2012, but democracy remains troubled. Classification of political regimes is always a delicate task, and the gray zone between democracy and dictatorship is no exception from this rule. It too has its gray zones—not least that between feckless pluralism and dominant power politics. Christofer Berglund and Sten Berglund See also Competitive Authoritarianism; Democracy; Dictatorship; Dominant Power Politics; Hybrid Regimes; Transitology

Further Readings Berglund, C. (2014). Georgia between dominant-power politics, feckless pluralism, and democracy. Demokratizatsiya, 22, 3. Carothers, T. (2002). The end of the transition paradigm. Journal of Democracy, 13(1). doi:10.1353/jod.2002.0003 Hale, H. (2015). Patronal politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Morlino, L. (2009). Are there hybrid regimes? Or are they just an optical illusion? European Political Science Review, 1(2). doi:10.1017/S1755773909000198

Feminism Feminism is the belief that women should enjoy the same political, economic, and social rights as men. Feminists criticize the unjust treatment of women in societies across the world. Feminism also refers to a global social movement seeking to raise awareness of gender inequalities through campaigns for women’s rights, including rights to vote, to bodily autonomy and

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freedom from violence, to education, to enter contracts, to equal rights within marriage, and more. The issues raised by feminists have become subjects of research and theoretical interpretations that have changed the social sciences and societies along the way.

Overview Feminists have identified and contested the subordination of women through political activism and research. Over time, they have developed sophisticated theories of gender relations and inequality worldwide. Feminist ideas must be understood with regard to the historical and social contexts they were developed in. Feminism emerged through the political organizing and scholarship of women in Europe and the colonies as early as the 15th century. In the late 19th century, women’s movements began winning the right to vote in national jurisdictions, and they began to secure access to education and repeals of discriminatory laws. Feminist agendas were difficult to pursue during the hostile interwar period. After World War II, a new “wave” of feminist mobilization occurred in the rich nations of the global North, where new radical movements were forming, and in the South, where women participated in struggles for independence from colonial rule. During the 1970s and 1980s, many lines of debate opened up within feminist movement networks about the sex/gender distinction, the women question and capitalism, gender and racial oppression, and more. Gains were made in law reform through the United Nations and through new national agencies dedicated to equal opportunity for women and other policies supporting women’s advancement. Women’s studies and, later, gender studies programs were set up in universities. Feminist and gender research is now widely practiced, although still marginal in many academic disciplines. Today, there is a diverse field of feminist research spanning numerous topics and issues including gender-based violence, reproductive technologies, gender and development, environmental change, and much more.

The Emergence of Feminism in Europe and the Colonies Feminism developed amid marked social and economic changes in Europe and in colonized societies. As ­European society was modernizing and the Industrial Revolution took hold, women in bourgeois society began questioning women’s subordinate social position. In colonized societies also, feminist theories of the exploitation of women have been recorded. Emerging feminist movements were calling for the repeal of

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discriminatory laws, rights to vote as a gateway to other rights, to education, for economic autonomy, and more. One of the first recorded criticisms of male authority was a book written by French court writer Christine de Pizan in the 15th century. The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) refuted the subordination of women through a lively allegorical tale about a city that houses famous women of history. By writing about the contributions of these women to society, de Pizan was refuting the traditional subordination of women in medieval Christian Europe. English writer and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft hurriedly wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in response to the French Assembly’s “Declaration of the rights of Man and of the Citizen,” which stated women should only have rights to domestic education. Wollstonecraft argued for an education system that afforded the same opportunities for learning to boys and girls. Feminist objections to patriarchal traditions extended beyond Europe and often came from religious women. In the 17th-century Spanish colony of Mexico City, Catholic nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz championed the cause of equal respect for women’s work in her poetry and other writings. Protestant groups such as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, were prominent among the women’s rights movement in British colonial North America. In the United States, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention drawn up by 240 women and men met to “discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman,” concluding with a statement that borrowed the moral language of the American Declaration of Independence. Some early advances in feminist thought in the 19th century were made by men, who were the majority of intellectuals and educated professionals of the time, responding to the claims of the emerging women’s movement. For instance, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote a famous essay, “The Subjection of Women” (1869). He argued that physical force was the basis of inequality between men and women, not women’s inferiority. German labor leader August Bebel published the popular book Woman Under Socialism (1879), and Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), an even more popular statement on the oppression of women. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, theoretical writing about women tackled economic issues in increased depth, including from the periphery of European capitalism. South African author Olive ­ ­Schreiner wrote Woman and Labour (1911), which criticized the exploitation of working women. In China, feminist anarchist writer He-Yin Zhen published an

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influential essay, “On the Question of Women’s Liberation” (1907), tracing the history of exploitation of women’s labor. Russia’s Alexandra Kollontai argued that there is no general “woman question” in The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1909). For socialist feminists like Kollontai, support by working-class women for socialism was the only path toward true equality between the sexes. By the early 20th century, a good variety of feminist perspectives on the social position of women was scattered across the world. In Egypt, gender issues were raised by Aisha Taymur in her book Mir’at Al-Ta’mmul fi Al-Umur (The Mirror of Contemplation, 1892), an interpretation of Qur’anic texts about women that questions modern patriarchy. In Indonesia, Raden Adjeng Kartini wrote now-famous letters to a Dutch pen friend about her unrealized aspirations to set up a school for girls and stay unmarried. One of the most significant advances in feminist theories of gender relations was produced by German sociologist Mathilde Vaerting, whose book The Dominant Sex (1921) criticized the notion of a fixed masculine and feminine character, arguing that masculinity and femininity reflected power relations. Vaerting created the first extended social theory of gender linking psychological patterns with social structure. She identified gender domination in the law and the division of labor in society and in ideology. Vaerting’s work was cut short when Hitler came to power and she was removed from one of the first professorships ever held by a woman in sociology. Feminist theorists developed a view of gender as a social practice. With consumer capitalism and suburban life, gender norms were changing. Anthropologists were producing studies of societies in the colonized world, disrupting the accepted definitions of sex difference across culture and history. For instance, Margaret Mead’s widely read book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) documented different gender arrangements from those in European bourgeois society. This and other anthropological work rejected the idea of a fixed relationship between biological sex and gender. Based on Mead’s work and that of sociologist ­Talcott Parsons, sex role theory became popular, which explains differences between men and women as a result of social scripts learned through institutions of socialization such as the family, schools, and sport clubs. Sex role (later gender role) theory provided the basis of feminist politics focused on the harms of gender stereotypes—normative ideals about what men and women ought to be. Sex role theory had limitations as an explanation for gendered social power. It emphasized the social construction of individual and collective

behavior but tended to assume perfect replication of gender norms through faithful performance of gender roles. The many tensions, ambiguities, and sometimes instability of gender in social practice were not in theoretical view. Less deterministic ideas about gender relations were also emerging. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex (1949), a foundational text for modern feminism. She drew on psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy to illustrate how women were constituted as the “other” in men’s consciousness. De Beauvoir famously argued that “one is not born but becomes a woman.” She wrote portraits of social life illustrating that gender is embodied, not a “natural” expression of sex difference. Through these portraits, de Beauvoir showed that gender is socially complex and heterogeneous.

Decolonization and Women’s Liberation Questions of social power came into sharp relief after the turbulence of war and through economic transition in the mid-20th century. The post–World War II period saw major struggles for independence in colonized societies, which were led by men, but in almost all cases women played significant roles in movements for independence from colonial rule. Feminists added education for women and girls to the economic development agendas of postcolonial states, and new feminist theories were developed. In Brazil, Heleieth Saffioti’s book A Mulher na Sociedade de Classes (Women in Class Society, 1969) outlined a Marxist feminist theory of genderbased social stratification using data about the sexual division of labor, family relations, and women’s education. She demonstrated the historical sources of women’s subordination, critiquing the conservativism of the Catholic Church. In the North, feminists developed the anthropological concept of patriarchy to name systems of male power. Feminism, along with other new social movements for gay liberation, civil rights, and peace, worked with the view that social systems could be overthrown. Calls for new radical feminist politics were written up. Sheila Rowbotham’s pamphlet Women’s Liberation and the New Politics (1969) was one of the first feminist manifestos put into circulation in the United Kingdom. A group of New York feminists released Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), edited by Robin Morgan. The calls to action also extended to men. Jack Sawyer published an article titled “On Male Liberation” (1970), arguing that gender stereotypes negatively affected men. Debates opened up within the women’s liberation movement about how best to theorize women’s labor. French sociologist Christine Delphy emphasized the

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exploitation of women in the family in her essay “The Main Enemy” (1970), whereas feminist socialists conceptualized women’s reproductive labor in the household as the basis for wage work and accumulation in the formal economy. In the United States, Black feminists argued that racial oppression was interlinked with sexual and classbased oppression. In 1971, the Third World Women’s Alliance was formed to foster solidarity among Black women. One of the cofounders, Frances Beal, authored the pamphlet “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” (1968), addressing misconceptions about Black women. Beal highlighted the economic exploitation of Black women, racial discrimination underlying birth control programs, and differences between issues facing White middle-class women and Black women in capitalist society. Policy change followed feminist movement mobilizations in the 1970s. After a decade of campaigns for women’s liberation, policy-makers and government bodies started to respond. The United Nations declared 1975 to be International Women’s Year, followed by the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. National governments embarked on their own investigations into the issues. In 1973, the Australian government appointed the world’s first Advisor on Women’s Affairs reporting to a head of state. In 1975, the Committee on the Status of Women in India produced an expansive report on the conditions of life for women titled Towards Equality. This activity is the result of work by a new grouping of feminist campaigners colloquially called “femocrats.” Conservative critics, as well as some in the radical feminist movement, pejoratively called feminists working within the public service femocrats. The term has been reappropriated by feminist public servants who use it as a reference to their social power and influence in government agencies. In her book Inside Agitators, Hester Eisenstein (1996) documented the femocrats’ strategies seeking to use bureaucracies and law reform to shift toward gender equality in Australia, Scandinavia, and Germany. This led to the creation of women’s affairs and gender equity units within government departments and to dedicated funding for child care, women’s health centers, and domestic violence support centers. The pursuit of feminist agendas through the state has produced mixed results and long political struggles. Mala Htun studied laws governing family life and ­gender relations between the 1960s and the 1990s in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Brazil legalized divorce in 1977, and Pinochet’s government in Chile gave married women full civil rights for the first time. Htun observed that democratization did not guarantee feminist agendas

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were acted upon. While there were some gains for women’s rights during transitions to democracy in Latin America, in no case were rights to abortion improved, which is linked to the regional strength of Catholicism. While women’s participation in governments across the world has increased, the nature of politics has not radically changed. In their transnational review of women in parliaments, Farida Jalalzai and Mona Lena Krook found that the practice of politics more often involves competition to define “winners and losers” than it institutes collaborative relations. Participating as a deputy or member of Parliament involves a workload and culture very similar to masculinized management work in the corporate sector. Across the 1970s and 1980s, feminist research in most humanities and social science disciplines grew rapidly. Feminist studies of policy became a field in its own right, with research identifying sex discrimination in laws, gender bias in government priorities, and gender inequalities in the governance of social security, health care, employment, and many other policy areas. Feminist history developed as a significant field, which involved correcting the masculine bias of historical interpretations that do not address gender as a significant feature of historical knowledge or the role of women in past societies. In sociology, sex and gender moved from being a marginal topic to one of the most active fields of inquiry. Feminist studies of science also took off, revealing and contesting the masculine basis of scientific authority. Journals dedicated to feminist theory and research about sex roles, gender, women, and men were set up across the world. These included al-Raida in Lebanon, Debate Feminista in Mexico, Estudos Feministos in Brazil, Manushi in India, Australian Feminist Studies, the Nordic Journal for Masculinity Studies in Norway, and Signs and Gender & Society in the United States, which became prestigious publications.

Feminist Theory and Research in a Globalized World In the 1990s and 2000s, women’s studies has been ­redefined as gender studies, a term that describes a broadened research agenda including studies of sexualities, transgender issues, masculinities, and so on. New professorial chairs in gender studies have been set up during this period. But not all gender studies programs have survived funding cutbacks. Resourcing problems aside, there is without doubt a diverse feminist research agenda evident globally. Across the 1980s and 1990s, social movements fragmented. There were splits over issues of sexuality, race, and negotiations with governments. Women’s liberation

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as a collective movement identity lost its cohering influence. Feminists continued campaigning but in more focused issue areas and with more fluid political identities and affiliations. Feminist theory reflected this shift. Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990) was perhaps the most influential text in academic feminism in the 1990s. Butler argued strongly that there is no fixed ahistorical basis to gender categories, and therefore no single shared strategy for change is possible. Her theory of gender emphasized the “performativity” of gender identities brought into being through repeated actions, which are not simply an expression of sex difference. Black feminists in North America also advanced new ground in debates about gender identity and feminist politics. In her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), literary scholar and activist bell hooks argued that White feminist claims about “women” as a unified social group covered over the realities of racism and colonialism. American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways race and gender interact in shaping black women’s employment experiences. Taking this up, Patricia Hill Collins’s book Black Feminist Thought (1991) argued that there are multiple “standpoints,” or perspectives, for different groups of women: Black feminism, Latina feminism, and lesbian feminism. Feminist theory has mixed with subaltern studies and postcolonial theory, producing a critical understanding of gender in the global South. Indian-born philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s most famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), calls attention to the situations of women in poverty and emphasizes the dangers of claiming to speak on behalf of impoverished groups. Within feminist environmental theory, there have been debates about the strategic use of claims about women. Indian nuclear physicist Vandana Shiva and German political economist Maria Mies produced broad integrative theory concerning the relationship between patriarchy, capitalism, and environmental destruction. In her book Staying Alive (1989), Shiva criticized economic development in the South as “maldevelopment,” a process of violence against nature and women built into the current development paradigm. Together, Mies and Shiva have emphasized the “subsistence” perspective reflected in spiritual and sustainability dimensions of life for women and subaltern groups in the South. As a counterpoint, Indian economist Bina Agarwal argued against making claims about women in general. Her essay “The Gender and Environment Debate” provided empirical evidence that environmental degradation is experienced differently by women according to the mutual conditioning of gender and class (/caste/race).

In the North, debates within feminist theory about environmental and technological change have focused on relations between human and nonhuman entities. Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1987) used the term cyborg as a metaphor for an ecosocialist identity that does not fall into false universal claims about “women” and “nature.” More recently, the subfield of feminist theory called “new materialism” has developed focusing on human/nonhuman relations. With economic expansion and rapid technological change, familiar feminist issues have changed. For instance, debates about reproduction and women’s bodies in the 21st century have sparked a new subfield of feminist theory and research. Declining birth rates in the global North, coupled with new reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy arrangements, have created new economic and social practices surrounding women’s bodies. Feminist sociologists Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby argue that women’s “reproductive work,” theorized by materialist feminists like Julie Delphy, has been transformed through new markets for reproductive medicine. Meanwhile, across the world, feminist movements continue to fight against gender-based violence and restrictions on abortion, and to advance women’s and girls’ right to education, safe workplaces, property ownership, and much more. This brief tour of the history of feminism and its contributions to social science illustrates the dynamic character of this important field of social action and research. Rebecca Pearse See also Discrimination; Equality of Opportunity; Gender Bias; Patriarchy; Social Movements; Women’s Liberation Movement

Further Readings Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Connell, R. (1987). Gender and power. Cambridge, England: Polity. de Beauvoir, S. (1972). The second sex. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. (Original work published 1949) Eisenstein, H. (1996). Inside agitators: Australian femocrats and the state. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin. hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Mies, M., & Shiva, V. (1993). Ecofeminism. London, England: Zed Books. Moghadam, V. M. (2005). Globalizing women: Transnational feminist networks. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morgan, R. (Ed.). (1970). Sisterhood is powerful: An anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement. New York, NY: Vintage.

First Ladies Walby, S. (1997). Gender transformations. London, England: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, M. (1975). Vindication of the rights of woman. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. (Original work published 1792)

First Ladies “First lady” is a term applied to the wife of a male president of the United States. It evolved in the late 1840s from earlier usages such as “president’s lady and “lady presidentress.” It also has gained usage recently in reference to wives of other heads of state and even wives of state governors and CEOs. FLOTUS is the acronym used within the U.S. government to denote the First Lady of the United States; OFL is the acronym used within the U.S. government to denote the Office of the First Lady, a unit of the Executive Office of the President. The state of the marriage of the presidential ­couple as portrayed by mass media has become an important societal beacon in an age of deep social cleavage over the tensions between women’s caregiving roles and their economic and political freedoms. First ladies’ involvement in their husbands’ presidencies also pose a concern for presidential and constitutional scholars who prefer a limited presidency to a stronger, “unilateral presidency.”

White House Resources Congress approved a budget line item in 1977 establishing a staff to serve the first lady in her capacity as an assistant to the president. Today this staff of approximately 25 people (plus interns and volunteers) is known as the OFL, which is a formal organizational unit of the Executive Office of the President that works closely with the political advising unit known as the White House Office. The OFL is headed by a chief of staff who enjoys rank as an assistant to the president, one of only 25 or so senior staff in the White House. In American Physicians v. Hillary Clinton, 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the first lady enjoys congressionally delegated lawful standing as an assistant in the performance of the president’s duties.

Roles and Constraints Scholars of the political role of the first lady of the United States have frequently employed comparison with the vice president of the United States. A series of studies of the staffing of the Ronald Reagan, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush White Houses titles the chapters on first ladies and vice presidents in each

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volume as the “First Special Counselor” and “Second Special Counselor” to the president, respectively. Other research has noted that first ladies who share the spotlight with the president provide opponents an additional path to attack the president and that first ladies as well as vice presidents are most effective when adhering to “team player” constraints. Another influential study compiled data showing that first ladies often drew more press coverage than vice presidents, especially during the first year of a new administration, and that 31 of 38 U.S. first ladies discussed politics with their husbands; 26 of them could be construed as advisers to their husbands; 15 made known their policy preferences in private (8 opted for public disclosure as well); 14 wielded influence regarding nominations, appointments, and departures from service; 6 attended executive meetings in the White House; 5 actually influenced policy debate outcomes; and 3 testified at Congressional hearings. Much of the literature on the Clinton presidency concurs that the staffs of First Lady Clinton and of Vice President Gore operated in effect as part of the political staff of the White House Office. Whether such strong, politically involved presidential spouses are problematic for a constitutional republic has been a recurrent public concern during the James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, ­Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and ­William Clinton presidencies. In contrast, the power of vice presidents has been criticized only during the recent George W. Bush–Richard Cheney and William Clinton– Albert Gore administrations.

The “Hidden Power” Issue The question of “co-presidencies” in which first ladies and/or vice presidents exercise power derived from the president at his or her prerogative is becoming quantifiable as daily White House schedules and other presidential documents become available online through the collaboration of presidential libraries and the National Archives and Records Administration. Research into this topic will need to take into account the questions of executive prerogative and of the institutional development of the presidency, respectively. Lacking office staff, early presidents had more reason to seek counsel from first ladies and less reason to seek it from vice presidents, who for a time were their chief competitors for the presidency and since have frequently rivaled the president for party nomination. The Executive Reorganization Act of 1939 creating the Executive Office of the President reduced presidential need for either spousal or vice presidential advice until emergency presidential authorities delegated during global wars and economic crises were curtailed by congressional enactments in the early

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to mid-1970s. The process of globalization, however, continued uncurtailed; thus, presidents since the mid1970s usually have chosen to use first ladies as well as vice presidents as presidential surrogates with whom to engage simultaneously on multiple fronts with domestic as well as external elites, mass audiences, and media.

Public Regard and Gender While research of the governmental influence of first ladies is still nascent, much quantitative research already has been done regarding the public’s perception of first ladies. First ladies have been included as significant objects of citizen affect in public opinion polling since the 1930s. Political scientists have published volumes of analytical work suggesting that perceptions of first ladies have definite consequences for public approval of presidents (notably, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton). Kathryn Hall Jamieson’s argument that women in politics are trapped in a “double bind” in which the display of either (and both) strength or weakness works against them does seem applicable to first ladies. Strong, active first ladies (and vice presidents) have had the effect of making presidents look comparably weak to the public; and yet weak (as well as strong) first ladies can become fodder for opponents to use against even accomplished presidents. Students of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid depict the first ladyship as having disadvantaged her because of the East Wing–West Wing “double bind” in which observing customs, traditions, and ceremonial duties was dismissed as “garden tea parties,” while meaningful involvement in politics and policy was framed as “interloping.” Thus, how the mass media “frames” first ladies and their various roles (e.g., hostess, emissary, role model for women, and civic activist) for public consumption has become a new line of research. Gary D. Wekkin See also Gender Bias; Globalization; Media Framing

Siena Research Institute, The First Ladies Study. www.siena.edu. Watson, R. P. (2014). The presidents’ wives: The Office of the First Lady in U.S. politics (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

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Personality

Personality characterizes a person’s usual way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. An individual’s behavior may fluctuate due to situational features, mood, or even long-term personal development, but over fairly long periods of time, his or her characteristic behavior can be described by a typical level. These descriptions can be organized into multiple frameworks, of which follow two important cases: the Big Five as an example of the bright side of personality (normal, adaptive behavior), and the Dark Triad as an example of the so-called dark side (moderately extreme behavior that may become maladaptive under stressful or unusual conditions). Both perspectives implicate personality in most interpersonal behavior, including responses to leaders and groups. In what follows, both perspectives are described and discussed within the context of a comprehensive typology of follower behavior.

The Bright Side The Big Five model of personality consists of five dimensions, which are largely independent of one another. Extraversion is one’s tendency to be talkative, sociable, and dominant versus quiet, reserved, and submissive. Neuroticism describes one’s tendency to experience anxiety, worry, and negative emotions versus being calm and worry free. Conscientiousness describes one’s tendencies to be detail oriented, orderly, and self-­ controlled versus impulsive and disorganized. Agreeableness describes one’s warmth and desire for close relationships versus coolness and aloofness. Finally, openness to experience describes having intellectual versus mass culture interests and a preference for novelty over convention.

Further Readings Burns, L. M. (2008). First ladies and the fourth estate: Press framing of presidential wives. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Lawrence, R. G., & Rose, M. (2010). Hillary Clinton’s race for the White House: Gender politics & the media on the campaign trail. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. O’Connor, K., Nye, B., & Van Assendelft, L. (1996). Wives in the White House: The political influence of first ladies. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 26(3), 835–853. National First Ladies Library. www.firstladies.org.

The Dark Side The Dark Triad, so called, is composed of three interrelated but distinct personality characteristics that share a core of callous disregard for others. Narcissism describes one’s tendency to be self-focused and selfenhancing/self-promoting. The key features of Machiavellianism are manipulativeness and a propensity to derive enjoyment from deceiving others. Psychopathy describes individuals who are impulsive and lack

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empathy; in addition, their own emotional experiences, barring brief, intense bursts of anger, tend to be very shallow. Individuals displaying Dark Triad characteristics can be extremely difficult to manage, requiring either extensive mentorship or placement where they can do the least damage or, occasionally, where their dark traits are useful. For instance, psychopathic individuals can make good enforcers, that is, they have little difficulty in administering punishments or firing people.

Models of Followership Scholarly discussion of followership dates back nearly a century, but there is very little empirical research on which followership styles exist, which are typical, or what the causes or consequences of particular varieties of followership might be. The earliest typology of followers was developed by Paul Pigors, who argued that there were four kinds of followers: constructive, subversive, routine, and impulsive. Constructive followers actively tried to help their leader and fellow followers. Subversive followers put their own interests first. Routine ­followers passively accepted direction from leaders without contributing. Impulsive followers were not usually helpful but may have had an unpredictable emotional attachment to their leaders. Subsequent models continued distinguishing between proactive and passive followers, but little of this work had much grounding in empirical data. Thomas Sy developed a model of followership that detailed several dimensions of positive and negative followership. A critical feature of Sy’s model is that positive forms of followership are highly related to one another (good followers tend to be good in many ways), but negative forms of followership are largely independent of one another (poor followers tend to fail in specific ways). The model has three positive and three negative forms of followership.

The third component of positive followership is good citizenship. Good citizens are loyal, reliable, and team players. Agreeable individuals value their interpersonal relationships and are trusting of and loyal to others. We should expect that agreeable followers will be good citizens. Furthermore, one perspective on psychological maturity holds that as individuals mature, they tend to become more conscientious and agreeable and less neurotic. In general, we should expect that psychologically mature followers will display many of the characteristics of positive followership. On the other hand, less psychologically mature individuals are likely to be more unreliable, self-serving, and anxious.

Negative Followership The first component of negative followership is conformity. Highly conforming followers are easily influenced, tend to follow trends, and are soft-spoken. It is likely that individuals who are low in either extraversion or openness to experience, or both, may likely display conformity. Such individuals are likely to be submissive, if low in extraversion, and relatively conventional and traditional, if low in openness. As such, they are more likely to quietly accept a leader’s directives blindly. The second component of negative followership is insubordination. Insubordinate followers tend to be arrogant, rude, and bad tempered. Insubordinate followers are likely to be disagreeable. Additionally, arrogance is a cornerstone of the self-focus typical of ­narcissism. Rudeness and ill-treatment of others are characteristic of the whole Dark Triad. The third component of negative followership is incompetence. Incompetent followers tend to be uneducated, slow, and inexperienced. Individuals low in conscientiousness are likely to be incompetent followers. Their lack of organization will tend to compound any skills deficits they may have.

Positive Followership The first component of positive followership is industry. Industrious individuals are hardworking and productive and tend to go above and beyond in fulfilling their duties. A key element of conscientiousness is industriousness. Highly conscientious followers should generally be expected to display behavior characteristic of industry. The second component of positive followership is enthusiasm. Individuals high on this dimension of followership are characterized by being outgoing, excited, and happy. People who are highly extraverted are outgoing and energetic and display positive emotions. They are likely to be seen as enthusiastic followers.

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Seth M. Spain See also F-Scale; Locus of Control; Narcissism; Narcissistic Personality Inventory; Personality Traits

Further Readings Epitropaki, O., Sy, T., Martin, R., Tram-Quon, S., & Topakas, A. (2013). Implicit leadership and followership theories “in the wild”: Taking stock of information processing approaches to leadership and followership in organizational setting. Leadership Quarterly, 24, 858–881. Pigors, P. (1934). The types of followers. Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 378–383.

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Spain, S. M., Harms, P. D., & LeBreton, J. M. (2014). The dark side of personality at work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35, S41–S60. Sy,  T. (2010). What do you think of followers? Examining the content, structure, and consequences of implicit followership theories. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113, 73–84.

Framing Effects How do individuals form preferences? One essential factor is the manner in which their choices are framed. According to Robert M. Entman, “some aspects of a perceived reality” are made more salient and “a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (1993, p. 390) is promoted. That is to say, frames increase the salience of a particular consideration. Within the broad literature on framing in political science, scholars are continuing to define distinct types of frames. One important distinction is that between equivalency frames and issue frames. The former occurs when the same crucial information is presented in opposing ways to influence individuals’ preferences. For example, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously found that when individuals are presented with scenarios about a rare disease, the treatment programs can be presented in terms of the number of lives saved or, alternatively, as the number of lives lost. When a certain frame highlights loss, participants are significantly more risk seeking, but when an equivalent frame highlights lives saved, participants become risk averse. Issue framing, on the other hand, relies on the presentation of particular considerations when evaluating a set of options. For example, respondents assessing a Klu Klux Klan rally can be induced to consider free speech or, alternatively, public safety. Indeed, Thomas E. Nelson and colleagues find that these alternative considerations dramatically affect how individuals will ultimately assess the rally. In essence, when considering free speech, respondents become more likely to support the right for the rally to take place; when considering threats to public safety, on the other hand, the respondents become significantly more opposed to the rally. A second useful distinction among frames, particularly when considering how information is presented by news media, is the classification of thematic versus ­episodic frames. Thematic framing of an issue relies on a broad context and abstract information—for example, aggregate statistics or over-time trends. Episodic framing instead presents specific anecdotes, individuals,

and concrete events involving human interest details. Leni Aarøe experimentally tests the relative strength of these two types of frames, finding that episodic frames outweigh thematic frames when individuals experience emotional reactions. In the absence of emotion, however, thematic frames are stronger. In the real world, of course, individuals rarely encounter just one frame. Thus, scholars increasingly incorporate competitive framing into their experimental studies, exposing participants to two competing frames at once. Paul Sniderman and Sean Theriault show that competing frames can effectively cancel one another out, leaving respondents to rely on their preexisting values to make decisions. While this cancelling out of competing frames may be true for equal frames, frame strength must also be considered. Dennis Chong and James Druckman consider the strength of frames in three ways: availability, accessibility, and applicability. The frame must be available, meaning an individual must connect the frame to an issue for the frame to influence the person. A frame must be accessible to be strong—it must come to mind when a person is considering an issue. A frame must finally be applicable, meaning a person must view the frame or consideration as relevant to the issue at hand. Competing frames do not always cancel one another out, but rather stronger frames dominate weaker frames, even when individuals are exposed to weak frames repeatedly. Research into the origins and outcomes of framing is ongoing, and there is considerable potential to extend this work with additional experimental studies as well as other methods. Rose McDermott suggests novel measures to investigate the origins of framing effects. In addition, the durability of framing requires critical interrogation. There are still lingering questions regarding the influence of repeated competing frames in observational settings. Are framing effects simply artifacts of  experiments? Do framing effects occur and impact ­voters outside the lab? The boundary effects of framing merit further consideration, given the known influence of frames on public opinion. Elizabeth Schmitt and Samara Klar See also Cognitive Dissonance; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Heuristics; Implicit Association Test; Name Order; Prospect Theory; Sleeper Effect

Further Readings Aarøe, L. (2011). Investigating frame strength: The case of episodic and thematic frames. Political Communication, 28, 207–226.

Free Market Chong, D., & Druckman, J. N. (2007). Framing public opinion in competitive democracies. American Political Science Review, 101, 637–655. Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm. In D. McQuail (Ed.), McQuail’s reader in mass communication theory (pp. 390–397). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. McDermott, R. (2004). Prospect theory in political science: Gains and losses from the first decade. Political Psychology, 25, 289–312. Nelson, T. E., Clawson, R. A., & Oxley, Z. M. (1997). Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and its effect on tolerance. American Political Science Review, 91, 567–583. Sniderman, P. M., & Theriault, S. M. (2004). The structure of political argument and the logic of issue framing. In W. E. Saris & P. M. Sniderman (Eds.), Studies in public opinion: Gauging attitudes, nonattitudes, measurement error, and change (pp. 133–165). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458.

Fraternal Deprivation See Group Relative Deprivation

Free Market The term free market means a market economy based on classical laws of supply and demand without government interference. This is in contrast to mercantilism, which was a dominant economic system from the 16th to the 18th centuries based on government regulation of the national economy to augment state power over rival nations. Adam Smith (1723–1790) argued that man’s natural tendency toward self-interest in a free market would open markets to competition and thus bring about the accumulation of universal wealth. This freemarket hypothesis became known as the doctrine of “the invisible hand”: enlightened self-interest, limited government, and the free market would bring about universal wealth (and overturn mercantilism). Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) marked the beginning of modern economics and helped to construct modern industrial capitalism by popularizing many of the key ideas that underpin “classical” economics.

The Invisible Hand The primary idea of the invisible hand was that laissezfaire capitalism self-regulates the supply and demand of

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goods: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Smith (1759) had a very benign view of self-interest and did not see it as antithetical to “sympathy.” His view of the “free market” thus is not an account of ruthless individualism and competition but rather a conception of “self-interest” that embraces more the notion of selfpreservation and responsibility. In Smith’s view and that of his contemporaries David Hume and John Locke, “self-interest” is not to be confused with “selfishness” but rather seen as an underlying principle of human action. It does not, for instance, exclude charitable behavior or being interested in the fortune and happiness of others, as Smith argues in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith considered the invisible hand a mechanism of a benevolent God who administered the world in order to maximize human happiness. It has become a metaphor and doctrine that describes the unintended social effects resulting from individual choice and action. Smith’s notion of the invisible hand, a metaphor used only three times in his entire work (including once in his posthumous work The History of Astronomy), has been exaggerated and falsely used as the symbol of freemarket capitalism (Kennedy, 2009). Smith uses it in the limited context of an argument against protectionism based on moral reasoning from Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson, among others. Hutcheson, Smith’s teacher at Glasgow, called it a “moral sense” that helped to promote the happiness of all. It is not a universal principle in Smith, nor did he suggest that all “public goods” are produced through the pursuit of self-­interest. Against triumphalist claims for the free market based on the appeal to Smith’s metaphor, many critics, especially since the 2008–2009 financial meltdown, now question that the free market operates, as if guided by the invisible hand, according to a kind of optimum equilibrium or well-ordered and regulated state of efficiency. Warren Samuels (2014), for instance, regards the concept as ideology, knowledge, and a linguistic phenomenon, distorted by the Chicago school. He charts how nearly 4,000 books that discuss the invisible hand, increasingly in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, have construed the term as significant in the contemporary context, often based on poor examination of sources or evidence. The contemporary centrality of the “free market” and its interpretation in terms of Smith’s invisible hand can be attributed to Milton Friedman, the rise of neoliberalism, and rational choice theory. Friedman, as a ­second-generation leader of the Chicago school along with George Stigler, held that the invisible hand doctrine was of central importance in their definition of

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free-market capitalism. Yet both held that the invisible hand operated within a framework of law directed by social values informing the political system that help to ensure the public good.

Neoclassical Economics and Utility Maximization With the birth of neoclassical economics, supply and demand were related to rational choice models and the individual’s ability to maximize utility or profit—the so-called “rational utility maximizers” of Chicago school thinking, which began as a reaction to Keynesianism in the mid-1970s. The term was introduced by Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) as early as 1900 in an article trying to establish economics as a science. Marginalism and the theory of marginal utility can be traced to Carl Menger (1840–1921), who founded the ­ Austrian school, William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882), a logician who introduced mathematical method in economics, and Léon Walras (1834–1910), a mathematical economist—the three leading figures of the marginalist revolution. The central idea of marginalism is that economic actors make decisions based on margins in an aggregated decision-making process and that markets tend toward equilibrium. For Milton Friedman and members of the Chicago school, all human behavior and motivation is considered to be limited to rational utility maximization, and all decisions are exchanges based on utility maximization. The standard model of neoclassical economics of the Chicago school is described by E. Roy Weintraub in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics in terms of three assumptions: (1) people have rational preferences among outcomes; (2) individuals maximize utility and firms maximize profits; and (3) people act independently on the basis of full and relevant information. He explains further: The framework of neoclassical economics is easily summarized. Buyers attempt to maximize their gains from getting goods, and they do this by increasing their purchases of a good until what they gain from an extra unit is just balanced by what they have to give up to obtain it. In this way they maximize “utility”— the satisfaction associated with the consumption of goods and services. Likewise, individuals provide labor to firms that wish to employ them, by balancing the gains from offering the marginal unit of their services (the wage they would receive) with the disutility of labor itself—the loss of leisure. Individuals make choices at the margin. This results in a theory of demand for goods, and supply of productive factors. (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/Neoclassical Economics.html)

The rise of neoclassical economics in the form of the Chicago school is one of the main forms of economic liberalism based on the ideological idea that economies should be organized on the economic freedom of individuals (rather than organizations or collectives) to make decisions in their own self-interest. This conception of the free market favors free trade, the institution of private property, and open competition and opposes government intervention in the market based on the notion of the limited state. To this extent, neoclassical economics and its conception of the free market inherits Enlightenment assumptions concerning individual freedom, rationality, and self-interest. It prizes individual freedom above equality and seeks to reduce state intervention and state or public enterprise on grounds that it distorts market outcomes and creates inefficiencies.

Neoliberalism The term neoliberalism has been used since the 1980s to describe the resurgence of ideas associated with economic liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism that ­ maintains markets left to themselves are stable and self-­ regulating. The consolidation of neoliberalism coincided with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States a year later and was represented by a set of policies including privatization, deregulation, free trade, and reduced social spending that together signaled a return to the notion of the free market as the single most robust characteristic of capitalist democracies and the international driver of globalization. In this broad characterization, we can say that “free market” policies became the true center of Western neoliberal policy regimes, presiding over any attempts to resuscitate social democracy. Neoliberalism buttressed by the free market was also seen as the means to turn back the Keynesian welfare state and the tide of social welfare expectations for aging populations. Neoliberalism emerged originally as an economic ideology from European scholars in the 1930s with scholars like Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek, who were looking for a “third way” between classical liberalism (capitalism) and socialism in a conception of the social market economy that implied a strong state that would intervene on ethical grounds to protect social institutions like health and education. In the postwar period, the German ordoliberals fashioned a “third way” as the basis for the reconstruction of the German economy after World War II. Ordoliberalism or social liberalism, especially in the hands of the Freiburg school of law and economics, held that the state is responsible for creating an appropriate legal infrastructure for ensuring fair and open competition against the emergence of

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monopolies and oligarchies that will subvert free-market principles. Under the combined influence of the Austrian (Hayek) and Chicago schools (Friedman), Thatcher and Reagan repudiated the principles of the welfare state in favor of free-market capitalism as the driver of globalization, in which free trade and free market forces were held to promote growth, stability, and efficiency by attracting foreign investment. Milton Friedman summarizes the neoliberal argument for a truly global form of the free market: Downsize the government, reduce the welfare state and deregulate the economy. Let the free market determine where capital flows. Forget about striving for full employment (a Keynesian goal) and focus on profits and world-wide investments. This approach will lead to lower costs for the consumer and an increase in world trade. This [ . . . ] kind of economic organization [ . . . ] provides economic freedom directly, namely competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power. (Friedman, 1962, p. 9)

Homo economicus of neoliberalism is based on three massive operating and contestable assumptions about the free market: (1) the assumption of individualism— that all choice-makers operating in the market are ­individuals or modeled on individuals (including firms); (2) the assumption of rationality—that economic actors have rational preferences decided by rational processes and that these can be related and calibrated according to values and outcomes; and (3) the assumption of selfinterest (drawing from the tradition of classical political economy going back to Smith), that economic actors as rational agents in the market work to maximize their utility and firms to maximize their profits. Standard criticisms of neoliberalism as it evolved during the 1980s and after to increasingly reflect the ideas of the Chicago school and a highly mythologized notion of the free market tend to revolve around objections to each of these assumptions. Individualism has been identified as an ideological construct that is a Western and culturebound concept that takes different forms throughout history and should be seen as social and moral processes (individualization) rather than as abstract philosophical principles.

Critiques of Individualism and Rational Choice Theory Various critiques of individualism (the belief that only individuals exist) insist that this is a false ontology that disguises the relational nature of social reality, privileges a white, male, and Western view at the expense of the

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Other (women and cultural minorities) and also mythologizes the nature of multinational capitalism. The critique of the rationality assumption and rational choice theory is a complex and ongoing literature, but it is fair to say that the rationality of individual behavior, once taken as the touchstone of modern economics, has come under sustained criticism. Some (e.g., Hollis & Nell, 1975) argue for a philosophical critique of positivism and rationalism, while others question weak statistical methods and empirical outcomes (e.g., Green & ­Shapiro, 1994). Duncan Foley argues: The concept of rationality, to use Hegelian language, represents the relations of modern capitalist society one-sidedly. The burden of rational-actor theory is the assertion that “naturally” constituted individuals facing existential conflicts over scarce resources would rationally impose on themselves the institutional structures of modern capitalist society, or something approximating them. But this way of looking at matters systematically neglects the ways in which modern capitalist society and its social relations in fact constitute the “rational,” calculating individual. The wellknown limitations of rational-actor theory, its static quality, its logical antinomies, its vulnerability to arguments of infinite regress, its failure to develop a progressive concrete research program, can all be traced to this starting-point. (Foley, 2003, p. 9)

A great deal of empirical psychological research shows the weakness of the rational model. In the bestselling Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2011) provides empirical evidence conducted over several decades to show the existence of two systems of thought: one that is fast, instinctive, automatic, and emotional and the other that is slower, deliberative, conscious, and logical. There have been a host of critiques also at the level of anthropology that claim that rational choice theory fundamentally misunderstands the way that social agents act. These criticisms have increasingly surfaced in behavioral and finance economics, especially since the 2007–2008 financial meltdown, and have led to a reassessment of the centrality of the rationality assumption on the basis of arguments and empirical data concerning (a) the sociality of choice (the influence of family and friends), (b) the burden and paradox of choice, (c) the hypothetical nature of choice, and (d) various emotional considerations that cannot be accounted for by bounded rationality models that emphasize the limits of memory or cognitive capacity. Some critics argue that neoclassical economics does not have a consistent theory of preference formation and that preferences are open to manipulation. Some of these scholars criticize mainstream economics for not taking into account what

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it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology. The last assumption of self-interest has already been discussed earlier in this entry. It appears that the golden age of homo economicus and rational choice theory has passed, and its orthodoxy based on a logical construct has given way to more detailed descriptions of the way that social agents act. In the same way, events in the real  world like the 1987 stock market crash and the 2007–2008 financial meltdown have shown that macroeconomic policy based on the free market has failed to live up to expectations. Far from being rational, people act out of many different motivations and emotions that are calibrated closely according to age, sex, race, and culture, among other variables. Many critics of neoliberalism have pointed out that there cannot be a free market when the world is dominated by multinational corporations. Robert Reich (2013) exposes the active mythologizing that surrounds the notion that the “free market” knows best: One of the most deceptive ideas continuously sounded by the Right (and its fathomless think tanks and media outlets) is that the “free market” is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government. So whatever inequality or insecurity it generates is beyond our control. And whatever ways we might seek to reduce inequality or insecurity—to make the economy work for us—are unwarranted constraints on the market’s freedom, and will inevitably go wrong. 

He continues: In reality, the “free market” is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); (2) on what terms (equal access to the internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); (3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); (4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); (5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on. These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them. (http://robertreich.org/post/61406074983)

The Free Market: A Convenient Fiction? The “free market” is both a theoretical and an ideological construct that has a complicated history in the evolution of the discipline of economics. It has a history,

and its meaning has changed according to the context of its use in theory and policy. The notion of the free market has often been legitimated by reference to a literature and discourse that is both theological and philosophical in nature. The notion of the free market has also been sustained by appeal to its naturalness as a necessary outcome of impartial economic laws—an autonomous, self-regulating system that spontaneously and without conscious design by any one agent achieves natural equilibrium if left to itself and produces universal wealth. Critics have deconstructed these claims, demonstrating that this fabrication is a convenient fiction wedded to the status quo and to a form of crony capitalism (see, e.g., Aschoff, 2015). In The Great ­Transformation, Karl Polanyi argues that the free market has never existed. Fred Block and Margaret S­ ummers note that the idea of an autonomous economy independent of government and political institutions is a “stark utopia”  both unrealizable and doomed to failure. Against free-market purists, other critics, such as Mark Martinez, have demonstrated that far from being antithetical to markets, states are actually instrumental in creating markets and making them work. In a globalized world where “state capitalism” describes the Chinese economy and has also been applied to the United States, where certain enterprises are deemed “too big to fail,” the notion of the free market seems curiously more and more inapt. “Free trade” increasingly is constituted in regional trade agreements often engineered as an arm of foreign policy. Flows and exchange mechanisms of global finance are manipulated by big banks as with the Libor scandal, and ­migrations of people are a result of widespread and semipermanent conflict zones rather than true labor need. In this environment, the fiction of free market– driven globalization appears more an ideological justification of the massive inequalities between and within countries and the massification of wealth of the few rather than an impartial description of economic and political processes. Michael A. Peters See also Conservatism; Economics and Political Behavior; Globalization; Keynesian Economics; Liberalism; Meritocracy; New Left; Poverty Trap; Social Class

Further Readings Amir-ud-Din, R., & Zaman, A. (2015). Failures of the “invisible hand.” Forum for Social Economics, doi:10.1080/ 07360932.2015.1019536 Aschoff, N. M. (2015). The free-market fantasy. Jacobin. https:// www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/free-market-consciouscapitalism-government/

Free Rider Problem Basu, K. (2010). Beyond the invisible hand: Groundwork for a new economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Block, F., & Sommers, M. (2014). The power of market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s critique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foley, D. K. (2003). Rationality and ideology in economics. Lecture in the World Political Economy course at the Graduate Faculty of New School UM, New School. Available at http://www.uvm.edu/~wgibson/PDF/Foley_rationality.pdf Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Green, D., & Shapiro, I. (1994). Pathologies of rational choice theory: A critique of application in political science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hollis, M., & Nell, E. (1975). Rational economic man. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kahneman, D. (2001). Thinking fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kennedy, G. (2009). Adam Smith and the invisible hand: From metaphor to myth. Econ Journal Watch, 6(2), 239–263. Martinez, M. (2009). The myth of the free market: The role of the state in a capitalist economy. Boulder, CO: Kumarian Press.  McFadden, D. (2013). The new science of pleasure. NBER Working Paper No. 18687. http://www.nber.org/papers/ w18687.pdf?new_window=1 Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation (Foreword by R. M. MacIver). New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart. Samuels, W. (Ed.). (2014). Erasing the invisible hand: Essays on an elusive and misused concept in economics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (1790). The theory of moral sentiments. Library of Economics and Liberty. Available online at http://www .econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html Smith, A. (1904). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (E. Cannan, ed.). Library of Economics and Liberty. Available online at http://www.econlib.org/ library/Smith/smWN.html Steger, M. B. (2002). The new market ideology: Globalism. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Weintraub, E. R. (2002). Neoclassical economics. In The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Available online at http:// www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NeoclassicalEconomics.html

Free Rider Problem The free rider problem is a concept that has primarily been studied in economics. It has also been examined to make sense of the behavior of states in international relations, particularly the small ones. Free riding in international relations is a strategy that small states can adopt. At times, free riding is also an accusation made by large states against small states. The free rider problem is very important, as it concerns the reasons states decide to join

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an alliance and how they actually behave within an alliance. This entry provides an overview of the free rider problem by looking at what it is and what its consequences are. It then uses the example of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to exemplify it ­ and discuss it further. In so doing, this entry discusses key examples of free riding in international relations.

Overview In international relations, states have different military capabilities and interests. A state such as the United States of America, for example, tends to spend far more than other states for its military and has global interests. Yet in order to pursue its interests, even a great power such as the United States needs allies in various parts of the world. The problem of free riding concerns the relationship between a large country such as the United States and smaller states. It manifests itself when small states decide to join an alliance with a large or great power in order to counter a common threat to their security or to advance common interests in international relations. The free rider problem can become apparent as the new alliance made up of large and small states coordinates its efforts to contain a threat to its member states’ common security. The reason for this is that the large states will most likely be able to spend more than small states do for military purposes. Therefore, the latter have an incentive to “free ride,” meaning not to share the burden of defense spending with the large states.

Common Defense as “Public Good” To discuss the free rider problem further, it is important to look at the concept of public good. In so doing, it is necessary to borrow from the discipline of economics. A public good has two characteristics: first, it is a good  that cannot be withheld from any member of a ­particular group. In economics, this is the principle of nonrivalry. Second, the public good is such if it is made available to other members of the group at little or marginal cost. In economics, this is the principle of nonexcludability. Public goods are subsequently nonrival and nonexcludable, as they can be made available at little or no additional cost to others once they have been made available to one individual. Public goods may include education, street lighting, clean air, and many others. For example, an individual benefiting from street lighting does not preclude another individual’s benefiting from it. The same type of reasoning can be applied to international relations. In particular, the free rider problem is a consequence of seeing the security provided by an

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alliance among states possessing different military capabilities and interests as a “public good.” If a state initially provides a public good to a group of other states, these have a minor incentive to pay for it. Within an alliance, if the large states halved their defense spending, it would be far more noticeable than if small states halved their defense spending. Why should the large states put up with free riding? This question is at the center of debates as to how allies should behave within an alliance and the reasons an alliance survives despite the incentive of small states to free ride. For the large state, putting up with free riding is still better than engaging in arms races with other states, and it is able to maintain a hegemonic position within the alliance. Put differently, the large state pays more for the security of the alliance as a whole, and it ends up providing free security to small states, but it is able to remain influential within the alliance. Small states have the incentive to accept large states as hegemonic in order not to spend resources for their military. In the theory of free riding in alliances as put forward by Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, the smaller a state within an alliance, the more likely it will be to engage in free riding.

Do Small States Always Free Ride? Because free riding is an incentive for smaller states to enjoy a public good such as security and protection from a threat without having to pay for it, it is possible to expect more and more states to become interested in enjoying the benefits of free riding. This can lead, in turn, to a system in which the larger states may no longer be able to pay enough for more states to enter the alliance. The subsequent result of this process of overconsumption of the “public good” provided by the alliance can be the breakup of the alliance itself. Yet the issue of free riding of small states should not necessarily be taken for granted. In some circumstances, it is possible to assume that small states may choose not to free ride. Negotiation and bargaining can take place within an alliance, and Glenn Palmer has shown that small states have an incentive to free ride by looking at the shortterm utility of their behavior: as they join an alliance, small states enjoy the benefit of protection by relying on others to pay for it. Nevertheless, as small states bargain with large states over time, Palmer argues that while small states may not increase their defense spending by the same amount as the large state, they will still increase their defense spending by a certain amount. To review, if a large state increases its defense spending, the first time it does so, smaller members of the alliance will have an incentive to free ride. Over time, however, small member states will begin to contribute to the alliance,

even if not in the same way or amount as the large members of the alliance. The negative effect of free riding (small states not contributing anything to the alliance) can therefore be tamed with a milder version of free riding (small states contribute something to the alliance in accordance with their own resources). Other circumstances need to be taken into account when assuming that small states will free ride on the hegemon. Large states within an alliance can resort to diplomatic and economic sanctions toward small states that free ride. The latter can run the risk of abandonment and even exclusion from the alliance. Therefore, while it is plausible to assume that small states will free ride on the large states, the dynamic within the alliance may prevent small states from continuing to free ride.

The Free Rider Problem in NATO During the Cold War An example that can be used to exemplify the free rider problem in international relations is the formation and working of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Formed in April 1949 with the aim of containing the Soviet Union (USSR) at the beginning of the cold war, NATO had 14 founding members in North America and Western Europe. Discussions between the United States and its European allies over the need to share the burden and contribute to collective security in a fair way have haunted NATO throughout the long decades of the cold war. On several occasions, Washington put pressure on its European allies to spend more on defense to contribute to the alliance’s objective of containing the USSR. The free rider problem in NATO, with smaller European members of NATO benefiting from the United States paying for their defense, was therefore an important issue during the cold war. Article 3 of the Washington Treaty, which established NATO, was about avoidance of the free rider problem: “In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” While the specific amount of contributions by each member state is not included in Article 3, Washington’s aim was to avoid the free rider problem. With Article 3, Washington could also maintain significant influence over its European allies. The latter, in order to enjoy the benefits of being part of NATO, would need to promise to bolster their defense spending to contribute to the alliance’s purpose. The intra-NATO discussions on the free rider problem were not of easy solution: members of the alliance could not be deprived of security once they were in, but should they not contribute their fair share, undersupply

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of security would take place, to the detriment of the alliance’s purpose. Yet for the United States this would be a very high price to pay, as its allies in Western Europe were too important to contain the threat from the Soviet Union.

The “Mansfield Resolutions” During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States decided to put pressure on its European allies with the aim of countering the free rider problem. The American message to the Europeans was particularly noticeable through the so-called Mansfield Resolutions. Mike Mansfield, a U.S. Senator from Montana who served between 1953 and 1977, was not satisfied with the amount of defense spending by NATO’s European allies, and he therefore introduced a number of resolutions through which the United States should reduce the amount of troops stationed in Europe. With the ­Europeans having recovered economically from World War II, so Mansfield thought, they were able to share the burden of defense with the United States and contribute to the common defense. Mansfield’s resolutions were ultimately not implemented, and the United States did not diminish the number of troops stationed in Western Europe during the cold war, but the message was clear: the free rider problem bothered U.S. administrations, and European smaller allies could not take their defense for granted. The United States was suffering economically during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the perception in Washington that its European allies had become more economically competitive was widespread. By putting pressure on its European allies to spend more on defense, American policy-makers were convinced that more money would become available to be spent in domestic industries, providing the United States could begin to spend less on defense and rely on its European allies for defense purposes a bit more.

Possible Solutions to the Free Rider Problem Mancur Olson Jr. and Richard Zeckhauser’s argument that the output of an alliance, security, is a public good, seemed to explain the situation of NATO during the cold war rather well. In a situation in which the free rider problem dominates within an alliance, large members of the alliance will most likely end up paying far more than their smaller peers pay, and the latter, in turn, will have an incentive to free ride. To avoid the free rider problem, a possible solution could be for members of an alliance to set up a supranational authority, an independent institution that can have the legitimacy and power to put pressure on them to pay their fair share of

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the defense burden. A supranational authority can introduce taxation by treating all beneficiaries of the good provided by the alliance as one and then allow them to divide the cost equally. However, this can prove quite difficult in an international context. States are less likely to give up their authority to a supranational organization that decides how much taxes they should pay toward an alliance. It is more likely that individual governments of an alliance will seek to convince their population to pay more taxes toward defense. Even in this case, however, it is difficult for all citizens to accept paying more taxes for defense purposes for two reasons. First, a threat to the security of the country may not be in place to the extent that citizens are convinced to have to pay more taxes for defense purposes. Second, several citizens, especially antiwar protesters, may dislike the issue of paying more taxes to fund the defense effort. The government in place in a small country may find itself under pressure from large states that accuse it of free riding and from its own citizens who prefer to pay taxes for goods other than international security. A second possible solution is for the large states to play the card of altruism. Large states can ask individual member states of the alliance to donate to the cause of the alliance. In this scenario, some individual states could make a high donation, others could make a small donation, and yet others may continue to free ride as usual. While counting on other member states’ altruism can indeed contribute to raising funds for the common purpose of defense, it will not eliminate the issue of free riding and could contribute to further divisions among member states who seem more willing to contribute and those who do not make any such effort. A third way to try to eliminate the free rider problem is to make a public good private. In this way, the large state within the alliance will allow into the alliance only those states that are definitely willing to pay for the provision of the good. Nevertheless, the large state may lose allies in the process, those that free ride but that may prove useful from a strategic point of view.

The Free Rider Problem in NATO in the Post–Cold War Period With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the cold war came to an end. NATO, responsible for containing the military threat from the Soviet Union during the cold war, apparently lost its reason to exist. NATO, however, survived and expanded with new members in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, NATO has 28 members. With more members, the free rider problem becomes even more visible when the United States calls on allies to contribute more resources to the defense burden.

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NATO’s purpose in the post–cold war period has been as varied as the tasks of the alliance itself, but U.S. policy-makers are still preoccupied with the free rider problem. For example, in 1998, with NATO having intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina and preparing to intervene against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the U.S. ambassador to NATO warned that support for the alliance would erode and European allies would be seen as free riders unless European allies could contribute more force-projection capabilities. It is a different scenario: during the cold war, the purpose for NATO was to contain the Soviet Union, so the United States was worried about the free riding of small members of NATO. U.S. support for the alliance was key, however, as the threat from the Soviet Union was the glue that kept the NATO allies together. In the post–cold war period, U.S. support for NATO itself would not be taken for granted without a common and overarching threat to the alliance. Therefore, U.S. support for NATO has become more dependent on the need for European allies to contribute their fair share to the defense burden and force-projection capabilities. In every major NATO operation carried out during the post–cold war period, from Bosnia (1995) to Kosovo (1999), from Afghanistan (2001–ongoing) to Libya (2011), the free riding issue has been present. The concerns over free riding in these operations had less to do with the actual budget devoted to defense against containing a common threat, as was the case during the cold war, and more to do with supporting the United States in peripheral regions, thus showing how NATO has changed in the post–cold war period but how the free rider problem has persisted.

Contemporary Relevance of the Free Rider Problem in NATO In 2006, NATO provided clear guidelines to its members over the amount to spend on defense. Up until then, it was not clear how much the smaller states should contribute for large states not to see them as free riders. Member states of NATO committed themselves to pay 2% of their national gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. Currently, few member states of NATO are able to spend 2% or more of their GDP on defense, making the debate over the free rider problem very contemporary. As long as the United States maintains high military spending, leadership of NATO, and global interests, it is possible to assume that there will continue to be occasional declarations by U.S. policymakers against free riding. The charge of free riding can indeed serve a political end in order to ask smaller states to contribute their fair share and relieve the United States of tasks in international relations. If smaller states

increased their defense budgets, they could complement American military power. Yet a small state may have less of an incentive to increase its defense spending without the global interests of the United States. The small state may also assess threats in a different way than the United States does. Therefore, what might look like free riding as strategic exploitation of the large state by the small one could in fact be a strategy that the small state adopts in times of low threat assessment. Lorenzo Cladi See also Capitalism; Citizenship; Egocentrism; Equity Theory; Free Market; Hierarchy of Needs; Irrationality; Selfish Gene; Tragedy of the Commons

Further Readings Andreoni, J. (1988). Why free ride? Strategies and learning in public goods experiments. Journal of Public Economics, 37, 291–304. Lanoszka, R. (2015). Do allies really free ride? Survival, 57(3), 133–152. Lepgold, J. (1998). NATO’s Post–cold war collective action problem. International Security, 23(1), 78–106. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (1949, April 4). The North Atlantic Treaty. Washington, DC. Olson, M., & Zeckhauser, R. (1966). An economic theory of alliances. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 48(3), 266–279. Palmer, G. (1990). Corralling the free rider: Deterrence and the western alliance. International Studies Quarterly, 34(2), 147–164. Snyder, G. (1962). Strategy, politics, and defense budgets. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Thies, W. J. (2003). Friendly rivals: Bargaining and burdenshifting in NATO. New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

F-Scale After the Second World War (1939–1945), a number of important programs of psychological research were launched with the goal of gaining a better understanding of human behavior in support of dictatorial regimes. During the 1930s particularly, not only had Hitler and Mussolini gained widespread support in Germany and Italy, but fascism also gained strong support in other Western societies, including in Britain where the profascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley led the so-called Blackshirts. Mosely enjoyed some support among both the general public and the British aristocracy. Although the  war against Germany’s Nazi regime changed the

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situation, the question remained as to why antidemocratic leaders had enjoyed such widespread support in Western democracies and why such terrible atrocities were committed during the war. The F-scale, developed to measure the authoritarian personality, was an outcome of one of the research programs developed to address these questions. Psychologists were particularly interested in identifying the kind of personality likely to support fascism. Beginning in 1947, the German sociologist Theodor W. Adorno produced a series of influential essays to describe the psychological traits of profascist individuals. As a former member of the Frankfurt school, a predominantly Jewish cohort of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Nazi Germany, Adorno attempted to identify and measure the factors that play a role in anti-Semitic and profascist traits. In 1950, Adorno and his colleagues published The Authoritarian Personality, identifying key personality characteristics of those who score high on the profascist scale, or F-scale. According to Adorno and his associates, the authoritarian personality is characterized by nine traits: conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness,” destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over ­ sex. Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and the psychodynamic developmental model, Adorno and his associates believed these traits were shaped by childhood experiences. Harsh and punitive parenting was assumed to result in deep anger on the part of the child toward the parents. At the same time, the consequent fear of parental disapproval or punishment prompted children to identify with and idolize authority figures later in life. Adorno and his associates also suggested that suppressed homosexuality redirected into outward hostility toward the father could be an explanation for authoritarianism; such a homosexual inclination would likely also be suppressed for fear of rejection or penalization by the father. However, empirical data have not confirmed this part of the theory. The California F-scale was created in order to measure ethnic prejudice and profascist tendencies without explicitly citing members of minority groups or specifically referencing overt fascist ideology. It is one of the most broadly used scales of the post–World War II era. Due to its correlation with variables such as ethnic prejudice and right-wing political beliefs, the scale and the succeeding modifications appealed to social scientists and have been utilized in hundreds of studies as a unifying concept for attitudes and presumed personality variables. Four forms of the California F-scale have been widely used: Form 78, 60, 40–45, and 60a, named

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respectively for the number of items (questions) they include. The content of the items was determined on the basis of a combination of earlier scales of fascist attitudes, foundational ideas of psychoanalytic theory, interview comments from high-scoring subjects, and also how well the items fit into the authors’ evolving notion of the authoritarian person. Each item was scored on a seven-point scale in which 1 represented strong disagreement and 7 represented strong agreement. Omissions were given a mid-point value of 4. Examples of items from the F-scale are as follows: •• Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn. •• Nowadays, when so many different kinds of people move around and mix together so much, a person has to protect himself especially carefully against catching an infection or disease from them. •• No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative. •• When you come right down to it, it’s human nature never to do anything without an eye to one’s profit.

The Authoritarian Personality was heavily criticized and even attacked as propaganda masquerading as ­science. A major criticism of the F-scale concerns the construction of the items. The one-direction wording, according to critics, lent itself to acquiescence (the tendency to agree with any statement regardless of content) and thus confounded the results. Consequently, attempts were made to balance the F-scale by including “reverse” items (questions that are worded so that a high authoritarian would disagree rather than agree with them). Arguably the most notable of these modifications was through the research of the Canadian-American psychologist  Bob Altemeyer, who from the 1970s developed the Right Wing Authoritarian Scale (RWA). While the F-scale originally purported to measure all types of authoritarianism, Altemeyer decided that authoritarianism was necessarily right wing. In his scale, Altemeyer preserved two items from the original F-scale: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn” and “Young people sometimes get rebellious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and settle down.” Despite modifications over the years, the basic concept of the authoritarian personality has endured since the 1950s. Today, research on the authoritarian tendency is still highly relevant, as dictatorships continue in many parts of the world and new forms of authoritarianism gain traction, particularly associated with r­ eligious movements such as Islamic fundamentalism. ­Terrorists and radical extremists, including extremist nationalists, would likely score high on the F-scale. Typically individuals who identify with fundamentalist ideologies

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tend to be intolerant of ambiguity, dogmatic, closedminded, and lacking in cognitive flexibility—the classic cognitive style associated with high scores on the F-scale. Madeleine Blackman and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Authoritarian Personality; Authoritarianism; Dictatorship; Fascism; Personality Traits

Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, B. W. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper. Christie, R. (1991). Authoritarianism and related constructs. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, L. S. Wrightsman, & F. M. Andrews (Eds.), Measures of personality and social psychological attitudes (pp. 501–577). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.

Functionalism Functionalism is one of two general approaches the Supreme Court uses to decide constitutional disputes implicating the separation of powers. Functionalism constitutes a pragmatic approach to the separation-ofpowers doctrine that carefully considers the costs and benefits that a nontraditional administrative structure would provide. By way of contrast, formalism—the other general approach the Supreme Court uses to frame and decide separation-of-powers questions— seeks to strictly enforce the framers’ scheme of divided and separated powers; under this approach, federal courts generally deny Congress and the president discretion to create new administrative structures ­ that redistribute legislative, executive, and judicial functions among the three branches of the federal ­government. This entry discusses functionalism as an aspect of the separation-of-powers doctrine, the constitutional foundations of functionalism and the separation of powers, and the Supreme Court’s vacillation over time between functionalist and formalist reasoning in major separation-of-powers decisions. Functionalism tends to generalize the underlying purpose of specific constitutional assignments of power to particular branches of the federal government rather than apply such commitments in a strict and narrow fashion. Functionalism usually involves balancing these textual commitments with a larger set of concerns related to creating and maintaining an efficient and effective federal government. This does not mean that functionalism will

permit any and all departures from the framers’ model of carefully separated legislative, executive, and judicial powers among the three branches of the federal government. However, functionalist analysis, unlike formalist separation of powers analysis, always will consider carefully the potential public ­policy benefits associated with a novel administrative structure.

The Separation of Powers and Functionalism The framers of the U.S. Constitution intentionally broke with the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty by strictly dividing and separating legislative, executive, and judicial power. In the United Kingdom, both in the late 18th century and today, no constitutional limits exist on Parliament’s authority to enact legislation or to decide how such legislation should be implemented. Moreover, sitting members of Parliament staff all major executive branch offices. Finally, until 2005, when Parliament created the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the House of Lords served as the UK’s highest appellate court. Under the traditional understanding of the British constitution, the queen in Parliament constitutes the highest legislative, executive, and judicial authority. The British model incorporates a balance rather than a separation of governmental powers. By way of contrast, the U.S. Constitution strictly divides and separates legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It vests all legislative powers in Congress, all executive powers in the president, and all judicial powers in the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. The U.S. Constitution reflects a strong commitment to separating and dividing powers among the three branches of the federal government. In so doing, the framers consciously and intentionally broke from the British constitutional model. The U.S. commitment to the separation of powers constitutes an effort to prevent government oppression; the framers of the Constitution genuinely feared that vesting legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the same hands would create an unacceptable risk that government power would be abused. Inspired by ­ the ­ writings of classical political thinkers, such as ­Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, as well as celebrated Enlightenment political theorists, such as Montesquieu, the framers firmly believed that separating and dividing the government’s powers was essential to protecting individual liberty. Unfortunately, however, the framers did not anticipate the rise of the modern administrative state. In the late 19th century, starting with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, Congress began to experiment with novel administrative structures that

Functionalism

vested legislative, executive, and judicial powers in a single independent administrative agency. Congress believed that expert agencies could be trusted to undertake legislative, executive, and judicial duties. Congress’s decision to vest legislative, executive, and judicial powers in federal agencies presented a difficult constitutional issue for the federal courts. Vesting federal administrative agencies with legislative, executive, and judicial functions plainly united powers that the framers sought to divide and separate; yet the creation of expert administrative agencies presented the clear benefit of having expertise rather than politics inform agency regulation and enforcement. As Congress delegated more and broader responsibilities to independent federal agencies, the potential separation-of-powers objections became increasingly acute. During the early years of the New Deal, the Supreme Court applied a strict, highly formal analysis to disallow many of Congress’s administrative ­innovations. The justices used legal doctrines, such as the nondelegation doctrine, to invalidate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to create a bevy of new, independent, expert administrative agencies. By the late 1930s, however, with significant changes in the membership of the Supreme Court, the justices began to apply a more deferential, functional analysis to ascertain whether novel administrative structures were consistent with the separation-of-powers doctrine and invariably found them to be constitutional. By the 1960s, however, faith in agency expertise began to give way to critiques of the administrative state grounded in public choice theory. Critics of the federal administrative state argued that federal agencies were subject to capture by the entities that Congress charged them with regulating. Moreover, because independent federal agencies—those whose heads are protected from presidential removal by statute—are ­ politically insulated from direct forms of presidential oversight and control, critics of the New Deal’s vision for the administrative state began to argue that the federal courts should more closely police the structure of federal agencies and the scope of their powers. By the 1980s, the Supreme Court once again began to issue decisions that invalidated novel administrative structures and procedures under the separation-of-powers doctrine. Then and now, however, the justices have not been consistent in using formalist or functionalist analysis when deciding separation-of-powers questions.

The Main Characteristics of Functionalism Functionalism takes careful account of the potential costs and benefits of novel administrative structures. Thus, the fact that an executive agency might exercise

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legislative or judicial functions would not automatically render the structure unconstitutional. Rather than simply asking which branch the Constitution assigns a particular task and ascertaining whether that branch is, in fact, performing the task (as would be the case in a formalist analysis), a functionalist analysis considers the reallocation of power across branches a relevant but not controlling consideration. Under a functionalist analysis, even relatively substantial reallocations of powers among the three branches could be constitutionally permissible if sufficiently offsetting public policy benefits justify the departure from the framers’ model. Functionalist analysis does take into account whether the task being reassigned lies at the core or periphery of a particular branch’s constitutional authority. Thus, an effort to reassign core presidential powers, such as the conduct of foreign and military affairs, would require significantly stronger justifications than the reassignment of tasks that rest at the periphery of executive power. In all cases, however, a reviewing court carefully considers the costs and benefits associated with a novel administrative structure.

Major Functionalist Supreme Court Decisions Congress permitted the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to hear and decide certain common law claims associated with administrative proceedings before the agency. In CFTC v. Schor, decided in 1986, the Supreme Court rejected a separation-ofpowers challenge to this arrangement. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, explained that the CFTC possessed only a limited power to hear and decide common law counterclaims, both parties had to agree to litigate the common law claims before the administrative agency, and CFTC’s decisions on such common law claims would ultimately be subject to review in the federal courts. Because the reallocation of judicial powers to an executive agency was justified by the clear benefit of permitting all claims related to a particular transaction to be resolved in a single adjudicative proceeding, the Supreme Court permitted Congress to vest a core judicial function with an executive branch agency. Two years later, in Morrison v. Olson, the Supreme Court again used a highly functionalist analysis to reject separation-of-powers objections to the Independent Counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act. Although investigating and prosecuting crimes is a core executive function, an 8–1 majority of the Supreme Court held that the limited scope of an independent counsel’s investigative authority, coupled with the limited duration of an independent counsel’s service, ­

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and the attorney general’s ability to remove an independent counsel for good cause sufficiently mitigated any potential separation of powers objections. The clear public policy need for a politically independent prosecutor, coupled with the structural limits on the scope of an  independent counsel’s authority, justified limiting the  president’s control over a core executive branch function. The Supreme Court also upheld the service of federal judges on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which is responsible for writing and updating the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. Arguably, writing a binding set of rules that sets the applicable sentences for federal crimes was a core legislative task—a duty that Congress should perform. However, in Mistretta v. United States, decided in 1989, the Supreme Court rejected objections to the structure of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The majority, using functionalist reasoning, opined that federal judges historically played a significant role in the sentencing process, and charging a commission staffed with federal judges with writing ­ formal sentencing rules arguably fell within the scope of these responsibilities. To be sure, in other cases, the Supreme Court rejected a functionalist analysis and relied on formalism to invalidate novel administrative structures. The justices disallowed the use of the so-called legislative veto, whereby Congress delegates discretionary power to the executive branch but reserves to a single chamber or even a single committee a formal power to oversee how the executive branch exercises that delegated authority. The Supreme Court also held unconstitutional the appointment of principal executive officers by Congress. Finally, the justices prohibited the vesting of executive duties with government officials removable by Congress (except by impeachment). Each of these decisions reflected formalist rather than functionalist reasoning.

The Roberts Court’s Rejection of Functionalism The Roberts Court (2005–present) has rejected functionalism in favor of formalism in virtually all of its major separation-of-powers decisions. Consistent with this approach, the Supreme Court has held that Article I bankruptcy courts may not hear and decide common law claims because the Constitution requires the resolution of such claims by Article III courts. The Supreme Court also has held unconstitutional a two-tiered system of good cause removal for a board located within an independent federal agency because, in the majority’s view, the two-tiered system of protection against

removal unduly attenuated the president’s ability to oversee the execution of federal law. Finally, the Court has invalidated presidential recess appointments made during pro forma sessions of the U.S. Senate because the Senate rather than the president may determine whether it is in session. In each of these instances, sound reasons existed for permitting the administrative innovation, but the Supreme Court disregarded these policy justifications and instead focused on the nature of the power being exercised and whether the appropriate branch of the federal government was exercising the power in question. Only time will tell if this trend will continue going forward.

Conclusion Functionalism takes the framers’ design for the federal government as an important starting point but seeks to accommodate the needs of the modern administrative state by carefully considering the potential costs and benefits of novel administrative structures. When a reviewing court applies a functionalist analysis, it will almost invariably reject a separation-of-powers challenge to a novel administrative structure. Thus, functionalism reflects a general posture of judicial deference to Congress and the president to structure administrative agencies as they think best. Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr. See also Bureaucratic Politics; Bureaucratic Structure; Democracy; Electoral Systems; Judicial Review; Parliamentarism

Further Readings Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714 (1986). Brown, R. L. (1991). Separated powers and ordered liberty. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 139, 1513–1566. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976). Calabresi, S. G., Berghausen, M. E., & Albertson, S. (2015). The rise and fall of the separation of powers. Northwestern University Law Review, 106, 527–549. CFTC v. Schor, 478 U.S. 833 (1986). Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, 561 U.S. 477 (2010). INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983). Jellum, L. D. (2009). “Which is to be master,” the judiciary or the legislature? When statutory directives violate separation of powers. UCLA Law Review, 56, 837–898. Krotoszynski, R. J., Jr. (2015). Transcending formalism and functionalism in separation-of-powers analysis: Reframing the appointments process after Noel Canning. Duke Law Journal, 64, 1513–1569. Magill, M. E. (2000). The real separation in separation of powers law. Virginia Law Review, 86, 1127–1198.

Functionalism Magill, M. E. (2001). Beyond powers and branches in separation of powers law. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 150, 603–660. Manning, J. F. (2011). Separation of powers as ordinary interpretation. Harvard Law Review, 124, 1939–2040. Mistretta v. United States, 481 U.S. 361 (1989). Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654 (1988).

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Noel Canning v. NLRB, 134 S. Ct. 2550 (2014). Redish, M. H., & Cisar, E. J. (1990). “If angels were to govern”: Pragmatic formalism in separation of powers theory. Duke Law Journal, 41, 449–506. Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S. 462 (2011). Strauss, P. L. (1984). The place of agencies in government: Separation of powers and the fourth branch. Columbia Law Review, 84, 573–669.

G Gender bias is a social preference for, and positive behavior toward, people of one gender over another. Gender bias can appear as subtle or obvious, conscious or unconscious. It is visible in individual actions, thoughts, and beliefs, but not limited to the individual. Gender bias must be understood as embedded in social life and institutions, such as the family, workplaces, schools, and political institutions. This entry provides an overview of gender bias, with a particular focus on how it materializes in economic, educational, and political institutions and changes over time.

take up portfolios like social services and education— arenas traditionally understood as “feminine” and less senior than portfolios like defense or finance. Unpaid household labor is still more frequently performed by women than men. In every national labor force, women’s wages are considerably lower than men’s. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the gender wage gap in the United States is 36%, 32% in Russia, and 19% across Europe. But there are some countries with lower gaps, such as Germany (7%), Slovenia (6%), and Sweden (8%). Because gender bias is associated with the social production of gender inequalities, it is important to understand how gender bias materializes in practice.

Overview

Gender Relations

Gender bias most often involves giving preference to men over women. It can be subtle or explicit. For instance, an individual may hold the biased belief that women are not suited to senior government positions because women “intrinsically” lack the political leadership skills men are assumed to have. A person holding this belief may never voice this opinion explicitly, but he or she may consistently perceive and reward the actions of men more favorably than women. Gender bias can be written very explicitly into laws governing property, work, family relations, reproductive rights, and more. It took the better part of the 20th century for feminist movements to secure full voting rights in most of the world’s nations. Legal barriers preventing women from political participation and realizing the same opportunities and careers as men appear to be diminishing; however, inequalities persist in practice. Men hold more than three quarters of seats in parliaments across the world. When political parties do promote women to ministerial positions, most often women

The term gender is undefined in many discussions of gender bias; however, it is important to consider its meaning before investigating how bias manifests. The commonsense definition of women and men is part of the meaning of gender, but these social categories must be understood in terms of social relationships. Gender is not a simple reflection of natural sex difference. Becoming a woman or a man is the product of a social process, and huge amounts of energy go into to shaping gendered behavior in families, schools, sports fields, workplaces, and other contexts. In the 1970s, the term sex role (later, gender role) came into common use to describe the social norms defining appropriate behavior for women and men. Social role theories and other socialization models of gender assume a one-dimensional transfer of normative ideals to gender development. However, developing a gender identity can involve a number of different trajectories, often ambiguities and contradictions over one’s lifetime. In addition, there are important differences

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within the categories of men and women. During the 1980s and 1990s, social researchers found multiple forms of masculinity and showed that gender hierarchies exist among men, as well as between men and women. The term intersectionality was also developed to describe how gender is coconstituted with inequalities of class, race, sexuality, disability, age, and so on, establishing that multiple gendered social positions exist. Raewyn Connell defines gender as a multidimensional structure of relations that organizes individual and collective action. Through these relations, reproductive bodies (male and female) become part of social life, as the “men” and “women” of our everyday experience. Gender relations are enacted in everyday life, in individual habits, conduct, and speech; they also form a large-scale structure that organizes economies, states, and communication. Gender is both symbolic and material; it is revealed in the uneven division of labor and resources between women and men and in the normative representations ascribing difference in ability, desires, behavior, and traits to men and women.

Gender Bias and Discrimination Gender bias and gender discrimination are overlapping, but distinct, concepts. Both terms refer to behavior that involves the unfavorable treatment of women or men because of their gender. The conceptual focus of gender discrimination is barriers to women’s full participation in social, economic, and political activity. Gender bias extends more widely and is often used to describe the motivational, normative, and cultural dimensions of gender inequalities of all kinds. Gender discrimination takes many forms including sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, and unequal pay for women and men doing the same work. The concept of gender discrimination has been enacted as a political and legal principle. In response to the international feminist movement, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a new convention in 1979. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) defines discrimination against women as any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.

CEDAW and national equal opportunity laws have been successfully achieved in many countries across the

world. Feminists working in a liberal political framework pushed for these reforms, arguing that gender discrimination was motivated by “false beliefs” that women are less capable than men. Feminists commonly argued that it was irrational to exclude women from senior roles in economic and political organizations; it simply didn’t make sense to underutilize half of the population. Organizational measures are intended to remove barriers to women’s advancement. This interpretation of gender discrimination does not fully capture the problem. Gender discrimination is not simply a matter of irrationality or false beliefs. Rather, there are multiple dimensions to gender relations and the exclusion of women from the opportunities afforded to men. Gender bias, as a more general term than gender discrimination, must be understood as embedded in social practice and organizations.

Gender Bias, Organizations, and Change Gender bias is not purely a psychological state; it is a social and political phenomenon expressed through relationships. Following Connell’s approach to gender, we can identify gender bias in four key dimensions of life: 1. Gendered divisions of labor—for example, gendering of occupations, paid and unpaid work 2. Gendered relations of power—for example, forms of authority, control, and force 3. Emotions and human relations—for example, gendered attachments and conflicts 4. Gender culture and symbolism—for example, in language and symbols of gender difference

To illustrate gender bias in practice, the following sections present evidence from studies of work and political life.

Workplaces Gender bias influences the recruitment of workers, interpersonal relations in workplaces, wage levels, and career trajectories. Women are more likely than men to be concentrated in the informal sectors of the global economy, where their work is precarious, poorly paid, and often dangerous. Globally, racial hierarchies and class distinctions coconstitute the gendered organization of work, shaping workplace masculinities and femininities. Gender bias is visible in many aspects of work life. Joan Acker famously argued that organizations are inherently, not accidentally, gendered. Workplaces involve

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gendered divisions of labor (e.g., women disproportionately represented in administrative roles), symbols and images that confirm or express gender divisions (e.g., dresses and suits), and interactions between men and women that enact dominance and subordination (e.g., setting agendas, frequent interruptions). Importantly, gender bias is often subtle and difficult to pinpoint. Patricia Yancey Martin found that unintentional gendering goes on in workplaces; for instance, unsolicited help given by men to women reflects a paternalistic masculinity and stereotype that women “need rescuing.” Cultural and symbolical practices produce and reproduce gender bias in organizations, but they do change over time. Gender difference at work is dynamic and created through what Silvia Gherardi and Barbara Poggio call a kind of “dance” of alignment, based on power relations involving men and women. As women enter management roles, there is a process of adjustment and compromise over change to the gender order, which included women avoiding competition with men. Changing economic dynamics have produced gender biases in favor of women’s employment in some arenas. In many parts of the world, economic restructuring has destroyed male-dominated heavy industry or public ­sector employment, leading to greater workforce participation for women and changed family dynamics. In developing nations, women have been recruited as industrial workers in large numbers, targeted by factory recruiters because of their “traditional” sewing skills and assumed timidity. Economic change can have contrasting effects on different groups of women. For instance, Sonia Montecino found that economic liberalization in Chile favored middle- and upper-class women entering professional employment; however, this shift is enabled through the growth of poorly paid and precarious feminized domestic work performed by much poorer women.

Education Institutions Education in general, and schools in particular, have become both sites of persistent gender bias and crucial sources of gender equality in recent generations. Schools and universities reflect gendered social divisions. For instance, men tend to do most of the teaching of trades, computer technology, and sciences, and women tend to work teaching early childhood education and humanities. Course materials tend to reflect gender biases and normative assumptions about men and women, girls and boys. The gender biases producing inequalities in education, however, have relaxed markedly in recent decades. There has been a worldwide increase in school participation, literacy, and access to advanced education for

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women and girls. Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi and Valentine Moghadam found this to be the case in North Africa and the Middle East, though gender inequality continues. In their in-depth study of education in postwar England, Madeleine Arnot, Miriam David, and Gaby Weiner found unprecedented shifts such as the near elimination of gender differences in school participation and retention. The 2003 UNESCO report Gender and Education for All: The Leap to Equality demonstrated the strong global shift toward numerical parity in schooling for girls and boys, especially in primary education. However, numerical parity is not the same as gender equality in curricular and teaching practices, education outcomes, and relations within educational institutions. Gender bias that reinforces inequality can be found in multiple social phenomena, including social expectations about education and employment, family decisions that privilege the interests of boys over girls in education, girls’ household labor and care obligations, pregnancy or early marriage, violence in society and in schools, sexism in the curriculum, prohibitive costs, limited access to education, and more.

Governments and Political Life Women’s absence from the most important political institutions (parliaments, Congress in the United States) is a strong signal of gender bias in political life. In no country do women hold 50% of seats in a parliament or congress. However, there is change afoot. The world average number of women in parliaments has increased from 10% in 1995 to 21% in 2014. Since Sri Lanka elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1960, more than 70 women have been elected as prime ministers or presidents. Developing countries have led the way with first women heads of state in elected governments. Bias toward masculine political culture persists even with women’s greater participation in political life. Commonsense understandings of politics and standards for evaluating performance tend to reflect masculine norms and values. For instance, political success continues to be defined as a competition to define “winners and losers,” not collaboration. The intensity and working hours demanded of politicians is biased toward individuals without caring responsibilities, which works against women who still do the majority of care work at home. Removing barriers to political life is important because state policies reinforce gender inequalities, for instance through biased laws governing families, divorce, reproductive rights, and property rights. In practice, campaigns for reform take a long time, with uneven results. For instance, across the 1980s and 1990s, it was

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the Brazilian military that legalized divorce, and Pinochet’s government in Chile that gave married women full civil rights for the first time, but no improvements to abortion rights were made. Democratization and economic wealth do not always predict gender equality reforms. Multiple dynamics shape policy outcomes, including religious traditions and political ideologies. Positive reforms in end gender discrimination have clearly made differences in women’s lives, but change is highly uneven. Feminists have focused on gender discrimination and equal opportunity legislation to foster organizational change. Importantly, reducing the widespread incidence of gender bias is not simply a matter of correcting false beliefs and policy. Gender bias materializes in many aspects of life. Change is multidimensional, and gender equality is not easily realized. Rebecca Pearse See also Discrimination; Equality of Opportunity; Feminism; Women’s Liberation Movement

Further Readings Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society, 4, 139–158. Chafetz, J. S. (1978). Masculine, feminine or human? An overview of the sociology of the gender roles. Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock. Chappell, L., & Waylen, G. (2013). Gender and the hidden life of institutions. Public Administration, 91, 599–615. Connell, R., & Pearse, R. (2015). Gender: In world perspective (3rd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Davies, B. (1989). Education for sexism: A theoretical analysis of the sex/gender bias in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 21, 1–19. Martin, P. Y. (2006). Practising gender at work: Further thoughts on reflexivity. Gender, Work & Organization, 13, 254–276. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1, 125–151.

Genetic Determinism See Genetic Essentialism

Genetic Essentialism Genetic essentialism is arguably one of the most important social phenomena today, and yet scholars have given it only limited attention. This said, genetic essentialism

can be understood to be a variant of a more general phenomenon that has received thorough investigation by scholars—psychological essentialism. This entry defines psychological essentialism and explains how a minor modification yields genetic essentialism. Also discussed is the relationship between genetic essentialism and the related concept of genetic determinism. The entry concludes with a brief discussion of some of the effects of genetic essentialism and determinism on attitudes and behaviors. The concept of genetic essentialism can be understood as a specific type of psychological essentialism. Psychological essentialism has several well-accepted components. Probably the most critical component is reflected in its name: people believe that categories possess “essences.” An essence is some sort of underlying entity thought to be shared by all category members. This entity—which may be concrete (as in genes) or spiritual (as in a soul)—represents the category’s “true nature” and is believed to be causally responsible for category members’ observed similarities. (See especially work by developmental psychologist Susan Gelman.) For example, the element gold, the species tiger (Panthera tigris), the religious group Catholics, the regional group Europeans, and even a professional group such as accountants are believed by many people to share deep properties or characteristics (essences) that are responsible for creating observable characteristics shared by members of the category. Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify that, while such essentialist perceptions are common and may even be an intrinsic part of human psychology, psychological essentialism is an aspect of human perception of the world and should not be confused with empirical reality. This is why the term is psychological essentialism, as opposed to simply essentialism. Studies have demonstrated that a belief in some type of essence that determines other characteristics perceived to be shared by category members is ­theoretically and empirically associated with several other beliefs. Individuals who believe that an essentialist basis underlies group members’ similarities also tend to (1) view category membership as absolute (as opposed to graded); (2) exaggerate the extent to which individual category members share observable characteristics (i.e., stereotype); (3) see group-linked characteristics as mutually exclusive (if present in one group, then not present in any other group); and (4) understand these similarities to be stable over time and unalterable, most likely because the essence itself is considered unalterable. These four types of belief are often folded into the definition of psychological essentialism.

Genetic Essentialism

Natural Kinds, Human Artifacts, and Determinism It is important to note that not all types of categories are equally likely to be essentialized. In particular, scholars draw distinctions between “natural kind” and “human artifact” categories. A natural kind is a category of objects discovered in nature that would exist even in a world with no humans; examples from the previous list include gold and tigers. Human artifacts are constructed by people, often to serve a particular function, such as clocks or books. Given that the belief in an internal force driving category members’ similarities is fundamental to psychological essentialism, it should be of no surprise that people are more likely to essentialize natural kinds than human artifacts. Human artifacts are clearly the product of external forces (human invention), whereas causal influences on natural kinds are more likely to be internal. What is more surprising is that people also tend to essentialize social categories—such as Catholics, Europeans, and a­ccountants—as if they were natural kinds, when in reality they are more similar to human artifacts (because their boundaries and shared characteristics are largely socially constructed). In short, social groups are perceived by many to be similar to biological species. (See especially work by Myron Rothbart and Marjorie Taylor.) Essences are not always perceived to be biological. Douglas Medin and Andrew Ortony have proposed that, in the human mind, categories possess “essence placeholders.” People fill these placeholders with a variety of idiosyncratic beliefs that range in their specificity and plausibility. Examples of what constitutes essences include souls or spirits, blood or brain structures, and hormones or genes. Thus, the definition of genetic essentialism seems straightforward: It is the belief that genes make up the (mostly) unobservable essence that determines category membership. Genes are perceived to be the substance that creates sharply defined groups with shared, mutually exclusive, and immutable characteristics. In sum, genetic essentialism is a type of psychological essentialism, one where genes have filled the essence placeholder. Calling genetic essentialism a variant of the broader concept of psychological essentialism should not diminish its importance. Numerous scholars have argued that, at least in the contemporary era, genetic metaphors—for instance, “it is in their DNA”— are one of the most common ways in which essentialist beliefs are expressed. All essences are assumed to be deterministic, that is, to serve as the independent and unstoppable creators of a group’s shared, observable characteristics. Genes fill the role of essence so well because they are also assumed by most people to be deterministic. At the

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extreme, genetic determinism is the belief that a ­person’s genome provides a blueprint that defines that person’s every characteristic. DNA is said to be causally responsible for an individual’s unique identity. Applied to social groups, genetic determinism points to genes as directly responsible for shared group characteristics, ranging from distinctive cultural norms to income differences. Genetic determinism need not always be so all-encompassing, however. While it is true that genetic influences tend to be interpreted in deterministic ways (e.g., a person learning she or he has a gene that increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 10% may erroneously believe she or he is certain to develop the disease), most people do not believe that every individual or group characteristic is driven by genes. Most believe that additional causal forces, including socialization and choice, also influence some human characteristics and behaviors. Thus, while genetic essentialism requires genetic determinism as its causal engine, genetic determinism need not always lead to essentialism. It is possible to believe genes determine a handful of traits possessed by a person or group without reducing their entire identity to their genes. It should be emphasized that genetic essentialism and determinism bear little relationship to genetic science. For example, almost no human characteristics or diseases are determined by single genes; genes interact in extraordinarily complex ways with a variety of phenomena (internal and external to the person) during the course of human development; and the genetic diversity within social groups is far greater than any genetic differences found between social groups. Lay belief in the deterministic character of genes and in the existence of significant biological differences between social groups probably stems from psychological essentialism. Susan Gelman has observed this process among children. She finds that children often use biological language when describing human differences. In doing so, they do not appear to begin with biological facts (such as what they learned in school) and draw essentialist conclusions; rather, they begin with essentialist beliefs and search for a cause, such as biology. Gelman argues that this human tendency to assimilate biology to essentialism results in a folk biology that is essentialist. This said, to some extent the relationship between psychological essentialism and lay beliefs about genetics is endogenous, with causation running in both directions. This is because it is also true that exposure to scientific arguments about the role of genes in human behavior encourages people to think in essentialist ways. For example, those who learn that a subset of individuals share a genetic commonality, however small, are more likely to perceive large and permanent differences between that group and others.

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Social and Political Effects The social and political effects of genetic essentialism and determinism vary. Depending on the person, target, and social context, believing that group or individual differences are rooted in genetic differences can be associated with conservative or liberal policy ideas and high or low levels of stigma. The conditions under which genetic explanations may lead predominantly to one type of effect or another are admittedly not very well understood. Genetic determinism can decrease stigma when a negative characteristic has previously been viewed as a moral failing, such as homosexuality, obesity, drug use, or criminality; however, such determinism can also increase stigma to the extent that a person or group’s disliked characteristics are believed to be permanent. Genetic determinism also brings with it deep—and usually unwarranted—pessimism about the possibility ­ for change. At the individual level, this can decrease motivation to pursue healthy behaviors as a means of improving physical or psychological health. At the social level, this can lead to reluctance to engage in helping behavior toward those in need. From a political perspective, genetic determinism misrepresents downward the odds of success of governmental efforts to address social problems, including socioeconomic inequality. Because genetic essentialism exaggerates group differences and renders them permanent in the imagination, it often results in intergroup prejudice and discriminatory behaviors. In fact, according to some scholars, genetic essentialism is synonymous with prejudice. Genetic essentialism has been used by numerous dominant social groups to justify their societal position and associated discriminatory policies. The most notorious example is the German Nazi Party’s use of genetic theories of racial difference to justify their efforts to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. Prior to World War II, many Whites in the United States based their support for racial segregation and African Americans’ disenfranchisement on a belief in the genetic superiority of Whites. This said, note that there are also some instances of members of disadvantaged groups—including African Americans, lesbians and gay men, and women—embracing genetic essentialism as a means of strengthening group solidarity and, in a few cases, even asserting their innate superiority over others. Despite these varied and sometimes unpredictable social and political associations, scholars tend to argue that genetic essentialism and determinism are normatively problematic on balance. There is little question that such phenomena usually exacerbate social divides and lower expectations for change. In some cases, they have contributed to truly catastrophic events. Finally,

genetic essentialism and determinism are epistemically problematic in nearly all instances: They represent flawed theories of the empirical world masquerading as scientific ones. Elizabeth Suhay See also Life Cycle Effects; Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives; Selfish Gene; Sociobiology; Youth and Political Change

Further Readings Allport, G. W. (1979). The nature of prejudice. New York, NY: Basic Books. (Original work published 1954) Dar-Nimrod, I., & Heine, S. J. (2011). Genetic essentialism: On the deceptive determinism of DNA. Psychological Bulletin, 137(5), 800–818. Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Haslam, N. (2011). Genetic essentialism, neuroessentialism, and stigma: Commentary on Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137(5), 819–824. Jayaratne, T. E., Ybarra, O., Sheldon, J. P., Brown, T. N., Feldbaum, M., Pfeffer, C. A., & Petty, E. M. (2006). White Americans’ genetic lay theories of race differences and sexual orientation: Their relationship with prejudice toward Blacks, and gay men and lesbians. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 9(1), 77–94. Keller, J. (2005). In genes we trust: The biological component of psychological essentialism and its relationship to mechanisms of motivated social cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(4), 686–702. Lewontin, R. C., Rose, S., & Kamin, L. (1984). Not in our genes: Biology, ideology, and human nature. New York, NY: Pantheon. Medin, D., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Moore, D. S. (2008). Espousing interactions and fielding reactions: Addressing laypeople’s beliefs about genetic determinism. Philosophical Psychology, 21(3), 331–348. Nelkin, D., & Lindee, M. S. (2004). The DNA mystique: The gene as a cultural icon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Oyama, S. (2000). The ontogeny of information: Developmental systems and evolution (2nd ed.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rothbart, M., & Taylor, M. (1992). Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In G. R. Semin & K. Fiedler (Eds.), Language, interaction, and social cognition. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Genocide Suhay, E., & Jayaratne, T. E. (2013). Does biology justify ideology? The politics of genetic attribution. Public Opinion Quarterly, 77(2), 497–521.

Genocide Genocide––the extermination of human groups––is stereotypically viewed as an irrational and explosive outburst of primordial hatreds. Explosive it certainly is. But it is rarely irrational, and just as rarely apolitical. Perhaps the misapprehension is rooted in the canonical––until recently unique––status of the Jewish ­Holocaust in popular and scholarly understandings of genocide. The Nazis’ depiction of Jews as a satanic force, of their political control as total and universal (despite their manifest defenselessness everywhere the Nazis reached)––it all seems the very nadir of insanity. Much the same could be said of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), the megalomaniacal megamurders of Stalin and Mao, and the lethal barbarism of today’s Islamic State. These genocidal agents seem either prepolitical or suprapolitical, driven instead by primitive urges and millenarian fantasies. Yet in none of these cases, and few others of genocide stretching back to antiquity, are political considerations absent. In the age of the nation-state, they have typically been primary. The Nazi, Stalinist, and Maoist genocides were all driven by clearly articulated imperial ambitions. These regimes aimed to reorder political relationships by establishing tyrannical control over (surviving) populations. Extraction and exploitation of material resources was the fundamental goal. That the Nazi empire was international, and the urbanite ­Stalinist-Maoist project internal vis-à-vis the rural population, should not obscure the core dynamic. Even in the case of the Holocaust, Jews were targeted as political enemies more than “racial” ones––so argues Jeffrey Herf (2006) in an important and convincing contribution. The Khmer Rouge likewise sought to reestablish a Khmer-ruled imperial polity stretching far beyond the borders of “Democratic Kampuchea.” The declared and desired caliphate of the Islamic State génocidaires is both revolutionary toward the international system, and quite conventional in its state-building agenda, as evidenced by its attention to administration, taxation, and public services in the territories it controls. As the field of genocide studies has grown in comparative breadth and deepened in theoretical nuance, the political dynamics of genocide have emerged more clearly. Beyond the macro-level imperial/tyrannical projects just cited, meso- and microlevel mobilizations and organizations of genocidal forces are increasingly

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well studied. Political scientists––among them Leo Kuper, Robert Melson, R. J. Rummel, and more recently Scott Straus––have been prominent in genocide studies since the founding of this eclectic and multidisciplinary field in the 1970s and 1980s. Others political specialists not explicitly identified as genocide scholars––from Hannah Arendt to Stathis Kalyvas––have also been influential. Indeed, the very concept of genocide is a political intervention. It is the brainchild of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish linguistics student who switched his specialty to law in the wake of what we know today as the Armenian genocide (1915–1921). When an exiled ­Lemkin, barely escaping the Nazi extermination campaign against his people, settled on his term genocide, he defined its essence as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (Lemkin, 1944, p. 80). What could “national groups” mean in the absence of a political sphere? How could any such “coordinated” project be implemented without political inspiration, organization, and administration? Even “wild genocides” that are not central-state directed, such as between frontier settlers and indigenous peoples, exhibit a high degree of local or regional politicking and administration. Someone in authority, after all, was promoting the scalping and paying the bounties. Notable too is the extraordinary, possibly unequalled political power of Lemkin’s neologism. “Genocide” (combining the Greek genos––race, tribe––with the Latin suffix -cide, killing) is arguably the most powerful word in the English language. It galvanizes political concern even in its various translations. Remarkable, too, was Lemkin’s political activism to sway the post– World War II international community to his vision. Nearly single-handedly, he haunted the halls of the nascent United Nations, badgering diplomats until they agreed to strike a commission and frame a legally binding instrument. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (ratified in 1948, implemented in 1951) departed somewhat from Lemkin’s original vision. For example, it “privileged” the physical murder of individuals over more amorphous and indirect forms of cultural and social destruction. But it enshrined a revolutionary international political understanding of the rights and vulnerabilities of human groups, especially minorities. Lemkin’s efforts, and those of his allies, stand as one of the 20th century’s most impressive and successful examples of “norm entrepreneurship” aimed at founding a morally infused “prohibition regime.” This entry cites terminology that will be familiar to most students of political science today.

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How successful the prohibition regime has been is open to question. One crucial oversight was evident at the outset. For a concept and phenomenon that seems so inherently political, it is disconcerting that United Nations drafters chose to exclude political groups from the Genocide Convention’s protections. Only “national, ethnical, racial, and religious” groups are encompassed. The banishing of political groups was, of course, highly political. Many have pointed to the obstructionist role of the Soviet Union, with its millions of political enemies lying in mass graves. But the Convention’s Travaux préparatoires (Abtahi & Webb, 2008) demonstrate that other states also objected to including political groups. Such protections, they claimed, might allow rebellious, secessionist, and terrorist groups to mobilize and operate unhindered. Or––another regularly aired criticism–– perhaps political affiliations were simply malleable and provisional, in a way that racial, ethnonational, and religious ones were not. The latter argument is unconvincing. If it is true that political identities can alter––sometimes overnight––­ cannot the same be said for religious ones? Even ethnicity is protean: A Guatemalan may move from an “Indio” to a “Ladino” ethnic identification merely by switching to Spanish rather than an indigenous language, dressing in the European style, and adjusting other minor ­“markers.” Moreover, the emphasis on claimed identities ­overlooks the literally pulverizing significance of imputed ones. No prisoner of the Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot regimes identified as an “enemy of the people.” But tens of ­millions of people died as such. Jews under Hitler were murdered when the genocidal regime imposed a ­political-juridical category of “Jew” upon them––even on those who had long since converted to Christianity, or defined themselves only as “Germans,” thoroughly assimilated to the national-political order. Other lacunae of the prohibition regime surrounding genocide are evident all around us, unfortunately. The unresolved catastrophes in Syria, Iraq, Congo, South Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere remain stains on the human conscience. At the same time, there have been notable advances. Some genocides have been suppressed, and some probably incipient ones prevented, through concerted action by states and alliances of states. Civil societies have played vital roles, by publicizing genocides and protogenocides, and mobilizing to demand action by their political authorities. Almost universally, of course, such interventions evince political calculations. Indeed, they are always driven by them. Sometimes Realpolitik dominates ­blatantly, as with India’s 1971 intervention to crush Pakistani genocide in the territory that would become Bangladesh. Even in this instance, however, Indira Gandhi’s government was under sustained civil-society

pressure to intervene, especially as voiced through the democratic media. A very different and fascinating case is the multilateral intervention in East Timor in 1999, to end the genocidal depredations of the Indonesian army and affiliated paramilitaries, and to secure East Timorese independence. Research suggests that it was civil societies (through furious and often massive protests and public demonstrations in Australia, Canada, Portugal, the United States, and the United Kingdom) that drove nation-states to respond. But if these ­ordinary citizens succeeded in changing the political calculation, its substitute was no less political––merely a shifting of political priorities. A political skein is woven through genocide, “the crime of crimes,” and efforts to confront and prevent it. Adam Jones See also Anti-Semitism; Authoritarianism; Dictatorship; Fascism; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Abtahi, H., & Webb, P. (Eds.). (2008). The genocide convention: The Travaux Préparatoires (2 vols.). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Herf, J. (2006). The Jewish enemy: Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lemkin, R. (2008). Axis rule in occupied Europe: Laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress (2nd ed.). Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange. (Original work published 1944)

Gerontology, Sociopolitical Old age is generally recognized as the life phase that begins at 65 years of age. In gerontology, a differentiation is made between the third age (65 to 85 years) and the fourth age (from 85 years). The former is usually characterized by the preservation of competence, efficiency, and productivity; the latter, however, by a ­ significantly increased level of vulnerability and frailty. It is useful to distinguish between physiological-­ biological, psychological, and social aging. In these three dimensions, development processes follow very different kinds of patterns. In the physiological-­ biological dimension, reductions in adaptation and restitution ability are seen with increasing age: These are manifested in older people’s increased vulnerability or susceptibility to disease. In the psychological dimension, both gains and losses can be found: Gains are observed

Gerontology, Sociopolitical

especially in those mental functions that are based on experience and knowledge. Older people also display special skills in tackling health borderline situations, such as the ability to accept unchangeable limits and to arrive at a modified, viable perspective on life. Losses tend to occur in areas that are linked to the adaptability of neuron clusters, such as short-term memory or the ability to think quickly. In the social dimension, old age is associated with the loss of significant social roles. At the same time, in our society, retiring from their respective occupations gives many people a late freedom as, at this time, they not only enjoy good health but also have satisfactory material resources.

Need for Policy Advice in the Area of Gerontology Politicians often have only scant knowledge of gerontology and yet, in this area, there is a great need for advice. However, it should be remembered here that older people show a significantly higher turnout in elections (a recent example being the referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union). Moreover, in the various national parliaments, the majority of the members are over 50 years old; this alone should suggest an impetus for focusing on aging as a social issue. Aging is a relatively new cultural phenomenon because in former times, human life expectancy was much shorter; for this reason, there is uncertainty on the part of politicians in respect of finding solutions to the demands posed by aging. Owing to this uncertainty, many assumptions, positive or negative prejudices, and stereotypes prevail with regard to aging. Thus there is a risk of discrimination in political decision making (and thus also in the distribution of resources). An example of this discrimination is the “rationing” of health care: With increasing age, there is the risk that necessary medical measures will no longer be implemented if they are associated with high costs.

Potentials of Age The phrase potentials of age refers to a twofold design option, which is to be understood in the sense of an opportunity and a challenge. From an individual ­perspective, there are now better possibilities for older people to fulfill their own life plans, as well as to participate in social development and to engage in ­ activities for the benefit of others and the community. From a societal perspective, potentials of age refers to the opportunity to contribute, by means of social, cultural, and institutional means, to the growing proportion of older people being able to lead independent,

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self- and co-responsible lives for as long as possible. Attention must be directed to reducing social inequalities. A major social issue relates to intragenerational justice; that is, the society should be in a position to effectively support those older people who find themselves in distress, whether health related, social, or financial.

Age-Friendly Culture Age-friendly culture is to be understood as the involvement of older people in social, political, and cultural discourse, as well in social and cultural progress. All too frequently in public discourse, there is a tendency to talk about the elderly but not with them. This is an expression of the neglect of older people, if not covert discrimination. Talking about the elderly, but not talking to them, suggests the assumption that older people are not perceived as active, co-responsible parts of society, that their potentials are not being taken seriously. In an age-friendly culture, elderly women and men are equally heard, are treated with as much respect as younger people. An age-friendly culture does not make generalizations about older people as a category, but respects the uniqueness of being of older women and men. It should be noted that, with increasing age, the proportion of women always clearly exceeds the proportion of men. The intergenerational perspective forms the second feature of an age-friendly culture. Age is integrated into an intergenerational perspective, whereby it must be explicitly stated—and empirical findings support this statement—that there is an active exchange of ideas, knowledge, experience, assistance, and sympathy between the generations. That this be embedded in a generational sequence is an important expression of participation, more so for the elderly than for the young. Prominent examples of this perspective are intergenerational teams and mentoring opportunities in the workplace, as well as sponsorships of older people in civic matters. An age-friendly culture articulates a vital interest in the potentials of age (which can, of course, vary ­considerably from person to person) and creates conditions that are conducive to the realization of such potentials—among these being the introduction of ­ ­flexible retirement age in the world of work (which is not to be construed as a relinquishment of legally defined age limits), as well as the removal of all age limits in the field of civic engagement. Also important are the opportunity structures, such as community centers, where the generations can meet, enriching ­ and supporting each other—an important incentive to realizing potentials in old age.

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An age-friendly culture encounters older women and men, in whom vulnerability is clearly expressed, with respect and sensitivity. It provides sociospatial contexts that promote independence and self-­ responsibility and secure participation—such as places to meet in living quarters; differentiated, target group–specific service systems; and barrier-free ­ ­environments—all of which have a positive impact on the maintenance or recovery of elders’ independence and mobility. In the case of severe physical and cognitive losses in older persons, an age-friendly culture respects the individual’s uniqueness, expresses its respect for the d ­ ignity of this individual, avoids trying to externally determine the quality of life of this person, and denies the ­individual neither the fundamental right of participation nor expert and ethically sound medical care. Any “grading” of human dignity is avoided, as is an agedetermined “downgrading” of the extent and quality of medical and other care. An age-friendly culture is determined to reduce social inequality for older people as a group, and to ensure that every person—regardless of education, income, or social class—receives the social and medical services known to be necessary for his or her specific life situation. An age-friendly culture does not deny the rights, claims, or needs of younger people; rather it endeavors to identify and recognize the rights, claims, and needs of all the generations, whereby no single generation is either preferred or disadvantaged. Andreas Kruse See also Identity Politics; Lobbying; Parental Worldview and Children; Social Influence

Further Readings Ezeh, A. C., Bongaarts, J., & Mberu, B. (2012). Global population trends and policy options. Lancet, 380, 142–148. Finkelstein, L., Truxillo, D., Fraccaroli, F., & Kanfer, R. (Eds.). (2015). Facing the challenges of a multi-age workforce: A use-inspired approach. London, England: Routledge. Torp, C. (Ed.). (2015). Challenges of aging: Pensions, retirement and generational justice. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations. (1983). Vienna plan of the first international action on ageing. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/es/ globalissues/ageing/docs/vipaa.pdf United Nations. (2002). Report of the second World Assembly on ageing. Retrieved from http://www.cpahq.org/cpahq/ cpadocs/UN%20Report%200f%20the%20Second%20 World%20Assembly%200n%20Ageing.pdf

Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Eligible voters in the United States are frequently asked to cast ballots at the polls, but voter turnout tends to lag behind that of other democracies, leading political parties, candidates, community organizations, and academics to seek better ways to motivate turnout. Prior to an election, various interested groups and individuals will engage in get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts meant to encourage voters to participate. These efforts include blandishments to come out to support particular candidates or political parties, or to support or oppose a ballot initiative, as well as nonpartisan and neutral efforts by community organizations interested simply in broadening the electorate, for example in a particular community or among particular types of voters, such as African Americans or youth. There are three major types of variation in GOTV efforts: the method, the message, and the messenger. GOTV efforts include a variety of tactics, ranging from the more personal and labor-intensive methods of doorto-door canvassing and live phone banking, to traditional mass media methods such as television and radio advertisements, and new media methods such as e-mail messages, text messages, and banner advertisements on social networking sites like Facebook. GOTV messages also vary considerably, from messages that cue civic duty to messages that explicitly urge voters to cast their vote for a particular candidate, to messages that suggest or blatantly state that voting is a matter of public record, and that the voter is being monitored. Messages also vary in terms of their content, such as whether they include information about a polling place locations and hours, issue positions of candidates, or whether targeted voters are explicitly asked to pledge to vote. Finally, the messenger varies, from GOTV using actual candidates (or their proxies) to messages delivered by neighbors and friends. All three of these types of variation impact the effectiveness of a GOTV campaign. Overall, the research finds that mobilization matters: When seeking to increase voter turnout, asking ­individuals to vote can have a powerful effect on participation. Methods that are more personal—making a personal connection between the voter and the individual making the GOTV request—that are nonpartisan, and that come from a trusted source, tend to be more effective. GOTV effectiveness also requires a quality campaign; for example, with well-trained canvassers or phone bankers. Most of what we know about the relative power of GOTV comes from the use of randomized field experiments. These experiments derive their power from the randomized division of target populations into treatment

Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts

and control groups. Much as randomized drug trials compare the effectiveness of placebos (e.g., sugar pills) with actual treatments, randomized GOTV experiments randomly assign individuals either to receive an encouragement to vote or a placebo message (or no message at all). For example, individuals in a treatment group might receive a phone call reminding them of an upcoming election, while those in the placebo (control) group would receive a phone call reminding them to change their clocks for daylight savings time or to recycle. Whether a person voted in a given election is public record, allowing for postelection comparison of turnout rates in the two groups. A successfully implemented experiment can then attribute any differences in turnout between the treatment and control groups to the GOTV intervention. Most candidates and campaigns focus on likely voters: those most easily moved to go to the polls. ­ Likely voters tend to be older, White, wealthy, and more educated, among other characteristics. Youth, people of color, the poor, and those with less education are less likely to vote. Research has shown that any targeted group can be effectively moved to go to the polls with a quality GOTV effort, but moving likely voters to the polls is often cheaper and thus a more efficient use of limited resources. Campaigns thus tend to deploy resources strategically, focusing their GOTV on easy-toreach supporters who are likely to vote. Parties and candidates choose who to target based on publicly available registration records, voting histories, and campaign donation records. This makes randomized ­ experiments crucial for truly understanding GOTV effectiveness. At the same time, it also means that most experiments are conducted with nonpartisan organizations or by academics, working independently of parties and candidates, and thus less is known about the effectiveness of partisan campaigns.

The Method Matters Resource-intensive methods that generate a personal interaction between the target voter and the GOTV canvasser are the most effective. Door-to-door canvassing has produced the largest effects on turnout, especially when targeting reliable voters in a low-salience election. Lower propensity voters can also be moved to vote with a high-quality door-to-door campaign, but at a higher cost and with fewer votes generated per contact. Door-to-door canvassing also has a spillover effect, increasing turnout among other members of a household where a voter is successfully contacted. Door-to-door campaigns can also fail. It can be hard to maintain quality control, or to be sure how well canvassers in the field are sticking to their scripts and

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instructions. Canvassers can encounter a variety of challenges, including unfriendly dogs and locked apartment buildings, and it can be difficult to reach target voters who are not often at home. Live phone banks can also generate large increases in turnout, particularly when combined with follow-up reminders just before Election Day. Phone banks also have a variety of advantages over door-to-door canvassing, in that those engaged in the GOTV effort can be more easily supervised, and there are fewer concerns about canvasser safety. The effectiveness of a phone campaign can be boosted if individuals who have been successfully contacted are contacted a second time just before the election. However, compared with door-todoor canvassing, phone banks tend to be less consistent in generating increased turnout; this is particularly true if callers are using poor-quality lists of phone numbers or if contact rates are low. Caller ID and shifts to cell phones make conducting an effective phone bank GOTV effort more challenging today than just a decade ago. Other, less personal GOTV efforts can also generate increases in voter turnout, although these effects tend to be smaller. Mailed postcards or letters that use social pressure are particularly effective. These experiments lead voters to believe that their participation in the upcoming election is being monitored, or even that it will be revealed to their neighbors. Voters tend to dislike the more strongly worded of these messages and have at times even complained to law enforcement officials. Thus, more recent social monitoring GOTV messages have turned to a gentler approach, such as thanking voters for their participation or placing them on voter honor rolls. Other tactics using the media can also increase participation, although the increases tend to be significantly smaller than other methods. Scholars have found that Spanish-language radio advertisements increase Latino voter turnout, and that cable television advertisements can increase youth turnout. Text messages and e-mail messages can also increase turnout, in certain circumstances, as can messages shared via Facebook.

The Messenger Matters Responsiveness to a GOTV effort also varies by messenger. Voters are more likely to answer the phone, open the envelope, or click on the e-mail message from a trusted source. Door-to-door canvassers from the local neighborhood or who match the community demographic (e.g., Latino canvassers in a Latino neighborhood) are more likely to be able to make contact with targeted voters, and those messages are then more likely

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to move individuals to go to the polls. Encouragements to vote via Facebook are more effective when linked to a close friend or are delivered via a personal message (as compared with a banner advertisement). Efforts by community organizations with histories in the neighborhood are more effective than those where canvassers are bused in from afar or who represent an unknown organization. People of color are generally less likely to vote (although Black turnout exceeded White turnout in 2012), but GOTV experiments have found that these communities are also receptive to invitations to participate. This is particularly true when the message comes from a member of the community, and when the message effectively speaks to a salient shared identity. In-language outreach is particularly important when working in Asian American and Latino communities. Not surprisingly, GOTV efforts that are delivered in a language in which the target voter is not fluent are less effective than those delivered in the voter’s preferred language. This includes not just doorto-door and phone bank efforts, but also indirect methods such as postcards and radio advertisements. Effectiveness in these communities also varies by nativity: While naturalized voters are consistently more likely to vote in elections than are U.S.-born voters (by a margin of about 9 to 12 percentage points), U.S.-born Latinos and naturalized Asian American voters are more likely to vote in response to a GOTV effort, compared with U.S.-born Asian Americans and naturalized Latino voters. In conclusion, likely voters are more likely to be the target of a GOTV campaign, particularly those conducted by candidates and campaigns, but even unlikely voters, including youth, those with lower levels of income and education, and minorities, will turn out to vote in response to a quality GOTV effort. Melissa R. Michelson See also Collective Action; Mass Political Behavior; Polling; Social Movements

Further Readings Davenport, T. C. (2010). Public accountability and political participation: Effects of a face-to-face feedback intervention on voter turnout of public housing residents. Political Behavior, 32(3), 337–368. García Bedolla, L.,& Michelson, M. R. (2012). Mobilizing inclusion: Transforming the electorate through get-out-thevote campaigns. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Green, D. P., & Gerber, A. S. (2015). Get out the vote: How to increase voter turnout (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Mann, C. B. (2010). Is there backlash to social pressure? A large-scale field experiment on voter mobilization. Political Behavior, 32(3), 387–407. Michelson, M. R., García Bedolla, L., & McConnell, M. A. (2009). Heeding the call: The effect of targeted two-round phone banks on voter turnout. Journal of Politics, 71(4), 1549–1563. Rogers, T., Fox, C. R., & Gerber, A. S. (2013). Rethinking why people vote: Voting as dynamic social expression. In E. Shafir (Ed.), The behavioral foundations of public policy (pp. 91–107). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Glass Ceiling

and

Glass Cliff

The glass ceiling and the glass cliff are metaphors that point to discriminatory obstacles to the professional upward mobility of qualified women or other minorities, regardless of their actual performances. This entry defines these concepts, gives research illustrations of the phenomena and their causes, and points to real-life examples.

Overview Despite half of the world population being female, only 6.6% of heads of state worldwide were women in 2015. Although the percentage of women increases at lower levels of the hierarchy (e.g., 22% for members of ­parliament [MPs] worldwide in 2014), gender parity in positions of responsibility is an exception. Similarly, ­ ­ethnic minorities’ representations rarely correspond to the average population makeup. Numbers on ethnic minorities’ representation are hard to aggregate because the ­definition of who may be categorized as ethnic minority is more complex than for gender. However, statistics point to a large gap between ethnic representation in the population and in governments. For example, in the ­ 114th U.S. Congress, 6% of politicians in the Senate were non-White compared with 40% in the whole U.S. population. Likewise, in 2015 in the United Kingdom, 4.2% of politicians (House of ­Commons, 5.5% of the House of Lords) were ethnic minorities compared with 12.9% in the general population. Around 2010 in other European countries (e.g., France, Germany, the Netherlands), ethnic minorities made up about 1% of MPs, again not matching the proportion of 5% to 12% in the general population. The glass ceiling and the glass cliff are two distinct concepts that capture the underrepresentation of qualified individuals who belong to stigmatized minority groups in positions of prestige or power. Overall, these notions both focus on the difficulties that minorities face

Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff

in politics and organizations, but they do so at different career stages: The glass ceiling describes the barriers in accessing top positions, while the glass cliff notion concerns the actual experiences of minority individuals who have advanced in the hierarchy. Thus, the latter takes a more dynamic approach that looks into the process of and the experiences surrounding such appointments. Both metaphors were applied to women first and then extended to other social groups with a stigmatized or minority status (e.g., ethnicity, age, sexual orientation) in the context of business and politics.

Glass Ceiling This notion focuses on stereotyping and discriminatory practices that are difficult to see (thus “glass”) but are effective in keeping members from certain social groups from scaling the highest echelons of organizations (thus “ceiling”). The first known usage of the glass-ceiling metaphor goes back to the late 1970s in the United States, but the term only became widely known in 1986 when Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt published their famous article on “The Corporate Woman” in the Wall Street Journal. This metaphor was followed by many other metaphorical concepts such as the concrete ceiling, which refers to the double jeopardy faced by African American women who belong to two stigmatized groups, or the bamboo ceiling, which describes the exclusion of Asians from managerial positions.

Reasons for the Glass Ceiling Research showed that male and female political candidates did not differ in individual characteristics (e.g., critical thinking) that could explain women’s worse ­ election outcomes. However, structural factors such as a lack of access to social networks that are predominated by men, a lack of mentors, or problems linked to workfamily balance hamper women’s careers. In addition, a number of social psychological processes such as stereotyping have been investigated in order to understand gender discrimination in evaluations, promotions, and hiring. Stereotypes Philip Goldberg demonstrated in 1968 that despite giving participants exactly the same article to read, the quality of the article was evaluated to be lower when the author was said to be a woman compared with a man. This finding suggests that inferences, which people draw from the social group to which performers belong, bias performance evaluations. People have expectations for individuals’ behavior and characteristics that derive

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from social knowledge acquired through interactions and observations in society. Gender stereotypes are such knowledge entities that associate certain behaviors, roles, and capacities with men and others with women. In the 1970s, Virginia Schein examined the stereotypes associated with successful managers and with women and men in general. Asking participants about the typicality of a list of traits for these three groups, she found that the traits associated with a manager and a male largely overlapped (e.g., competitive, ambitious), whereas traits associated with women were considered untypical for managers. This phenomenon, called think manager–think male (TMTM), was replicated in different cultures, with different populations (e.g., students, managers). However, since the 1990s only men and not women stick to the TMTM stereotype. Women, meanwhile, perceive managerial traits as compatible with their gender group. But where do these stereotypes come from? According to Alice Eagly’s social role theory, the historical gender division in labor and social roles led to associations of agentic capacities such as strength and power with men and the association of communal competences such as care and warmth with women. As a consequence, men are expected to better fulfil managerial and political roles, and women caregiving roles. In turn, seeing larger proportions of men in agentic professions and larger proportions of women in communal professions reinforces such gender stereotypes. Discrimination A number of experimental studies show that due to this perceived lack of fit between women and managerial roles, female targets face discrimination. For example, female targets are attributed less managerial ability and lower salaries, and they are less likely to be promoted to a position compared with a male target. In addition to this evaluation bias, research initiated by Laurie Rudman on the backlash effect showed that minorities are discriminated against even when they are actually perceived to be competent performers. For example, women who violate expected stereotypical behaviors or status norms (e.g., self-promotion, agency) are perceived as socially deficient (e.g., not nice), which results in social and economic punishments such as hiring or pay discrimination. Women fear such negative reactions and thus hide their successes, which further undermines women’s progress in their careers.

When Minorities Become Leaders Minority groups usually do not face just one barrier in their career that needs to be surmounted; their entire

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careers are full of twists and turns. Although minorities are underrepresented, they are not completely excluded from positions of power. Research in the 21st century started to focus on the circumstances under which women and other minority groups access higher echelons. For example, the analysis of the appointments of female heads of states worldwide between 1960 and 2007 showed that women were likely to be elected in precarious and unstable political contexts, in countries lacking institutionalization, and for positions of limited powers.

Glass Cliff This notion is an extension of the ceiling concept and focuses on the rare members of minority groups who succeed in moving up the hierarchy. It shows that atypical leaders, such as women or ethnic minorities, are more likely to access these positions in risky or precarious contexts. The discriminatory nature of such appointments is invisible (thus “glass”), and there is an increased chance to blame the newly appointed individual for the situation of failure, resulting in serious damage for this individual’s career and a fall down the hierarchy (thus “cliff”).

Evidence for the Glass Cliff Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam initiated this research in 2003 by investigating the circumstances in which women become directors. They accumulated archival data on the stock performances of the largest U.K. companies over the 5 months preceding directors’ appointments. Findings demonstrated that women were more likely to become directors in companies exposed to declining or fluctuating stock performance, whereas their male peers did so following stable stock performance. Such a tendency suggests that bad company performance was not due to a lack of managerial capacities of the female directors, but rather that crisis contexts led to a preferential choice of women. Experimental research replicated these archival results. In such studies, participants typically learned either about a crisis or an improving context and had to choose a qualified person to deal with this situation. Results consistently showed that various types of people (e.g., school and university students, professionals, lawyers) selected female leaders in crisis contexts.

The Political Glass Cliff The glass cliff was also observed in political contexts and for ethnic minority groups. The investigation of U.K. general elections results between 2001 and 2010

revealed that the female and ethnic minority candidates of the Conservative Party were more likely to run in constituencies where the conservatives had not been successful in the past, compared with male and White candidates. In consequence, the minority candidates received fewer votes. Archival findings from French cantonal elections for the Socialist Party in 2007 and from the Canadian federal election for most political parties (between 2004 and 2011) also highlighted glass cliff patterns for ethnic minorities. Again, this pattern of observations was replicated in experimental settings with participants preferring to nominate a woman to run in constituencies with less winnable seats. Thus, one of the factors that may account for minority individuals’ failure in politics is that they are more often exposed to situations where it is impossible to win the election. In the United Kingdom, affirmative action procedures, which match the winnability of seats for which minority and majority candidates run, eliminated such differences in the Labour Party.

Real-Life Examples In the media, many careers of minority politicians were associated with the glass cliff metaphor because they reached powerful positions in unstable or troubled times. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom ­during a severe economic recession. The election of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as first female prime minister of Iceland in 2009 also took place in a period in which Iceland was experiencing one of its worst financial crises. Similar cases can be found all over the world (e.g.,  Julia Gillard in Australia, or Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in ­Liberia). In comparison, examples for ethnic minorities are more difficult to find. Probably the most prominent is Barack Obama’s election in 2008 as the first Black U.S. president, which happened during the United States’ worst recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Although these cases capture instances of crises at the moment of the appointment of women and ethnic minorities, the study of a single case should not serve as proof for the glass cliff as not all components of failure (e.g., level of competence, various other reasons) can be controlled. Only laboratory studies can provide unambiguous information on the causalities.

Reasons for Glass Cliffs Why are minorities the preferred leaders in such risky and precarious contexts? Several (nonexclusive) causes were advanced in the literature, two of which received particularly convincing empirical support.

Globalization

Stereotypes Following the TMTM association, Ryan and her collaborators proposed the think crisis–think female (TCTF) association to account for the glass cliff phenomenon. As explained in the glass ceiling section, gender stereotypes imply that men are expected to display the traditional, agentic, task-oriented way ­ of leading, while women are expected to display a ­communal, relationship-oriented leadership style. The TCTF hypothesis states that feminine leadership styles are perceived as more suitable during a crisis. As a consequence, women should be perceived as better suited to deal with a crisis. According to experimental evidence, this preference for communal leadership in crisis contexts occurred mainly when the leader’s mission was to endure or take the blame for the crisis, or to deal with people, but not when the mission was to directly improve the economic situation. The stereotype content model by Susan Fiske and her collaborators states that any kind of low-status group is associated with such feminine or communal traits (and high-status groups with agentic traits). Thus, not only women but any low-status groups are stereotyped as warm, friendly, and helpful and thus potentially fit the TCTF expectations. Signaling Change Experimental research found that, in troubled times, people wanted the situation to change and thus chose an atypical candidate who could transmit such a message to clients and investors or, in a political context, to electors. Since the typical leader is a man, and possibly a member of a majority ethnic group, signaling a change consists in choosing women or ethnic minorities. Conversely, in prosperous times, signaling a change is unnecessary or even harmful; thus people tend to stick to typical leaders (i.e., men).

Conclusion In the 21st century, research on the barriers minorities face shifted from a mere investigation of these barriers to an examination of the conditions in which hierarchies are scaled. Although minority individuals made progress, the quality of such positions involves the risk to fail, to be criticized, and to experience stress due to the high potential of conflict, blame, and difficult underresourced working conditions. Glass cliff appointments may thus lead to opt-out decisions in which minorities decide to leave such discriminatory and precarious contexts, thereby reinforcing the glass ceiling. Fairness, however, requires that minorities should be given the opportunity to make careers not only in

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precarious but also in safe contexts, and if chosen for troublesome contexts, they should be equipped with the same social support as majority individuals for handling such situations. Clara Kulich and Vincenzo Iacoviello See also Discrimination; Gender Bias; Stereotypes

Further Readings Barreto, M., Ryan, M. K., & Schmitt, M. T. (2009). The glass ceiling in the 21st century: Understanding barriers to gender equality. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Bruckmüller, S., Ryan, M. K., Rink, F., & Haslam, S. A. (2014). Beyond the glass ceiling: The glass cliff and its lessons for organizational policy. Social Issue and Policy Review, 8, 202–232. doi:10.1111/sipr.12006 Kulich, C., Ryan, M. K., & Haslam, S. A. (2014). The political glass cliff: Understanding how seat selection contributes to the under-performance of ethnic minority candidates. Political Research Quarterly, 67, 84–95. doi:10.1177/ 1065912913495740 Ryan, M. K., Haslam, S. A., & Kulich, C. (2010). Politics and the glass cliff: Evidence that women are preferentially selected to contest hard-to-win seats. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 34, 56–64. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2009 .01541.x Ryan, M. K., Haslam, S. A., Morgenroth, T., Rink, F., Stoker, J., & Peters, K. (2016). Getting on top of the glass cliff: Reviewing a decade of evidence, explanations, and impact. Leadership Quarterly, 27, 446–455. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua .2015.10.008 Schein, V. E. (2001). A global look at psychological barriers to women’s progress in management. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 675–688. doi:10.1111/0022-4537.00235

Globalization Although globalization is considered an essential topic of inquiry among diverse social science disciplines and technical and scientific fields, the topic has not generated widespread interest within psychology. Reasons for this may reside in the nature of globalization’s multilevel complexity, requiring transdisciplinary ­ approaches for linking macro-level forces and events to individual and collective behavior. Western psychology, the dominant global professional and scientific psychology, continues to locate behavioral determinants in the immediacy of the situation, and in the individual human psyche.

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Globalization

As a number of authors have noted, it is important for psychology, as a science and profession, to expand its theoretical and conceptual models of behavior to become more inclusive of global levels of political, economic, technical, and cultural events and forces (e.g., international and civil wars, global financial systems, mass migrations, disease epidemics, famine, population growth, international terrorism, criminal cartels, and climate change). Globalization can be considered the major macro-level force shaping individual and collective human and natural life. Although it is not acknowledged to be so, globalization as a process and product should be considered the core variable for political psychology inquiry. While subspecialties within psychology (e.g., social, community, environmental) study macro-level topics such as poverty, migration, population, racism, and war, there has been a reluctance to include globalization in training and research activities. However, psychology’s reliance on conventional psychological theories and models has proven insufficient to accommodate the rapid and profound sociotechnical changes connecting our lives and destinies to international events and forces. This is globalization! Thus, new “psychology” models are needed that accommodate (1) international and global problems; (2) multiple conceptual levels of analysis; (3) multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multisector research approaches; and (4) the ethnocentric (Eurocentric) biases currently dominating psychology’s assumptions and premises. Understanding human behavior apart from its political, economic, social, and moral determinants limits understanding. Some theorists have called for a the development of a new psychology—a global psychology—defined as a meta-discipline, or superordinate discipline, characterized by premises, methods, and practices commensurate with global levels of scope, relevance, and applicability. The rationale for this need is apparent amid the alarming descriptions of the challenges facing humanity. Human survival and well-being are now embedded in a complex interdependent global web of economic, political, social, technical, moral, and environmental events, forces, and changes that confront us with an array of intricate, conflicting, and confusing demands and opportunities. Our response to this challenge will shape the nature, quality, and meaning of our lives in the coming century as human beings and as psychologists. This is the reality of our times. We live in a new era—a global era—and if psychology is to be a responsible and relevant discipline, it must explore and understand the consequences of this global era for human behavior and well-being. Some prescient psychologists urged the study of globalization—its nature,

meaning, and implications—but there were few ­sustained efforts to pursue the topic. Missing in psychology was a clear and comprehensive definition of globalization, capable of serving as a heuristic for psychological study.

Emergence of the Term Globalization Scores of definitions of globalization have been published in the social science literature. Almost all definitions acknowledge the process of globalization involves extensive, and often imposed, contacts among people from different cultures, nations, and empires with subsequent increases in social, cultural, economic, and political interdependencies and consequences. Globalization is best considered a reciprocally ­determined process and product; the primary drivers of globalization are all transnational, transcultural, and transborder ownerships (i.e., multinational), capital flows, independent and pact trades, telecommunications, media, entertainment, and transportation venues. Though often ignored, national and international ­political and military alliances also are sources of globalization because they link distant nations and interests into protective frameworks constraining natural flows.

Globalization as Interdependency As a set of processes, globalization refers to historic and contemporary global events, forces, and changes a­ ltering our individual and collective lives because of their immediate or future consequences for interdependency. The recent global interdependency of our lives raises important questions about the survival, adaptation, and adjustment of human and natural life. Events in distant lands, involving distant peoples, once considered ­inconsequential now have immediate consequences for individuals, nations, and the natural environment. Globalization occurs at different levels (e.g., individual, community, societal, national, regional), and may have different sources (e.g., economic, political, cultural, geographic, technical, medical, psychological). The various descriptive parameters of globalization are essential in grasping its distinct impacts; these parameters include (1) level, (2) source, (3) rate, (4) frequency, (5) severity, (6) duration, (7) complexity, (8) controllability, (9) predictability, and (10) negotiability. The parameters shape globalization’s outcomes (positive, negative, or both). Globalization processes and consequences in a rural sub-Saharan nation will differ from those in an urban Western metropolis. Globalization processes and consequences are unique to each setting. In some instances, the events, forces, and changes associated with globalization may be welcome and

Globalization

sought by governments and private sources. However, too often the events, forces, and changes may be imposed directly or indirectly as carriers of Western cultural values, products, and ways of life, resulting in destruction of local traditional life. It is notable that many Islamic nations and cultures have considered globalization (hegemonic globalization) to be cultural invasion, undermining traditional religion, cultural values, and social formations. International extremist jihadist terrorism has stated this perception to be a source of violence. Islam, as a religion and cultural context, is caught between a visible global “Islamophobia” accusing Islam of terrorism, and endless Western invasions, occupations, and destruction of Middle Eastern and West Asian nations. Tragically, globalization assumed political, militaristic, and world-order proportions and consequences as it became controlled and dominated by a limited number of nations (G-8, now G-20). This process implies what has been called hegemonic globalization. At issue is the homogenization of world cultures in accord with U.S. preferences and interests, and the loss of a multicultural and diverse world. The ensuing competition to control and exploit this new global-era reality led to a morphing of globalization to hegemonic globalization. Hegemonic globalization, or the control of globalization processes and products by a few Western nations for their national interests, has elicited increased resistance and protests among many nonparticipant nations, fostering individual, group, and state terrorism. Many critics fault the United States’ pursuit of international dominance, pointing to the recommendations of a neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC, 1997), as a major source of global conflict, violence, wars, and government overthrows and regime changes. The PNAC, led by future vice president Richard Cheney, promoted American global political dominance and encouraged uses of military strength. The PNAC endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In brief, hegemonic globalization, the process and product of global changes dominated by G-8 nations, became a crucible for international, national, and civil wars.

A New Word, but Not a New Process Contact among people from different cultures is not a recent phenomenon. Some scholars have suggested that contacts such as those that occurred with the Roman Empire and the European 15th- and 16th-­ century discovery voyages around the world represent a beginning. The vast 18th- and 19th-century colonial occupations associated with European imperialism (e.g., France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain) are also considered early manifestations of globalization.

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It could be argued, depending upon the preferred definition of globalization, that globalization began when our earliest ancestors left Africa and migrated across the globe, dispersing and then again making contact. What is special about globalization in our present era, however, is the fact that telecommunications and transportation link all humans in immediate contact and impact—a phenomenon that the Canadian communications scholar Marshall McLuhan labeled “the global village.” Initially, the term globalization was attributed to Theodore Levitt (1983) in his published article titled “Globalization of Markets,” in the Harvard Business Review. Levitt noted changes in technology and business organizations permitted multinational corporations (e.g., Coca-Cola, McDonalds) to market their products globally. Levitt’s article promoted increased use of the term globalization; however, other writers note the term was used decades earlier, in 1940s political discussions and aspirations for “planetary democracy.”

Psychological Outcomes (Products) of Globalization Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2004), a cultural anthropologist, suggested globalization can lead to three possible outcomes (i.e., products or consequences) for societies, cultures, or nations: (1) cultural differences (especially as encoded in religions) may never be resolved, leading to states of constant tension and conflict; (2) ­“McDonaldization,” in which Western corporations impose a uniform or homogenized global culture rooted within Western values, priorities, and lifestyles; or (3) hybridization, in which Western globalization processes and products interact with traditional processes and products in an ongoing process of mixing and generating new patterns with neither side of the interactions dominating. This dynamic encounter (struggle) between East and West, North and South, and corporate powers and traditional lifestyles via globalization was made famous in journalist Thomas Friedman’s (2000) popular volume, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Samuel Huntington, in his classic publication, The Clash of Civilizations (1982), was among the first to raise the potentially destructive outcomes and consequences of the growing contact and interdependency among “civilizations.” For Huntington, civilizations would inevitably face conflicts with each other. Huntington offered several primary reasons for his conclusion: (1) The world was becoming a “smaller place,” and interactions were becoming more frequent, intensifying awareness of differences; (2) social change and economic modernization were weakening nation-state identities and producing

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Globalization

new sources of identities; and (3) conflict was inevitable because of the different interests and concerns from civilization to civilization. Although Huntington did not use the term hegemony in referring to the role of the West, it is clear that hegemonic globalization was an inevitable product of civilization dynamics. Hegemonic globalization impacted the identities of individuals, groups, and nations. Accordingly, identity is a critical topic for political psychological inquiry in a global era. It represents a gateway ­concept for psychology to explore and understand the processes and products of globalization. Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and political science scholar at Harvard University, noted changes associated with globalization are creating new global requirements for multiple group loyalties, multiple identities, multiple citizenship, organizations, cities, regions, and ultimately the world. He pointed out that “nations” were no longer situated as a defining determinant of culture or b ­ ehavior, and contended that national sovereignty was being eroded by globalization. Sandel observes that because of the fading of national sovereignty and nations’ loss of their hold on the allegiance of their citizens, the integrating tendencies of the global economy, and the fragmenting tendencies of group identities, nation-states are increasingly unable to link identity and self-rule. The requirements of multiple loyalties, multiple identities, and multiple citizenships cry out for a new psychology, one capable of linking identity to global events, forces, and changes.

Global-Era Context By the beginning of the present century, the concept of globalization was gaining popularity as a theoretical foundation for understanding rapid local, national, and international changes and their dislocating effects. Many of the changes occurring—and continuing to occur—in national economic and commercial areas became powerful determinants of local and national changes. Within the United States, these changes included (1) corporate and small-business downsizing, mergers, and monopolies (e.g., oil, banking, airlines, agriculture); (2) automatization; (3) bankruptcies; (4) progressive layoffs; (5) outsourcing; (6) temporary hires; (7) pension defaults; (8) free trade compacts; (9) extensive international relocation of production and clerical services (e.g., manufacturing, information and technology services) to foreign countries offering the cheapest labor, and the fewest worker laws (e.g., Central America, China, India, Philippines, Vietnam); and (10) austerity requirements to meet developing nation debts. It is also important to recognize that globalization had critical political sources and implications

because multinational corporations and global corporations competed for national loyalties and allegiances. Even a cursory look at the 1990s reveals an endless series of economic, political, and social changes reshaping the world: (1) Multinational corporations were ­growing in number and influence; (2) investments in deve­ loping countries were increasing while investments within home nations were decreasing; (3) international conflicts and wars were increasing in number and severity, and terrorism was beginning to loom; (4) financial industries were replacing manufacturing as sources for increasing wealth; (5) nongovernment organizations (NGOs) were increasing in number, and protest groups were emerging; and (6) information technologies were providing people around the world with access to information, news, and shared organizational interests. A global era had emerged, and its events, forces, and changes could be controlled and manipulated by powerful nations. The roots of globalization reside in a spectrum of immediate and situational social, political, and economic events and forces. However, historical factors must always be considered. An excellent example of this is Juan Garcia-Garcia’s (2015) trenchant analysis of the consequences of World War I in which nationalism, the degeneration of empires, and mass psychology emerged as roots for globalization. Seeds of conflict were being sown by efforts to establish dominance of the West and suppression of non-Anglo (English, American) cultures. Garcia-Garcia points out that the political aspirations and economic powers of developing countries would be exploited for resources (imperialism, colonization). Germany and its allies in World War I would be ­punished. An Anglo-American world order would be developed and sustained as voracious quests for global dominance and control enveloped all subsequent policy decisions. If globalization was to occur, as the unfolding of events, forces, and changes indicated, then it would be a globalization favoring Anglo-American interests.

Ambivalence Toward Globalization Although some argue that globalization cannot be avoided or prevented because of the powerful ­economic, political, and technical changes driving its existence, there is considerable criticism, resistance, and resentment to globalization locally, nationally, and internationally. There is no denying globalization has fostered some positive changes, especially new opportunities for commercial ownership and employment. Simultaneously, however, it has been punitive, bringing massive destruction within the social fabric of societies, with all of the problems this entails. The issue, then, is control of globalization.

Globalization

Globalization gives and it takes, it promises and it deceives, it liberates and it imposes. In this respect, globalization is colonization—imperialism—disguised ­ under the mantle of mutual trade interests. But the “mutual,” critics point out, is never the case. The exportation of U.S. popular culture becomes an invasive tactic for control via colonization of minds, including the inculcation of individualism, materialism, competition, hedonism, rapid change (“progress”), profit, greed, commodification, consumerism, reductionism, celebritization, privatization, and English-language preference. We cannot assume that the process or consequences of globalization will be the same. There will be positive and perceived negative consequences, some of which are outlined in Table 1. As Table 1 indicates, the societal consequences of globalization are sources of great debate because of their perceived positive and negative impacts. Globalization brings rapid and dislocating change, producing social upheavals and associated psychological and behavioral disturbance, disorders, and deviancies. Instabilities in the economic, political, and social institutions become associated with uncertainty, unpredictability, and a range of negative emotions including anxiety, fear,

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anger, and distrust. This creates conditions for protests, mob violence, and insurgencies. For these reasons, it is important that psychology as a profession and science develop concepts and methods to help assess the emerging crises.

Current Status of Psychology and Globalization It is critical for psychology to join with other social sciences in studying globalization. The impediments to this can be found in psychology’s basic assumptions and methods. Emphasis on individual psyche and behavior. Psychol­ ogy’s historical development as the study of the determinants of individual behavior placed extensive interest on both within-person (e.g., brain, personality, unique developmental experiences) and immediate situational (e.g., family, school, work settings) determinants, especially reward and punishment patterns. Causes were always located within the human psyche or the environmental context of behavior amid a vocabulary of needs, motives, drives, and thoughts.

Table 1  Potential Positive and Negative Societal Outcomes of Globalization Positive

Negative

Alternative beliefs, values, lifestyles

Exploitation of labor forces, land, environment, culture

Increased quality of life

New social dysfunctions, disorders and deviancies (e.g., substance abuse, youth alienation, family disintegration, divorce, suicide, generational conflicts, prostitution, mental health)

Increased standard of living Increased GNP and national wealth Social mobility

Breakdown in traditional values and customs

New life meanings, purposes, opportunities

Loss of national sovereignty to foreign powers and multinational corporations

International integration and networking

Cultural homogenization

Exposure to new ideas and customs

Out-migration

Increased population diversity

Commodification

In-migration

Increased dependence on foreign sources

New technologies (e.g., Internet)

English language penetration

Changes in gender status and opportunities

Distrust of authorities, foreign governments, businesses

Opportunities for economic growth via foreign companies

Unemployment (switch from agricultural to manufacturing economy)

Sense of global solidarity with humanity

Cultural disintegration, dislocation, collapse Future, culture, identity shock Division between rich and poor (income inequality)

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Globalization

Emphasis on direct and immediate services in clinics and offices. The heavy emphasis of psychology on direct clinical interventions at individual levels of adaptation and adjustment associated with various mental health problems has limited the concern for the broader macro-social variables in which these problems were actually located. That is to say, problems were understood to be situated within the individual and his or her lived experience. Dominant interests of the psychology professions (clinical, counseling, industrial, organizational, applied social). The domination of psychology’s directions by the applied fields of clinical, counseling, and organizational/industrial psychology, especially as these are now institutionalized in hundreds of for-profit,­ not-for-profit, and nonprofit professional psychology schools emphasized office practice and clinical therapy models and interventions. Larger global problems (e.g., poverty, war, disasters) and their settings (e.g., war zones, famine areas, and refugee camps) did not yield well to conventional professional skill and value sets. This situation also minimized interest in the broader macro-social terms used by other social sciences to explain these problems and to intervene at levels beyond the individual. Ethnocentric bias. Psychology as a science and profession was unprepared to function at global levels because of its ethnocentric biases and orientation. Psychology, as a Western cultural creation, proceeded from a series of assumptions impairing its ability to be an effective resource for understanding human behavior in nonWestern cultures and crisis settings. Limited multidisciplinary, multicultural, multinational, and multisector training. Concepts like globalization are so broad in their conceptual implications and consequences that no single discipline can adequately provide understanding. By its very definition, glo­ balization requires multiple orientations. Psychology, replete with its course requirements in traditional foundation topics (e.g., physiology psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, statistics, research design), combined with the heavy demands on conducting research, seeking funding, and adhering to time requirements, leaves little room for multiple orientations. Further, there are virtually no psychology journals that consider multidisciplinarity of sufficient import to interfere with their specific topical missions. Inadequate attention to the Universal Declaration of  Human Rights (UDHR). Although psychology ­ and psychologists have demonstrated a gradually

increasing interest in the study of the many social problems associated with such global events, forces, and changes as globalization, it is fair to point out that it has only been within the last decade with the American Psychological Association’s formation of Division 52 (International Psychology) and a much more active Committee on International Affairs (CIRP) that the APA has evidenced a strong social “activist” orientation with regard to global challenges (Note: Division 9—Society for the Study of Social Issues is an exception to this case, especially with regard to nuclear weapons.) It is critical that psychology, psychologists, the APA, and other psychology organizations commit themselves to the UDHR as their basic foundation document; visible and active commitments to the UDHR would encourage and promote an increased global awareness and responses. The UDHR would provide a welcome foundation for establishing new and creative research directions for psychology in a global era; inherent in the UDHR is a strong sense of global awareness and responsibility of solidarity with the world’s peoples.

The Global-Era Reality Globalization is inevitable given present political, ­economic, and social forces, events, and changes. Given this situation, there is a considerable need to develop a globalization consistent with human rights and human dignity. A report by the United Nations Development Program (1999) called for a globalization characterized by ethics—less violation of human rights; equity—less disparity among nations; inclusion—less marginalization of people and countries; human security—less political and economic instability and vulnerability; sustainability—less environmental destruction; and development—less poverty and deprivation.

These qualities are consistent with a science and profession of psychology committed to social activism. This offers psychology an opportunity to make a profound contribution to understanding and addressing the many challenges posed by globalization. Anthony J. Marsella See also Corporatism; Development, Theories of; Ecopolitics; Free Market; Immigration; International Security; Modernization Theory; Refugees; United Nations

Governmentality

Further Readings Abushouk, A. (2006). Globalization and Muslim identity: Challenges and prospects. The Muslim World, 96, 487–505. Ahmed, N. (2015, July 8). The Anglo-American Empire is preparing for resource war. Retrieved from http://www .informationclearinghouse.info/article42333.htm Englehardt, T. (2015, March 19). The new American order. Retrieved from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/ article41296.htm Friedman, T. (1999). The Lexus and the olive tree: Understanding globalization. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Garcia-Garcia, J. (2015). After the Great War: Nationalism, degenerationism, and mass psychology. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3, 103–123. Hallinan, C., & Wofsy, L. (2015, June 28). “The American Century” has plunged the world into crisis: What happens now? Retrieved from http://fpif.org/the-crisis-of-the-americancentury/ Huntington, S. (1982). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Levitt, T. (1983, May/June). The globalization of markets. Harvard Business Review, 2–20. Marsella, A. J. (1998). Toward a global-community psychology: Meeting the needs of a changing world. American Psychologist, 53, 1282–1291. Marsella, A. J. (2005). “Hegemonic” globalization and cultural diversity: The risks of global monoculturalism. Australian Mosaic, 11(13) 15–19. Marsella, A. J. (2012). Psychology and globalization: Understanding a complex relationship. Journal of Social Issues, 68, 454–472. Marsella, A. J. (2014, December 1). The epic ideological struggle of our global era: Multiculturalism versus homogenization. Retrieved from https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/12/ the-epic-ideological-struggle-of-our-global-eramulticulturalism-versus-homogenization/ Milner, A. (2010). Suicide in a global world: Relationships between globalization, social-ecological factors, and suicide mortality in 35 countries (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Griffin University, Queensland, Australia. Pieterse, J. (2004). Globalization and culture. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Prilleltensky, I. (2012). The way, why, how, and who of globalization: What is psychology to do? Journal of Social Issues, 68, 612–629. Salzman, M. (2008). Globalization, religious fundamentalism, and the need for meaning. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 32, 318–327. Sandel, M. (1996). Democracy’s distance: America in search of a public philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stockbauer, B. (2003). Rebuilding America’s defenses: A summary blueprint of the PNAC Plan for U.S. Global Hegemony. Retrieved from http://www .informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.htm

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Governmentality In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s, the philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault ­(1926–1984) held a course at the Collège de France on the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the ­Austrian school characterized by Friedrich Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault’s great insights in his work on governmentality was the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the self and government of the state—understood as the exercise of political sovereignty over a territory and its population. He focused on government as a set of practices legitimated by specific rationalities and saw that these three schools of contemporary economic liberalism focused on the question of too much government—a permanent critique of the state that Foucault considers as a set of techniques for governing the self through the market. Liberal modes of governing, Foucault tells us, are distinguished in general by the ways in which they utilize the capacities of free-acting subjects, and consequently, modes of government differ according to the value and definition accorded the concept of freedom. These different mentalities of rule, thus, turn on whether freedom is seen as a natural attribute as with the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, a product of rational choice making, or, as with Hayek, a civilizational artefact theorized as both negative and anti-naturalist. Foucault’s lectures on governmentality were first delivered in a course he gave at the Collège de France, titled Sécurité, Territoire, Population, during the ­1977– 1978 academic year. While the essays “Governmentality” and “Questions of Method” were published in 1978 and 1980, respectively, and translated into ­ English in the collection The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991), it is only recently the course itself has been transcribed from original tapes and published for the first time (Foucault, 2004a), along with the sequel Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Foucault, 2004b), translated into English in 2007 and 2010, respectively. The governmen­ tality literature in English dates from 1990 and has now grown quite substantially (e.g., Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1996; Dean, 1999; Miller & Rose, 1990; Peters, Besley, Olssen, Maurer, & Weber, 2009; Rose, 1999). Foucault relied on a group of researchers to help him in his endeavors: F ­rançois Ewald, Pasquale Pasquino, Daniel Defert, Giovanna Procacci, and Jacques Donzelot on governmentality; and François Ewald, Catherine Mevel, Éliane Allo, Nathanie Coppinger, Pasquale Pasquino, François Delaporte, and Anne-Marie Moulin on the birth

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Governmentality

of biopolitics. These researchers working with Foucault in the late 1970s constitute the first generation of governmentality studies scholars, and many have gone on to publish significant works too numerous to list here. Fundamental to Foucault’s governmentality studies was the understanding that Western society professed to be based on principles of liberty and the rule of law and claimed to derive the legitimation of the state from political philosophies that elucidated these very principles. Yet as a matter of historical fact, Western society employed technologies of power that operated on forms of disciplinary order or were based on biopolitical techniques that bypassed the law and its freedoms altogether. Foucault embraced Friedrich Nietzsche as the thinker “who transforms Western philosophy by rejecting its founding disjunction of power and knowledge as myth” (Gordon, 2001, p. xxvi). By this he means that the rationalities of Western politics, from the time of the Greeks, had incorporated techniques of power specific to Western practices of government: first, in the expert knowledges of the Greek tyrant, and second, in the concept of pastoral power that characterized ecclesiastical government. It is in this vein that Foucault examines government as a practice and problematic that first emerges in the 16th century and is characterized by the insertion of economy into political practice. Foucault explores the problem of government as it grew dramatically in the 16th century after the collapse of feudalism and the establishment of new territorial states. Government emerges at this time as a general problem dispersed across quite different questions: Foucault mentions specifically the Stoic revival that focused on the government of oneself; the government of souls elaborated in Catholic and Protestant pastoral doctrine; the government of children and the problematic of pedagogy; and, last but not least, the government of the state by the ruling prince. Through the reception of Machiavelli’s The Prince in the 16th century and its rediscovery in the 19th century, there emerges a literature that sought to replace the power of the prince, or monarch, with the art of government understood in terms of the government of the family, based on the central concept of “economy.” The introduction of economy into political practice is for Foucault the essential issue in the establishment of the art of government. As he points out, the problem is still posed for Rousseau, in the mid-18th century, in the same terms— the government of the state is modeled on the management by the head of the family over his family and household and its assets. It is in the late 16th century, then, that the art of government receives its first formulation as “reason of state” that emphasizes a specific rationality intrinsic to

the nature of the state, based on principles no longer philosophical and transcendent, or theological and divine, but rather centered on the problem of population. This became a science of government conceived of outside the juridical framework of sovereignty characteristic of the feudal territory and firmly focused on the problem of population based on the modern concept that created new forms of subjectivity and enabled new forms of state intervention. It is this political-statistical concept of population that provided the means by which the government of the state came to involve individualization and totalization, and, thus, married ­ Christian pastoral care with sovereign political authority. The new rationality of “reason of state” focused on the couplet population–wealth as an object of rule, providing conditions for the emergence of political economy as a form of analysis. Foucault investigated the techniques of police science and a new biopolitics that treats the “population” as a mass of living beings with biological traits and particular kinds of pathologies giving rise to specific knowledges and techniques. As Foucault comments in “The Political Technology of Individuals,” the “rise and development of our modern political rationality” as “reason of state,” that is, as a specific rationality intrinsic to the state, is formulated through “a new relation between politics as a practice and as knowledge” (2001b, p. 407), involving specific political knowledge or “political arithmetic” (statistics); “new relationships between politics and history,” such that political knowledge helped to strengthen the state and at the same time ushered in an era of politics based on “an irreducible multiplicity of states struggling and competing in a limited history” (p. 409); and, finally, a new relationship between the individual and the state, where “the individual becomes pertinent for the state insofar as he can do something for the strength of the state” (p. 409). In analyzing the works of von Justi, Foucault infers that the true object of the police becomes, at the end of the 18th century, the population; or, in other words, the state has essentially to take care of men as a population. It wields its power over living beings, and its politics, therefore, has to be a biopolitics (p. 416). Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters See also Activism; Corruption; Insurgency; Mutual Radicalization; Political Participation; Social Revolts; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings Barry, A., Osborne, T., & Rose, N. (Eds.). (1996). Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government. London, England: UCL Press.

Greed Versus Grievance Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P. (Eds.). (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London, England: Sage. Foucault, M. (2001a). Governmentality. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: The essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (R. Hurley, Trans., pp. 201–222). London, England: Allen Lane & Penguin Press. Foucault, M. (2001b). The political technology of individuals. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: The essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (R. Hurley, Trans., pp. 403–417). London, England: Allen Lane & Penguin Press. Foucault, M. (2001c). Power: The essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (J. D. Faubion, Ed., & R. Hurley, Trans.). London, England: Allen Lane & Penguin Press. Foucault, M. (2004a). Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au collège de France (1977–1978) [Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977– 1978)] (A. I. Davidson, Ed., & G. Burchell, Trans., 2007). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2004b). Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au collège de France (1978–1979) (F. Ewald, A. Fontana, & M. Senellart, Eds.). Paris, France: Seuill. Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France (1978–1979) (A. I. Davidson, Ed., & G. Burchell, Trans.). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, C. (2001). Introduction. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: The essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (R. Hurley, Trans., pp. xi–xli). London, England: Allen Lane & Penguin Press. Hayek, F. A. (1960). The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31. Peters, M. A., Besley, A. C., Olssen, M., Maurer, S., & Weber, S. (Eds.). (2009). Governmentality studies in education. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of liberty. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Gray Political Organizations See Advocacy

Greed Versus Grievance Since the end of World War II, more than 16 million people have been killed in civil wars. For conflict prevention and intervention it is important to understand the causes of such conflicts. One of the core questions

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is why people join a deadly armed struggle. Economists suggest that individuals join if the personal gains are higher than the costs of participation. This cost–benefit calculus is referred to as being motivated by “greed.” Other social scientists and historians have emphasized that individuals join rebellions because of discrimination, oppression, and economic marginalization. Hence, the explanation of civil war participation is based on “grievance.” In the literature these greedversus-­ grievance explanations have provoked an ­acrimonious debate. What has been commonly misunderstood is that greed and grievance are not necessarily rival explanations and that different reasons for participation can coexist in the same armed conflict.

Grievance Civil wars are commonly defined as organized armed opposition to a government. The aim of the rebellion is either to gain control of the existing state or to secede and form a new state. Unlike violent crime, where an individual makes a choice of whether or not to commit an assault or murder, civil war is a group activity. These rebel groups may already have a strong identity based on cultural norms and traditions, adhere to one religion or understand each other as co-ethnics, or identify as members of the same class. Some groups are loose alliances of different, smaller groups, bound together by common grievances. These grievances are typically the result of being alienated from mainstream politics, marginalized in political decisions, and economically deprived. Thus, grievances either are experienced by existing groups or can lead to the formation of new groups or alliances. A common argument is that the frustration resulting from these grievances can be so acute that groups organize armed resistance with the aim to overthrow the existing government or to secede from it. The assumption is that individuals rebel because they are aggrieved and that they fight in the hope that their new political regime will end the discrimination, oppression, and inequality.

Greed In economic theory, rebellion is akin to producing a public good through collective action. However, if we understand this group activity of the formation of a new government or a new state as the provision of a public good, then grievance is not a sufficient trigger for civil war. The argument is as follows. Public goods have two main features: They are nonrival and nonexcludable. Nonrivalry means that the consumption by one individual does not reduce the availability of the good for consumption by others. Nonexcludability means that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good.

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Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership

Civil wars can be understood as the provision of a public good, because if the rebellion succeeds, the entire population will be living under the new regime, irrespective of individual support for the rebellion. Collective action is necessary to produce this public good. This collective action is difficult to achieve, because individuals have no incentive to participate. Individuals want to “free ride,” because whether or not they individually participate in the production of the public good, they will be able to consume it. As per definition, the individual cannot be excluded from the consumption of the public good. In order to overcome the participation problem and achieve collective action, participants have to receive private rewards in order to overcome the free rider problem. In the context of a civil war, these private rewards can be any number of things, ranging from looting money and property, to sexual gratification, or the promise of a future government position. Each individual decides whether or not to participate based on weighing up the costs and benefits of the participation. This is referred to as rebellions being motivated by greed. The individuals know that their personal participation will have very little impact on the outcome of the rebellion. Thus, collective action is unlikely to occur even when groups have common interests (based on grievances) and requires private rewards.

Greed and Grievance To summarize, grievances motivate the rebellion in the sense that a group is either defined or formed by the common interests based on grievances, and greed solves the collective action problem by incentivizing individual participation. Every rebellion is thus motivated by greed and grievance. There are other reasons to believe this to be the case. Rebellions typically start off with small armed groups whose size increases over time. The early joiners are those that are strongly motivated by grievances, but as the rebellion continues, opportunities for large private gains may be opening. These opportunities are often connected to the arms trade, drug production, and human trafficking. These private gains attract individuals who are mainly interested in personal profit rather than the public good. Thus, due to an adverse selection in motivation, a justice-seeking rebellion can turn into a loot-seeking rebellion. The criticism of these economic explanations of civil war centers on two issues. First, there are theoretical concerns. Can rebellions be characterized as public goods, and are individuals making rational choices when joining an armed group? Second, measuring greed and grievance is challenging, resulting in difficulties when interpreting the empirical results. Anke Hoeffler

See also Conflicts, Protracted; Egocentrism; Hearts and Minds Approach; Mutual Radicalization; Omniculturalism; Selfish Gene; Trust

Further Readings Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievance in civil wars. Oxford Economic Papers, 56, 563–595. Cramer, C. (2006). Civil war is not a stupid thing: Accounting for violence in developing countries. London, England: Hurst & Company. Hoeffler, A. (2011). “Greed” versus “grievance”: A useful conceptual distinction in the study of civil war? Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11, 274–284. Humphreys, M., & Weinstein, J. M. (2008). Who fights? The determinants of participation in civil war. American Journal of Political Science, 52, 436–455. Keen, D. (2008). Complex emergencies. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Tullock, G. (2005). The social dilemma: Of autocracy, revolution, coup d’état, and war (Vol. 8, C. K. Rowley, Ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership A leading scholar of political psychology, leadership, and presidential decision making, Fred I. Greenstein, in his 2009 book The Presidential Difference, developed a six-point framework for analyzing the political and personal qualities and skills of U.S. presidents, their characters and leadership styles, and their successes and failures in office. He assesses and compares presidents in relation to (1) their proficiency as public communicators, (2) organizational capacity, (3) political skills, (4) policy vision, (5) cognitive style, and (6) emotional intelligence. Drawing out the mix of qualities exhibited by individual presidents, Greenstein shows there is no single presidential personality or uniform set of traits associated in any straightforward way with presidential leadership, effectiveness, or achievement.

Leadership Qualities Greenstein built on, but went beyond, the work of ­Richard E. Neustadt and James David Barber in analyzing presidential leadership and personality. His approach is inductive and interpretive, based on deep historical understanding, but also applies a set of common criteria for analyzing and comparing presidents, related to the demands of the presidential role. These qualities come in pairs: Public communication is the outer face of

Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership

leadership; organization is the inner face. Political skill is complemented by the vision to which it may be directed. Cognition and emotion are deeper and more psychological variables. Greenstein’s framework highlights the variability of presidential performance. He picks out only a handful of modern presidents as outstanding communicators. Presidents have differed greatly also in terms of organizational capacity (the ability to forge a team in the White House and get the most out of it, or design effective institutional arrangements). Some have been more politically skillful than others in terms of the use of persuasion, negotiation, maneuvering, and deal making to work the Washington system, deal with the problems they face, and advance their goals. Most of the modern U.S. presidents have, argues Greenstein, lacked “the vision thing” and been pragmatists of one sort or another. They have varied widely in their cognitive styles, or the way in which they process and deal with advice and information and approach decision making. Under the emotional intelligence heading, he is concerned with how the occupants of the White House manage their emotions and turn them to constructive purposes rather than being dominated by them and allowing them to diminish their leadership. Greenstein concedes that great political ability does sometimes derive from troubled emotions but puts most emphasis on the dangers and problems that can arise in this area. However, deficiencies in emotional intelligence may not prevent a leader from governing successfully, and some of the greatest presidents may not have scored highly on emotional intelligence.

Greenstein’s Significance Greenstein’s Presidential Difference has had a wide appeal and influence (including on pundits and practitioners), based on the accessibility, coherence, and economy of his checklist approach, on his historical understanding of the presidency, and on his shrewd insights into the political and personal qualities of individual presidents. The performance of presidents usually being mixed, Greenstein’s argument is that there is at least as much to be learned from their failures and limitations in terms of the six components of leadership as from their successes and strengths. He is in fact able to highlight shortcomings in the leadership of presidents generally regarded as “successful” and the strengths of presidents usually written off as “failures.” Greenstein does not present his six qualities in any particular order of significance but argues that while some presidential limitations or skill gaps can be compensated for, a defective temperament or the lack of

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emotional intelligence can be a truly destructive weakness. Some critics, however, argue that policy vision—a sense of direction and the values a president stands for—is at least as important, suggesting that performance in the White House cannot be judged by considering form in isolation from content. Other critics argue that his categories may be too wide and elastic or else insufficiently rigorous (e.g., criticisms of emotional intelligence as “pop psychology”), while other writers have come up with different must-have lists of skills needed to be successful in the White House or have criticized the attempt to deconstruct presidential leadership as the sum of separate parts. There is also the danger of focusing too much on the individual leader at the expense of context and the wider political environment. The inheritance of an incoming leader, the circumstances faced, and the problems on the political agenda all need to be factored in. What did the times demand and what did they permit? Perhaps some of the qualities, traits, or skills Greenstein noted were more important in some times or situations than in others. Greenstein has, however, acknowledged the importance of contextual factors, and that the nexus between the personal qualities of presidents and the demands of the times is central to their effectiveness. A president who is well suited to serve in one setting may be ill suited for another. Moreover, some skills may matter more at different stages or in different phases of a presidency. Although originally developed to analyze the “modern presidency” from Franklin D. Roosevelt onward, Greenstein has also gone back into history to analyze the leadership styles of earlier presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, applying his model to the very different political world of late-18th- and 19th-century America. Allowing for constitutional, institutional, and political differences, Greenstein’s model also provides yardsticks that permit comparisons across nations and has been used in evaluations of the leadership styles and strengths and weaknesses of French presidents and British prime ministers. Kevin Theakston See also Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character; Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power; Personality Traits; Strong President Model

Further Readings Berman, L. (Ed.). (2006). The art of political leadership: Essays in honor of Fred I. Greenstein. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Greenstein, F. I. (2009a). The presidential difference: Leadership style from FDR to Barack Obama (3rd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greenstein, F. I. (2009b). Inventing the job of president: Leadership style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greenstein, F. I. (2013). Presidents and the dissolution of the union: Leadership style from Polk to Lincoln. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Group Ideologies Group ideologies are shared belief systems that provide an interpretation of the social environment and a prescription as to how the society should be structured. They can be general, common to many cultures (e.g., political ideologies that span across cultures), or more specific, related to a given culture. Group ideologies attempt to understand, interpret, and organize information about different aspects of a society: for example, economy, justice, health care, education, and intercultural relations. These representations of the social order reflect conscious or unconscious tendencies to rationalize the way things are or, alternatively, the desire for them to be changed. Advocating versus resisting social change and rejecting versus accepting inequality are two interrelated dimensions that underlie the distinction between left-wing and right-wing political ideologies in Europe, or between liberalism and conservatism in the United States. Outside political ideologies, which are more general, group ideologies may take the form of socially constructed myths referring to more specific aspects such as explanations of poverty, interpersonal conflicts (e.g., rape), and intercultural relations.

Structure of Group Ideologies Group ideologies have both a socially constructed superstructure and a motivational substructure. The superstructure refers to the network (e.g., elected officials, party leaders, media representatives) which creates and transmits the social representation of an ordered society, including attitudes, values, and beliefs and underlining the intergroup attitudes and behaviors. The motivational substructure refers to psychological needs, goals, and motives that drive the interests of ordinary citizens and are served by the content of a given group ideology. These psychological motives can be epistemic (e.g., the need to reduce uncertainty, complexity, or ambiguity), existential (e.g., the drive to manage threatening situations, the search of meaning in life), and relational (e.g., the desire to affiliate and establish

interpersonal relationships, the need for identification with social groups). Studies conducted in many countries demonstrate consistently that individuals who score higher on the Need for Cognitive Closure scale (which measures the motivation to “seize and freeze” on beliefs that offer simplicity, certainty, and clarity) or individuals made aware of their own mortality are more likely to hold right-wing group ideologies. In contrast, relational motives such as social identification, partisanship, and group interest can exert influence in both ­liberal and conservative directions.

The Political Orientation of Group Ideologies Group ideologies generally parallel the distinction between political left and right wings. One of the most useful constructs for understanding the political dimension of group ideologies is the social dominance orientation defined as an individual’s preference for groups’ hierarchy and inequality (e.g., “It’s probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom”; “Inferior groups should stay in their place”). This preference for groups’ inequality and status quo maintenance is related to the endorsement of a broad spectrum of group ideologies, including just-world beliefs (e.g., internal attributions of poverty: “Individuals possess what they deserve.”), rape myths (e.g., victims challenged their aggressor), and acculturation ideologies (e.g., assimilation, multiculturalism). Social dominance orientation has been found to be a powerful predictor of prejudice against a wide array of denigrated groups such as poor people, gays, women, Arabs, Muslims, Blacks, Jews, immigrants, and refugees. The relationship between social dominance orientation and prejudice varies as a function of the hierarchyenhancing or hierarchy-attenuating nature of the acculturation ideologies that are considered normative in a particular social context.

Acculturation Ideologies and Intergroup Relations The acculturation ideologies prescribe how the immigrants and other minorities should make their cultural choices and interact with the majority group members in a host society. The acculturation ideologies of democratic states oscillate mostly between (a) assimilation and (b) multiculturalism and color blindness. (Newer ideologies such as polyculturalism and omniculturalism have also emerged but are outside the scope of this discussion.) According to assimilation ideology, immigrants are supposed to abandon their own culture and adopt the language, values, and customs of the majority group.

Group Relative Deprivation

Adhesion to this hierarchy-enhancing ideology by the majority group members is associated with greater prejudice against immigrants. By contrast, multiculturalism defends the idea of a multiple cultural identity, where specific cultures and the national culture coexist harmoniously. As an acculturation ideology that recognizes the value of all ethnic cultures inside the host society, multiculturalism is a hierarchy-attenuating ideology and is associated with less prejudice against immigrants. Color blindness states that individuals must be considered as unique persons rather than simply as members of a racial group. Even if color blindness may be considered as a hierarchy-attenuating ideology, results concerning the link between preferences for this model and negative attitudes toward immigrants are ambiguous. Sometimes color blindness is associated with a high level of prejudice and sometimes with a low level. In France, this ideology (largely developed in the United States) relates to republicanism, which comprises two main aspects: (1) citizenship, which promotes the respect of democratic values by all individuals irrespective of their ethnic origin, and (2) secularism, which requires separation between religion and politics. While citizenship is associated with a low level of prejudice, secularism can be linked to negative attitudes toward immigrants. Immigrants themselves adhere to acculturation ideologies, and these preferences affect their ingroup evaluation: Those who endorse assimilation express less in-group liking compared with those who endorse multiculturalism. An understanding of the role of group ideologies in intergroup relations is promoted by a study of the interplay between personal beliefs and attitudes (i.e., an individual’s endorsements of an ideology) and cultural norms (i.e., representation of the social support of a given ideology in a society). A shared belief tends to be perceived as more valid to the extent that it is anchored in a group of people with similar beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. Therefore, when individuals learn that other people share their belief or attitude, the personal belief or attitude in question should become a major factor guiding behavior. Constantina Badea See also American Exceptionalism; Groupthink; Indoctrination; Mass Communication; Mutual Radicalization; Political Mandates; Utopia

Further Readings Badea, C., Er-rafiy, A., Chekroun, P., Légal, J. B., & Gosling, P. (2015). Ethnic in-group evaluation and adhesion to acculturation ideologies: The case of Moroccan immigrants

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in France. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 45, 47–55. Guimond, S., Crisp, R. J., De Oliveira, P., Kamiejski, R., . . . Zick, A. (2013). Diversity policy, social dominance, and intergroup relations: Predicting prejudice in changing social and political contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(6), 941–958. Jost, J. T., Frederico, C. M., & Napier, J. L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 307–337.

Group Relative Deprivation Group relative deprivation (GRD) is defined by Heather J. Smith and her colleagues as a judgment that one’s ingroup is disadvantaged compared with a relevant referent, and that this judgment elicits feelings of anger, resentment, and entitlement. GRD, also known as fraternal deprivation, is distinct from individual relative deprivation (IRD), the judgment that as a unique person, one is relatively disadvantaged accompanied by feelings of anger, resentment, and entitlement. GRD occurs when people compare their reference group’s situation with another possibility, based on what “ought to be.” It is this emphasis on entitlement or “deservingness” that distinguishes GRD from other psychological theories and measures.

Concept History After Samuel Stouffer initially used relative deprivation (RD) to describe unexpected relationships that emerged from surveys of World War II soldiers, Walter Runciman broadened the RD construct by distinguishing between egoistic (individual) and fraternal (group) RD. People can believe that they are personally deprived (individual RD or IRD) or that a social group to which they belong is deprived (group RD or GRD). GRD is associated with support for political protest and out-group prejudice whereas IRD is associated with individual behavior (e.g., moonlighting to earn extra money, stealing, using drugs). Comparisons to a reference group’s past or future situation also can elicit GRD. For example, ­Kyrgyzstan citizens who compared their country’s present situation to a more positive past or more dismal future reported lower collective esteem. Social identity and intergroup emotions theorists propose that appraisals of the intergroup situation shape GRD. People will feel more group deprived if (a) the intergroup situation is illegitimate, (b) the situation is unlikely to improve without collective challenge, and (c) group boundaries are impermeable. Importantly,

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Group Relative Deprivation

the same undeserved disadvantage can elicit anger (and confrontation), sadness (and withdrawal), or fear (and escape) depending upon how people appraise the situation. For example, university faculty members who viewed the administration as responsible for a collective pay disadvantage responded with anger and support for collective protest. In contrast, faculty members who viewed the situation as unstable reacted to the same collective pay disadvantage with sadness and more interest in leaving the university.

Behavioral Reactions GRD predicts a variety of group-focused attitudes and behavior. For example, if people experience increased deprivation (caused by widespread unemployment or other social changes), they can become committed to an ideology that identifies a scapegoat as a target for blame. They also may be more susceptible to terrorist recruitment. But before people pursue collective action, they typically evaluate how easy it is to move to a different, more advantaged group. Even if the possibility of movement is small (e.g., a few token group members can move to a more advantaged group), people tend to distance themselves from their group and focus on individual solutions. If movement is impossible (e.g., due to psychological connections to the disadvantaged group or structural barriers), people will focus on group-based entitlements and collective action. Even then, the choice to participate in collective action reflects a mixture of emotion and cost–benefit analyses. For example, Martijn van Zomeren and colleagues propose a dual pathway model for understanding how people cope with group-based disadvantages. One path, presented as emotion-based coping, describes collective protest as the product of group-based anger and perceptions of injustice (GRD). The other path, presented as problem-based coping, describes collective protest as the product of perceived group efficacy (defined as the group’s ability to change the situation).

Self-Concept and Comparisons A key requirement for GRD is that people view themselves as representative group members as opposed to unique personalities. Experiments that increase the salience of group memberships show that when people view themselves as group members, they are (a) more likely to notice intergroup differences, (b) less likely to attribute personal losses or gains to their unique personal qualities, (c) more likely to interpret the behavior of out-group members as hostile or greedy, and (d) more likely to engage in collective action to remedy their

group’s unfair disadvantage. If people do not view themselves as “interchangeable” members of the same category, it is unlikely that people will adopt the psychological perspective that leads to group-serving attitudes and behavior. Interestingly, comparisons to potential out-group members can provide a bridge between IRD and GRD. If people view the comparison target as a member of the same social category, they should experience IRD, but if people view the comparison target as an out-group representative, they should experience GRD. Imagine a female scientist who compares herself with a better paid male colleague because they share a common occupational category. When she discovers the inequity, she should be motivated to look for explanations—including the possibility that the pay difference was the product of gender and not a personal quality. This possibility could prompt her to interpret the comparison in group-based terms and make it more likely that she will experience GRD. In fact, politically active feminists often mention the “shock” of experiencing gender-based discrimination as the trigger for their political involvement.

Causal Model Relative deprivation models imply a causal argument, in which cognitive appraisals lead to different emotional reactions which, in turn, lead to different action tendencies. Although evidence supports some of these causal relationships, there is also evidence for the opposite causal paths. For example, priming anger shapes attributions of fairness, legitimacy, and responsibility. Many RD models also assume that greater identification with one’s disadvantaged group will increase one’s sensitivity to GRD. Again, some research supports this assumption, but other research does not. These patterns may depend upon the content of the collective representations associated with particular group memberships. Further, people who view their groups in politicized terms (in which they view their group as engaged in a power struggle with another group) should be most likely to make the intergroup comparisons associated with collective protest. GRD is a valuable tool because it shows how subjective interpretations of one’s circumstances (created by larger institutional and cultural forces) lead to anger, resentment, and, under the right circumstances, collective action. Heather J. Smith and Desiree Ryan See also Collective Action; Distributive Justice; Egoistical Relative Deprivation; Social Identity Theory

Groupthink

Further Readings Moghaddam, F. M. (2005). The staircase to terrorism: A psychological exploration. American Psychologist, 60(2), 161–169. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.2.161 Mummendey, A., Kessler, T., Klink, A., & Mielke, R. (1999). Strategies to cope with negative social identity: Predictions by social identity theory and relative deprivation theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(2), 229–245. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.76.2.229 Smith, H. J., Pettigrew, T. F., Pippin, G. M., & Bialosiewicz, S. (2011). Relative deprivation: A theoretical and meta-analytic review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 203–232. doi:10.1177/1088868311430825 van Zomeren, M., Spears, R., Fischer, A. H., & Leach, C. W. (2004). Put your money where your mouth is! Explaining collective action tendencies through group-based anger and group efficacy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 649–664.

Groupthink How do policy-making groups and executive teams reach and enact disastrous decisions? This is the question Irving Janis sought to answer in the late 1960s. His approach was to analyze how groups and teams made decisions that led to some of the biggest U.S. policy fiascos of the 20th century including the appeasement of Nazi Germany, the failure to prepare for Pearl ­Harbor, the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. His answer: All of these groups suffered from groupthink.

Definition Groupthink is defined as a pattern of group dynamics of extreme concurrence seeking (or conformity) displayed by decision-making groups. According to Janis, decisionmaking groups are most likely to experience groupthink when the following antecedent conditions are present in the group: high group cohesion, insulation from outside experts, limited search and appraisal of information, operating under directive leadership, conditions that foster high stress and low self-esteem, and little hope of finding a better solution to a pressing problem than that favored by the leader or influential members. When present, these antecedent conditions are ­hypothesized to foster the extreme consensus seeking of groupthink as embodied in two categories of undesirable decision-making processes. First, the group engages in symptoms of groupthink, including the illusion of

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invulnerability, collective rationalization, stereotypes of out-groups, self-censorship, mindguards (exclusion of criticism from the group), and belief in the group’s inherent morality. Second, the pressures of groupthink lead the group to employ defective decision making, involving the incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing. Not surprisingly, under these conditions, the group shows extremely defective decision-making performance.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Groupthink After the publication of Janis’s analysis, the term groupthink was quickly embraced by many academic disciplines, appearing in textbooks and educational films used in social psychology, political psychology, and organization and management, among other fields. It was also embraced by the general public where it became a synonym for any sort of group conformity or poor group decision (in contrast to how Janis originally used the term). There was just one problem with this popularity: Empirical research on the concept has produced overwhelmingly equivocal support—in both case study and experimental research—for Janis’s original groupthink model. In a research approach similar to that used by Janis, researchers have looked for the groupthink pattern in a wide variety of historical cases of poor group decision making. The result of this research was that it is rare in these case studies to find the constellation of antecedents and consequences proposed by Janis. ­Similarly, researchers have also used the experimental method in an attempt to produce groupthink in the laboratory. These experiments, which manipulated such variables as group cohesion, directive leadership, and stress, created ad hoc groups that were required to make group decisions under conditions associated with groupthink. With one notable exception (discussed below), these experiments have not been able to produce the pattern of groupthink symptoms and defective decision making associated with groupthink. On the 25th anniversary of groupthink, researchers actively investigating groupthink took stock of the groupthink concept, with their analyses published in a special edition of the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. This group of scholars reviewed the equivocal results of empirical groupthink research with some calling for the abandonment of the groupthink concept and others offering new and revised models of the groupthink process. One of these m ­ odels— the social identity maintenance (SIM) model—has gained both case and experimental support.

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Groupthink

Social Identity Maintenance Model of Groupthink In the SIM model, groupthink occurs when members attempt to maintain a shared positive image of the group (e.g., “the Kennedy White House,” “NASA,” or “progressive City of Santa Cruz”), and that positive image is subsequently questioned by a collective threat (e.g., no good solution to problems with the Bay of Pigs plan, political pressures to launch a space shuttle, financial pressures of retrofitting for an earthquake). In such cases, the group tends to focus on how it can maintain the shared positive image of the group and not the specific task of making a good decision in the situation. Given this change in focus, the group comes to make a poor decision. The SIM model of groupthink has been tested in a number of experiments. In a typical experiment, threeperson teams attempt to solve a difficult problem involving the falling productivity of a group of assembly station workers. Half of the groups are given a unique social identity (e.g., a group label such as Eagles or Cougars) and then asked to list the similarities among the group members. The other groups are not given labels and are asked to discuss their dissimilarities. In addition, half of the groups are informed that their group would be videotaped, and more critically, are told that their videotapes would be used for training purposes in both classes held on campus and training sessions held in local corporations. Thus, failure at the task would in fact involve direct negative consequences for the group that would threaten a positive image of the group. Using such procedures, the results show that the groups who are given a social identity and who are operating under threat perform poorly at decision making, consistent with the expectations of a SIM model of groupthink. This basic pattern of results has been replicated over three experiments. The SIM model of groupthink has also been tested using real-world case examples. For example, a case analysis of how the city council of Santa Cruz, C ­ alifornia, made decisions regarding earthquake safety prior to the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake found that the city council had a strong social identity as a progressive, humane governing body and that this image was threatened by a state-mandated earthquake preparedness plan. An examination of the proceedings of the city council on earthquake preparedness showed all of the classic antecedents and consequences of groupthink (as originally proposed by Janis) as well as defective decision making.

Preventing Groupthink Given the negative impact of decisions made under groupthink, it is imperative for policy-makers and other executive teams to take steps to avoid or prevent it.

In his original formulation, Janis contrasted groups operating under groupthink (in particular, the Kennedy White House making the Bay of Pigs decision) with effective teams (in this case, the Kennedy White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis) in order to identify interventions that would prevent groupthink and lead to effective decision making. As with the original concept of groupthink, the interventions for preventing groupthink Janis identified are often taught in textbooks and courses on decision making but also have not stood the test of time. First, unbeknownst to Janis, the materials and documents he used to understand decision making during the Cuban Missile Crisis did not accurately reflect what took place. In fact, the group that Janis thought had made the key decision in the crisis (known as ExComm) did not provide the ultimate policy recommendation, which was made by Kennedy and a handful of advisers. (ExComm recommended a hardline approach of a blockade of Cuba, whereas the ultimate solution to the crisis also included removing U.S. missiles from Turkey.) The Kennedy administration did not release the full details of the decision-making process, and the truth was not revealed until after most of the key decision makers had died. Second, and more importantly, there has been little research supporting the effectiveness of Janis’s interventions, and research on decision making in general raises questions about Janis’s proposals. For example, Janis recommends assigning the role of a devil’s advocate to members of the team to raise criticisms in order to counter the conformity pressures of groupthink. Research on devil’s advocates (as opposed to real dissent) finds that devil’s advocates stimulate cognitive bolstering of an initial decision—a process that would be consistent with groupthink pressures and would increase the likelihood of a poor decision. Similarly, Janis recommends each member consult trusted associates and for the group to invite outside experts to challenge the group’s decision. There is little reason to expect that a group worried about its threatened identity would select unbiased associates and experts who would offer real criticisms and, if such criticisms were indeed raised, that the group would carefully consider those criticisms as opposed to engaging in additional mindguarding (excluding the criticisms from the group discussion) or derogating the suggestions and the associate or expert who made them. In the same vein, Janis’s recommendation for the leader to be absent and not to be clear on her or his decision preferences runs contrary to the research finding that leaderless groups often adopt the first solution where positive group comments in the group’s discussion exceed negative ones—regardless of the quality of that decision. The SIM model of groupthink can be used to develop interventions for preventing groupthink. These

Groupthink

i­nterventions are designed to structure the group decision-making process specifically by stimulating ­ intellectual conflict and by mitigating identity ­protection tendencies. In contrast to Janis’s recommendations, some of the SIM interventions have been empirically shown to reduce groupthink whereas others have been shown to be generally effective in promoting the outcome of group decision making. For example, in one experiment, the poor decision making found in groupthink was mitigated by giving the group deliberative discussion guidelines that emphasized that the group should focus on the problem, evaluate ideas, avoid criticism of individuals, and engage in extensive solution generation. In another experiment, the negative effects of groupthink were overcome by providing the group with a face-saving mechanism (an excuse for poor performance) that thereby reduced the identity threat. A case study of how Intel management avoided groupthink in making a decision to exit the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) market found that a key to this effective decision was having the group imagine other possible identities for the group (identity metamorphosis) as they made the decision. Some other SIM model interventions for mitigating the negative consequences of groupthink include structuring the decision using the two-column method or by breaking the decisions into parts, requiring a second solution; instituting norms and procedures to elicit minority opinions; expressing fears through role play; and eliciting fears and focusing group discussion on mitigating those fears. Anthony R. Pratkanis and Marlene E. Turner

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See also Conformity; Decision Making; Group Ideologies; Mutual Radicalization; Obedience

Further Readings Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Pratkanis, A. R., & Turner, M. E. (1999). Groupthink and preparedness for the Loma Prieta earthquake: A social identity maintenance analysis of causes and preventions. In E. A. Mannix & M. A. Neale (Series Eds.) & R. Wageman (Vol. Ed.), Research on managing groups and teams: Vol. 2. Groups in context (pp. 115–136). Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Pratkanis, A. R., & Turner, M. E. (2013). Methods for counteracting groupthink risk: A critical appraisal. International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management, 2(4), 18–38. Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1998). A social identity maintenance theory of groupthink. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73, 210–235. Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (Eds.). (1998). Theoretical perspectives on groupthink: A 25th anniversary appraisal [Special issue]. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2/3). Turner, M. E., Pratkanis, A. R., & Samuels, T. (2003). Identity metamorphosis and groupthink prevention: Examining Intel’s departure from the DRAM industry. In A. Haslam, D. van Knippenberg, M. Platow, & N. Ellemers (Eds.), Social identity at work: Developing theory for organizational practice (pp. 117–136). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

H Hearts

and

and in exchange, the population, out of gratitude, reward the counterinsurgents with their loyalty. In an alternate, perhaps more sophisticated version of the strategy, political and economic reforms encourage popular ­ enfranchisement, on the assumption that if the population feels like they have a stake in the status quo, they no longer will feel the need to turn to violence. On a tactical level, hearts and minds proponents are also split on how much force is permitted as part of the approach. Most recognize that not everyone will be open to the counterinsurgents’ appeals and that the counterinsurgents will need to occasionally use force. Indeed, some even cast security as one of the essential public goods that the counterinsurgents use to foster popular support. The question, however, is how much force is allowed and under what circumstances. The answer is often unclear, and this injects some definitional ambiguity into what is (and what is not) considered a hearts and minds approach. Generally, the more force that is allowed, the less distinct a hearts and minds approach becomes from counterinsurgency “punishment” strategies that rely more on brute force coercion to repress the insurgency. Empirical evidence supporting the hearts and minds approach comes from a select number of 20th-century examples, starting with the British experience fighting a communist insurgency in colonial Malaya. In 1952, British high commissioner to Malaya Gerald Templer famously remarked, “The answer [to the uprising] lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people.” Templer—according to the popular narrative—defeated the insurgency by improving the living conditions of the poor, rural, ­ethnic-minority Chinese population and thereby denying the insurgency its principal support base. Other empirical examples include the Civil Operations and  Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS),

Minds Approach

A “hearts and minds” approach refers to a counterinsurgency strategy centered on winning the local population’s loyalties, or at least their acquiescence, usually through a means of economic inducements, political reforms, and propaganda, in order to deny the insurgency a basis of support. In the Western context, this approach first gained attention during anticommunist wars in Southeast Asia, and more recently in U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The expression itself is more popular slang than a specific military doctrinal term. Consequently, vigorous debates exist about what exactly this approach means in practice as well as its effectiveness. Arguably, this approach’s intellectual premise lies in Mao Zedong’s classic admonition that “the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” In this conception, guerrillas rely on the population for recruits, supplies, intelligence, safe havens, and a host of other necessities. Hearts and minds theory extrapolates from this assumption that the best way to defeat an insurgency is by denying it access to its ­lifeblood—the population. Hearts and minds, therefore, is considered a population-centric (as opposed to an enemy-centric) strategy, in that it identifies the local populace—rather than the insurgents themselves—as the key to victory. Hearts and minds proponents diverge on precisely how the approach works in practice. While most advocate using a mixture of propaganda, political reforms, and economic incentives to shift the population’s support away from the insurgency, there is a debate about exactly how these tools work. In one version, these measures form the counterinsurgents’ half of the quid-pro-quo bargain: The counterinsurgents provide public goods 351

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undertaken during the latter half the Vietnam War and, more recently, the 2007–2008 Iraq “surge.” In the latter case, according to one account , multinational forces in Iraq under General David Petraeus implemented a new hearts and minds approach embodied in the December 2006 FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency Manual (although the term appears only once in the Manual) and dramatically reduced violence as result. Critics raise both empirical and theoretical doubts about the hearts and minds approach’s effectiveness. First, they note that, historically, many counterinsurgents—from the Romans of old to Sri ­ Lanka’s more recent campaign against the Tamil Tigers—employed brute force without any real attempt to win over the population and yet they still won these wars. Even the original use of the term hearts and minds had a grimmer connotation. Long before Templer, in 1776, General Sir Henry Clinton argued that the British needed “to gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.” Second, skeptics note that even in the cases where hearts and minds approaches were supposedly employed, they often were accompanied with draconian tactics. During the Malayan Emergency, for example, the ­British forcibly resettled at least 400,000 ethnic Chinese (about a twelfth of Malaya’s population) into so-called New Villages—guarded camps enclosed with barbed wire—so as to prevent them from feeding the insurgents in the jungle. Similarly, the United States’ “success” against the Viet Cong insurgents in Vietnam came only after it had defeated the 1968 North Vietnam–led Tet Offensive largely through conventional means and employed significant amounts of force—including through the controversial Phoenix program that targeted insurgents for elimination. Even the Iraq Surge was also accompanied by a near doubling of special operations raids, about a 50% increase in the number of insurgents killed, and the emplacement of dozens of kilometers of concrete walls to divide key urban centers into ethnically homogeneous enclaves. Finally, but most importantly, hearts and minds approaches suffer from a missing-variable problem. Most historical counterinsurgencies have left only anecdotal data about how the local population thought and felt. Only a handful of wars have left behind public opinion surveys, and these are often of dubious accuracy. Moreover, to the extent these surveys do shed light on how populations are thinking and feeling, it suggests that hearts and minds may be the effect rather than the cause of victory; that is, popular attitudes toward the counterinsurgent improve, but only after the insurgency is defeated and the population is spared the ­horrors of war. These criticisms notwithstanding, however, the hearts and minds approach remains very much present in the

popular and scholarly discourse on counterinsurgency. Part of this has to do with the approach's effectiveness, but arguably, the appeal extends beyond a purely military logic. Many liberal democracies would rather fight these wars by winning support than by coercing it. And as long as this remains true, the strategic debate about hearts and minds is likely to continue. Raphael S. Cohen See also Mass Communication; Media Framing; Positioning Theory; Social Influence

Further Readings Boot, M. (2013). Invisible armies: An epic history of guerilla warfare from ancient times until the present. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Cohen, R. (2014). Just how important are hearts and minds anyways? Counterinsurgency goes to the polls. Journal of Strategic Studies, 37(4), 609–636. Department of the Army. (2006). FM 3-24 counterinsurgency manual. Washington, DC: Author. Kilcullen, D. (2010). Counterinsurgency. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Nagl, J. (2002). Learning to eat soup with a knife: Counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Westport, CT: Praeger. Porch, D. (2013). Counterinsurgency: Exposing the myths of the new way of war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Hegemony The concept of hegemony comes predominantly from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1889– 1937), who was also a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy. As a university student, he became involved in the Italian labor movement and was arrested and incarcerated in 1926 for challenging ­ Mussolini’s fascist control of Italy. Gramsci spent the next decade in prison, where his health steadily deteriorated. He died shortly after his release in 1937. Gramsci struggled over the conflict between fascism and communism in Italy in the 1920s. Although he saw that his country was in a position to create a left-wing revolution, instead, the fascists conquered popular ­opinion by engaging with the everyday life of the working classes. In a period of great social, political, and economic crisis, the Italian fascists were able to tap into and exploit popular sentiments and frustrations to their benefit.

Hegemony

Despite bouts of poor health while in prison, Gramsci filled more than 35 thick notebooks with analyses that focused on the social relationship between consciousness, institutions, and culture to answer one fundamental question: Why (and how) do the dominated consent to their domination? To answer this question, Gramsci relied on the concept of hegemonia, the active process of mobilizing popular support or “spontaneous consent” for the ruling classes through the moral and intellectual leadership that reflects and serves the interests of the ruling classes. The notion of hegemony thus emphasizes the ways in which large masses of people “willingly agree” to the claims that the powerful are entitled to wealth, power, and status. Advanced liberal societies are ruled not by state force and repression, but rather by continually winning the consent of the dominated. Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gramsci took the view that capitalist societies are built upon fundamental inequalities (class domination) where the ­bourgeoisie (ruling class) dominate and exploit the proletariat (working class). The latter sell their labor power to the former in the form of wage slavery. However, the bourgeoisie not only own and control the capitalist means of production but also influence and control the state and its repressive apparatuses (law, police, prisons, army) to quell uprisings and to ensure and enforce conformism, if and when necessary. Significantly, however, social control and conformity occur primarily through the intellectual and moral leadership of traditional intellectuals (priests, professors, physicians, lawyers, etc.), who are in a position to influence and persuade the masses. The hegemonic apparatuses of society include churches, schools, media, religion, art, and even the names of streets and buildings. Individuals are socialized to accept social institutions such as education, religion, universities, and popular culture as givens where the vast majority of people, most of the time, are not in open resistance and revolt to capitalist society, thus giving the appearance of a consensual relationship between the citizen and the state in ­capitalism. The dominant classes, by virtue of their social positions of power, use mass media, communications, and popular culture to construct other groups into target markets and consumers, thus highlighting the role of culture in securing the capitalist society as a whole. For Gramsci, the state plays an educative and expansive role whereby the dominant ideology becomes lived discourses and routinizations encompassing multiple social institutions and everyday norms. The state is conceived at two levels: political society and civil society, the latter referring to an ensemble of social relations

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commonly called private, whereas the former refers to the level where coercive power is located. The dominant classes seek to contain, repress, and incorporate all human conduct within the terms and limits set by, and disseminated through, traditional intellectuals, who promote “common sense” (traditional authority) versus “good sense” (critical counteranalysis). Counterhegemony refers to the anticapitalist strategies to challenge class society through a variety of revolutionary tactics, practices, and coalitions needed to challenge the status quo. The goal is to overthrow the capitalist system by expansion, eventually overtaking all areas of civil society. Subaltern groups, trade unions, and revolutionary parties must displace ruling-class hegemony and become hegemonic themselves, before assuming state power. Rather than a bloody revolution contingent upon state force and coercion, he advocated a gradual democratization of all social institutions to include the involvement of all people in all aspects of their lives and communities based on a socialist rather than bourgeois ideology. Working-class movements can fight to win back the hearts and minds of the subaltern groups. Counterhegemonic strategies thus promote uprising and revolution, but alliances and coalitions must be made if an effective opposition is to be mounted and carried out. Countering the dominant ideology with a working-class ­philosophy signaled the need for popular workers’ education to encourage the development of intellectuals from the working class. Gramsci argued that the mobilization of the revolution hinged upon the working class's will to exploit the social, political, and economic conditions to their benefit. Originally applied to Marxist studies on class inequality and capitalism, the concept of hegemony has recently been applied to various kinds of social domination to analyze historically mobile and dynamic power structures and hierarchical relations between different social groups. Western hegemony, for example, can be seen as a serious problem in many areas: major armed conflicts, nuclear proliferation, c­ limate change disasters, global financial instability, and failing food production and distribution to the most vulnerable societies. For those interested in questions of power, cultural practices, social inequality, and social injustice, the ongoing relevance of Gramsci’s scholarship can be seen in Marxism, anarchist theory, cultural studies, sociology, criminology, media studies, political science, sociolegal studies, and postcolonial research. Heidi Rimke See also Capitalism; Marxism; Social Class

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Further Readings Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York, NY: International Publishers. Le Blanc, P. (2009). Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937). In I. Ness (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of revolution and protest: 1500 to present (8 vols., pp. 1422–1427). Cambridge, England: Blackwell.

Heuristics Heuristics are cues or “mental shortcuts” people employ to solve problems or make decisions in situations where correct answers and effective courses of action may otherwise be difficult or impossible to discern. Systematic research on how heuristics influence political decision-making has focused heavily on factors that ­ affect voting behavior in the United States and other mature democracies. These studies are closely intertwined with the development of survey research techniques for measuring public political beliefs, attitudes, and opinions, with additional important influences coming from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology. This entry discusses major findings and continuing controversies in research on political heuristics. The role of normative concerns about the quality of democratic governance as a motivating factor for the political heuristics research program is also considered.

Origins and Key Developments Research on how heuristics affect political attitudes and behavior was given impetus by key findings emerging from survey-based studies of voting in the United States. Early analyses of data gathered in surveys by Philip Converse and his collaborators on the American National Election Study (ANES) revealed that a large majority of citizens lacked coherent political belief systems and many lacked rudimentary knowledge about government institutions and processes. In addition, opinions about topical issues were subject to seemingly random change or absent entirely. These findings painted an unflattering picture of the American electorate, one that was strongly at odds with the image of a cognitively capable, well-informed citizenry found in civics texts on democratic governance. Surveys conducted in other mature democracies reported similarly dispiriting findings. At the same time that this bad news was appearing, Herbert Simon was challenging the anthropological foundations of economic theory by arguing that people

were “satisficers.” Rather than an omniscient Homo economicus who used expected utility models to make rational decisions, Simon’s satisficers were “boundedly rational.” Recognizing their cognitive constraints, they used cost-effective, readily available information as cues and invoked “good enough” as a stopping rule for choice. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky subsequently demonstrated that people used heuristics to make a wide variety of decisions and that risk-averse decision makers were guided by asymmetric loss functions that privileged losses over gains. They also argued that decisions guided by heuristics often were biased, being suboptimal by the standards of microeconomic theory. Research by Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues demonstrates that humans do indeed rely heavily on various “fast and frugal” heuristics, but challenges the conclusion that heuristic-based decisions are typically inferior.

Political Heuristics Research on public opinion and voting has been heavily influenced by these studies by behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists. However, work on heuristics in political science has its origins in the social ­psychological theory of electoral choice developed by ANES investigators at the University of Michigan. They argued that voters develop durable psychological attachments with political parties similar to identifications with social groups. Party identifications serve as “perceptual screens” that voters use to evaluate information relevant for making political choices. Many subsequent studies have generalized this idea and shown that, in addition to having direct effects on the vote, party identifications exert significant indirect effects by serving as important heuristics people use to form judgments about parties and their candidates. Candidate and party leader images are a second major heuristic. Survey research and laboratory experiments indicate that perceptions of candidates and leaders as competent, responsive, and trustworthy, or simply as likeable, do much to establish their credibility as cue givers. In this regard, research on voting in national and subnational referendums demonstrates that people are influenced by their impressions of party leaders and candidates who argue for or against a referendum proposal. Rather than attempting to learn the details of the proposal, voters rely on their images of its friends and enemies. They use a similar heuristic when judging the efficacy and desirability of policy proposals advanced by competing parties and their leaders. Leader image heuristics can have especially important effects on ­foreign policy preferences where stakes are high and

Hierarchy of Needs

uncertainty about the efficacy of alternative courses of action is pervasive. The roles of risk aversion and political knowledge in heuristic-based political decision making are noteworthy. Echoing research by behavioral economists, ­political scientists have found risk aversion leads voters to privilege the status quo. This “better the devil you know” effect affects referendum voting; other things equal, risk-averse individuals reject proposals for changing important economic and political arrangements. As for political knowledge, early researchers hypothesized that voters with low levels of knowledge would be especially prone to rely on heuristics; they did not have the information needed to make a rational choice. However, recent studies have found that more knowledgeable voters actually place greater weight on heuristics provided by leader and candidate images. Reacting to this finding, some scholars argue that the politically knowledgeable are “smart enough to know that they are not smart enough” to adhere to the canons of instrumental rationality. Others suggest that greater use of heuristics by more knowledgeable individuals reflects the fact that they are more likely to have a heuristic that they can readily access. Since party leaders are salient figures, their images are available for use by those with relatively abundant political information. Normative debates about heuristic-based political decision making continue. Some researchers argue that these decisions mimic those of a classic civics book ­citizenry, or at a minimum benefit from a “miracle of aggregation” whereby the noise of random error injected by an ignorant, heuristic-using majority is drowned out by the signal provided by a well-informed, instrumentally rational minority. Others disagree and, recent research notwithstanding, express reservations about the behavior of electorates where Homo heuristicus is the rule, not the exception. Harold D. Clarke See also Attribution Theory; Cognitive Dissonance; Framing Effects; Groupthink; Irrationality; Mutual Radicalization; Political Symbolism; Risky Shift

Further Readings Clarke, H. D., Elliott, E., & Stewart, M. C. (2015). Heuristics, heterogeneity and green choices: Voting on California’s proposition 23. Political Science Research and Methods, 4, 1–20. Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R., & Pachur, T. (Eds.). (2011). Heuristics: The foundations of adaptive behavior. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

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Lupia, A., McCubbins, M., & Popkin, S. L. (Eds.). (2000). Elements of reason: Cognition, choice and the bounds of rationality. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Hierarchy

of

Needs

Identifying human needs for the purpose of understanding human motivation has been a topic of research for many decades. The most popular approach is that of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but it is not without its critics. Other approaches appear to have more empirical support and are worthy of consideration.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs Psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) attempted to synthesize a large body of research related to human motivation. Prior to Maslow’s work, researchers generally focused separately on such factors as biology, achievement, or power to explain what energizes, directs, and sustains human behavior. Maslow posited a hierarchy of human needs based on two groupings: deficiency needs and growth needs. Within the deficiency needs, each lower need must be met before moving to the next higher level. Once each of these needs has been satisfied, if at some future time a deficiency is detected, the individual will act to remove the deficiency. The first four levels are 1. Physiological: hunger, thirst, bodily comforts 2. Safety/security: out of danger 3. Belongingness and love: affiliate with others, be accepted 4. Esteem: to achieve, be competent, gain approval and recognition

According to Maslow, an individual is ready to act upon the growth needs if and only if the deficiency needs are met. Maslow’s initial conceptualization included only one growth need—self-actualization. Selfactualized people are characterized as problem focused with a concern for personal growth. This is accomplished through the ability to engage in peak ­experiences and incorporating an ongoing freshness of appreciation of life. Maslow and Richard Lowry later differentiated the growth need of self-actualization, specifically identifying two of the first growth needs as part of the more

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general level of self-actualization, and Maslow identified one beyond the general level that focused on growth beyond orientation toward self. They are 5. Self-actualization: to find self-fulfillment and realize one’s potential a. cognitive: to know, to understand, and explore b. aesthetic: symmetry, order, and beauty 6. Self-transcendence: to connect to something beyond the ego or to help others find self-fulfillment and realize their potential

Maslow’s basic position stated that as one becomes more self-actualized and self-transcendent, one develops wisdom and automatically knows what to do in a wide variety of situations. His conclusion that the highest levels of self-actualization are transcendent in nature may be one of his most important contributions to the study of human behavior and motivation.

Using the Theory George Norwood proposed that Maslow’s hierarchy can be used to describe the kinds of information individuals seek at different levels of development. For example, at the lowest level, individuals seek coping information to meet their basic needs. Information that is not directly connected to helping a person meet his or her needs within a very short time is simply left unattended. Individuals at the safety level need helping information. They seek to be assisted in seeing how they can be safe and secure. Enlightening information is sought by individuals seeking to meet their belongingness needs. Quite often, this can be found in books or other materials on relationship development. Empowering information is sought by people at the esteem level. They are looking for information on how their sense of self can be developed. Finally, people in the growth ­levels of cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualization seek edifying information. Although Norwood does not specifically address the level of transcendence, it is reasonable to suppose that individuals at this stage would seek information on how to connect to something beyond themselves or to how others could be edified.

Critiques of Maslow’s Theory and Alternatives Maslow published a first conceptualization of his ­theory more than 50 years ago, and it has since become one of the most popular and often-cited theories of human motivation. Mahmoud Wahba and Lawrence

Bridgewell, as well as Barlow Soper, Gary Milford, and Gary Rosenthal, reported a lack of empirical evidence to support Maslow’s hierarchy. Nevertheless, it enjoys wide acceptance. The few major studies that have been completed on the hierarchy seem to support the proposals of William James, Clayton Alderfer, and Eugene Mathes that there are three levels of human needs rather than the five or six proposed by Maslow. James hypothesized the levels of material (physiological, safety), social (belongingness, esteem), and spiritual. Alderfer developed a comparable hierarchy with his ERG (existence, relatedness, and growth) theory. Mathes proposed that the three levels were physiological, belongingness, and self-actualization; he considered security and self-esteem as unwarranted. Currently there is little agreement about the identification of basic human needs and how they are ordered. For example, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci also suggested three needs, although they are not necessarily arranged hierarchically: the need for autonomy, the need for competence, and the need for relatedness. Michael ­Thompson, Cathe O’Neill-Grace, and ­Lawrence Cohen stated that the most important needs for children are connection, recognition, and power. Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohra provided evidence from a sociobiology theory of motivation that humans have four basic needs: 1. Acquiring objects and experiences. 2. Bonding with others in long-term relationships of mutual care and commitment. 3. Learning and making sense of the world and of ourselves. 4. Defending ourselves and our loved ones, beliefs, and resources from harm.

Conclusion There is much work still to be done in this area before practitioners can rely on a theory to be more informative than simply collecting and analyzing specific data for an individual or group. However, this body of research can be highly important to parents, educators, administrators, and others concerned with developing and using human potential. It shows that if human beings are to achieve the levels of character and competencies necessary to be successful in the information/ conceptual age, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its alternatives offer an outline of some important issues that must be addressed. William G. Huitt See also Attitudes; Motivated Reasoning

Hostage Taking

Further Readings Alderfer, C. (1972). Existence, relatedness, and growth. New York, NY: Free Press. Huitt, W. G. (2007, October 26). Success in the conceptual age: Another paradigm shift. Paper presented at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Georgia Educational Research Association, Savannah, GA. Retrieved from http://www.edpsycinteractive .org/papers/conceptual-age.pdf James, W. (1892/1962). Psychology: Briefer course. New York, NY: Collier. Lawrence, P., & Nohria, N. (2001). Driven: How human nature shapes our choices. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Maslow, A. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396. Retrieved from http:// psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. Maslow, A. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. New York, NY: Viking. Maslow, A., & Lowery, R. (Eds.). (1998). Toward a psychology of being (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley. Mathes, E. (1981, Fall). Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a guide for living. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 21, 69–72. Norwood, G. (2015). Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Deeper Mind. Dallas, TX: Author. Retrieved from http://www .deepermind.com/20maslow.htm Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. Soper, B., Milford, G., & Rosenthal, G. (1995). Belief when evidence does not support theory. Psychology & Marketing, 12(5), 415–422. Thompson, M., O’Neill-Grace, C., & Cohen, L. (2001). Best friends, worst enemies: Understanding the social lives of children. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. Wahba, A., & Bridgewell, L. (1976). Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15, 212–240.

Hostage Taking Hostage taking refers to the action of seizing or holding one or more persons in order to achieve certain goals. The offenders (i.e., hostage takers) could be criminals or prisoners, terrorists, or mentally disordered people. A hostage-taking incident may be the result of sophisticated advance planning, but often the offenders take hostages randomly when committing other criminal acts. Typically the hostage takers make demands and threaten to hurt or kill the hostages if the demands are not fulfilled within a given period of time. Hostage taking is a general term that incorporates at least four

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types: abduction and kidnappings, skyjackings, nonaerial hijacking, and barricade situations. This entry briefly introduces hostage-taking research, discusses different types of hostage taking, and evaluates the “no concession” policy adopted by governments and other targets.

Demands of Hostage Takers Hostage takers make various demands, including ransom, safe conduct, the release of imprisoned compatriots, media announcement, and other material gains such as food and medicines. Murray S. Miron and Arnold P. Goldstein classify hostage taking into two categories, according to hostage takers’ main motivation: instrumental and expressive. Instrumental hostage taking is the action of taking hostages to demand material gains, such as ransom. Expressive hostage taking is the action of taking hostages in order to become significant or noticed. Criminal hostage taking usually belongs to the first category, as criminals or prisoners may take hostages as human shields when they commit a crime or plot to escape. Terrorist hostage taking often involves both motives or only the latter. Terrorists typically have political objectives and attempt to achieve their objectives by terrifying the public, so taking hostages may be one of their strategies to attract public or international attention. Since terrorist hostage takers may not have material goals, and they are often young people who are well trained by terrorist organizations, they may be more willing to kill innocent hostages. Major hostage taking incidents perpetrated by terrorists include the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, and the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis. Recent brutal killings of hostages by the Islamic State show that terrorist hostage takers may intentionally kill hostages in order to express their ­ideology or to terrorize their enemies and the public.

Types of Hostage Taking Hostage taking includes four categories: abduction and kidnappings, skyjackings, non-aerial hijacking, and barricade situations. Abduction and kidnapping are usually committed by criminals, and they do so mainly to demand money. Unlike the other three types, the locations in kidnapping events are unknown and the authorities cannot directly track or monitor the incidents, so kidnapping events usually last longer. In a long-lasting hostage-taking incident, hostages may end up feeling sympathetic toward, or even attracted to, the hostage takers. This psychological phenomenon is called the Stockholm syndrome, which got its name from a hostage-taking event in Sweden in 1973. In this

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event, the hostages showed compassion for the captors and even resisted police efforts to rescue them. The locations in skyjackings, non-aerial hijacking, and barricade situations are known: aircrafts, non-aerial means of transportation, and buildings, respectively. In some circumstances, the hostages can be the perpetrators ­ themselves. For instance, an incident in which a person fortifies himself or herself in a building and threatens self-harm is considered a barricade situation. Although the locations differ, in hostage-taking incidents, the ­hostages’ lives hang in the balance.

Negotiation in Hostage-Taking Incidents In a hostage-taking incident, the victims (i.e., the hostages) and hostage takers’ targets are usually different parties. Often the victims are innocent people and the targets are those of whom hostage takers make demands, such as the government or the media. Hostage taking usually involves bargaining between the hostage takers and the targets. Proper and calm conversation with hostage takers can help distract them and thus reduce the chance of a violent outcome. Todd Sandler and John Scott distinguish two types of success in a hostage-­ taking incident: logistical success and negotiation success. Logistical success means that hostage takers ­ successfully execute their mission as planned; negotiation success means that hostage takers, after their ­logistical success, receive some or all of their demands. Their empirical research shows that negotiation success is more likely in kidnapping events, probably because in such events hostage takers’ goal is only to get money and also because hiding hostages in a secluded location is more likely to compel concessions.

No-Concession Policy The conventional wisdom and the long-held government principle in responding to hostage-taking events, especially those carried out by terrorists, is the “noconcession” policy. The logic is that concessions may encourage more hostage-taking events in the future as well as create moral hazards among citizens since they know the government will rescue them if they are taken captive. This policy, however, is hard to adhere to because a hostage-taking event is highly newsworthy. The media tend to focus on the helplessness and fear of hostages, which will arouse the audience’s emotion and in turn drive them to support a concession. Chia-yi Lee finds that hostage-taking events are more likely to happen in democratic countries because democracies ­ allow greater freedom of the press and place greater value on human life. Harvey Lapan and Todd Sandler show that the no-concession policy is not necessarily

plausible unless some conditions are met: for example, the government’s pledge of no concessions being credible to hostage takers and hostage takers only gaining from demands being fulfilled. So whether the government should negotiate and further concede to hostage takers may be determined on a case-by-case basis. Current knowledge about hostage taking indicates that hostage takers act in order to achieve certain goals, whether material or immaterial. Instrumental hostage taking may be easier to deal with because the goal for this type of hostage taker is clear, and a noconcession policy may be effective in preventing this type of event. Recent cases, however, show that expressive hostage taking has been increasing. More research is needed to prevent expressive hostage taking, especially because hostage takers of this type are more likely to take h ­ ostages’ lives. Chia-yi Lee See also Authoritarianism; Ecopolitics; Functionalism; Jihad; Refugees; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Further Readings Lapan, H., & Sandler, T. (1988). To bargain or not to bargain: That is the question. The American Economic Review, 78(2), 16–21. Lee, C.-Y. (2013). Democracy, civil liberties, and hostage-taking terrorism. Journal of Peace Research, 50(2), 235–248. Miron, M. S., & Goldstein, A. P. (1979). Hostage. New York, NY: Pergamon. Sandler, T., & Scott, J. (1987). Terrorist success in hostage-taking incidents: An empirical study. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 31(1), 35–53.

Human Duties A duty is an intentional response to the compelling power and binding nature of religious, cultural, moral, legal, or political norms that commit individuals or groups to a particular kind of action or behavior. Human duties, in a plural and political sense, refer to individual or collective responsibilities that owe their imperative character to institutionally established norms, conventional social roles, or political coercion. This entry considers different cultural understandings of human duties, offers an overview of conceptions relevant to political behavior, identifies tensions and ­ complementarities between human duties and human rights, and presents the notion of collective responsibilities as a broader framework for contemporary understandings of human duties.

Human Duties

Overview A duty is a strong call to action emerging from various possible compelling forces: social expectations projected upon individuals; normative justifications for the legitimacy of these expectations; a corresponding warranty of rights and claims, ability, or possibility of responding to such claims; and differentiated interpersonal relations affected by the anticipated action. Because this process has multiple implications for political behavior, this entry considers the ­plurality of human duties, which are complementary to human rights and equivalent to human responsibilities. Human duties are multiple and complex. There are duties to oneself, as seen in the drive to finish a marathon or the pursuit of a goal in life; duties to other humans such as honoring one’s parents, protecting ­children, or promoting charity; duties toward a country, requiring citizens to be patriotic or to obey a constitution; cosmopolitan duties similar to the Samaritan hospitality to strangers and foreigners; and duties to a divinity according to religious customs. Duties are expressed in communicative interactions and behaviors that can be implicit or explicit. Whether culturally implicit or politically explicit, they generate a variety of obligations for individuals and groups. Such complexity can be observed throughout history in many political contexts.

Multiple Conceptions of Human Duties Human duties have deep roots which are observable in  various cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. In Chinese culture, human duties have been connected to political behavior for millennia. For Confucius (551–479 BCE), relationships involving family, work, and politics are based on a basic virtue of filial piety (xiao) which generates specific duties aimed at guiding social interactions. Therefore, the Analects depict Confucius exhorting his pupils to let the ruler be ruler, fathers be fathers, and sons be sons. Pressed by his pupils for more guidance, the Master simply adds, Never disobey, but serve those above you with propriety (li) and perform your duties with loyalty. In the Hebrew tradition, the narrative of Yahweh’s commandments to Moses defines the positive and negative principles to guide human action. The corresponding duties are traditionally expressed by the notions of mitzvah  and hovah. They include prayers, . rituals, dressing codes, fasting, and the observance of the Sabbath. A long tradition of rabbinic literature since around 200 CE has prescribed and updated the obligations and roles of community members according to the Talmud.

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Islamic views on human duties emerged with the establishment of the Muslim community in Medina after 622 CE. They evolved gradually from the jurisprudence about daily rituals to the requirement to establish a political system according to the Qur’an and the Sunnah. Fundamental religious duties (‘ibad at) constitute the “Five Pillars of Islam”: a declaration of faith (Shahada); compulsory prayers (Salah); observance of mandatory annual payments (Zakah); obligatory fasting during Ramadan (Sawm); and the pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj). Other aspects of daily life are regulated similarly, establishing strict duties that indirectly generate rights and influence political behavior. Another development can be seen in Christianity. The duties registered in the Hebrew Torah are summarized by Jesus in the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them done unto you.” Under the influence of Roman Catholicism in medieval Europe, the Christian admonition to love one another is reiterated in theological treatises and codified in rules of charity (caritas), such as the ones put into practice by St. Francis (1181/1182–1226). These cultural and religious conceptions are ancient, but still relevant today. They influence many groups worldwide and shape their political views.

Political Duties and Political Rights Western philosophy developed different versions of a theory of duty, a deontology, increasingly moving away from references to religious duties in order to emphasize rational moral obligations and political rights. In ancient Greece, duties defined daily life in the city of Athens (polis) and the role of citizens (polites). Individuals abiding by the law knew what was necessary to do (to deon) in terms of public behavior. In his Dialogue Crito, Plato (427–347 BCE) depicts Socrates (469–399 BCE) refusing an offer to escape from prison and insisting on the mandatory allegiance to one’s country and its laws, even if this goes against one’s individual or family values. Aristotle uses the same expression, to deon, to describe what is absolutely necessary to do when performing a practical action. A political duty is the action utterly necessary for the good of the social order and pursuit of human wellbeing (eudaimonia). With the stoics and Romans, a systematic view of human duties can be found in Cicero (106–43 BCE), who sees duty (officium) as a virtuous practice governing every human interaction. However, due to his involvement in political matters, he relates duty to the honor and dignity in the exercise of a public office in the Roman Empire. Echoing Aristotle, he defines duty as practical rules that regulate daily life, adding that

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these rules should be based on a doctrine of the supreme good (summum bonum). Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) expands on this idea. He defines human duties (debiti) as directly related to natural rights. For Aquinas, humans are free rational beings who own their own acts but have a debt to other persons: They ought to (debent) treat others as equals because all humans are created in the image of God (imago Dei). These fundamental duties and rights ­emanate from God and are both natural and rational. European political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) contributed to a more secular rendering of human duties and natural rights, but Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) synthesized their theories during the European Enlightenment. He defines duty (Pflicht) as a mandatory moral obligation that should not be motivated by empirical constraints— such as the fear of punishment. Rather, an action should be based on the respect for a universal moral law that each and every autonomous individual could accept and justify as valid. To make this very abstract process more applicable, Kant proposes the “categorical imperative.” In one of its formulations, this imperative states that one should act in such a way as to treat Humanity, in ourselves and in others, as an end in itself. Throughout the 20th century, the psychological and social aspects of deontology gave way to legal and political duties and rights. Legal duties are not necessarily perfect duties toward oneself or toward another person, but obligations such as to obey the law or pay taxes. Conversely, political duties are owed to an authority or to other humans in virtue of their legitimacy or membership in the same community. These duties are more enforceable within a community, but not necessarily beyond its boundaries. As a result, questions emerge about what duties are owed toward others who are not community members.

From Human Duties to Human Rights Human duties have evolved to include religious, moral, legal, and political perspectives. In modern times, their political function became more evident in relation to the nation-state, but the state tends to exempt citizens from human duties toward foreigners, immigrants, or refugees. To address this challenge, the traditional emphasis on human duties has been contrasted, controlled, and complemented by the idea of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 integrates and updates religious traditions and natural rights and combines them with secular political developments to proclaim human rights as “a common

standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” It also requires that these rights be promoted by national and international measures. Thus, the United Nations implicitly imposes new duties on the states as signatories of the Declaration. While the Declaration was initially nonbinding and could impose only moral duties upon nations, its values have been progressively integrated into national legal and constitutional frameworks. Accordingly, many constitutions define human duties as complementary to human rights, making them legally binding and politically enforceable. In the 1990s, however, a new movement came to defend the need for a correspondent universal declaration to make human duties more explicit at the local, regional, national, and global levels. In view of these developments, the United Nations attempted to draft a Declaration on Human Social Responsibilities. This document would avoid exclusive religious connotations of the concept and define human duties in terms of ­collective responsibilities.

Human Responsibilities as a Broader Framework The concept of responsibility can be understood in social, legal, political, and global terms. Viewing human duties as human responsibilities allows us to consider interpersonal relationships as well as the institutionalization of implicit commitments to responsive attitudes. The human duty to communicate is a fundamental norm in human interactions and functions as the basis for other norms crystallized in social religious, cultural political, economic, or legal institutions. An important contribution to this process was offered by sociologist Max Weber in 1919, when he proposed a differentiation between an individual “ethics of conviction” (Gesinnungsethik) based on religious or moral virtues and an institutional “ethics of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik) based on political expedience. Following a similar approach, legal and political scholars used the term responsibility to address the harmful consequences of war. As a result, this term became more complex and useful in discussions about human rights and war reparations during the 20th century. With the definition of crimes against humanity, human rights, and new duties imposed upon states after 1945, human duties began to be understood as collective responsibilities. One example of a new norm that emerged in this context is the “responsibility to protect,” which allows the United Nations to lead global interventions in nation-states in order to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

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Human Responsibilities as Communicative Practices Human duties and responsibilities are based on communication. As early as 1948, H. D. Lewis was one of the first to observe that, etymologically, responsibility can be interpreted as an “ability to respond” or liability to respond. The very term responsibility reveals a basic human duty to communicate. Philosophically, Peter Strawson defines responsibility in terms of “social practices,” behavior, and attitudes in interpersonal human relationships. In his article “Freedom and Resentment,” published in 1962, ­responsibility is ascribed to persons in a reactive manner, as members of a community react to a person’s action with certain attitudes, values, and practices. Similarly, in publications during the 1990s, Karl-Otto Appel explores the dimension of community and shows that often an individual cannot be liable in case of systemic issues. In the same way as parents share the responsibility for their children with schools, hospitals, and other institutions, global environmental problems would require collective coresponsibility (Mit-Verantwortung). Between 1972 and 1995, Peter French developed a political and economic perspective on this subject. His point of departure is the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, but he later expands his views to discuss the responsibility of corporations. He proposes a shift to collective entities, defines collective moral responsibility, and concludes that it is possible to ascribe intentionality and duties to large organizations. Likewise, in a series of books published between 1992 and 2014, Larry May provides insights for the concept of collective responsibility in terms of “shared attitudes” and “shared values” within a community. His work has expanded the framework of discussion by showing the need to address the collective duties in cases of wars and human rights violations. Historical advances and contemporary understandings show that human duties are communicative ­practices that naturally entail individual and collective obligations. The various religious, cultural, moral, legal, or political duties express communicative practices and behavior within given communities. However, regional, national, or global issues cannot be addressed by individuals or groups alone but require wider collective actions. Therefore, defining human duties as human collective responsibilities represents an important conceptual development. Amos Nascimento See also Attitudes; Human Rights; Pluralism; Political Morality; Religiosity; Weber’s Protestant Ethic

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Further Readings Engstrom, S., & Whiting, J. (Eds.). (1996). Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking happiness and duty. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Fredman, S. (2008). Human rights transformed: Positive rights and positive duties. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hodgson, D. (2003). Individual duty within human rights discourse. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. International Council on Human Rights Policy. (1999). Taking duties seriously: Individual duties in international human rights law: A commentary. Versoix, Switzerland: Author. Johansen, B. (1999). Contingency in a sacred law: Legal and ethical norms in the Muslim Fiqh. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Kuper, A. (Ed.). (2005). Global responsibilities: Who must deliver on human rights? London, England: Routledge. May, L. (2013). Responsibility to protect and collective responsibility. In J. Klabbers & T. Piiparinen (Eds.), Normative pluralism (pp. 323–339). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Moghaddam, F. M., Slocum, N. R., Finkel, N., & Harré, R. (2000). Toward a cultural theory of duties. Culture & Psychology, 6, 275–302. Saul, B. (2001, Summer). In the shadow of human rights: Human duties, obligations, and responsibilities. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 32, 565–624. Wellman, C. (Ed.). (2002). Rights and duties (Vols. 1–6). New York, NY: Routledge.

Human Rights A general reflection on the term human rights suggests that they are rights that belong to all human beings in virtue of their common humanity. Human rights are said to be universal because they exist for the benefit of all people irrespective of nationality, race, class, gender, and so on. They constitute mandatory norms of high priority that impose duties on others to respect, protect, and fulfill fundamental interests of the individual rightsholder. If the oldest and perhaps best known examples of human rights are civil and political rights such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech and expression, or the right not to be tortured, the contemporary debate has witnessed a considerable expansion of interests they are said to protect, including the right to a healthy environment and the rights of indigenous peoples. While the historical origins of human rights are sometimes traced further back in history, contemporary usages of the term owe much to the emergence of the liberal-democratic state in Western modernity. Although the late 18th-century revolutions in France and the United States proclaimed the universal and inalienable

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“rights of man,” it took until the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) after World War II that they began to gain international political and legal momentum. In the domestic and the international realm, the law and politics of human rights have traditionally been predicated on the (nation-) state as both their principal guarantor and their main violator. This state-centrism is increasingly deemed insufficient to respond to new threats to human rights wrought by globalization, be it in the context of the so-called global war on terrorism or the operations of multinational corporations. At least since the 1970s, human rights have become one of the most powerful political ideologies of the contemporary world order, and so it is perhaps not surprising that wide disagreement persists as regards their proper foundations, justification, content, and interpretation in morality, politics, and law. This entry provides a brief overview of these debates, organized around two main themes: the grounding of universal human rights in humanity, and the relationship between human rights and the law and politics of the state.

Humanity’s Rights Article 1 of the UDHR proclaims that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” In this vein, the universality of human rights is sometimes treated as a truism: Human rights are universal because they belong to all human beings by virtue of their being human; or put the other way around, unless they are universal rights, they cannot be human rights. This despite the fact that from a historical perspective, many humans—including slaves, Black people, women, and homosexuals—have long been excluded from the equal enjoyment of their rights. Olympe de Gouges’s attempt to bring the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of women to the attention of the male drafters of the 18thcentury French Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen infamously ended under the guillotine. Even today, human rights remain a scare resource, with benefits distributed very unevenly across the world. Geography plays a decisive role in the global birth lottery, and most Northerners happen to live a more dignified and less unequal life than people in the so-called Global South. None of this would appear to undermine the normative thrust of human rights’ proclaimed universality, namely that we ought to be treated as if we were born free and equal in dignity and rights. From this perspective, human rights operate as critical standards of ­political morality that empower individuals to challenge existing conditions of rightlessness and injustice. It is sometimes argued that human rights are (at least) universal in the sense that virtually all states have signed up

to international conventions dedicated to their protection. Such unduly positivistic approaches bear close resemblance to arguments that the only “real” human rights are those recognized and enforced by law, most famously expressed in Jeremy Bentham’s early repudiation of the rights of man as “nonsense upon stilts.” As Bentham was keenly aware, this renders the existence of human rights contingent on their enactment in (international) law, thus depriving them of their critical (revolutionary) force. At the same time, conceiving human rights as “natural” prepolitical and prelegal rights leads straight back to the problem of their universal moral foundations. (Liberal) philosophers have espoused different views on what constitutes a fundamental interest of, or is of intrinsic value to, all human beings. Prominent candidates for justifying human rights universalism include individual autonomy and agency, human dignity and well-being, and the satisfaction of basic needs. To ensure the feasibility of their universal implementation, human rights are often said to merely require the establishment of minimum conditions for people to lead a decent life. Whatever the merits of any particular approach, a number of overarching concerns with attempts to ground rights in humanity may be singled out. A first concern is with the undue proliferation of human rights that relates to disagreements about what is truly fundamental to human beings. To use a common example, is the right to “periodic holidays with pay” provided by Article 24 UDHR really an essential condition for the realization of individual autonomy or human dignity? In international practice, we have witnessed an as steady as contested expansion of human rights from so-called “first generation” rights (the classical civil and political rights) to “second generation” rights (social and cultural rights) and “third-generation” rights (solidarity rights including group rights and the right to development). A second concern is that universal justifications of human rights are too abstract to determine what is due to all human beings as a matter of right. Here, the problem is that positing interests and values at a sufficiently abstract level to command general consent (e.g., freedom of religion is a fundamental aspect of individual autonomy) tends to evade conflicts that persist about their proper interpretation and implementation. For example, the question of whether the human right to freedom of religion entitles Muslim women to wear headscarves in public educational institutions has been answered very differently even within the Western family of liberal states. Thirdly and closely related, the discourse of universality risks concealing that human rights are, at least historically, a child of Western liberalism and may as

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such be ill-suited to govern the globe. Not everyone aspires to be an “atomistic” rights-bearing individual (more pointedly, a White heterosexual Christian male), and it is difficult to see why, say, an indigenous community in sub-Saharan Africa organized around communal goods would put a prime value on a universal right to private property. To these concerns, it may be responded, first, that it is possible to meaningfully distinguish between fundamental and less fundamental aspects of human existence (everyone suffers when being tortured and no one can legitimately claim a human right to ice cream); second, that a diversity of (legitimate) interpretations of human rights is not necessarily incompatible with maintaining that they have a universal core; and third, that even if human rights are of Western origin, they have been reappropriated and reinterpreted from within a wide range of non-Western (Asian, Arabic, and African) traditions and cultures. Nevertheless, the notion that “we all” have rights simply in virtue of our common humanity remains contested terrain.

The Law and Politics of Human Rights in the International Order of States Unlike desires people may have or goals they may pursue, human rights (as other types of rights) entail claims to justified entitlements toward others. This explains why rights are often considered to correlate with duties. According to one influential account, (human) rights protect those human interests that are considered sufficiently important to impose corresponding duties on others. It further suggests that the justification of a (human) right requires not only justifying the claim of the rights-holder but also the burden imposed on the duty-bearer. What distinguishes human rights from other types of rights is that they protect interests that are considered fundamental to human beings and that therefore enjoy a high priority or threshold value in relation to competing social considerations. This does not mean that human rights were absolute, with the right not to be tortured being one important exception. In most cases, the individual interests protected by human rights must be reconciled with the requirements of social order. To give one famous example, the right to free speech does not entitle people to falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater. In politics, human rights’ relationship to duties and considerations of social order finds an expression in the requirement that they be justified toward the political community as a whole. From this perspective, human rights are those rights that human beings accord to each other as members of a polity. While it is, accordingly,

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common to assume that human rights and democracy are interrelated, the precise contours of their relationship remain contested. For liberals, the primary role of human rights is to protect a private sphere of individual freedom against undue interference by state authorities, including the proverbial “tyranny of the majority.” Republicans, by contrast, stress the political role of human rights in empowering individuals to participate in the public affairs of the state. Two international treaties of the 1960s, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on E ­ conomic, Social and Cultural Rights, rendered the human rights previously proclaimed in the UDHR binding upon states as a matter of international law. Other international human rights treaties dedicated to, among other things, the protection of women and children followed. This ­international system of human rights protection is complemented by regional instruments in Europe (the European Convention of Human Rights), the Americas (the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights), and Africa (the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights). International human rights law imposes three types of duties on states: a duty to respect, which entails that states should refrain from violating human rights; a duty to protect, which requires states to prevent third parties (nonstate actors) from “abusing” human rights; and a duty to fulfill, which means that states should proactively and progressively facilitate people’s enjoyment of their human rights. Considerations of social order that circumscribe the legitimate scope of human rights enter international law through so-called limitation clauses. As in the case of falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, Article 19 of the ICCPR authorizes states to restrict freedom of speech and expression to ensure, among other things, the protection of “public order, or of public health or morals.” The foregoing considerations point to the central role of the (liberal-democratic) state in structuring the operation of the law and politics of human rights. Human rights evolved in tandem with the modern state and expanded globally at a time when states monopolized international relations. In their constitutional dimension, human rights play an important role in legitimating the political compact between rulers and ruled (the government and the people) within the state legal order. Their international dimension concerns the relationship between states that undertake political and legal commitments toward each other to secure the human rights of people on their territory or otherwise within their jurisdiction. Human rights’ state-centered heritage has come under increasing pressure under contemporary conditions of

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globalization. We have witnessed the emergence and proliferation of globally operating nonstate actors, including international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and multinational corporations, whose powers to promote and violate human rights can match those of many states. Patterns of global economic cooperation and competition correlate with increasing numbers of people crossing state borders, be it as businessmen or women, tourists, workers, asylum seekers, or victims of human trafficking. Such and similar challenges invite a reconsideration of the relationship between human rights’ proclaimed universality and their political and legal compartmentalization in the international order of states, with a view to addressing matters of common global concern including the mitigation of global ­climate change and the alleviation of world poverty. Daniel Augenstein See also Globalization; Human Duties; Human Trafficking; Legitimacy, Forms of; Refugees; Torture; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Further Readings Alston, P., & Goodman, R. (2012). International human rights law. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. De Feyter, K. (2005). Human rights: Social justice in the age of the market. New York, NY: Zed Books. De Schutter, O. (2014). International human rights law (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Finkel, N., & Moghaddam, F. M. (Eds.). (2005). The psychology of human rights and duties: Empirical contributions and normative commentaries. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Freeman, M. (2011). Human rights (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Kinley, D. (2009). Civilizing globalization: Human rights and the global economy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Moyn, S. (2010). The last utopia: Human rights in history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nickel, J. W. (2007). Making sense of human rights (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Blackwell. Vincent, A. (2009). The politics of human rights. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Human Trafficking Human trafficking is the cruel and widespread practice of exploiting vulnerable women, children, and men for profit. Because trafficking can be identified in virtually

every country in the world, it is considered a truly global crime. In addition to its transnational ­characteristics— taking place across international b ­orders—human ­trafficking also takes place within countries. Acknowledging the severity of the offense, in December 2000 the United Nations introduced the Protocol to Prevent, ­Suppress and Eliminate Trafficking in Human Beings, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the ­ Transnational Organized Crime Convention (Protocol). The protocol provides a common definition of human trafficking as well as a consistent framework to guide efforts of law enforcement, government agencies, and civil society actors. Countries around the world, including the United States, have subsequently passed national legislation to address human trafficking within their borders. Human trafficking is composed of a series of actions including the recruitment, transportation, and harboring of another person, accomplished by means that include force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of exploitation. According to the protocol, exploitation may include sexual exploitation as well as forced labor and services. Young women and girls are trafficked into brothels, massage parlors, and strip clubs; women may also be exploited as domestic servants, in nail or hair salons, in sweatshops, hotels, and restaurants, and in agriculture. Men are also trafficked to work in fields, in construction, in factories, and in hazardous industries such as mining and deep-sea fishing. Notwithstanding the abusive treatment encountered in both practices, human trafficking is not the same as human smuggling. A smuggled person is complicit in the action to cross a border illegally and pays a transportation fee (usually up front) to the smuggler. A trafficked person, having been recruited under false pretenses, is not complicit in the crime, and the trafficker, who frequently fronts the transportation costs, does not profit until exploitation begins. While smuggling requires crossing an international border, human trafficking can take place within a country and internationally. Individuals are vulnerable to trafficking in a variety of ways. They may be vulnerable because they are poor, but they may also be vulnerable because they are illiterate and unskilled, because of their gender, race, or religion, because of war and conflict, because of past histories of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and because of culture and tradition. Traffickers can be part of large criminal organizations with tentacles in many parts of the world; they can also be part of small groups of individuals linked together by technology. Trafficking is a dynamic process that begins by winning a person’s trust in order to convince that individual to leave home and family in search

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of a better life and includes recruiters, transporters, managers, financial experts, and human resources specialists. Both women and men are involved in the trafficking chain.

Addressing the Problem The international community has developed a threepronged framework to prevent the crime, bring traffickers to justice, and provide assistance to trafficked ­persons, commonly referred to as the “3 P Approach”: Prevention, Prosecution and Law Enforcement, and Protection and Assistance. • Prevention refers to a wide range of educational and awareness-raising programs designed to educate vulnerable persons about how to recognize potentially exploitative situations. Prevention programs also help individuals identify signs of human trafficking in their communities and know how to respond to a trafficking situation. In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on prevention by addressing the demand for both sex trafficking and labor trafficking. For example, campaigns at large sporting events warn prospective buyers of sexual services of the possibilities of encountering a victim of human trafficking. And increasingly, legislation and regulatory measures are seeking to make corporations responsible for their supply chains. • Prosecution and law enforcement are central to anti-trafficking initiatives. This approach begins with rigorous legislation defining the crime of human trafficking, including robust sentencing guidelines. According to the protocol, anti-trafficking legislation should be victim-centered. Notably, such an approach seeks to eliminate criminalizing a trafficked person for any illegal activities if these were committed while being ­ trafficked, recognizing the special needs of minors and allowing foreign trafficked persons a “reflection” period during which they may decide whether or not to cooperate with law enforcement officials in the prosecution of their traffickers. • Protection and assistance to trafficked victims is necessary in any comprehensive anti-trafficking model. This includes support throughout legal proceedings as well as the provision of a wide range of services, including shelter, medical, psychological, and material assistance as well as education and employment training. Protection and assistance also includes consideration of the age, gender, and special needs of victims of trafficking, and in particular the special needs of children. Within this framework, consideration is given to

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protect trafficked persons from revictimization and retrafficking.

Major Challenges in Combating Trafficking Since the introduction of the Palermo Protocol and the annual publication of the U.S. government’s Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries according to their governments’ efforts to combat the crime, human trafficking has received considerable political and popular attention. The majority of the world’s countries now have some form of anti-trafficking legislation in place; however, it is difficult to assess how much progress, if any, has been made in addressing the problem or in helping trafficked persons recover from the abuses of a trafficking situation. One of the greatest challenges is the lack of reliable, accurate, and comparable data about the scope of the problem; countries’ anti-­ trafficking efforts and estimated numbers of trafficked persons vary widely. Lack of political will, endemic corruption, and a lack of willingness to tackle the demand side of trafficking contribute to a thriving criminal activity that operates with impunity in many parts of the world. While civil society organizations have displayed considerable effort to care for victims and educate the public, governments still need to strengthen their resolve to aggressively pursue traffickers and provide assistance to trafficked persons. Michele Anne Clark See also Blaming the Victim; Corruption; Dependency Theory; Gender Bias; Human Duties; Human Rights; International Humanitarian Law; Migration; Social Darwinism

Further Readings Office of the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights. (2000). Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ ProfessionalInterest/Pages/ProtocolTraffickingInPersons.aspx Shelley, L. I. (2010). Human trafficking: A global perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). (2014). Global report on trafficking in persons 2014. Available at http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/ GLOTIP_2014_full_report.pdf United States Department of State. 2016. Trafficking in persons report 2016. Available at http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/ tiprpt/2016/

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Hybrid Regimes Hybrid regimes are regimes that combine both democratic and autocratic traits. Hybrid regimes could be politically repressive yet have relatively free and fair elections. They could exhibit some judicial independence yet experience no turnover in power. Some scholars label them anocracies, while others may refer to them as semiauthoritarian regimes. Many typologies have been created in order to identify the different institutional arrangements in hybrid regimes and to distinguish them from authoritarian regimes and democracies. As the name would suggest, hybrid regimes are not purely authoritarian because they have adopted many institutions used in democracies, yet in practice, they do not operate democratically. However, in contrast to authoritarian regimes, they also have much greater ­levels of pluralism. They are not completely politically closed nor can they fully eliminate the rules or make them a facade. This entry provides an overview of the key elements of hybrid regimes and offers a brief historical summary of the different ways in which nondemocracies have been categorized in the past. Before doing so, the entry explains how hybrid regimes emerged.

Why Have Hybrid Regimes Emerged? Hybrid regimes are most often found in developing countries though there are some richer countries that also employ both autocratic and democratic institutions, such as Singapore. Most hybrid regimes are a product of the Third Wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s, where many new countries got stuck transitioning to democracy but never consolidated democratic rule. Many of these countries began the transition into democracy by holding elections, but their other political institutions were extremely weak. The elections became routine but the parties, for example, were fragile and lacked nationwide appeal. These organizations would remain dormant in between elections and had few organizational resources. We can see this in the case of Nigeria and Kenya where elections are highstakes affairs, but voting behavior is often based on patron–client ties and not voter–party ideological bonds. Additionally, the legislatures were never fully developed, nor were the judiciaries. In other cases, hybrid regimes emerge after a democratic regime has decayed to the point that many of their political institutions no longer function democratically, such as was the case in Venezuela in the 2000s after Hugo Chávez took over (1999–2013). Venezuela had experienced years of democratic elections, but by

the 2000s, the legislative branch’s powers were severely limited, term limits were abolished for the president, and the incumbent benefited from his access to the state-owned media. The same fate also hit Nicaragua in the past decade. After years of dictatorship, the country democratized in the 1990s only to revert to a hybrid regime with increasing control over the courts and repression of civil liberties. Press freedom, in particular, has been severely curtailed since the 2000s. Hybrid regimes also develop when an authoritarian regime finally attempts to democratize. This is the case of Burma/Myanmar. The regime was staunchly authoritarian for decades, but decided to open up and hold elections in 2010 in order to gain more international legitimacy. Political parties and politicians that had been banned for many years were now allowed to contest elections. Though human rights abuses are still problematic for Burma’s ethnic minorities and there are laws that apply heavy censorship and restrictions against associations, the elections of 2015 resulted in an opposition party winning with 60% of the votes. Legislative power, however, is limited by a rule that mandates that 25% of all of the seats are reserved for the military. Nevertheless, allowing the opposition to run in elections differentiates Burma/Myanmar from authoritarian regimes like China.

Theorizing Authoritarian Regimes In the past, little was known about authoritarian regimes. Most scholarly research focused on democracy and the process of democratization. Any regime that was not classified as a democracy was thrown into the category of dictatorship. Thus dictatorship became a large residual category by which many regimes around the world were identified. Initially, one of the few attempts to differentiate between dictatorships was the distinction made between totalitarian regimes and authoritarian regimes by authors such as Hannah Arendt and Juan Linz. Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes differed in terms of the degree of control the regime had over the population. Totalitarian regimes are completely allencompassing, offering no room for the individual. The goal is to mobilize society, increase participation, and create a disciplined and united populace through the use of terror and propaganda. The political party and secret police play a strong role, while the regime claims to have a strong ideology that acts to provide legitimacy. In contrast, authoritarian regimes generally have weak ideologies. The goal of the regime is to have a society that is depoliticized and demobilized. Though terror and repression are used, authoritarian regimes allow varying degrees of pluralism. The masses may even have some ability to provide a check on the regime’s power.

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In essence, this first attempt to differentiate despotic regimes illustrates that the degree of control that regimes have over the population varies considerably, or that dictatorship is something that varies by degree. Multiple research strains have arisen from the initial work on dictatorships. These research strains can broadly be divided into two groups: categorical and continuous. Categorical typologies of dictatorship ignore the level of authoritarianism and instead focus on the heterogeneity that exists within the universe of dictatorships. Thus, categorical typologies of dictatorship view all dictatorships as equally authoritarian and instead focus on how they differ from one another. Continuous typologies, in contrast, disaggregate regimes based on how authoritarian they are. These typologies emphasize the various gradients of dictatorship. Such typologies identify the extent to which regimes are democratic or authoritarian and place regimes on a democratic-autocratic scale, or continuum. Many scholars, such as Larry Diamond, concur that continual measurements are useful. They claim that there is a gray zone that lies between democracy and dictatorship, and regimes that lie somewhere in the middle can be referred to as hybrids. However, there is no consensus regarding exactly how hybrids should be defined and measured.

Gray-Zone Regimes Regimes that fall in the gray zone between authoritarianism and democracy are referred to as hybrid regimes and flawed democracies. It is important to make the distinction between these two types of regimes since both share autocratic and democratic features. More democratic assessment organizations are distinguishing between hybrid regimes and flawed democracies since flawed democracies more closely resemble actual democracies and have a much better chance of transitioning into a consolidated democracy. The ­following sections highlight the prevailing approaches to differentiating these regimes that fall in the gray zone.

Flawed/Defective Democracies Flawed democracies are not hybrids; they are simply democracies that have imperfections that affect the quality of democratic governance. One of the most notable terms for flawed democracies is delegative democracies, a term coined by Guillermo O’Donnell. Delegative democracies have many of the characteristics of actual democracies. They have a free media, civil liberties and political rights, and free and fair elections that are high-stakes affairs. The issue is that there are low levels of horizontal accountability. The leader, once elected, has few restraints on the exercise of power.

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These regimes are characterized by strong presidentialism with an opaque decision-making process. Power is personalized around the president, who is above the law and makes most of the decisions. Many individuals may be dependent on the president with patron–clientelism linking the leadership to the citizens. Though the judiciary is mostly free to invalidate the orders of the executive, the legislature and political parties are poorly institutionalized. This term has been used to describe regimes in Latin America that had high levels of executive power but weak political parties and legislatures and very low levels of trust in these institutions; strong presidentialism, however, is a characteristic of flawed democracies around the world.

Competitive Authoritarian Regimes Competitive authoritarian regimes is a term devised by authors Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way to describe a hybrid regime. In contrast to flawed democracies, which usually perform well on civil liberties and electoral processes but have weak methods of accountability, competitive authoritarian regimes exhibit the same problems, but electoral processes are not entirely fair. Competitive authoritarian regimes may claim to guarantee civil liberties and hold regular elections, but they violate the rules enough to not meet the minimum standards for democracy. This label is similar to the category developed by Andreas Schedler for electoral authoritarianism. He argues that in electoral authoritarian regimes, elections are manipulated in favor of the incumbent to such a degree that they are not considered truly democratic. Schedler’s main difference is that electoral authoritarian regimes are not competitive in any way. They allow multiparty elections for the executive and the ­legislature, and some seats are granted to the opposition, but there is a lesser degree of uncertainty. Thus, what Schedler considers a hybrid regime Levitsky and Way see as fully authoritarian since the results are manipulated far too much. Larry Diamond offers a further category of regimes that are hegemonic electoral authoritarian. As in Schedler's category, there is no uncertainty year after year about what party is going to win. The ruling party is a hegemonic party that dominates all of the elections for years, such as the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico (PRI) until the year 2000. In contrast to Schedler’s electoral authoritarian regimes, countries with hegemonic parties may have power shared by many elites who belong to the party. The party may not share the same preferences as the leader, which indicates that these regimes may offer more intraparty democracy compared with electoral authoritarian regimes without a hegemonic party.

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Hybrid Regimes

The section that follows offers a more in-depth overview of the key political institutions that are studied to assess what constitutes a hybrid regime.

Measuring Hybrid Regimes Because the boundaries between authoritarianism and nonauthoritarian regimes are often imprecise, this often leads to conceptual confusion. However, a focus on, and assessment of, several key institutions can help enhance our understanding of what a hybrid regime is in practice. These institutions include the political parties and elections, the judiciary, the legislature and executive branches, and finally the constitution, or how civil rights and civil liberties are regulated. Democracies hold free and fair elections where turnover in power takes place. Democracies also have ­vertical and horizontal forms of accountability, with the legislature and the judiciary able to provide an adequate check on executive power. Finally, democracies have some guarantee of civil liberties and political rights, such as a constitution. Individual rights are assured, and the media is free to operate. In hybrid regimes, it is most common that all of these institutions exist. These institutions may even have some de jure power and some function, but in practice, their power may be limited.

Elections Elections are formal, state-run events that determine the selection of political leaders. Elections are widespread even among dictatorships. The quality of elections is usually the first step to distinguish hybrid regimes from dictatorships and from democracies. Elections that are held in hybrid regimes or democracies have some uncertainty. In full-fledged democracies, elections are free of fraud, interference, intimidation, and violence. Democratic elections also do not exclude the opposition or prevent them from accessing campaign resources or access to the media. All adult citizens have the right to run for office. Democratic elections are also held on a regular basis, all citizens of a certain age can vote in them, and citizens’ votes determine which individuals will hold major positions in government. In authoritarian regimes, elections, if they are held, have absolutely no meaning. These are sometimes referred to as pseudo democracies or facade regimes. The institutions are in place but in practice these institutions serve only to consolidate the regime. N ­ either facade regimes nor pseudodemocracies are hybrid regimes. They are simply authoritarian regimes that have fraudulent elections. In authoritarian regimes, the elections are won by the ruling party or leader exclusively. There may be elections, but there is no competition. Any election

where the incumbents win by 70% or more is not ­considered competitive. This certainly was the case for Tunisia under Ben Ali (1987–2011), who regularly won ­elections with over 80% of the vote. The presidents of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have routinely won with more than 90% of the vote and near full turnout. The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) under Hun Sen (1985–) barely won a majority of the seats in 1998, but 4 years later it was winning with 70% of the votes or more. In contrast to authoritarian regimes, in hybrid regimes elections take place and are not entirely predetermined by the leader, as they would be in a dictatorship. The opposition is legally given the right to contest elections, and its members may genuinely feel as though it has a chance to achieve some legitimate electoral gains. Incumbents do not always win by large margins. In Kenya’s elections during the 1990s, Daniel Arap Moi (1978–2002), the longtime leader, was elected with only a small plurality. Elections held in hybrid regimes are usually bitterly fought and are generally free from ­massive fraud (sometimes due to the presence of international observers). Incumbents take elections very seriously. However, they have a clear advantage due to their access to state resources. They may also deny the opposition adequate media coverage or harass, bribe, extort, and threaten the opposition candidates and supporters. They may also manipulate the electoral rules in ways that disadvantage opposition candidates. Opposition victories are not impossible, but they are highly unlikely and difficult to achieve and often require international observation and intervention.

Judicial Institutions Judicial institutions are also important to assess. In authoritarian regimes, judiciaries usually exist but have absolutely no power. The rule of law is unevenly applied, and access to the courts may be unfair due to location, costs, or discrimination. Thus, the equality of citizens before the law is not guaranteed. Political interference in the judicial process is the norm. Decisions are driven not by existing laws or legal precedents, but rather by political motivations or bribery. Leaders might habitually contact the judges to direct the outcome of a case. As a result, citizens cannot rely on the state to enforce laws in an unbiased and consistent fashion. Laws have little de facto significance, and the judiciary never challenges the regime. In hybrid regimes, judiciaries exist but are often plagued by the same problems facing those in authoritarian regimes. However, in spite of the weak judicial institutions, there are times when judiciaries in hybrid regimes disagree with the regime. In Russia under Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999) and Pakistan und Pervez Musharraf

Hybrid Regimes

(2001–2008), there were instances where decrees were declared unconstitutional. In Russia’s case under Yeltsin, the courts struck down decrees to protect the media or members of the opposition. Attempts to punish judges acting independently in Pakistan led to public backlashes under Musharraf.

Legislatures Most regimes (including authoritarian regimes) have a legislature, but whether or not this institution functions well varies considerably. In most authoritarian regimes, legislatures are solely tools of the executive, comprised purely of political appointees who have little actual say in how laws are composed or determined. In democracies, by contrast, members are directly elected by citizens, capable of sanctioning the executive, and serve as the driving force behind state legislation. In hybrid regimes, legislatures exist though they are usually not able to remove the president or prime minister. They are also not immune to their dissolution by the executive. However, unlike in authoritarian regimes, they are not directly appointed by the president. They also offer a forum for political discussion, even if such discussion is severely restricted. There is also some oppositional activity that occasionally takes place. Kuwait is one of the few monarchies in the Persian Gulf that makes use of a parliament. Though the parliament is not particularly powerful, it has challenged the ruling family at times. Legislatures in hybrid regimes may also be given the opportunity to actually legislate and make budgetary decisions, though there is a variance across hybrids. The legislative branch in Singapore has played an important role in enacting policy. In contrast, the legislature in Venezuela (a hybrid regime) under Chávez (2002–2013) played a relatively marginal role in ­policy-making. In Kyrgyzstan, the legislature is allowed to debate the budget but not allowed to make changes to it. The legislature is mostly subsumed under the power of the president. Yet unlike its authoritarian counterparts in other Central Asian regimes, the K ­ yrgyz government is given room to criticize and interact with the president.

Civil Liberties and Political Rights Civil liberties and political rights can also differ across regimes. Regimes that are mostly functioning democratic institutions but have weak civil liberties are often referred to as illiberal democracies. This is a form of flawed democracy, but it differs from delegative democracies where civil liberties and political rights are strong but there are few mechanisms of vertical and horizontal accountability of the president.

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Authoritarian regimes almost never offer their citizens civil liberties and political rights. In authoritarian regimes, rights and liberties are severely constrained. The media are entirely state-owned, heavily censored, and repressed. Independent newspapers are prohibited by law, such as is the case in Cuba. In Belarus, the national television is completely under the control of the state, and no opposition views are presented. In contrast, in hybrid regimes, the media are not completely owned by the state and are also free to operate legally. They may occasionally serve as a watchdog to expose the abuses of the government. Unlike in democracies, the media are ­heavily controlled by other means such as bribing, selective allocation of state advertising, and manipulating debts and taxes of media outlets. The media are also regulated through harsh laws on media freedoms that can be used to prosecute the media for libel. Other civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association are also not completely banned as they may be in authoritarian regimes. There is some degree of freedom to profess one’s opinion and form associations, though this may be heavily regulated or unevenly applied. To illustrate, in Cuba (an authoritarian regime), civil rights organizations are simply illegal. In contrast, in Honduras (a hybrid), there are constitutional guarantees of freedoms of assembly and association, but they are not always consistently upheld. Religious freedoms may also be better respected in hybrid regimes than in authoritarian regimes. For example, in Vietnam (an authoritarian regime) religious freedom remains restricted; all religious groups are required to join a party-controlled supervisory body and gain permission for their activities. Those that fail to do so are arrested. This contrasts with Cambodia (a hybrid regime), which allows religious groups to adhere to their religion, though in practice, there is some discrimination of nonBuddhist groups.

Conclusion Hybrid regimes demonstrate that there are different ways in which dictators hold power and maintain themselves in power. They also demonstrate that there is a wide gap between authoritarian regimes and democracies. Understanding the nuances in the gray zone helps to better assess the quality of political institutions across countries. Though hybrids often do not transition into fullfledged democracies, they may moderate into flawed regimes. This is most likely to happen after a hybrid regime faces a major crisis of legitimacy. A decision to engage in massive fraud after years of winning free ­elections can also cause a hybrid regime to be ousted, as was the case with Armenia in 1996. Nevertheless, hybrid regimes tend to be fairly durable. They offer

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c­itizens and the opposition the impression that the regime is democratic even though the democratic institutions have been implemented to help conceal their authoritarian tendencies—and prolong the longevity of the regime. Natasha Ezrow See also Capitalism; Clash of Civilizations; Democracy; Dictatorship; Springboard Model of Dictatorship; Sultanism; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1973). The origins of totalitarianism. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bogaards, M. (2009). How to classify hybrid regimes? Defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism. Democratization,  16(2), 399–423. Diamond, L. J. (2002). Thinking about hybrid regimes. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 21–35. Gilbert, L., & Mohseni, P. (2011). Beyond authoritarianism: The conceptualization of hybrid regimes. Studies in Comparative International Development, 46(3), 270–297. Herb, M. (2004). Princes and parliaments in the Arab World. Middle East Journal, 58(3), 380. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the cold war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Linz, J. J. (2000). Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Morlino, L. (2009). Are there hybrid regimes? Or are they just an optical illusion? European Political Science Review, 1(2), 273–296. O’Donell, G. A. (1994). Delegative democracy. Journal of Democracy, 5(1), 55–69. O’Toole, G. (2007). Politics Latin America. London, England: Pearson. Rocha Menocal, A., Fritz, V., & Rakner, L. (2008). Hybrid regimes and the challenges of deepening and sustaining democracy in developing countries. South African Journal of International Affairs, 15(1), 29–40. Sanchez-Ancochea, D., & Marti i Puig, S. (2013). Handbook of Central American governance. New York, NY; Routledge. Schedler, A. (2006). Electoral authoritarianism: The dynamics of unfree competition. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner. Starr, S. F. (2006, June). Clans, authoritarian rulers, and parliaments in Central Asia (Silk Road Paper). Washington, DC: Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program. Retrieved from http://www.silkroadstudies.org/ resources/pdf/SilkRoadPapers/2006_06_SRP_Starr_Clans.pdf Way, L., & Levitsky, S. (2002). The rise of competitive authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65. Wigell, M. (2008). Mapping “hybrid regimes”: Regime types and concepts in comparative politics. Democratization,  15(2), 230–250.

Hypocrisy Paradigm The hypocrisy paradigm is an experimental method used to induce feelings of hypocrisy and the associated negative emotions. The paradigm was developed by Elliot Aronson and colleagues in 1991 as a social influence technique to change intentions and behavior in the context of sexual health. However, the paradigm has since been used in a variety of contexts to facilitate attitude and behavior change, including religion, ­racism, and inter- versus intragroup relations. Because of the potential of the hypocrisy paradigm to influence social attitudes and behaviors that have political implications, for example in religion and intergroup relations, it offers valuable insights into political behavior. This entry introduces the theoretical and empirical background of the hypocrisy paradigm, as well as current trends that have relevance to political behavior.

Theoretical Background and Procedure The hypocrisy paradigm has its theoretical origins in one of the most widely studied phenomena in social psychology: cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger was the originator of the term cognitive dissonance, which refers to the negative arousal that individuals experience following a discrepancy between their attitudes and behavior or between different attitudes or different behaviors. Depending on which method is used to induce cognitive dissonance, the likely result is a change in attitude, intention, or behavior. The hypocrisy paradigm has been shown to change attitudes (by reconciling these with the discrepant attitude or behavior), intentions, and behavior in a number of social domains. As such, it offers a useful experimental way of investigating how important it is to individuals to be consistent, and to avoid feelings of hypocrisy. ­Moreover, it enables us to examine the emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral ramifications of personal inconsistencies. The most widely used experimental procedure of the paradigm is to ask participants to advocate a positive behavior (and if they do so publicly or in front of a video camera, the effect is expected to be stronger), ­followed by asking them to recall episodes in the recent past when they themselves did not adhere to these ­ideals. As such, participants are made to feel hypocritical because they “preached” something that they had not recently practiced. The following sections introduce three domains in which the hypocrisy ­paradigm has been used and which bear relevance to behavior and politics.

Hypocrisy Paradigm

Reducing Prejudicial Behavior in Racists Leanne Son Hing and her colleagues used the hypocrisy paradigm to change the behavior of aversive racists, who, due to their egalitarian views, were reluctant to express their racist views against Asians but scored highly on implicit measures of racism. Implicit measures do not rely on self-report answers to sensitive questions but instead tap into unconscious biases by asking participants to perform quick responses to categorical associations. Those who respond faster and more accurately to associations between a given race and negative adjectives (compared with positive adjectives) score highly on implicit racism. Son Hing found that the aversive racists self-reported more guilt and shame after the hypocrisy induction. More interestingly, they showed a favorable behavioral response toward Asians, as measured by the fact that they recommended fewer budget cuts to the Asian Students Association than nonracists and aversive racists who were not in the hypocrisy condition.

Effect of Group Support and Salience on Hypocrisy Blake McKimmie and colleagues studied how the social context might make a difference in how individuals respond to hypocrisy induction. They first emphasized the participants’ personal attitude toward generosity and then manipulated hypocrisy regarding generosity. This was done either with or without group support, and with high or low group salience. They found that individuals who were made to feel hypocritical with no group support and high group salience changed their attitudes regarding generosity and reduced their group identification. None of the other groups showed this effect. These findings highlight the importance of the social (and by the same token, political) context in which hypocritical feelings take place. The implications of these for social and political behavior are profound: The cognitive dissonance associated with holding socially unfavorable views is likely to depend on whether or not in-group members support those views.

Hypocrisy in Religion: A Reverse Effect? Omar Yousaf and Fernand Gobet have recently shown that hypocrisy does not always result in attitude–­ behavior reconciliation, which is what most past research had shown; traditionally in cognitive dissonance research,

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when individuals’ recent behavior (or previously stated attitudes) clashes with their present behavior or attitudes, they change the present attitudes to fit with the past ones in order to accomplish consistency. However, it may be the case that, with highly personal and important attitudes that are central to one’s sense of identity (such as religion or politics), individuals do not reduce the strength of their attitudes when feelings of hypocrisy are experienced. Indeed, they may increase the strength of their attitudes. This is what Yousaf and Gobet found in their study with religious individuals. Hence, it seems that maintaining a personal consistency is not always a priority for individuals. Sometimes, when their attitudes are particularly important to them, they may forgo consistency in favor of the possible motivational effect that attitude bolstering may offer. It is worth bearing in mind that individual differences and personality can make a significant difference to the result of hypocrisy as induced through this paradigm. Cécile Sénémeaud and her colleagues published a study in 2014 on how low scores on the “preference for consistency” personality trait can cancel any behavioral consequences of hypocrisy. Hence, while the hypocrisy paradigm is a generally powerful tool for influencing attitudes and behavior, political or otherwise, it does not work for all individuals. Fernand Gobet and Omar Yousaf See also Advocacy; Allegiances; Clientelism; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Election Rigging; Moral Dilemmas; Partisanship; Political Morality; Source Bias; Trust

Further Readings McKimmie, B. M., Terry, D. J., Hogg, M. A., Manstead, A. S. R., Spears, R., & Doosje, B. (2003). I’m a hypocrite, but so is everyone else: Group support and the reduction of cognitive dissonance. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7, 214–224. Son Hing, L. S., Li, W., & Zanna, M. P. (2002). Inducing hypocrisy to reduce prejudicial responses among aversive racists. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 71–78. Stone, J. (2012). Consistency as a basis for behavioral interventions: Using hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance to motivate behavior change. In B. Gawronski & F. Strack (Eds.), Cognitive consistency: A fundamental principle in social cognition (pp. 326–347). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Yousaf, O., & Gobet, F. (2013). The emotional and attitudinal consequences of religious hypocrisy: Experimental evidence using a cognitive dissonance paradigm. The Journal of Social Psychology, 153, 667–686.

I Democratic Party and are far more likely than White Americans to see racial discrimination as widespread within American society. In another powerful example, religiously observant Orthodox Jews in Israel hold distinct political views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and vote as a bloc for right-wing political parties. But many social groups do not cohere politically, or do not do so to any great degree, and it is important to study why some groups become politicized and others do not. In the United States and other countries, sociodemographic groups based on social class, age, gender, or marital status exhibit modest levels of political cohesion. On occasion, a subset of group members develops a cohesive political ideology and outlook. Feminists are an example of a politicized subgroup of women, and gay and lesbian activists form a politicized subgroup of all gays and lesbians. When these politicized subgroups identify with a specific political party, they can enhance their group’s political impact.

Identity Politics Identity politics occurs when someone takes political action, supports a political party, votes for a candidate, or supports a policy issue because they identify with a given social group. Identity groups are typically grounded in demographic characteristics such as race or ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, or region. Political identity increases the chance that group members will take specific political actions and adopt shared group beliefs about politics and is thus central to an understanding of political behavior. This entry explains the link between social identities and political attitudes and action, discusses the importance of subjective identities, and examines several key factors that are crucial to the development of identity politics.

Overview Social identities based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and other characteristics can generate cohesive political beliefs and action among group members. Group political cohesion occurs when a social group becomes associated with a specific political outlook or political party, creating normative group attitudes, and when group members conform to these norms. Groups can also form around specific political issues and ideologies such as pro-environment, feminist, conservative, or right-to-life. These groups also lead to the development of group identities and the development of political norms concerning the appropriate political beliefs and actions for group members. The political cohesion of racial, ethnic, and religious groups within specific polities is apparent throughout the world. As an example, African Americans in the United States reliably identify and vote for the

The Importance of Subjective Identity To understand identity politics, it is important to distinguish group membership, which is based on objective inclusion in a group, from a subjective identity as a group member, which is an internalized sense of membership. They are not the same thing. A second-generation U.S. citizen whose family immigrated from Latin America is objectively Latino or Hispanic but may not identify in this way. Many White Americans do not identify with other White people on the basis of their race, even though they are objectively White. More important, the internalization of group identity is central to undertaking political action on behalf of a group. The most strongly identified group member is also the one most likely to take action on behalf of the group and adhere most closely to the beliefs shared among group members. 373

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Social psychologist Henri Tajfel studied social i­dentities extensively and (together with John Turner) developed social identity theory to explain why group members feel more positively about each other than they do about outsiders, defined as in-group bias. He defined a social identity as an individual’s “knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to the membership” (Tajfel & Turner, 1979, p. 255). Tajfel and his colleagues believed that group members are motivated to positively differentiate their group from others, thus explaining in-group bias, although the researchers did not think that this necessarily leads to animosity toward outsiders. How strongly someone identifies is central to whether or not they will conform strongly to group norms and take action on behalf of the group. Political action is also more common among strong than weak group identifiers. For instance, U.S. Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans who identify more strongly with their racial or ethnic group are more likely to vote for a group member and are more willing to demonstrate and sign a petition on behalf of a group-related cause. Similar evidence is found among political partisans ­ whose behavior can be understood as a form of ­partisan identity politics. Just as for ethnic or racial groups, the most strongly identified Democrats and Republicans are more likely than weak partisans to have given money or volunteered their time to work for a political candidate or political party, to have voted, or to have engaged in other political activities. Researchers who study social movements and collective action report that someone who strongly identifies with a social movement is also more likely than someone with a weak identity to protest and work for the group cause.

The Formation of Politicized Social Identities Different factors have been put forward to explain why some social groups become politicized and others do not.

Cognitive Salience John Turner and his colleagues developed social categorization theory to explain when a group identity becomes salient and affects someone’s behavior and attitudes. The theory helps explain how political context can shape the emergence of identity politics. From this perspective, a group has to be salient within politics for members to see the political relevance of an identity. This can occur when a member of the group runs for political office. Consider Barack Obama’s presidential

candidacy in 2008. Race was a political identity for African Americans before Barack Obama ran for president. But Obama’s candidacy increased Black turnout and resulted in 95% of Blacks voting for Obama in 2008 and 93% in 2012, according to national exit polls. This represented an increase over 2004 when 88% of blacks voted for John Kerry, the Democratic candidate. It also provides a powerful example of how the group membership of a political candidate can increase group members’ political solidarity. A group’s political salience also increases when group leaders promote a specific stand on a public policy or urge members to take political action. Religious leaders have increased the link between religion and political beliefs and actions in this way. In the 1950s, Catholic priests urged their congregations to vote for the Democratic Party, and in more recent years, they have advocated support for pro-life political candidates. From the 1980s onward, evangelical pastors urged their congregants to support conservative Republican candidates such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The social categorization approach to social identities also stressed that different groups could be made more or less salient by circumstances and context. In American politics, the context changes dramatically between the presidential primaries and the general election. In the 2016 primaries, Democrats were split along ideological lines, with more liberal voters supporting Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. But in the general election, partisan identities are more salient, and most (but not all) of Sanders’s supporters shifted to support Hillary Clinton, the party nominee, over Republican Donald Trump. In another example, political scientist John Transue found that White Americans were more supportive of spending on minority education when their national identity is salient but less supportive of the same program when their racial identity is salient.

Identity-Based Grievances Realistic Grievances Another way in which social groups become politicized involves the emergence of group-based grievances and the identification of politics as a solution to such concerns. In realistic conflict theories, these grievances might concern group members’ access to political power, housing discrimination, or educational opportunities. Realistic grievances might be objective and borne out by evidence of legal discrimination, for example, or based on subjective perceptions of discrimination. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif documented the existence of realistic conflict in his famous Robber’s Cave experiment conducted with boys attending a

Identity Politics

summer camp. The boys were divided into two groups and exhibited intergroup hostility when in competition, but this conflict was eliminated when they shared a common goal. These kinds of realistic conflicts over resources that generate grievances can motivate groups such as the elderly to unite politically to defend threatened Social Security benefits or immigrants to protest denial of citizenship rights and benefits. Subjective group grievances can be even more politically potent than objective differences in access to resources. Sociologist Lawrence Bobo documented that White opposition to busing in the 1970s could be traced back to the perception that White interests were subjectively threatened by Blacks. Whites who felt that the civil rights movement was pushing too fast and who disliked Black militants were the most opposed to ­busing. Bobo concludes that a perceived threat from Blacks was a potent source of White opposition to ­policies designed to bring about racial integration. Symbolic Grievances Social identity theory emphasizes a different set of grievances as crucial to the politicization of social groups. Tajfel and colleagues focused on symbolic concerns such as a group’s social standing and the respect (or lack thereof) that group members receive within society. Somewhat paradoxically, it may be easier to forge a political identity in this way among members of high-status groups because membership in these groups is inherently positive and there is more at stake. This kind of dynamic seems to be occurring in a number of countries at present, fueling the sense among members of majority ethnic groups that their status is under siege. This, in turn, has been linked to support for anti-­ immigrant candidates such as 2016 Republican ­presidential candidate Donald Trump. The development of a political identity and cohesion is less certain among members of low-status groups. This puzzle was addressed by Tajfel and Turner, who laid out three different routes available to members of low-status groups, only one of which involved collective or political action: •• Leave the group (social mobility; not always an option) •• Develop an identity around alternative, positively valued group attributes (social creativity) •• Fight to change the group’s negative image (social change)

Nonetheless, issues of respect and grievances over group discrimination also fuel identity politics among members of minority and lower status groups. Latinos in the United States provide a good example. Leonie Huddy and colleagues studied partisan preferences

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among Latino immigrants and citizens and found that Latinos who believed they were discriminated against in American society and identified strongly as Latino or Hispanic were the strongest supporters of the ­Democratic Party. In this instance, the Republican Party’s opposition to the legalization of undocumented immigrants has alienated Latinos and moved them toward the Democratic Party. This holds true even for Latino immigrants who are not citizens and cannot vote. The distinction between realistic and symbolic or status-based grievances matters because it hints at the emergence of political cohesion in different types of groups—groups whose status is threatened are more likely to cohere according to social identity theory, whereas realistic interest approaches suggest political cohesion among members who share a similar ­economic fate. Moreover, concerns about status will translate most readily into political action among the strongest identifiers according to social identity theory. Political scientists Paul Sniderman and his colleagues document this process in the Netherlands. They exposed Dutch participants to various scenarios concerning new immigrants and found less opposition to unskilled immigrants, who might prove to be a drain on Dutch resources and thus pose an economic threat, than to immigrants who did not fit into Dutch culture and posed more of a symbolic threat to the Dutch way of life. And opposition to immigrants who posed a threat to the Dutch way of life was more pronounced among those with the strongest Dutch identity. These findings may help explain why some Whites supported Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant platform in the 2016 presidential election. Based on the studies described here, support for Trump was more likely to be based on symbolic concerns about White status than on realistic economic grievances. Leonie Huddy See also Allegiances; Art in Political Campaigns; Contact Theory; Ethnic Revival; Ethnicity; Ethnic-Based Voting Blocs; Ethnocentrism; Feminism; Jihad; Mass Political Behavior; Multiculturalism; Nationalism; Omniculturalism; Pluralism; Race and Ethnicity; Social Identity Theory

Further Readings Bobo, L. (1983). Whites’ opposition to busing: Symbolic racism or realistic group conflict? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(6), 1196–1210. doi:10.1037/0022-3514 .45.6.1196 Huddy, L. (2013). Translating group identity into political cohesion and commitment. In L. Huddy, D. O. Sears, & J. Levy (Eds.), Oxford handbook of political psychology (2nd ed., pp. 737–773). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Huddy, L., Mason, L., & Horwitz, N. (2016). Political identity convergence: On being Latino, becoming a Democrat, and getting active. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2(30), 205–228. Sherif, M. (2010). The robbers cave experiment: Intergroup conflict and cooperation. [Originally published as Intergroup conflict and group relations]. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. (Original work published 1961) Simon, B., & Klandermans, B. (2001). Politicized collective identity: A social psychological analysis. American Psychologist, 56(4), 319–331. doi:10.1037/0003-066X .56.4.319 Sniderman, P. M., Hagendoorn, L., & Prior, M. (2004). Predisposing factors and situational triggers: Exclusionary reactions to immigrant minorities. American Political Science Review, 98(1), 35–49. doi:10.1017/S000305540400098X Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Transue, J. E. (2007). Identity salience, identity acceptance, and racial policy attitudes: American national identity as a uniting force. American Journal of Political Science, 51, 78–91. Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. New York, NY: Basil Blackwell.

Images and Theory in International Relations Images are general perspectives on international relations (IR) that consist of certain assumptions about key actors and processes that influence how we interpret and explain world events. Theory involves explanation. In terms of IR, this usually involves explaining patterns of conflict and cooperation. This entry provides an overview of images of international relations and how they can influence the development of IR theory.

Images Although subject to debate, most scholars of international relations would agree that there are at least three major images: realism, liberalism, and economic structuralism. All three have a long historical and intellectual pedigree and will be the focus of this essay. It should be noted, however, that scholars have also made the case for what are known as the English school, constructivism, feminism, critical theory, and postmodern understandings. Images can also be viewed as perspectives or paradigms that act as a pair of lenses through which we view the world. Images are composed of several

interrelated underlying assumptions that influence not only what we focus on but also what we may ignore. While scholars may be quite aware of how the image they hold can influence their goal of developing theories that explain recurrent patterns in international relations, even casual observers of world politics may hold images that influence how they interpret daily events. Realism is the oldest image of international relations and can be traced back to the Greek historian Thucydides (471–400 BCE) and his analysis of the causes and conduct of war between Athens and Sparta and their respective alliances. Other prominent realist scholars include Niccoló Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. Key assumptions: States are the most important actors, whether city-states or modern nation-states. The study of major state powers is the principal focus. Second, for the goal of building explanatory theories, states are viewed as unitary actors facing the world as an integrated unit. Third, the state is essentially a rational (or purposive) actor. Fourth, national security issues and the application of force dominate the agenda of international relations. Examples of attempts to develop explanatory theory based on these assumptions involve understanding the circumstances under which balances of power occur among states and whether such conditions are a force for stabilization or an encouragement for war. Another prominent and related approach involves power transition theories that can be traced back to Thucydides. As the title suggests, these are circumstances in which rising powers challenge the dominant state, a phenomenon witnessed throughout history. Liberalism tends to focus on explaining the conditions under which international cooperation is achieved as opposed to the realist focus on war. Intellectual precursors include Immanuel Kant, Richard Cobden, ­ and Joseph Schumpeter. Key assumptions: Non-state, transnational actors—not just states—are also important entities in international relations. These would include international organizations and nongovernmental organizations, transnational organizations such as multinational corporations (MNCs), human rights organizations, and environmental groups. Second, many liberals see economic or other forms of interdependence among both state and non-state actors as having the potential to moderate state behavior. Third, for liberals, the agenda of international politics is extensive and includes economic, social, and environmental issues. Increasingly these can be viewed as national—and ­international—security issues in their own right. Fourth, liberals examine how factors within states and societies affect international relations to include the prospect for peace. This may include bureaucratic politics and domestic political constituencies and interest groups. All

Imagined Contact

four liberal assumptions are evident in democratic peace theory that attempts to explain how domestic political culture, values, and political structure can influence the prospects for peace. Economic structuralism is concerned with the basic question of why there is such a disparity in economic development and prosperity among states. Noted intellectual precursors include Karl Marx, John Hobson, and Vladimir Lenin. Key assumptions: It is critical to understand the global political and economic contexts within which states, societies, and non-state actors interact. The defining characteristic is capitalism. Second, historical analysis is required to include the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. It is assumed that tracing the historical evolution of the international system from a political-economic perspective and identifying patterns of exploitation and dominance is the only way to understand the current state of international relations. Third, particular mechanisms of ­domination exist that keep poorer states from developing, contributing to worldwide uneven development in which some states and societies benefit disproportionally in terms of income and quality of life. Understanding these mechanisms includes an examination of dependency relations between the “northern” industrialized, capital-rich states and their capital-poorer neighbors in the southern hemisphere. Fourth, eco­ nomic structuralists assume that economic factors are absolutely critical in explaining the evolution and functioning of the international or capitalist world-system and the relegation of many states to a subordinate position. They recognize the importance of political and military power but look to the economic underpinnings of both. Perhaps the most ambitious work in this tradition is Immanuel Wallerstein and his lifelong career dedicated to understanding the evolution and impact of what he terms the capitalist world-system.

Concluding Thoughts It is not a particularly fruitful exercise to engage in a debate as to which image is superior in advancing our understanding of international relations. First, all three tend to focus on different aspects of international relations: Realists emphasize the issue of war and peace among states; liberals are interested in understanding the circumstances under which cooperation among international actors can be achieved; economic structuralists wish to understand the structures and processes of the capitalist world-system and how they create and perpetuate uneven standards of living and class domination. Second, the assumptions within all three images have been the basis for insightful explanatory theories of

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international relations. In sum, conceptual pluralism is to be applauded. Mark V. Kauppi See also Capitalism; Dependency Theory; Globalization; Liberalism; Marxism; Realism

Further Readings Doyle, M. (1997). Ways of war and peace. New York, NY: Norton. Gilpin, R. (1981). War and change in world politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kinsella, D. (2005). No rest for the democratic peace. American Political Science Review, 99(3), 453–472. Viotti, P. R., & Kauppi, M. V. (2012). International relations theory (5th ed.). New York, NY: Longman. Wallerstein, I. (1979). The capitalist world economy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Waltz, K. (1959). Man, the state and war. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Imagined Contact The intergroup contact hypothesis presents a simple but remarkably powerful idea: that under the right conditions, social contact can improve tolerance and intergroup relations. This idea has been key to psychologists’ developing understanding of the nature of prejudice and one of the most successful and influential contributions to social issues research. Meta-analysis of more than 500 studies has confirmed the hypothesis: There is a fundamental, robust, and positive impact of contact on intergroup attitudes regardless of target group, age, geographical area, or contact setting. While properly implemented intergroup contact therefore seems to improve intergroup relations, the approach is not without its limitations. It is apparent, for instance, that in many of the world’s most pervasive conflicts, a key problem is a lack of opportunity for contact. From the West Bank Wall in Israel to the Green Line in Cyprus, groups in conflict may be physically separated in a way that simply prevents any positive contact from occurring. Even in multicultural societies, people often engage in little or no meaningful social interaction with members of groups other than their own. Negative stereotypes color expectations of c­ ontact, leading to avoidance and segregation of communities. How then to provide access to the positive processes inherent in contact when physical segregation prevents actual interaction? How to change negative expectancies

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Imagined Contact

so that when opportunities for contact do occur, they are approached with an open mind, free from avoidance and the conflict-inducing influence of stereotypes? Imagined intergroup contact has been proposed as one possible solution to these problems. It is an indirect contact strategy designed to promote tolerance and more positive intergroup relations where there is little opportunity for contact or where negative stereotypes gravitate away from any positive interaction. The idea is that the individual imagines a positive social interaction with a member of the other group, including details such as what they would say and how they would feel. This imagined interaction should then exert some ­influence on the perceiver’s expectations about future interactions with other members of that group. It should encourage that individual to engage in contact with an open mind rather than a negative predisposition. There are firm theoretical and empirical foundations for this “imagined contact” hypothesis. From a range of domains in psychology and neuropsychology, we already know that mental imagery elicits emotional and motivational responses similar to the real experience and that it employs similar neurological mechanisms as engaged in memory, emotion, and motor control. There is an extensive literature showing that mental simulation can improve planning and decision making, enhance sports performance, assist in countering phobias in psychotherapy, promote healthy behaviors, and boost academic achievement.

Empirical Support Empirical work examining the efficacy of the imaginedcontact hypothesis has employed techniques and theoretical perspectives from across social cognition ­ and intergroup relations. Specifically, this work has found that imagined contact can improve intergroup attitudes at both the explicit and implicit levels (e.g., using the implicit association test). Studies have found that imagining positive contact can also promote positive trait projection and encourage intentions to engage in actual contact (drawing on research into goal ­pursuit). Studies have found that it even reduces susceptibility to stereotype threat. Investigation of underlying processes has found that imagined contact works by enhancing the cognitive availability of behavioral scripts when people think about the out-group (that is, the imagined positive contact experience comes to mind). Cognitive availability in these studies has been measured using likelihood estimates, reported vividness, subjective reports of ease of retrieval, and metacognition. As well as cognitive mediators, imagined contact has also been found to work via affective routes. In particular, imagining positive contact experiences reduces anxiety at the thought

of future actual contact. It can also increase empathy with and trust of the out-group. A number of moderators have been found to determine the extent to which imagined contact will be more or less effective. For instance, consistent with research on direct contact, imagined contact has been found to be more effective for majorities than minorities, for lower identifiers, and when the self is salient. It has been found to be more effective when the imagined interaction features typical out-group members (again consistent with research on direct contact) and when the imagined interaction is accompanied by elaboration instructions (consistent with the social cognition research on mental simulation and goal pursuit). Imagined contact has also been found to reduce prejudice against a range of different target groups including groups based on age, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, mental health, and religion. The ease with which the technique can be applied, combined with its flexible and robust impact on intergroup perceptions, has suggested it is a potentially invaluable tool for practitioners and policy-makers in efforts to reduce conflict and encourage more positive intergroup relations.

Controversy and Debate Despite the extensive empirical support, these imaginedcontact effects have sparked considerable debate. Proponents have argued that imagery techniques (a) afford the ability to more flexibly explore processes underlying intergroup contact effects and (b) offer a wide range of practical implementations of contact theory that can be applied to educational and organizational contexts. In contrast, opponents have argued that such techniques cannot effectively tackle deep-rooted prejudices and pervasive conflicts and that imagined-contact strategies are unrealistic as solutions in classroom-based attempts to improve intergroup relations. In answer to these critiques, a recent meta-analysis of more than 70 imagined-contact studies has reported a robust overall effect of imagined contact on intergroup perceptions and behavior, ­confirmed the existence of facilitating conditions, and established its efficacy in varied settings, including as a classroom-based educational intervention. The latest research is broadening the scope and applicability of imagined contact, demonstrating its potential to improve outcomes in a ­ range of everyday domains. These domains include health (challenging negative stereotypes of mental health), work (promoting greater cooperation within teams and work groups), and education (mitigating the impact of negative stereotypes on academic performance). Richard J. Crisp See also Contact Theory; Discrimination; Prejudice

Immigration

Further Readings Crisp, R. J., & Turner, R. N. (2009). Can imagined interactions produce positive perceptions? Reducing prejudice through simulated social contact. American Psychologist, 64(4), 231–240. doi:10.1037/a0014718 Miles, E., & Crisp, R. J. (2014). A meta-analytic test of the imagined contact hypothesis. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 17(1), 3–26. doi:10.1177/1368430213510573 Turner, R. N., Crisp, R. J., & Lambert, E. (2007). Imagining intergroup contact can improve intergroup attitudes. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 10, 427–441. doi:10.1177/1368430207081533

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country each year on the basis of their potential economic contributions. Others, such as the United States, place more emphasis on family reunification, and their immigration policies focus more on how to avoid large numbers of “undocumented” or “irregular” immigrants. Still others, such as Germany, have historically denied that their country is an immigrant-receiving nation, and formal policies for accepting immigrants have been put into place relatively recently.

Why People Migrate Consideration of why people migrate has focused predominantly on the push and pull factors of immigration and the migrant personality.

Immigration Immigration is the voluntary or involuntary movement of people to a new country in which they intend to settle for an extended period of time. Immigration is on the rise, and members of receiving nations have a variety of reactions to the arrival of immigrants. Immigration has a major impact on the individuals who relocate and on source and receiving nations. This entry provides an overview of immigration in the 21st century and considers the motivations and personality traits that may determine why individuals leave their country of origin to live somewhere else. It then turns to a discussion of the drivers of host nationals’ attitudes toward ­immigrants and immigration and how discriminatory treatment of immigrants may occur. The final section provides a summary of the acculturation processes that may result from contact between immigrants and ­members of host societies.

Push and Pull Factors of Immigration

The decision to migrate can be encouraged by push factors, pull factors, and network factors. Push factors are those that drive people from their home country, while pull factors are those that attract people to a new country. Network factors become important once a migration stream has developed. Push and pull factors can be either economic or noneconomic. Economic push factors include unem­ ployment, underemployment, or low wages. Migrants may also be pushed out of their home country by noneconomic political factors, such as by persecution or war. Other noneconomic push factors can include lack of educational opportunity or various safety concerns, such as high crime rates. Sometimes these push factors can be connected to volatile environmental conditions such as drought or flooding that might depress wages through crop failure or lead to political instability and lack of safety. Economic pull factors include employment opportuOverview nity, more stable economic conditions, and labor recruitment, such as temporary guest worker programs, Immigration levels have reached historically unprecewhile noneconomic pull factors include a safe environdented levels in recent years, often involving movement ment, reuniting with family, or democratic governance. from less-developed countries to more-developed Global communication networks inform the interna­countries. It is estimated that there are currently around 232 million international migrants worldwide—­ tional community about conditions and opportunities abroad and act as the connector between push and pull approximately 3.2% of the world population—and factors. For example, migrants may be motivated to these n ­ umbers are expected to continue to increase for leave their home country by high unemployment (push the foreseeable future. A 2012 Gallup poll revealed that factor) and be encouraged to migrate to the United nearly 640 million adults (13% of the world’s adults) States by a guest worker program (pull factor). Once would emigrate if given the chance, with 23% of those this stream of migration is formed, it continues to grow who would like to move indicating the United States as via formal and informal networks of information their preferred destination. regarding wages and job opportunities. Regardless of Immigrant-receiving nations differ markedly in their what push, pull, and network factors are acting on approach to immigrants and in their immigration polimigrants, individual differences may be important in cies. Some, such as Canada, see immigrants, particularly determining who actually follows through with a desire those who are highly skilled, as a valuable commodity to migrate. and accept a large number of immigrants into the

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Immigration

The Migrant Personality

Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration among members of a host society are important because they may influence support for immigration policies within a nation, the treatment and acceptance of immigrants, the success of immigration policies, the life outcomes for immigrants, and the degree of harmony or discord within a nation. Two important theories that have addressed attitudes toward immigrants and immigration are the unified instrumental model of group ­conflict proposed by Esses and colleagues and the integrated threat theory of prejudice proposed by Stephan and colleagues. Both theories aim to explain the variety of factors that may influence immigration attitudes, including those discussed in what follows.

immigrants to Canada are accepted under the economic class of immigration and are thus specifically selected to fill labor market needs. In contrast, the majority of immigrants to the United States are accepted based on a family reunification model, so concerns about the economic contributions of these immigrants may be greater. In addition, when economic times are challenging and unemployment rates are higher, the costs of immigration may be seen as larger than the benefits. Irrespective of the actual economic contributions of immigrants, an important factor in determining attitudes toward immigrants and immigration among members of a host society is the perceived economic contributions and costs of immigration. Immigrants who do not do well economically are likely to be seen as a drain on social services (e.g., welfare), leading to negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. Perhaps less obviously, immigrants who do well economically may also be seen as a threat to the economic conditions of the host society because their successes may at times be seen as coming at the expense of ­nonimmigrants. These “zero-sum beliefs”—beliefs that the more immigrants obtain, the less is available for nonimmigrants—lead to negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. This means that some members of the receiving society may perceive immigrants negatively regardless of whether immigrants succeed or fail e­ conomically. Fundamentally, it is the belief that i­mmigrants are taking resources from members of the receiving society that drives these negative attitudes. Such a belief may be more or less likely to be part of the dominant discourse within a country, may be more or less likely to be promoted by the media, and may depend on individual difference variables, such as social dominance orientation. Research has shown that individuals who are higher in social dominance orientation (i.e., support inequality in society and believe in group hierarchies) are especially likely to see the world in general and to see relations with immigrants in particular as zero sum in nature. As a result, they are especially likely to hold negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration.

Perceived Economic Costs and Contributions

Perceived Threats to Safety and Health

Over the past few decades, there have been repeated debates as to whether immigrants contribute economically to their new society or are a drain on resources and compete for jobs with those who are native born. A specific answer to this question may depend on the immigration policy of the host nation, the type of immigrants who are arriving, the form that the host economy takes, and demographic and economic characteristics of the host economy over time. For example, many

Two other types of threats that can be associated with immigrants are threats to physical safety and threats to the health of members of the receiving society. Concerns about threats to safety posed by immigrants have become more prevalent since September 11, 2001, due to the salient association between immigrants and terrorists caused by media depictions of the terrorist attacks at that time. It is now the case that immigrants, particularly those from Near and Middle Eastern

Research on the migrant personality seeks to ­discover why some individuals, living in the same socioeconomic conditions, become immigrants, while others do not. The migrant personality may include resilience to anxiety and insecurity and more secure and dismissing attachment styles. A dismissing attachment style makes an individual more detached from social surroundings and more likely to emigrate, while a secure attachment style enhances psychological adjustment in the new country. Other aspects of the migrant personality are openness to experience and extraversion, which are positively related to one’s intention to emigrate. Some aspects of personality may be highly related to decisions to emigrate when conditions in the home country are poor. Irene Frieze and Man Yu Li argue that having an internal motivation to compete and achieve (i.e., achievement motivation) and an internal desire for leadership and control over others (i.e., power motivation) may be related to emigration when conditions block the fulfillment of these motivations. Alternatively, a desire to form and maintain relationships with others is related to choosing to stay in one’s home country.

Factors Influencing Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration

Immigration

countries and Muslims, are more likely to be viewed with suspicion and hostility. Most recently, many Western nations have been resistant to accepting large numbers of refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria and Iraq because of safety concerns and host members’ fear that they may be harboring terrorists and criminals. Indeed, the recent arrival of millions of refugees to Europe from the Near and Middle East and the purported migrant riots in European cities on New Year’s Eve 2015 have led to a backlash against Muslim refugees in the ­European Union and the rise of anti-immigrant groups and political parties. Concerns that immigrants may carry infectious diseases have influenced immigration policies throughout history and to the present day, despite the fact that immigrants are no longer a major vector of disease. Nonetheless, when the association between risk of disease and newcomers is salient in the media, irrespective of whether the risk is genuine, this may result in dehumanization of immigrants and the promotion of n ­ egative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration.

Perceived Cultural and Value-Related Costs and Contributions In addition to potentially being seen as a threat to tangible resources, immigrants are at times seen as threatening the culture and values of members of the host society. Just as some people may see tangible resources as zero sum in nature, some individuals may also see more symbolic outcomes as zero sum. As a result, they may believe that if immigrants are allowed to maintain their practices and values, this means that the culture and values of the host society are weakened. These zero-sum beliefs about culture and values are particularly likely to be held by individuals who are higher in social dominance orientation (more likely to believe in hierarchy and inequality) and lead to negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. Just as with tangible resources, the belief that immigrants threaten the dominant culture and values may be more or less likely to be part of the dominant discourse within a country and may be more or less likely to be promoted by the media. In recent years, the claim that immigrants are a potential threat to the dominant ­culture and values of host countries has become particularly prevalent within European discourse, resulting in increased support for restrictive immigration policies.

The Framing of National Identity How national identity is defined within a particular country and by specific individuals within that country plays an important role in determining whether

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immigrants are seen as beneficial or detrimental. Two important forms of national identity are nativist/ethnonational and civic/cultural national identity. The nativist form is based on descent or long-term residency and sometimes on being a member of the dominant religion. This narrow construal of the national in-group is closely tied to ethnonational identity, which is defined by kinship bonds and a common ethnic heritage. In contrast, the civic/cultural form of national identity derives from a voluntary commitment to the laws and institutions of the country and on the feeling of being a member of the national group. Countries with a history of promoting a nativist/ethnonational national identity (e.g., the United Kingdom) are more likely to have restrictive immigration policies and to reject immigrants as members of the national in-group. In contrast, countries that have a history of promoting a civic/cultural national identity (e.g., Canada) are more likely to have relatively open immigration policies and to accept immigrants as members of the national in-group soon after their arrival. Definitions of national identity may change over time. For example, it has been demonstrated that in times of national crisis and threat, the psychological boundaries defining the national in-group tend to narrow and nativist sentiments tend to increase, resulting in more negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. In addition, large-scale immigration, particularly from new and unfamiliar source countries, can increase concerns about national identity and nativist beliefs so that negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration become evident. Thus, narrow definitions of national identity and unfavorable views of immigrants and immigration may be mutually reinforcing. In addition to construal of national identity, forms of attachment to one’s nation also influence immigration attitudes. In particular, individuals who are higher in nationalism—believing that their nation is superior to all others—hold more negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. In contrast, individuals who are higher in patriotism—expressing pride and love for their nation—do not hold such attitudes.

Discrimination Toward Immigrants Negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration are likely to lead to acts of discrimination. Historically, immigrants to new countries have experienced a variety of forms of discrimination, including blatant acts of violence and exclusion. Today, the discrimination that immigrants face is often more subtle but continues to limit their life choices. This discrimination may affect all phases of the immigration and integration process, from restrictive immigration policies to limits on citizenship

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Immigration

to more subtle discrimination in everyday encounters. Subtle discrimination may manifest in crucial aspects of immigrant settlement and integration, including in securing housing, in having one’s skills and credentials recognized, in educational opportunities, and in accessing social services. As with other forms of subtle bias, this discrimination is most likely to be evident when justifications other than prejudice are readily available. For example, research has shown that employers may discount the skills of an immigrant applicant due to prejudice while using the uncertainty of foreign qualifications as a seemingly legitimate justification for this behavior. Whether blatant or subtle, discrimination may have a severe impact on immigrants and limit the contributions that they can make to their new country.

Acculturation Acculturation refers to the changes that occur following contact between individuals of different cultures. ­Acculturation differs from “assimilation” because acculturation encompasses the changes that occur for both immigrants and host societies as a result of contact, while “assimilation” has been employed under the assumption that immigrants will become more like the host society over time and across generations.

Acculturative Changes Acculturation changes can be both short and long term. Typically, it is thought that immediate, short-term experiences can lead to long-term outcomes. For example, navigating a cross-cultural transition can expose a newcomer to a variety of new experiences. Similarly, interacting with unfamiliar individuals on a daily basis could present challenges for hosts. As such, both hosts and immigrants may modify their behavior in the short term. Depending on both individual and contextual ­factors, it could be either easy or difficult to adjust one’s behavior in light of the social and environmental changes that occur during the acculturation experience. The term adaptation describes the long-term changes of acculturation. There are two primary forms of adaptation: psychological and sociocultural. Psychological adaptation refers to the long-term changes in an individual’s well-being that result from the acculturation experience. Psychological adaptation has been shown to be associated with acculturative stress. That is, experiencing a greater challenge navigating changes during acculturation may lead to outcomes such as depression or anxiety. Sociocultural adaptation refers to a person’s ability to negotiate social interactions in the context of acculturation. Strong sociocultural adaptation abilities can involve the acquisition of new language skills or customs one

previously did not have and are thus useful during acculturation. These have primarily been investigated from the perspective of newcomers, including immigrants, sojourners, and international students. However, they may also be applicable to host nationals experiencing large influxes of settlers from different cultural backgrounds.

Acculturation Strategies Acculturation strategies are based on beliefs about how an acculturating group should acculturate and can be adopted by both the host group and the immigrant group. In both cases, they are based on beliefs about how the immigrant group should acculturate. Attitudes people hold on two particular issues form the basis for preferred acculturation strategies—attitudes toward contact with the host culture and attitudes toward the maintenance of an immigrant group’s heritage culture. Thus, immigrants can endorse high or low desire for contact with hosts and high or low desire for the maintenance of their own culture. Research has demonstrated that integration, the strategy that includes both high desire for contact and high culture maintenance, has been associated with the most positive psychological outcomes. Other acculturation strategies for immigrants include assimilation (high contact desire, low culture maintenance desire), separation (low contact desire, high culture maintenance desire), and marginalization (low contact desire, low culture maintenance desire). For hosts, marginalization is replaced by the term “exclusionism” (low contact desire, low culture maintenance). Theory on host acculturation strategies suggests that there can be a bidirectional relationship between state immigration policies and hosts’ desired acculturation strategies for immigrants. Furthermore, a mismatch between the host society’s desired acculturation strategies for immigrants and the strategies adopted by immigrants can lead to negative intergroup outcomes. For example, if host members endorse a separation strategy and immigrants wish to integrate, this can create tensions between the two groups in the host nation. Developed nations increasingly have a need for immigrants in order to contribute to their labor markets and to boost their diminishing populations. Thus, the discourse of immigration within these countries is changing from a discussion of “tolerance of immigrants” to a discussion of the “need to attract and retain immigrants.” As a result, questions of immigration must now focus on how to optimize the contributions of immigrants to their new countries and promote positive relations with members of the receiving societies for the benefit of all. Victoria M. Esses, Joshua D. Wright, Clint Thomson, and Leah K. Hamilton

Implicit Association Test See also Assimilation; Citizenship; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Discrimination; Ethnicity; Media Framing; Multiculturalism; Nationalism; Patriotism; Prejudice; Refugees; Social Dominance Orientation

Further Readings Bourhis, R. Y., Moise, L. C., Perrault, S., & Senecal, S. (1997). Towards an interactive acculturation model: A social psychological approach. International Journal of Psychology, 32(6), 369–386. Brown, R., & Zagefka, H. (2011). The dynamics of acculturation: An intergroup perspective. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 129–184. Esses, V. M., Dovidio, J. F., Semenya, A. H., & Jackson, L. M. (2005a). Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration: The role of national and international identities. In D. Abrams, J. M. Marques, & M. A. Hogg (Eds.), The social psychology of inclusion and exclusion (pp. 317–337). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Esses, V. M., Jackson, L. M., Dovidio, J. F., & Hodson, G. (2005b). Instrumental relations among groups: Group competition, conflict, and prejudice. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, & L. A. Rudman (Eds.), On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport (pp. 227–243). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Frieze, I. H., & Li, M. Y. (2010). Mobility and personality. In S. C. Carr (Ed.), The psychology of global mobility (pp. 87–103). New York, NY: Springer.  Martin, P. L., & Zürcher, G. (2008). Managing migration: The global challenge. Population Bulletin (Vol. 63). Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau. Sam, D. L., & Berry, J. W. (Eds.). (2006). The Cambridge handbook of acculturation psychology. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Claremont symposium on applied social psychology (pp. 23–46). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Implicit Association Test The implicit association test (IAT) is a widely used measure of people’s associations in memory. These associations can be evaluative (e.g., Democrats and positivity) or descriptive (e.g., Republicans and wealth). The IAT is an indirect measure in that it does not ask people to explicitly report beliefs (e.g., Do you like Democrats? Do you think Republicans are wealthy?). Instead, the relative strength of associations is indexed from how one performs the IAT. Thus, IATs can both establish the presence of associations and index their strength (e.g.,

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some people may associate Republicans with wealth more strongly than others).

Methodology The IAT is a computer-administered task in which a series of stimulus items are presented on a computer monitor sequentially, and on each trial, the respondent classifies the stimulus item presented using one of two response buttons (typically keys on a keyboard, such as “E” and “I”). The IAT takes several minutes to complete and is composed of a series of trials organized into blocks (e.g., several blocks, each with 40 trials). Each block presents a different set of classification instructions to respondents. For illustration, we will consider an application in which researchers seek to assess whether respondents have relatively more positive ­attitudes toward Democrats than toward Republicans. In such a political party preference IAT, the respondent may be asked to classify well-known politicians (e.g., Hillary Clinton, George Bush) using two keys (e.g., press “E” if the politician is a “Democrat,” press “I” if the politician is a “Republican”). For example, the respondent would press “E” if “Barack Obama” was presented on the monitor but press “I” if “Donald Trump” was presented instead. Respondents are asked to make these judgments as quickly as possible while remaining accurate. In the next block of trials, participants might classify evaluative words like “wonderful” or “awful,” pressing “E” if the word is “positive” and pressing “I” if the word is “negative.” These classifications are easy. However, in later combination blocks, respondents must classify stimuli when two different categories are paired on the same response key. For example, in one combination trial block, participants would see (one at a time) stimuli that are either politicians or evaluative words, pressing “E” for “Democrats or positive” and pressing “I” for “Republicans or negative.” Finally, in a subsequent combination block, the pairings are changed (e.g., press “E” for “Republicans or positive” and press “I” for “Democrats or negative”). The key datum of interest in the IAT is the speed with which respondents perform classifications in the combination blocks. If respondents can perform one combination block more quickly than the other, it suggests stronger associations between the categories sharing the same key response in the block performed faster. Thus, if respondents perform the combination block in which Democrats and positivity are paired (and Republicans and negativity are paired) more quickly than the other combination block, it indicates they have relatively more positive associations between positivity and Democrats than with Republicans (with larger time ­ ­differences reflecting stronger associations).

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Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting

Why Use an IAT? Given the complexity of administering the IAT compared with just asking people directly about their beliefs, why use an IAT? First, social desirability ­pressures can affect how people explicitly report their beliefs to ­experimenters. For example, issues involving race or gender might lead people to “edit” their responses on paper-and-pencil measures. For example, in one study (McConnell & Leibold, 2001) examining racial prejudice (i.e., Do White undergraduates prefer Whites to Blacks?), the correlation was weak between a racial IAT (assessing strength of association between Whites-­and-positivity compared with Blacks-­­ and-­positivity) and traditional paper-and-pencil prejudice measures. More important, these researchers not only assessed participants’ racial prejudice with an IAT and traditional m ­ easures but also videotaped these White students’ interactions with Black experimenters. The racial IAT but not the paper-and-pencil measures predicted nonverbal biases exhibited toward the Black experimenter (e.g., less smiling and more speech errors). Thus, when predicting actual behavior, a measure such as the IAT (which is less influenced by self-­presentational concerns) can often be a better predictor of behavior (McConnell & Rydell, 2014). Further, often people may be unaware of their memory associations, and thus they cannot report these beliefs using traditional measures.

Interpretational Considerations There are important issues to consider when using the IAT. First, although IATs can circumvent some issues such as self-presentation or lack of awareness of one’s own beliefs, considering it a measure of one’s true beliefs is unwarranted. For example, IAT responses can be influenced by contextual factors like other measures, and thus, it is not a pure measure. Also, IAT effect scores are relative measures. In the political party preference example described earlier, the only conclusions one can draw are about one’s attitudes toward Democrats relative to Republicans. Because combination blocks feature both comparison categories, all IAT effects are relative in nature. Finally, conclusions drawn apply to the conceptual categories used (e.g., Democrats versus Republicans) and not the specific stimuli presented (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump). Thus, although the IAT can be a powerful predictor of behavior in ways that traditional measures cannot, IAT data provide relative comparisons among categories and cannot be broken down to target specific stimuli used in the study. Allen R. McConnell and Brandon T. Humphrey

See also Anti-Semitism; Confirmation Bias; Discrimination; Gender Bias; Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting; Irrationality; Motivated Reasoning; Partisanship; Stereotypes

Further Readings Greenwald, A. G., Poehlman, T. A., Uhlmann, E. L., & Banaji, M. R. (2009). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive utility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 17–41. McConnell, A. R., & Leibold, J. M. (2001). Relations among the Implicit Association Test, discriminatory behavior, and explicit measures of racial attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37, 435–442. McConnell, A. R., & Rydell, R. J. (2014). The Systems of Evaluation Model: A dual-systems approach to attitudes. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual process theories of the social mind (pp. 204–217). New York, NY: Guilford. Nosek, B. A., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2005). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: II. Method variables and construct validity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 166–180. Project Implicit Website. https://implicit.harvard.edu

Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting Implicit cognitive processes are automatic and spontaneous processes of thought, of which individuals can at times be unaware. Since the beginning of the 21st century, based on the development of new instruments for the measurement of implicit processes, it has been shown that their investigation is useful for understanding various aspects of human behavior, including voting. This entry describes research on the use of implicit measures in prediction of voting behavior and considers the question of how implicit cognition might influence voting.

Implicit Cognitive Processes Implicit cognition is a major theme in all fields of psychology since the last decades of the 20th century. Implicit cognition is typically understood in contrast to its opposite, explicit cognition. Explicit cognition refers to those processes of thought that occur in a reflexive, controlled, and intentional way, that require cognitive effort, and whose contents are characterized by subjective awareness. For instance, when individuals are asked their opinion about the current president of the United

Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting

States, they may reflect thoroughly about this person, retrieve relevant knowledge from their memory, and provide their response based on this knowledge. Explicit cognitive contents are typically measured through selfreport techniques: interviews and questionnaires. Implicit cognitive processes, in contrast, lack one or more elements that characterize explicit cognition: they are spontaneous and effortless, take place outside of people’s awareness, or are not controlled. In order to be considered implicit, a mental process has to possess one or more of these characteristics. For example, for some individuals, the simple fact of reading the name of the current president of the United States may be sufficient to automatically trigger a positive or negative feeling, even when they have not formed any intention to provide an evaluation. Implicit cognition is investigated through procedures designed to capture automatic responses, often based on the measurement of reaction times, like the Implicit Association Test. These procedures allow the inference of cognitive contents based on the speed with which individuals complete a set of tasks or by other aspects of performance without relying on people’s willingness and ability for introspection. Empirical research has shown that many aspects of human behavior are influenced by implicit cognition. Measures of implicit cognition have proven especially useful to investigate socially sensitive issues, such as prejudice or the self-concept, for which self-reports are often distorted by impression management and social desirability concerns.

Implicit Cognition and Political Judgment Based on the observation that political thinking is often characterized by a strong influence of affect, a hot cognition hypothesis has been proposed, according to which all sociopolitical concepts (e.g., political leaders, issues, social groups, etc.) that have been evaluated in the past are affectively laden, and this affect is stored in memory, directly linked to the concepts. When these same sociopolitical concepts come to mind again, for instance because the individual is reminded of them, the associated affect also becomes automatically active and colors subsequent cognitive processing, causing motivated reasoning. This process has also been referred to as the likability heuristic or how-do-I-feel heuristic. Milton Lodge and Charles S. Taber provided empirical support for the hot cognition hypothesis. They presented participants in their experiment with pairs of words, presented one after the other in what is called a priming paradigm. The first word of the pair was a political concept such as “guns.” The second word was an unambiguously positive word, like “rainbow,” or a

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negative one, like “toothache.” Participants had to ignore the first word and categorize as fast as possible the second one by pressing one of two buttons labeled + and − to indicate whether it had a positive or negative meaning. Importantly, they were requested neither to evaluate the first word nor to indicate whether it was related to the second one. Results were consistent with the hot cognition hypothesis: reactions to both positive and negative words were faster when they were preceded by affectively congruent political concepts (e.g., Hitlertoothache) as compared with when they were preceded by incongruent concepts (e.g., peace-toothache), despite the fact that participants were not requested to evaluate them. This indicates that when participants saw the first word of each couple, they activated in their mind the corresponding affect automatically, and it colored the processing of the second word, facilitating its categorization when it was affectively consistent and inhibiting it when it was affectively inconsistent. Lodge and Taber further showed that the strength of affective reactions to political stimuli differ among individuals and were stronger in individuals with more polarized attitudes and with more sophisticated political ideas. Subsequent investigations showed that implicit attitudes toward political contents are typically highly correlated to explicit attitudes, in line with the common observation that people are usually willing to describe their political opinions and voting intentions and able to explain the reasons underlying their political behavior. Therefore, it is important to understand whether and how they can help understand voting behavior.

Prediction of Voting One of the first studies to tackle the question of whether implicit measures enhance researchers’ ability to predict political behavior was conducted by Luciano Arcuri and colleagues. Four weeks before the 2001 Italian general election, the authors contacted an opportunity sample of voters, measured their implicit preferences for the leaders of the two main coalitions, and asked them whether they had already decided whom they would vote for. After the election, they asked participants to report their vote and found that the implicit measures of attitudes were predictive of the voting behavior, both for those participants who had made a decision at the moment of the measurement of implicit attitudes and for those who had not yet made their decision. In other words, automatic preferences were related to the vote expressed four weeks later not only for those citizens who had made a clear decision but even for those who were still in the process of making up their minds.

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Michele Roccato and Cristina Zogmaister subsequently investigated whether implicit measures could increase the quality of electoral forecasts when used together with the traditional (and less resource consuming) self-report techniques. One month before the 2006 Italian national election, they administered a representative sample of voters a measure of implicit preferences and an interview on explicit preferences for the main political parties and candidates. After the election, the respondents were contacted again and asked to report their voting behavior. Results indicated that the improvement in prediction of vote due to the implicit attitudes was significant but low. Empirical research conducted in various countries (United States, Germany, Great Britain) confirmed that implicit measures of preferences for political parties and leaders typically predict ­ subsequent selfreported voting behavior, even for undecided citizens, and provide significant, albeit not big, improvements in electoral forecasts when used together with explicit measures.

Implicit Prejudice and Prediction of Vote Implicit measures have proven particularly useful in research on the relationship between voting behavior and socially sensitive topics, such as prejudice and those related to intergroup contents. Based on the empirical observation that when self-presentation concerns are high, explicit measures generally suffer low predictive validity, whereas implicit measures are generally unaffected by social desirability, various studies in political psychology have explored the impact of implicit forms of prejudice on voting behavior. The 2008 presidential election in the United States gave the opportunity to investigate the role of implicit and explicit racial prejudice in voting. The principal contenders were John McCain, a European American, and Barack Obama, of African and European American ancestry. B. Keith Payne and colleagues conducted three surveys of representative samples of American citizens, measuring explicit and implicit prejudice during the months preceding the election. After the election, the respondents were contacted again and asked to report their vote. The authors found that both explicit and implicit prejudice were significant predictors of vote. Interestingly, though, they predicted different aspects of behavior: Indeed, citizens with higher levels of explicit prejudice were less likely to vote for Obama and more likely to vote for McCain. Implicit prejudice, on the other hand, did not increase the likelihood to vote for McCain, but it increased the likelihood to abstain from the vote. This

shows that implicit and explicit processes of thought may impact political behavior in different ways. In a recent experimental study, Cecilia Hunjung Mo investigated a controversial issue, namely whether ­sexism can still be considered one of the reasons women are underrepresented in political offices. She measured explicit and implicit attitudes against women in leadership positions and found that the more sexist the responses, both at the implicit and at the explicit levels, the lower participants’ propensity to choose a female candidate in a mock voting choice. Both the explicit and the implicit measures had incremental validity, indicating that the explicit measure of sexism did not capture the total effect of gender preferences on the choice of vote. Research has further shown that implicit attitudes toward social groups are related to opinions on political issues, predicting agreement for policies supporting members of minority groups, even after controlling for explicit cognitive contents.

Implicit Processes and Formation of Political Intentions How can implicit preferences influence voting behavior? One possibility is that spontaneous preferences direct selective exposure and interpretation of information on political issues and candidates. During the formation of voting intentions, individuals are not passive recipients of information: They actively select which information they pay attention to, interpret ambiguous communications according to their opinions, retrieve information from their memory, and counterargue. These processes can be heavily driven by automatic cognition. Supporting this hypothesis, Silvia Galdi and associates measured implicit affective responses to the integration of Turkey into the European Union and subsequently assessed selective exposure to information favorable and unfavorable to the issue at hand through a task in which participants had to choose between pairs of newspaper headlines. They found that for undecided participants, automatic associations predicted selective exposure to evaluatively consistent headlines, which in turn led them to adopt conscious beliefs that were in line with their preexisting automatic associations. This latter result is in line with the hot cognition hypothesis described earlier. It indicates that implicit processes can have an important influence in shaping explicit attitudes and voting intentions. Cristina Zogmaister See also Confirmation Bias; Heuristics; Implicit Association Test; Prejudice; Social Cognition; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Indoctrination

Further Readings Arcuri, L., Castelli, L., Galdi, S., Zogmaister, C., & Amadori, A. (2008). Predicting the vote: Implicit attitudes as predictors of the future behavior of decided and undecided voters. Political Psychology, 29, 369–387. Gawronski, B., Galdi, S., & Arcuri, L. (2015). What can political psychology learn from implicit measures? Empirical evidence and new directions. Political Psychology, 36, 1–17. Gawronski, B., & Payne, B. K. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of implicit social cognition: Measurement, theory, and applications. New York, NY: Guilford. Glaser, J., & Finn, C. (2013). How and why implicit attitudes should affect voting. PS: Political Science & Politics, 46, 537–544. Lodge, M., & Taber, C. S. (2013). The rationalizing voter. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Mo, C. H. (2014). The consequences of explicit and implicit gender attitudes and candidate quality in the calculations of voters. Political Behavior, 37, 357–395. Payne, B. K., Krosnick, J. A., Pasek, J., Lelkes, Y., Akhtar, O., & Tompson, T. (2010). Implicit and explicit prejudice in the 2008 American presidential election. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 367–374. Roccato, M., & Zogmaister, C. (2010). Predicting the vote through implicit and explicit attitudes: A field research. Political Psychology, 31, 249–274. Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2016). The illusion of choice in democratic politics: The unconscious impact of motivated political reasoning. Political Psychology, 37, 61–85.

Indoctrination Indoctrination is the imposition of a system of values, beliefs, or “doctrine” on another (or others) that does not tolerate critical reflection or questioning of that system but demands acceptance of it as absolute truth. As such, indoctrination does not allow for independent thought but requires unquestioning adherence. The belief or value system itself is often, though not necessarily, absolutist. However, the requirement for the indoctrinated to accept the system as infallible truth is absolute. Although indoctrination is largely discussed in relation to religion, and particularly religious fundamentalism, the belief or value system being imposed can be political, religious, prejudiced, or otherwise. It can also be a combination thereof, such as where religious and political ideologies are combined in the grooming of people into radicalization of different forms. Such explicit examples of indoctrination are considered to be dangerous because they allow for manipulation of the

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indoctrinated into extreme and even violent attitudes and behaviors. Indoctrination does not allow for the tolerance of other belief and value systems and seeks to suppress these. This entry explores how indoctrination is manifested, outlining some relevant theoretical perspectives on the subject and providing some examples.

Indoctrination as a Mode of Education Essentially, indoctrination should be understood as an approach to teaching, a mode of education (albeit in a very narrow sense of the word). Educational theorist Thomas F. Green explained that indoctrination is the method of teaching rather than the content. It is, however, a form of teaching that seeks to oppress and control rather than empower an individual to think or behave autonomously. Therefore, it involves an autocratic, as opposed to a democratic, approach to teaching. Indoctrination definitively states what the “truth” is without any notion of relativism or plurality. It fosters ignorance and controls and limits what is known by the learners rather than inspiring them to expand their knowledge independently. As such, the indoctrinatory approach is usually targeted at people with some form of vulnerability or where there is an imbalance of power. The most obvious example of this power imbalance is between a child and an adult authority figure. Philosopher R. S. Peters argued that indoctrination involves a lack of “willingness” and “voluntariness” on behalf of the receiver. Controversially for some, Peters argued that education is legitimate as a form of initiation into the political, social, religious, and other ideologies of a community. He suggested, however, that such education should be both “normative” and “cognitive,” where the learner is socialized into certain beliefs and values but where these are also reasoned and explained. Indoctrination might then occur where the normative is imposed without the cognitive and where reasoning is discouraged. Indoctrination is, thus, a contradictory approach to education that limits knowledge and understanding rather than encouraging it. It denies the opportunity for critical engagement with what is being taught. Pete Harris, in exploring indoctrination in relation to work with young people from both religious and nonreligious perspectives, explains that it is opposed to d ­ ialogue and dialogical education and restricts young people’s autonomy. This links with the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire’s critique of the dominant forms of education as restrictive. Freire argued that people are oppressed through what he described as “banking education,” in which deposits of knowledge are made into them. Instead,

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he called for a dialogical approach to education. As such, indoctrination may exist and have long existed in an implicit form through the dominant approach to schooling and education across the world and across time. This subtle form of mass indoctrination is also implicated in Marxist theory, both in Karl Marx’s referral to religion as the “opium of the people” and Friedrich Engels’s notion of people being lulled into a “false ­consciousness” whereby they are unaware of their exploitation by the institutions that hold power over them. Indoctrination may be present in the autocratic teaching of any worldview whether political, religious, or otherwise.

Examples of Indoctrination Indoctrination can be directed toward groups or individuals. On an individual basis, for example, it might occur in the imposition of a religious or even a political worldview on children by their parents—where there is no tolerance of the child’s critically engaging with the beliefs and values they are taught. Adolf Hitler’s manifesto to Germany during the Great Depression of the 1930s is perhaps the most obvious example of mass political indoctrination, and the Hitler Youth movements, in which children were even taught to spy on their parents, a powerful manifestation of young people being indoctrinated into a political worldview. Religious cults are one of the most explicit examples of mass indoctrination, with the most extreme of these having led to people giving up their possessions, money, and families or even engaging in mass suicide. The grooming of young people to take up extremist or radicalized causes is an example of where individuals or groups, particularly those who feel a sense of disenfranchisement, can be indoctrinated into a powerful combination of religious and political beliefs and action. Naomi Thompson See also Absolutism; Authoritarianism; False Consciousness; Marxism; Political Indoctrination; Radicalization; Religiosity; Values

Further Readings Harris, P. (2015). Youth work, faith, values and indoctrination. In M. K. Smith, N. Stanton, & T. Wylie (Eds.), Youth work and faith: Debates, delights and dilemmas (pp. 85–98). Lyme Regis, England: Russell House. Freire, P. (2006). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary edition). New York, NY: Continuum. Green, T. (1972). Indoctrination and beliefs. In A. Snook (Ed.), Concepts of indoctrination (pp. 44–45). London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Peters, R. S. (2015). Ethics and education (Routledge revivals). Abingdon, England: Routledge.

Insurgency Insurgency is the process by which an armed and organized group fights an established authority using force for political reasons. The established authority is in almost all cases a government or a foreign power, and fighting has historically occurred within the confines of one country. Aided by the technologies of globalization (improved transportation and communication), transnational insurgencies have been able to contest established authority in more than one country at the same time. The insurgent group may be a political or ethnic party, the personal militia of an individual, or a selfdesignated rebel/terrorist group. Insurgents principally rely on irregular warfare (hit-and-run attacks) and usually avoid overtly controlling territory, as this makes them an easier target for the established authority’s military forces.

Insurgent Goals Insurgency is distinguished from other types of contentious politics such as riots or protest, because the involved groups demonstrate command and control in the form of leadership that directs the activity of members, are armed with lethal weapons, and have a political agenda that is pursued using force. In this context, a “political agenda” means that the insurgent seeks to produce a specific public or “club” good that will, from the perspective of the group, benefit individuals that the group is intending to represent. Violent activity must also be seen by the group as an effective means to achieve goals. Insurgency is easier to undertake, and thus more likely to occur, in terrain favoring the use of irregular warfare and against a materially weak authority. A public good is a goal that will benefit all individuals should the insurgent be victorious. Key public goods include the pursuit of a political ideology like Marxism, democracy, nationalism, or individual liberty. Many of the insurgencies in Africa during the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, fought for the stated public good of decolonization. If the insurgents won, all individuals in the country would be “benefited” by removing colonial rule. Club goods, by contrast, benefit all individuals who are members of a particular group. Key club goods include control of a territorial homeland, political rights for an ethnic or religious group, or enrichment of a

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leader’s followers. The group Front for the Liberation of Cabinda (FLEC), for example, seeks autonomy for the Cabinda Province in Angola. All individuals in Cabinda—but only in Cabinda—would “benefit” if ­ FLEC were successful in removing Angolan government control of the area. There is an ongoing academic debate about whether armed groups with an identifiable leadership and organization but who do not pursue a political agenda should be classified as insurgents. These groups fight principally for the acquisition of private goods such as natural resources or to increase the fortunes of a particular leader. The drug cartels in Mexico, for example, are well equipped and organized and control populations but pursue profit instead of an explicit political agenda.

Insurgent Organization In order to fight an established political authority, an insurgent must be able to raise, arm, and protect its armed forces. In part, an insurgent relies on its goal (the public or club good that will benefit supporters should the group win) to attract the support necessary to maintain a fighting force. Because mobilization in support of a combatant is costly—individuals have to give up jobs and are at greater risk of being hurt—insurgent groups must supplement the promise of public/club goods with selective incentives. In other words, successful groups need to raise capital or win the support of neutral civilians in order to hire militants, buy weapons, and pay off individuals who may otherwise leak information to the enemy. Goods provision and use of selective incentives can take many forms including social welfare programs, individual payments, or local political appointments. This problem of mobilization is made even more difficult because insurgents are also often in competition with other insurgent groups over resource access. The competition may be from the same broader movement (in which case groups compete to mobilize the same pool of supporters) or with unrelated groups over access to lootable resources (e.g., diamonds/drugs) or territory. The short-term need to raise resources and survive competition with other groups means that insurgents must split their effort between pursuing a long-term goal and engaging in shorter-term betweengroup competition and fund-raising.

Insurgent Activity Insurgents use a variety of military tactics to advance short- and long-term goals. These include terrorist (attacks against noncombatants), guerrilla (hit-and-run attacks against government forces), and conventional

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(attacks designed to take and hold territory) forms of military activity. Guerrilla and conventional attacks are best suited to inflicting harm against an established authority or fighting other armed groups. Terrorist attacks are most effective for looting, for increasing awareness of a group to improve fund-raising or mobilization (e.g., through the Internet or among expatriates), and for controlling civilian populations. The type of tactics used depends in part on material factors such as the capabilities of the insurgent group (including training and access to weapons), and the local balance of power between the insurgent and its opposition. To effectively use guerrilla warfare, for example, a group must have access to light infantry weapons and basic small-unit training. Similarly, conventional warfare is only beneficial if the insurgent is able to defend ground against enemy forces and thus may not be feasible when facing an enemy with advanced weaponry. Choice of military tactics also depends on nonmaterial factors such as the specific short- and long-term goals that the insurgent is trying to achieve. Evicting a foreign political authority (such as the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor’s [FRETILIN] attempt to push Indonesia out of East Timor) requires guerrilla activity against Indonesian troops. In order to increase support among the East Timorese (including both locals and expatriates who may provide funding), however, FRETILIN may engage in attention-grabbing terrorism in other parts of Indonesia. Jacob Aronson See also Asymmetric Warfare; Civil Wars; Collective Action; Counterinsurgency; Greed Versus Grievance; Hearts and Minds Approach; Jihad; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings Berman, E., Shapiro, J. N., & Felter, J. H. (2011). Can hearts and minds be bought? The economics of counterinsurgency in Iraq. Journal of Political Economy, 119(4), 766–819. Boot, M. (2013). Invisible armies: An epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present. New York, NY: Norton. Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political Science Review, 97(1), 75–90. Kalyvas, S. N., & Balcells, L. (2010). International system and technologies of rebellion: How the end of the Cold War shaped internal conflict. American Political Science Review, 104(3), 415–429. Lyall, J., & Wilson, I., III. (2009). Rage against the machines: Explaining outcomes in counterinsurgency wars. International Organization, 63(1), 67–106.

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International Criminal Court

International Criminal Court When it was established in 1998, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was hailed as a millennial event of international criminal justice. The creation of the ICC marked the crystallization of the evolutionary process of international criminal law. The evolutionary process began with the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946), which prosecuted 22 Nazi war criminals and put to death 12 of the alleged perpetrators, followed by the adoption of the International Criminal Tribunals, notably the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal ­Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The ICTY Statute contains new elements of crimes against humanity, which would later be incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Unlike the international criminal tribunals, however, which were created in accordance with Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the ICC was established under international treaty law. Accordingly, it serves as a permanent court that can exercise jurisdiction over serious international crimes perpetrated by individuals within a territory of a state party and in a non-state party with UN Security Council authorization.

Mission and Structure The mission of the ICC is to ensure that the worst perpetrators of international crimes are held to account for their crimes. By serving as a court of last resort, the ICC investigates, prosecutes, and punishes individuals for the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It performs these duties by assisting national judiciaries in investigating and prosecuting the worst perpetrators. Under its statute, states are accorded prima facie recognition to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. Thus, where national governments once could adopt immunity laws designed to shield the perpetrators from international prosecution (i.e., Augusto Pinochet’s immunity for life as a senator in Chile), the ICC’s automatic jurisdiction ensures that such laws will no longer obstruct the adjudication of such crimes. As of October 2015, there were 123 states that had ratified the Rome Statute (to become a state party) and eight situations or areas where the ICC has been conducting its prosecutorial and judicial operations. In addition to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), there are three other principal organs of the ICC: the judicial chambers of the ICC (the Pre-Trial, Trial, and Appeals), the Registry, and the Presidency. Together, these organs are designed to maintain the Court’s

independence from the UN Security Council and to ensure that the legal standards of impartiality and accountability are effectively upheld. One of the issues discussed at the Rome Conference that established the ICC on July 17, 1998—with 120 participating states voting to approve the Rome Statute—was whether the UN Security Council or the ICC Office of the Prosecutor should be able to determine when acts of aggression had occurred. The negotiators failed to reach an agreement on a solution or compromise to this problem. Instead, they elected to hold open-ended sessions or meetings to discuss the future elements and comprehensive definition of the crime of aggression. Note that at the 2010 Review Conference held in Kampala, Uganda, state parties finally agreed to incorporate a comprehensive definition along with the specified elements of the crime of aggression. One of the important outcomes of the Rome Conference was that ICC officials and state delegates agreed that the OTP would reserve the right to initiate an investigation (proprio motu). This would prove important for two reasons: it would provide the prosecutor with an added measure of independence and encourage the prosecutor to assume a potentially assertive role in pressuring states to hand over suspected perpetrators. It is worth mentioning that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has already issued arrest warrants for rebel leaders in Uganda and the Congo, including Thomas Lubanga (the first person to stand trial and be punished by the ICC) and Joseph Kony, and state leaders, most notably the late Moammar Qaddafi of Libya and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan. Moreno-Ocampo’s successor, Fatou Bensouda, has since conducted in-depth ­preliminary reviews of the gravity of violence in the Palestinian Occupied Territories and Georgia, raising the possibilities of an investigation in these areas.

Jurisdiction and Complementarity The ICC conducts its legal process of preliminary review, investigations, and prosecution through the framework principle of complementarity. The principle holds that the states will be allowed prima facie to investigate and prosecute, but the ICC Office of the Prosecutor may intervene in the national judiciary’s affairs should the state prove unwilling or unable to investigate and/or prosecute. Complementarity was largely seen as a compromise between those who wished the ICC to exercise universal jurisdiction and sovereigntists who wished to subordinate the ICC’s jurisdictional and discretionary powers to the sovereignty of the state. But when the officials and leaders agreed to adopt the term at the preparatory meetings leading up to the

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establishment of the ICC, they began the difficult task of determining the parameters of this jurisdiction. Eventually, officials decided that there would be three ways to trigger the investigatory powers of the ICC. First, OTP would be allowed either to take over a case, or to ­exercise its proprio motu power with the authorization of the pretrial chamber, when it determined that the crimes committed within the territory of a state party rose to the level of severe gravity. Second, the UN Security Council could issue a resolution authorizing the ICC to investigate a situation of violence involving gross human rights atrocities within a non-state party. Note that the UN Security Council has already referred the situations of the Darfur genocide (2005) and the violence in Libya (2011) to the ICC, while the ICC Office of the Prosecutor has initiated its own investigations in Kenya, Mali, and the Côte d’Ivoire. Third, state parties reserve the power to refer a situation. Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic (CAR), for example, have elected to refer situations within their own state borders (also called self-referrals). In recent years, there has been growing discussion of how to apply and even interpret the complementarity principle. Much of the discussion has focused on the proactive ways of meeting states’ needs. A proactive notion of complementarity in this sense signifies an approach to empowering and advancing the equality of national judiciaries via legal and technical assistance and dialogue among ICC officials and state and local actors. In the Office of the Prosecutor Report of 2006, the prosecutor referred to this type of complementarity as “positive,” one stressing deference to national authorities and the need to participate in a system of international cooperation. As Carsten Stahn points out in a 2008 article, “positive complementarity can be essentially understood as a constructive relationship, based on partnership and dialogue with states” (p. 88). From this perspective, the ICC should play an active role in national capacity building and the rule of law promotion, especially in developing countries. But a proactive approach also raises concerns. The deferral to national authorities may encourage a local manner of administering justice that does not meet the ICC’s own standards. By focusing on national capacity building, the ICC might end up promoting or encouraging two unequal standards of the rule of law/justice and limited cooperation. In this case, the ICC might elect to relent to national authorities’ demands for ­prosecution—which it has done in Libya (where national ­standards or rules of administering justice do not meet the ICC’s standards)—or to remain inflexible and ­unwilling to negotiate at all with national authorities (i.e., Kenya). What this suggests is that the focus on national capacity building may actually encourage the

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development of political strategies by nation-states that can challenge the ICC’s legal capacity to impose international justice where needed.

Politics and Legitimacy However we choose to interpret the principle of complementarity, it has become clear that applying it raises political questions and implications concerning the court’s effective operations, credibility, and ongoing development. What should happen when a state party refuses to comply with a request from the ICC? For example, South Africa recently announced its decision to withdraw from the ICC, after having refused to comply with the court’s request to surrender Bashir, who had visited the country in June 2015 to attend a highlevel meeting of the African Union. There is no easy answer to this challenge, since the ICC lacks an effective mechanism and remains as such dependent on the voluntary cooperation of states. Nonetheless, if states choose not to comply with the ICC’s demands, the ICC will need to rely on three factors or measures: (1) the willingness of other states and the UN to pressure the noncompliant state; (2) the cost of and damage to the noncompliant state’s reputation; and/or (3) the Security Council’s willingness to impose coercive diplomatic measures on any state that fails to comply with the demands of the ICC. Another important and much-publicized challenge is the past and present role of the powerful states that have elected not to support the ICC. This includes the United States, China, Russia, and India. The United States, for example, which was one of seven states that voted against establishing the ICC, has long claimed that the ICC’s jurisdiction over its military personnel would allow the court to pass legal judgment on ­matters related to national security decisions and that certain vengeful states would file bogus claims with the ICC. In addition, the United States objected that the court’s jurisdiction over nationals of non-state parties violated international treaty law. According to this last claim, the United States demanded that the ICC could only exercise jurisdiction over individuals of non-state parties when the non-state party consented to the authority of ICC jurisdiction on a case-by-case basis. As such, the United States would proceed to use this and the other claims to pressure the UN Security Council to provide immunity for nationals of nonparty states in its resolutions referring a situation to the ICC.

The Problem of State Cooperation Still, U.S. opposition has never posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of the ICC’s authority or its capacity

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to promote equal participation, inclusion, transparency of the rules, accountability, and deliberation. Far more serious have been the political consequences of its decisions to hold state leaders accountable for their crimes. The situation in Libya, for example, has highlighted the difficulties of issuing arrest warrants. In February 2011, the UN Security Council referred the deteriorating situation in Libya to the ICC pursuant to the UN Security Council resolution of 1970. The ICC prosecutor opened an investigation and eventually, in June of the same year, issued arrest warrants for Qaddafi, his longtime intelligence and security chief (and brother-in-law) Abdullah al-Senussi, and Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi’s second oldest son and heir apparent. As one of the visible opponents of Qaddafi’s arrest, the African Union (AU) discouraged African states from cooperating with the ICC. In the summer of 2011, for example, the AU passed a motion requesting all member states to ignore the arrest warrant issued against Qaddafi, stating that the ICC was “discriminatory” against African nations and that the ICC should investigate crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the military forces of the United States and other Western powers. Much of the political resistance in this case could be attributed to the political concerns already raised by the issuance of arrest warrants for Bashir, the first head of state to be indicted by the ICC. Bashir strongly opposed the ICC’s first and then, later, second arrest warrant in 2009. In his efforts to contest the authority of the ICC, Bashir galvanized Sudanese nationals to protest the ICC’s action on the streets of Sudan before proceeding to visit states that were parties to the Rome Statute, including Chad, Kenya, and South Africa. None of these countries cooperated with the ICC’s request to have Bashir detained and surrendered to The Hague. Such lack of cooperation is perhaps the most serious threat posed to the ICC’s credibility as a court of last resort. And yet, in the absence of states parties’ willingness to enforce the provisions of the Rome Statute, the ICC possesses few, if any, options for enforcing its decisions. Still, this problem of enforcement should not imply that state leaders’ cooperation will necessarily produce favorable outcomes of international justice. Take the situation of Kenya. Here the OTP opened its investigation of the crimes committed in Kenya’s postelection violence in 2007–2008. By 2011, it had issued arrest warrants for Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto for crimes against humanity. And in March 2012, Bensouda declared that the arrest warrant for Kenyatta would not be dropped amid suspicions that Raila Odinga, the challenger to Kenyatta in the 2013 elections, had conspired with the West to disrupt the election process. Although Kenyatta proved willing to cooperate with ICC officials by attending preliminary proceedings held

at The Hague, his presidential victory in April 2013 only helped to foment further public opposition to the ICC’s intervention in Kenya (i.e., the parliament of Kenya introduced and discussed a bill that sought to withdraw Kenya from the ICC).

Peace and Justice The pursuit of heads of state, therefore, highlights a difficult and often intractable issue of how to merge the need for peace with the demands for justice. The ICC continues to insist that its mission is about both: that pursuing justice cannot be separated from the priority of maintaining or transitioning to peace. But in Uganda, its arrest warrants for Joseph Kony and his commanders have called attention to the difficulty of working with state authorities who have sought to reconcile their differences with the perpetrators. Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, had earlier, under a 1999 law, offered amnesty to the same perpetrators and in 2008 sought to institute a new national war crimes court via the 2008 Juba Declaration. Kony had initially pledged to abide by the new national war crimes court on the condition that the ICC drop its arrest warrants. But ICC officials insisted that it would not comply with such a request. Like Libya, Uganda shows how the ICC’s activities can drive a wedge between peace and justice. If nothing else, it demonstrates how the ICC must counter this political challenge to its legitimate authority by serving as the principal proponent of victims’ rights. The ICC consists of a Victims’ Trust Fund, which is composed of two mandates: (1) reparations in which the court orders the perpetrators to pay for reparations and (2) general assistance, which consists of voluntary contributions from donors to offer material support and physical rehabilitation for victims and families. In addition, the Office of Public Counsel for Victims (OPCV) remains the first global office of its kind in international criminal law, which is designed to assist victims in obtaining legal advice and organizing their legal representation. The ICC’s legal focus on the moral rights of victims thus remains a crucial counterweight to the political threat posed by state politics. Still, the ICC cannot simply rely on its mechanism of victims’ rights protection to bolster its credibility. It also must count increasingly on its own efforts to raise awareness of its activities. In recent years, this has led to the expansion of its outreach unit, which encompasses a network of ICC officials, lawyers (legal practitioners), activists, media personnel, civil society groups, and local communal groups. The ICC’s Outreach Unit consists of three procedural aims: (1) to offer accurate and comprehensive information to affected (general)

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communities regarding its role, (2) to provide further participation of the local communities in the activities of the court, and (3) to offer access to and understand prosecutorial proceedings among affected communities. As of 2015, the outreach unit continues to build broad coalitions and networks of actors that have raised awareness of the ICC’s operations and objectives. In the 2009 Outreach Report, for instance, ICC officials recommended, among other things, strengthening the capacity of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the media, ensuring that the local journalists attending The Hague proceedings would offer accurate information of the trial and conduct more surveys by third parties. Given these recommendations, some continue to insist that outreach needs to be expanded: that it remains primarily focused on the c­ apital cities rather than the countryside. If anything, it should suggest that present and future successful ­ outcomes of the ICC’s activities will rely on both state cooperation and the assistance by civil society organizations and NGOs to further its mission. Steven C. Roach See also American Exceptionalism; Asymmetric Warfare; Clash of Civilizations; Dictatorship; Genocide; Just War Theory; Negative Peace; Nonviolence; Peacemaking; Procedural Justice; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Further Readings Ainley, K. (2015). The International Criminal Court on trial. International Affairs, 24(3), 309–333. Bassiouni, M. C. (2003). The universal model: The International Criminal Court. In M. Cherif Bassiouni (Ed.), Post-conflict justice. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers. Bosco, D. (2014). Rough justice: The International Criminal Court in a world of power politics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Gegout, C. (2011). The International Criminal Court: Limits, potential and conditions for peace and justice. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), 800–818. Kleffner, J. (2008). Complementarity in the Rome Statute and national criminal jurisdictions. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Roach, S. C. (2013). How political is the ICC? Pressing challenges and the need for diplomatic efficacy. Global Governance, 19(4), 507–523. Schiff, B. (2008). Building the International Criminal Court. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Stahn, C. (2008). Complementarity: A tale of two notions. Criminal Law Forum, 19, 87–113. Tiemessen, A. (2014). The International Criminal Court and the politics of prosecutions. International Journal of Human Rights, 18(4/5), 444–461.

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International Humanitarian Law International humanitarian law (IHL) refers to that set of codes, conventions, and treaties intended to govern the actions of states, armies, and individual combatants when they resort to force and engage in armed c­ onflict— before, during, and afterward. Common synonyms for international humanitarian law are the laws of war (LOW) and the laws of armed conflict (LOAC). Introduction of international humanitarian law may provoke initial confusion and skepticism. Confusion focuses on the key word humanitarian: what could possibly be considered humanitarian about war? Skepticism focuses on the key word law: can war ever be law governed—and should it be? Whenever interstate or intrastate conflict reaches the point that parties engage in armed violence, have we not moved from the realm of civilization into that of barbarism? The Romans, for example, believed that inter arma silent leges: In wartime, law is silent (or absent). Yet our human community has passed on centuriesold practices intended to reduce as much as possible the human suffering and losses associated with war, whether physical, cultural, social, economic, or psychological. Texts—like Homer’s The Iliad or Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War—reveal it was permissible to seize the arms, supplies, and clothing of a dead enemy but forbidden to mutilate his corpse or leave his body unburied. Such histories and works of literature depict and enumerate war atrocities in detail but condemn barbaric acts of bloodthirsty rage, even those committed by warrior “heroes.” Other passages demonstrate the “civilized” norm was to mark the graves of soldiers (the enemy’s as well as one’s own) in the hope that, when peace would be reestablished, families could come claim or honor their loved ones or at least learn where they lay. Civilized armies were not to destroy temples, harm or imprison enemy emissaries (root of our modern practice of diplomatic immunity), or violate the immunity of soldiers who sought “sanctuary” in designated places. This fundamental conviction that certain moral and legal norms are binding (not silent or absent) in time of war is of both ancient and contemporary standing, a working part of the human consensus about armed conflict. What we call international humanitarian law is the embodiment of this gradual development, articulation, and reshaping of that consensus until the present day. Two convictions undergird that consensus: (1) if human beings start, fight, prolong, and end wars, they also have the capacity and obligation to govern that behavior; and (2) across time and cultural differences, we human beings share a common moral

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universe when it comes to determining fundamental questions of good and evil.

Just War Theory It is impossible to comprehend international humanitarian law (IHL, LOW, or LOAC) without situating it within its foundation: just war theory. Scholars disagree on the origins of just war theory, but we inherit the parameters we know today from Augustine (354–430 CE) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE). Augustine introduced the idea that just war theory comprises two distinct components:



analysis. Some, however, reject—or at least rigorously challenge—the distinction between these components as unsustainable given current levels of knowledge. For example, does it make ethical sense to claim soldiers act justly so long as they observe jus in bello requirements if these soldiers know their state has acted unjustly in going to war in the first place? Or does it make ethical sense for the state(s) with just cause to fight for unconditional surrender, regardless of the number of casualties or the duration of the war? Still others in the just war tradition call on states to weigh two additional components.

1. Jus ad bellum focuses on whether and under what circumstances the use of political violence, through war, is morally justifiable. Since the Latin roughly translates as “conditions of justice on the way toward war,” the key idea is that sovereigns must give compelling moral reasons to justify going to war in the first place. These leaders also bear responsibility for the choice to launch war.



3. Jus ante bellum demands we study the conditions of in/justice prevalent before war breaks out.



4. Jus post bellum demands states (especially victors) fulfill the moral obligation to ensure conditions of justice after the conflict ends.

2. Jus in bello focuses on whether particular acts of waging war are morally justified. The Latin, in this instance, focuses on justice during conflict, for which political leaders, military commanders, and individual soldiers may bear responsibility.

Influenced by Greco-Roman natural-law thinking and by the Christian gospels, Augustine and Aquinas base moral assessment of any act on the substance of the act itself in conjunction with the intention of the actor. Moral philosophers call this a “deontological” (as opposed, ordinarily, to a “consequentialist”) approach to moral judgment. To be clear, deontologists do not disregard consequences. Most are quite prudent in weighing likely outcomes of an act. But they do judge the moral permissibility of a particular act primarily on its possible, even probable, consequences. Take the act of the killing of a human being. Deontologists do not assume or insist all killing is necessarily evil. Before judging, they weigh the killing, fused with the actor’s intention. So they may decide a particular killing is accidental or depraved indifference or even an unfortunate outcome of a beneficent effort to save, not end, a life. Thus, deontologists insist that, in war, it is possible to distinguish between killing that is “self-defense” or “defense of the other” and killing that is “murder,” even though the circumstances surrounding such killings are often befuddling or liable to partisan misinterpretation. Consequentialists, of course, also distinguish between killing that is “murder” and killing that is “self-defense.” In fact most people do, except for some at the far end of the spectrum, namely pacifists, who condemn all killing. But deontologists put stringent attention on ­ particular circumstances—and they set the bar high. For example, is the threat of being murdered so imminent and grave and other options so few that the only way a

In our day, the consensus view is that the only justifiable cause for force is self-defense or collective defense against an aggressor that egregiously and deliberately targets lives—and liberal states add liberty. By implication, some wars have no justifiable cause. Moreover, just war theorists insist human beings can sort deceitful from persuasive moral claims, even though human perspectives are limited, often partial, or otherwise distorted. In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly ratified “The Responsibility to Protect” (abbreviated variously as RtoP or R2P), an international norm that extends collective self-defense to include military action by states undertaken to defend civilians in countries other than their own, when a state targets the lives and liberties of its own people. Called humanitarian intervention, such military action counters crimes against humanity in process, like mass killing, mass enslavement, mass expulsion, starvation as government policy, or genocide. The international community today never agrees that all state parties in war must have “just cause”—a consensus that pays tribute to the long-term power and persuasiveness of just war thinking. Just war theorists routinely distinguish jus ad bellum and jus in bello components in their moral

Just War Theory: Deontological

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person could save his or her own life is by killing the other? Anything less is not self-defense. A consequentialist, in contrast, might find it permissible to prevent future killing. Deontologists would not agree. So just war theorists reject the permissibility of preventive war. A deontological moral approach can be demanding. That said, most just war theorists are quite capable of dealing with complex and nuanced factors. For example, just war theorists who reject preventive war may nevertheless agree that, under strict conditions, forceful preemptive self-defense may be permitted. Questions about means justifying ends and about weighing the lesser of two evils often arise whenever we assess the moral content actions in war. As a matter of conviction, those who assess these actions based on just war theory proceed from a deeply anchored deontological point of view.

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While having “just cause” is the nonnegotiable element of jus ad bellum thinking, just war theorists, following the thinking of Aquinas and others, contend that war must also (1) be decided by rightful political authority and (2) be fought with right intention; that is, to redress the harms suffered, advance the common good, and restore the peace. For jus in bello analysis, the nonnegotiable moral commandment is this: No killing or harming of the innocent. Since human beings can reasonably disagree over who counts as “innocent” in war, that principle has been translated into the principle of (1)  noncombatant immunity along with the obligation to (2)  discriminate between military and civilian targets and (3)  fight in a manner necessary to redress the harm suffered and restore the peace. Just war theorists may differ somewhat in how they enumerate or prioritize the elements of jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria, but this list and the following brief sketch give a general overview.

The Just(ifiable) War Tradition Purposes 1. Preclude, prevent, or minimize use of force and resultant human suffering. 2. Set out moral criteria for assessing the justifiability of resort to interstate violence and the means adopted in use of force. 3. Delineate rare instances in which the resort to force may even be required to achieve justice. Components Main: Jus Ad Bellum:

The decision to resort to force is justified.

Jus In Bello:

The forceful means and strategies employed are justified.

Additional: Jus Ante Bellum: The conditions of in/justice before use of force count in the moral calculus. Jus Post Bellum:

Establishing justice after conflict is both a goal and an obligation.

Jus Ad Bellum Criteria Just Cause: Self-defense against aggression and coming to the aid of victims of aggression (whether perpetrated between states or within a state), that is, “Collective Self-Defense” or “Responsibility to Protect.” Competent Authority:

Properly constituted authorities (state, international) authorize force.

Last Resort: Other reasonable and possible means of resolving the conflict must have been exhausted. Proportionality:

War is a proportionate response to the harm suffered.

Reasonable Chance of Success: The justified state can achieve its goals without subjecting its population to slaughter and wholesale destruction.

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Right Intention: Resort to force is intended to redress the specific harm suffered or restore or instantiate peace. Note: Just Cause and Competent Authority are nonnegotiable. Other criteria raise important moral questions. Jus In Bello Criteria Just war theory insists that certain moral obligations bind all parties using force during a violent conflict, even the party (parties) with justifiable cause. Noncombatant Immunity:  No actor (state or soldier) may target, harm, or kill the ­innocent. In practice, noncombatants may not be harmed. Discrimination:  In targeting and using force, all actors (state, commanding officer, and individual soldier) must discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, between civilian and military infrastructure. Proportionality:  The means employed (e.g., weapons, battle strategies, a settlement, must be proportionate to the goal, judged necessary to achieve that goal, given military necessity). Restoring or Instantiating Future Peace: A  ctors must fight in a way that makes a future peace ­possible. Ergo: No forms of violence that shock the conscience of humankind! Note: In Jus in bello criteria, noncombatant immunity is nonnegotiable.

To insist human beings developed and observed just war theory over time does not mean finding a linear development of humane, binding “laws of war” and restraints on armed conflict. The long, disturbing history of all war-related atrocities is on the record. But the laws of war and war atrocities intrinsically relate: human revulsion before the horrors of war, heart-­ rending suffering over senseless death and destruction, and stunned shock in the face of endlessly creative human malevolence in war have always driven the development of IHL.

Just War Theory and IHL Jus Ad Bellum Components of IHL Elements of jus ad bellum are critical in the laws of war as broadly understood. For example, the Charter of the United Nations weighs in on jus ad bellum criteria of “just cause” and “lawful authority.” All “members will settle their disputes by peaceful means” (Ch. I, Art. 2:3). The Security Council is primarily responsible to ensure they do (Ch. V, Art. 24:1). Only the Security Council may authorize force to maintain international peace and security (Ch. VII, Art. 42), although members retain the right of self-defense (Ch. VII, Art. 51). While

the international community has not legally abolished war, member states have imposed on themselves extensive restraints, including the obligation to exhaust all peaceful means of dispute resolution before using force. The charter embeds the jus ad bellum criteria of last resort, proportionate response, and right intention of restoring peace through international force when the Security Council believes there is a reasonable chance of success.

Jus Ante Bellum Components of IHL After two world wars and the Holocaust, with the Great Depression in between, the international community enacted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Catastrophe catalyzed statesmen into realizing “human rights should be protected by the rule of law” (UDHR) to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” (UN Charter). The International Court of Justice and arms agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions also aim to avert war or control its destructive power.

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Jus Post Bellum Components of IHL The Geneva Conventions obligate the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, founded in 1863) to oversee the exchange of prisoners of war after conflicts conclude. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 1950) oversees repatriation of refugees displaced by war when it is safe for them to return. Ad hoc international tribunals such as those for Nuremberg, for Rwanda (ICTR), and for Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecuted war crimes and crimes against humanity until the advent of the International Criminal Court (ICC 2002). Truth commissions seek to establish just postconflict conditions. The International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), or World Bank, set out to rebuild nations after the destruction of war and accelerate development to avert future conflicts spurred by destitution.

IHL: Jus In Bello Central to the laws of war are the treaties that transform jus in bello criteria into legal norms that delimit who may fight, under what circumstances, and by what means. Chief among these pacts are the Hague Conventions (1899, 1907) and the Geneva Conventions and Protocols Additional (1864, 1906, 1929, 1949, 1977). These conventions spell out “protected persons” and “protected places” and enumerate forbidden weapons and targeting. They establish the ICRC to oversee IHL enforcement when the state parties cannot and to mediate between warring state parties as necessary. The ICRC is not a state, an intergovernmental agency (like UNICEF), an international institution (like the World Bank), or a nongovernmental organization (like Doctors Without Borders). The ICRC inhabits its own distinct niche in world politics.

The Moral Equality of Soldiers Soldiers, beyond childhood, are entitled to fight, whether enlisted or conscripted, regardless of whether their state has justifiable cause. Under IHL, when ­soldiers kill enemy soldiers, they are not murderers. (A  soldier who deliberately kills civilians or fellow soldiers is guilty of murder.) This central canon of just war theory emphasized moral equality of soldiers. A soldier is not a ­criminal, even when that soldier fights under and for a nefarious regime. Soldiers, even across enemy lines, view one another as morally worthy, because they risk their own lives nobly on behalf of others. Soldiers who target enemy soldiers are not criminals. Since soldiers may never target or harm the innocent but only enemy soldiers, IHL stipulates that soldiers

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must wear recognizable uniforms and must act only under the authority of recognized command and control. Even guerrilla fighters, waging war domestically against their own governments, must wear some kind of insignia and operate under a chain of command (Geneva Protocols Additional, 1977). For if a soldier cannot distinguish who may be targeted, that soldier cannot obey the most important law of war: noncombatant immunity. Moreover, wounded, shipwrecked, and surrendered soldiers, rendered thereby hors du combat (unable to fight), may no longer be targeted, but must be fed, clothed, housed, given medical care, and detained in reasonable and humane conditions by their captors until they either return to the conflict or the war concludes (Geneva I, II, III).

Protected Persons and Places To uphold noncombatant immunity, IHL requires state actors to adopt military strategies, targeting ­decisions, and rules of engagement designed to ensure above all that civilians will not be harmed and civilian infrastructure, holy places, cultural sites, and medical facilities will be spared any damage.

Superfluous Suffering Even though soldiers may target soldiers, IHL forbids methods or weapons that inflict “superfluous” suffering. Thus certain bullets are forbidden, as are ­ blinding weapons or serrated blades. It may seem absurd that IHL permits the killing of an enemy soldier while s­ imultaneously forbidding certain means of doing so. Moreover, when death and grievous injury are at stake, who is to say what constitutes a superfluous component of suffering? Yet we fail to grasp the purpose of IHL if we forget its humanitarian component. IHL regulates war to protect the innocent and reduce human suffering, loss, and destruction.

War Crimes By delineating who may fight; restricting what persons, objects, or places may be targeted; insisting on humane treatment for those hors du combat; stipulating the obligations of an armed power toward those under its control (Geneva IV); and prohibiting certain ­weapons or tactics, IHL thereby defines actions that constitute war crimes. For example, a soldier who shoots and kills a civilian commits a war crime and is subject to criminal prosecution unless this death is “collateral damage” in the course of a military operation under command and control with strict and clear rules of engagement in an

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action designed ahead of time to discriminate between civilian and military targets in accord with strict military necessity. The previous words sound simple, but they require accurate intelligence, skilled and up-to-date reconnaissance, prior approval by those military officers highly specialized in the laws of war, and soldiers rigorously and regularly educated on their duties and restraints under IHL.

Challenges to IHL: Familiar and New Political leaders and military commanders charged with carrying out IHL wrestle with predictable complications. For example, a legitimate military target, like the electrical grid, may also be a civilian or “dual use” ­facility. The distinction between civilian and combatant is not always clear. A force strategy that meets the ­constraints of “military necessity” may nonetheless be “disproportionate” in inflicting civilian casualties. Not all belligerent forces represent states, exert military command and control, wear uniforms, and fight in accordance with the laws of war. In fact, some belligerent forces deliberately violate LOW, targeting noncombatants while hiding among noncombatants, as the only way they wage war. Yet a legitimate state is entitled to protect its own civilians when irregular belligerents attack. Under LOW, these self-appointed belligerents are criminals engaged in crimes against humanity. But states are rarely in a position to arrest and try them under internationally recognized judicial standards, imprison them upon conviction, or release them upon acquittal. Yet the international community has morally compelling reasons for refusing to grant them the moral equality of soldiers (or POW status if detained). The state that is under attack and party to IHL has a right to defend its people against these warrior criminals, but how— when they hide among civilians and do not wear distinctive insignia? Given such long-standing and new problems states face in waging war in compliance with IHL, some ­commentators rashly conclude IHL is outdated, or even dangerous; they propose that states should ignore, or even abrogate, these legal constraints. Yet close study of the history of the development of IHL over the centuries suggests states will continue to devise and revise binding moral and legal constraints on the use of force while insisting on the defense of lives and liberties against violent attack. Marilyn McMorrow See also American Exceptionalism; Civil Wars; Conflicts, Protracted; Development, Theories of; Drones; Just War

Theory; Military Action; Political Crimes; Powerlessness; Refugees; Social Welfare; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Further Readings Coady, C. A. J. (2008). Morality and political violence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Corn, G. S., Schoettler, J. A., Jr., Brenner-Beck, D., Hansen, V. M., Jackson, R. B., Jensen, E. T., & Lewis, M. W. (2014). The War on Terror and the laws of war: A military perspective. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Gross, M. L. (2010). Moral dilemmas of modern war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, A., & Guellf, R. (2000). Documents on the laws of war. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Walzer, M. (1977). Just and unjust wars. New York, NY: Basic Books.

International Security While security is the most fundamental of all political goals and personal desires, it is a condition that, in practice, is difficult to attain or advance, in large part because it is inherently relative, subjective, and multifaceted. The idea of “international security,” in political parlance and practice, reflects this in assuming that security at an individual, social, or national level is, to some degree, determined by events and political interactions external to a given country. This “internationalization” of security has advanced in line with the onset of globalization and the related changes that occurred to the international political landscape, particularly after the ending of the cold war. However, this internationalization has also come to be accompanied by much greater contestation over what the political pursuit of security actually means. From almost any ideological or analytical perspective, keeping people secure must be a primary political task, but precisely how this can best be achieved has become hugely contested. What is it that should be secured, and who is it that should be responsible for seeking to do this? For most of us, our instinctive response to these twin questions is “our country” and “our government.” This is a reflection of the dominance of the notion of “national security” in the politics of a large swath of the world. From the genesis of the concept of sovereignty in the 17th century to the rise of “total wars,” pitting whole societies into combat with each other in the twentieth century, we have come to depend on our governments and consider their primary political task to be to protect us from danger and harm.

International Security

We expect other things from our governments, like education and an expanding economy, but without being secure against invasion or criminal attack, these are not provisions we can fully enjoy. However, for many people around the world, national security is not a route to personal security and may even be the primary source of their insecurity. The defense of “their” country may undermine their own security, and their government may be their chief source of threat rather than protection. Desperate migrants stuck in limbo trying to cross the Mediterranean to flee conflict in Syria, Iraq, or Eritrea to reach the security of the European Union are rendered insecure by the pursuit of national security by governments in both their countries of emigration and potential immigration. Hence, for some, “security” is a political goal that needs to be rethought in ways that move beyond the assumptions underpinning the concepts of sovereignty and the social contract of a ­ government protecting its citizens and become more ­ international and multifaceted. For others, though, it is unnecessary, naive, and even dangerous to risk diluting the concepts of sovereignty and security, since globalization is actually increasing our dependence on our governments to protect us from terrorists, international criminals, and the varied consequences of wars fought in other parts of the world (such as mass migrant flows). Globalization has led to internal political issues being increasingly externalized and external political issues being increasingly internalized. Traditionally domestic policy concerns, like health and human rights, are more prominent than ever on the global political agenda, and events occurring in other states, such as disasters or massacres, are more often than ever deemed to be of political significance for people not personally affected. In light of these changes, and also the reduced prevalence of interstate war, it has become a matter of contention among theorists of international relations whether the act of prioritizing certain issues as matters of security should maintain the traditional emphasis on military threats to the security of states or widen its focus. Alternative perspectives have argued increasingly that the discipline should either (1) widen—extend its reach to include nonmilitary threats to states and, perhaps, other actors or (2) deepen (as well as widen)—go further and bring within its purview the security of all actors and people in relation to a range of threats, both military and nonmilitary. In line with this, discussions of violence have been extended to include structural and cultural violence.

Traditional Approaches to International Security In the 1940s, the twin concepts of national interest and national security took center stage in both academic

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and real-world international relations as the Realist approach emerged as a counter to the more multilateralist liberal idealism of the 1930s (epitomized by the open diplomacy and legalism of the League of Nations system). At the close of World War II, Realism was in the ascendancy, since the application of force had proved its worth in curbing aggression and restoring order in Europe and Asia after the League of Nations, international law, and the appeasement of aggressors had comprehensively failed to keep the peace. In addition, the total war of World War II and the “total phony war” of the cold war, whereby whole populations were threatened by state quarrels in ways not seen before, bound individuals to the fates of their governments as never before. The scale of the threat posed by nuclear war in the second half of the 20th century served to weld the security of individual people to that of their governments. The state would assume the responsibility for protecting its citizens and demand their loyalty in return in a strengthened version of the social contract relationship articulated by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Hobbes’s advocacy of the need for the Leviathan (meaning a strong state) to save individuals from the dangerous anarchy that would otherwise result from the pursuit of their own selfish interests was a major influence on Realists like Hans Morgenthau, though, in the mid-20th century, anarchy was the international state system and the dangers came, to a greater extent than ever before, from other states. Traditional notions of national security can still take “internationalized” dimensions, of course, if the national interest is considered to be served by taking part in an international war to expand influence or restore a balance of power, as has happened throughout history. Hence the Realist approach to international relations represented a revival of the understanding that the state was crucial to securing the lives of its citizens in a different guise. This assumption is well established and deeply embedded in most countries. If you took a course in security studies before the 1990s, you would have studied matters of military defense and then—and still today—if you were about to listen to a security correspondent on the TV news, you would anticipate a story relating to war, diplomacy, terrorism, or arms control with relevance to your country.

Widened Approaches to International Security More internationalized approaches to conceptualizing security gained ground in the 1990s, when the ending of the cold war seemed, to many statesmen, academics, and members of the general public, to herald a new era

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of international politics. In this “new world order,” the threat of global nuclear Armageddon apparently had subsided, allowing previously marginalized issues to emerge from the shadow of superpower rivalry and register on the international political agenda. Security “wideners,” including some Realists, came to accept that nonmilitary issues could become “securitized” and hence be privileged with “national security” status. Indeed, many governments have come to take a widened approach to security since the 1990s. The United States, for example, has led international wars against drugs (in Colombia and Panama) and wars for human rights (such as in Somalia or Kosovo) as well as those of the War Against Terror. President George W. Bush, hardly renowned as a multilateralist liberal, in 2004 launched the biggest ever international health program to tackle AIDS in Africa, recognizing that this would be self-serving as well as altruistic given the transnational spread of the disease and its capacity to destabilize ­African states. Many other examples of security widening can also be found in the politics of international organizations. In 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution on a nonmilitary issue for the first time when it debated the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and, 5 years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led international relief operations after the Pakistan earthquakes, a scenario barely conceivable before the 1990s. Widening security, then, is a conceptual exercise but often as a corollary, also a geographical one. Emergency domestic policy can be initiated on nonmilitary threats like epidemics, crime syndicates, and disasters, but since such issues have become increasingly transnational, this is unlikely to be a sufficient response. This more expansive interpretation of security has found many critics among traditional Realists, not shaken from their belief in maintaining a narrower focus by the ending of the cold war. Traditionalists fear that widening the d ­ efinition of security poses the risk of rendering the concept redundant by making it too all encompassing and diluting the important task of appraising military threats and interstate conflict. Underlying this fear is the belief of many Realists that military threats are actually more apparent in a post–cold war world devoid of that traditional guarantor of state security the military balance of power, seen to have kept a lid on many regional conflicts.

Deepened Approaches to International Security While the notion of widening security divides Realists, many in the rival liberal, critical theory, and social constructivist camps of international relations have come to

argue for an additional deepening of the concept through the embrace of the concept of “human security.” Human security reasons that the chief referent objects of security should be not states but the individual people of which they are composed. For these “deepeners” an issue can be deemed to be a matter of security even if it is nonmilitary in nature and not a threat at the state level. For human security advocates, if people, be they government ministers or private individuals, perceive an issue to threaten their lives in some way and respond politically to this, then that issue should be deemed to be a security issue. In this view, security is considered to have lost its real meaning and come to be defined in international relations solely as noun synonymous with “military defense” rather than as an adjective or a value. The human part of a human condition has been lost, and the term has become synonymous with realpolitik, the interests of the state. Military might and the application of the “national interest,” certainly, can secure lives, but it can also imperil them if people are judged to be contrary to or expendable in the pursuit of those interests. Additionally, human lives can be imperiled by a range of issues other than military ones. Deepeners of security contend that military conflicts are not now and never have been the only threats that face states, people, and the world as a whole. Throughout history, people have been killed by things other than soldiers and weapons, and states have been weakened or destroyed by things other than military conflict. It should be noted, though, that human security itself is a contested concept, with more and less expansive versions having come to be employed in both academic and political discourse. A narrow—“freedom from fear”—version of human security concentrating on direct and deliberate violent threats, excluding less directly human-caused forms of insecurity like diseases and disasters, has found favor with the Canadian government in recent years. In contrast, a wider—“freedom from want”—version, which considers any issue that is directly or indirectly life threatening to be a matter of security, has been endorsed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Japanese government.

Contesting the Nature of International Security The traditional, Realist way of framing security presupposes that military issues (and certain economic issues for Neorealists) are security issues and as such must be prioritized by governments above other “low politics” issues, important though these might be. In addition, for Realists, globalization and the end of the cold war have not changed this reality. The absence of a mutually

International Security

deterring nuclear “balance of terror” between the United States and the Soviet Union has allowed previously contained national rivalries to erupt in the ­Balkans, Caucasus, and Ukraine and created dangerous power vacuums in failed states such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya. From the geographically and conceptually “narrow” way of interpreting the concept, the widening or deepening of security represents an unwelcome distraction from the still vital sovereign task of safeguarding the country against the perennial threat posed by expansionist statesmen and the growing threats associated with terror networks. For human security deepeners, it is an indication of how the study of security among scholars of international relations has become so skewed over time that the issue most associated with the discipline is actually a comparatively minor threat to most people in the world at large. Real-world thinking mirrors this, and most governments do tend to be somewhat Realist in their foreign policies; this high politics/low politics distinction is evident in the higher level of state expenditure typically allocated to the achievement of military security as opposed to other issue areas. The lives of far more people in today’s world, however, are imperiled by disease, disasters, and human rights abuses than by terrorist and conventional military attacks. Throughout the total-war era of the 20th century, a case could be made that the security of individuals was inextricably tied up with that of their states (at least in some of the world); but deepeners contend that that era has now passed into history. The security of governments does not equate with the security of the people they are meant to represent and protect. This has already been acknowledged by governments in sanctioning the development of global human rights law and is still evident in the existence of global systemic failings such as the widespread persistence of hunger and treatable diseases in a world with sufficient food and medical capability to counter them. It is perfectly natural to give priority to security over the other values since it is a precondition for realizing their allocation. If security is considered from the perspective of individual people, however, issues are less easily compartmentalized. Many issues of state economic gain, such as altering the terms of international trade, are security matters for people in other states forced into poverty by the change. The state protection of food supplies in already foodsecure Northern countries, for example, enriches some of their own people while rendering insecure millions in the Global South. State altruism exists in the world (such as in the provision of food aid in response to famines), as do some limitations to the pursuit of economic gain, but not to the same prominence as in the domestic

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politics of states where individual people are empowered with votes and/or rights of citizenship. Individual security is recognized in democratic states as overriding other values (at least most of the time), as is evidenced by health and safety laws restricting business activities and by “social security” laws. In global politics, though, issues of life and death frequently are not treated as priorities because they do not coincide with state gain or security. Widening security (which considers nonmilitary issues as matters of security but remains focused on the security of the state) is less utopian and more straightforward than deepening and has made a real-world impact, but this does not mean that it represents a compromise position between national and human security approaches, and it is criticized from either flank. For traditionalists, widening national security is an unnecessary dilution (albeit less “watery” than deepening). For deepeners, the problematic logic of the national interest, and the overprioritization of high politics, is not really challenged by widening. Military defense is still being prioritized and security still being defined as a very specific noun rather than as an adjective. The tendency has been, on the one hand, to select nonmilitary issues that military forces can help deal with, such as fighting drug barons abroad or assisting in civil emergency operations. On the other hand, nonmilitary problems have sometimes been securitized on the basis that they have domestic military repercussions. Issues such as AIDS or environmental degradation in distant countries may destabilize regional balances of power and trigger military conflict into which the onlooking government may be drawn or affected in some capacity. However, the political practice of widening security has sometimes proved counter to the interests of the people most affected by the issue due to a clumsy militarization of tasks previously performed by more appropriate personnel. Recent postconflict “nation-building” exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq have been notable for a militarization of development projects, with remaining armed forces being redeployed to reconstruction tasks and “winning the hearts and minds” of the locals. Such “humanitarian” roles may have some beneficial results for local populations but are, of course, ultimately driven by military expediency rather than human security. In addition, as is evidenced by the evolution of domestic health, safety, environmental, or crime policies in most developed countries, keeping people secure is often about the use of proactive, long-term measures to address vulnerability rather than dramatic reactions after a crisis has unfolded. Widening security is more pragmatic and achievable than deepening in a sovereign state system but can still be argued often to be

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contrary to the attainment of either (or both) human and national security.

Conclusions The notion that the pursuit of security has become more of an international concern over time is not really contentious, but the centrality of the sovereign state in this pursuit has become far more controversial. This increased contention over the meaning of security mirrors the wider political debates that have arisen concerning the onset of globalization. For some, the social and economic world is changing so profoundly that the political world needs to follow suit and evolve away from a sovereign state system we have inhabited since the middle of the 17th century that is no longer fit for the purpose. For others, though, globalization should not herald a new postsovereign era and, if anything, ought to reinforce our attachment to our sovereign protectors. While academic debates on ontology (the meaning of concepts) can—often rightly—be viewed as arcane and irrelevant to most people’s lives, how ­security is conceptualized is important to all because it influences political practice and the prioritization of issues. Determining how people’s lives can best be secured is complex and contested but, nevertheless, from almost any perspective remains the most fundamental of all political concerns. Peter Hough See also Civil Wars; Clash of Civilizations; Command of the Commons; Cyberwar; Defense Planning; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Hostage Taking; International Criminal Court; International Humanitarian Law; Maritime Terrorism; Peacemaking; Rule of Law; Terrorism, Theories and Models; United Nations

Further Readings Hough, P. (2013). Understanding global security. Abingdon, England: Routledge. Hughes, C., & Lai, Y. M. (2011). Security studies: A reader. Abingdon, England: Routledge.

Internet Jihadism Internet jihadism is a war conducted using the World Wide Web and led by the main terrorist entities that represent the global jihadist movement. The most violent form of Islamism, an ideological and political interpretation of the Islamic religion, jihadism promotes

violence as the only means to obtain a world entirely populated by Muslims and ruled by sharia, Islam’s religious legal system. Since the late 1990s, the evolution of the Internet from its beginnings as a cabled connection used in institutions to a global communications network linking tens of millions of mobile devices has resulted in rapid advancement in the technological resources available to the jihadist movement. This has gradually transformed Internet jihadism and resulted in changes in its key players. On July 9, 2005, Ayman Mohammed Rabie ­al-Zawahiri, the strategic leader of al Qaeda, sent a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the then-leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. He wrote that because they were at war and that more than half of this war was taking place on the battlefield of the media, it was vital to reach the hearts and minds of the ummah, the Muslim community. Jihadist groups use the Internet to increase their ability to gather information and produce intelligence and to organize, threaten, communicate, attack, spread fear, conduct propaganda, develop identity, and recruit.

Overview Jihad is an Arabic word that originally meant “struggling” or “striving.” The religious meaning of jihad is the internal and external endeavor to be a good believer in Islam and a good, practicing Muslim. Jihad is a polysemic concept and refers to the Islamic faith at both individual and collective levels. Every good Muslim must take part in the defensive struggle or “war” in order to extend Islam’s reach. In itself, however, jihad is not a violent concept and does not necessarily represent a declaration of war against other religions. According to those who choose to misinterpret jihad in a violent manner, jihad means “holy war,” and this would include any kind of violent action against the nonbelievers, who represent a threat to Islam and the Muslim community. According to this interpretation, jihad represents every war by Muslims against infidels, legitimately proclaimed by a recognized authority that can justify hostile and violent actions against others, including piracy, kidnapping, capital execution, and bombing. Since the early 19th century, the concept of jihad has been used to refer to the complex phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism and, in particular, groups that act in a violent way. Consequently, it has come to denote the heterogeneous galaxy of terrorist entities that make and promote the “war against the crusaders,” unbelievers, and apostates. The term jihadist is used to identify those violent Islamic militants who reduce the

Internet Jihadism

complexity of life to an extremely simplified, dichotomous, and violence-based vision. In this ad hoc confused war scenario, Muslims must fight their enemies without hesitation and attack without compunction. In the more recent past, the political use of the word jihad to mean “holy war” can be dated to the late 1970s. During this period, the Ayatollah (political-religious Shia Muslim leader) Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the Iranian revolution to gain power in 1979, proclaimed jihad against the United States because of its support for the Shah and its opposition to the Islamic Republic. According to a number of historians, a new age in the history of humanity began in the last decades of the 20th century. Globalization determined a definitive transition from an analogue, bipolar world to a digital, interconnected, multicentric, and networked one. This transformation enabled the spread of Islamic terrorism, converting it into a global jihadist movement. The rise of new terrorist entities, abetted by the capability for in-group communication and communication to the public, began to influence security policies in response to newly emerging threats and vulnerabilities. The ability to exploit the globally interconnected communications network has greatly strengthened the asymmetric aspect of terrorist entities. The core identity of jihadist terrorism has become more globalized because of “media weaponization.” The effect has been a fusion of communication and terrorism, producing viral digital contents structured as propaganda tools to build and bolster terrorist identity.

The Main Players of Internet Jihadism The Internet is the arena in which individuals can interconnect to play out many of their social, professional, economic, and political games in cyberspace. The Web, as a worldwide repository of knowledge, is the very first globalized mass-communication infrastructure. Terrorism expert John Thompson has identified five key factors that characterize mass communication. The first is the impossibility of disconnecting technology from the spread of information, with communication favoring media development. The second is the fact that communication uses the production and dissemination of objects as symbolic forms produced by humans. Ever since the dawn of the written word, humans have created technological tools to promote the dissemination of messages. The third factor is the resultant time dissociation, the lag between information production and audience reception. The fourth concerns the capability of message extension without any time limit or territorial borders. The final factor is the free circulation and availability of usable symbolic forms from a plurality of

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subjects with no differences between individuals, institutions, and organizations. The combined effect has been to facilitate new kinds of participation, personalization, re-mediation, and sharing within the same cybersocial global space. Internet jihadism has been led chiefly by two terrorist entities: al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which are based on two dissimilar ideological, geostrategic, and organizational models as follows: al Qaeda—this terrorist network wishes to realize a transnational globalized ummah (Muslim community), with no recognition of state authority or national borders. Islamic State—this self-proclaimed state seeks to establish a caliphate. It is based on a centralized religious leadership and in particular on a specific controlled territory. One of its goals is to reconquer all the lands that have historically been home to Islamic-majority societies.

Since entering cyberspace, these two entities have exploited the Web without pause, disseminating a host of multimedia products to bolster their global identity and promote their own jihad while vying for leadership of the global jihadist movement. The very nature of the new social media means that the strength of Internet jihad lies in the unmediated relationship between its violent contents and its audience. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State exploit the Web to produce propaganda, to legitimize the use of force against civilians, and to spread the spectacle of terror as the main asset of the Jihadist “culture of terrorism,” something that appeals especially to digital natives and the young. Terrorism consultant Marc Sageman maintains that mediated social networks and strong bonds with peers inspire young Muslims to join the jihadist movement and take lives more than they otherwise would as a result of behavioral disorders, poverty, trauma, mental illness, or sheer ignorance.

Internet Jihadism and Cyberwarfare The Web’s dynamic nature has changed a great deal over time. Internet jihadism initially began by creating primitive, static websites on which single terrorist groups would publicize their identity and organize discussion forums. These websites were created to stimulate contacts and exchange among the jihad audience from both doctrinal and operational perspectives, with the ultimate aim of enlisting enough people to support jihadism throughout the Web. For communications professor Gabriel Weimann, it is largely because of the Web that the global arena for terrorism has expanded.

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Through Internet jihadism, terrorists use the Web to gather information (railway and airport maps, flight characteristics, critical infrastructural areas, etc.) and for open-source intelligence (OSINT) with up to 80% public accessibility before carrying out an attack. Internet jihadism allows terrorists to turn the Web into a dynamic social information warfare platform that acts in different ways, as follows: Command-and-Control Warfare—aims to disrupt enemy command and control functions and processes via three different kinds of operation: •• Indirect—promoting and inciting the physical elimination of leaders, symbolically targeted individuals, or civilians. •• Direct—the Jihadist strikes the enemy’s reputation and authority. •• Destructive—using cyberweapons against critical infrastructures to cause communication breakdowns and destroy energy provider systems. Espionage—system violations to acquire sensitive information and then use this to carry out attacks and/or make it available to people to generate vulnerability and a sense of insecurity. Intelligence-Based Warfare—the search for and the analysis, manipulation, and dissemination of information on the enemy. Psychological Warfare—based on the programmed, structured use of propaganda and ad hoc rhetoric, with narrations created to influence, persuade, stimulate, and inflame vulnerable individuals. The players of the Internet jihad conduct PSYOPS (psychological operations) as coordinated and customized psychological warfare actions. Hacker Warfare—a specific sector of information warfare in which hackers operate against government sites and companies.

Midrange production and distribution entities (MPDEs) are acquiring a central role in the Internet jihad phenomenon thanks to their function of publishing validated jihadist propaganda files. MPDEs create an indispensable media network to disseminate ideology, linking supporters and militants in a unique global connective and cognitive dynamic network, especially through the social media. Expert David F. Ronfeldt compares this to a repetition of ancient tribal patterns in its creation of a radical virtual Islamic tribe, a sort of online ummah, attracting jihadists from all over the world.

Open-Source Jihad and Cyberjihad All the digital information entities dynamically interconnected with Internet jihadism represent the

“jihadisphere,” an enveloping space in which individuals have free access to stored terrorist information and material in different languages, a sort of e-learning platform, to share propaganda videos, tactical handbooks, explosives guides, magazines, and books. In 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active and dangerous of al Qaeda’s branches, published on the Web the first issue of Inspire, an English-language PDF magazine. In this issue, AQAP presented a major section titled “Open Source Jihad” (OSJ), a DIY guide for terrorists showing step by step how to “make a bomb in your mom’s kitchen” or create a pressure-cooker bomb from everyday materials. AQAP describes OSJ as a resource manual to fight tyrants and “imperialistic nations” and especially as a home training guide for individuals on self-triggering and attacking. This kind of self-trained and self-­ radicalized terrorist has to be considered a new jihadist threat: the lone wolf terrorist. Inspire is just the first in a series of jihadist magazines contributing to the creation and spread of the “culture of terrorism.” In 2015, the Internet jihad led by the Islamic State disseminated on the Web 15,000 photos, 800 videos produced in 11 languages, and a score of magazines. Since the rise of the Islamic State, there has been an evolution in Internet jihadism that favors the cybersocial emanation of the caliphate in the digital, global dimension of the “cybercaliphate,” known as the cyberjihad. In this way, jihadist terrorists are instantly connected to their followers in cognitive, experiential, and emotional terms, thanks to the expansion of the Internet jihad through microblogging and the social media. As a result, sharing attacks means not only strategic connections but sharing the experience, the actual sensation of it. This sort of new empathetic (cyber-)experience is a key trigger, giving the Internet jihadists the ability to instantly transform the jihadisphere into an environment that is no longer so virtual, where individuals can become Converts to Jihadism—vulnerable individuals who begin to act in a deviant or criminal way and join the Internet jihad, supporting its propaganda and proselytism. Foreign Fighters—vulnerable young people who decide to leave their own country to join the Islamic State army in the field. Lone Wolf Terrorists—highly vulnerable and borderline, frequently psychopathic and sociopathic individuals who decide to carry out attacks in the name of jihadism, especially in Western cities.

Intractable Conflicts

The United Cyber Caliphate is a new cyberentity that merges all the smaller cyberjihad groups to connect with young individuals through the recognition, acceptance, and introjection of “jihackism,” a globalized subculture based on jihadism, cyberculture, violent selfism, and hackism and whose generational appeal makes it one of the most serious threats to global security for the near future. Arije Antinori See also al Qaeda; Asymmetric Warfare; Islamic State; Jihad; Lone Wolf Terrorism; Propaganda; Terrorism, Theories and Models; Terrorist Networks

Further Readings Antinori, A. (2015). Gen-T: Terrorist infosphere and i-volution of lone wolf terrorism. In A. Richman & Y. Sharan (Eds.), Lone actors an emerging security threat (NATO science for peace and security, E: Human and societal dynamics) ­(pp.‑23–34). The Hague, The Netherlands: IOS Press. Ganor, B., Von Knop, K., & Duarte, C. (2007). Hypermedia seduction for terrorist recruiting—volume 25 NATO science for peace and security series: Human and societal dynamics. The Hague, The Netherlands: IOS Press. Kepel, G. (2003). Jihad: The trail of political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Matusitz, J. (2012). Terrorism and communication: A critical introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Paletz, D. L., & Schmid, A. P. (1992). Terrorism and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Tuman, J. S. (2009). Communicating terror: The rhetorical dimensions of terrorism (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Weimann, G. (2006). Terror on the Internet: The new arena, the new challenges. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press.

Intractable Conflicts Intractable conflicts are high-intensity, prolonged, violent conflicts that are perceived as irresolvable by the parties involved in them. These conflicts are usually characterized by self-perpetuating cycles in which sociopsychological infrastructures developed to assist the societies in conflict to cope with their harsh reality actually end up deepening the presence of the conflict in the collective psyche. This entry provides an overview of the features that comprise intractable conflicts and describes the sociopsychological infrastructures that constitute the self-perpetuating culture of conflict.

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Intractable Conflicts Features Intergroup conflicts erupt when two or more groups perceive their goals or interests to be in direct contradiction to one another’s and decide to act on this basis. This very general situation is an inseparable part of human life and, as such, there are many different causes, dynamics, and outcomes of intergroup conflict (see Thackrah, 2009). Although mostly portrayed as negative, conflict can sometimes play an important role in altering dangerous, discriminatory, or unjust realities. Nonetheless, more often than not, intergroup conflicts come at great personal and social cost for all those involved and are the cause of some of the greatest tragedies in human history. Due to the immense effect of intergroup conflict on human society, research of conflicts plays a major role in the social sciences and has provided insights into an array of various types of conflicts throughout history and around the world. Several factors are used to differentiate between different types of intergroup conflicts. These can be objective factors such as duration, intensity, and toll of the conflict or more subjective factors such as how the conflict is perceived, the magnitude and duration of felt emotions, or what psychological processes the conflict sets in motion. These different parameters have led to the development of an elaborate typology of intergroup conflicts over the years, whether it is in the work of Edward Azar, who advanced the concept of protracted conflict, or other social scientists who introduced additional concepts such as enduring rivalries (e.g., Mor & Maoz, 1999), malignant conflicts (Deutsch, 1973), and deep-rooted conflicts (e.g., Burton, 1987). The diversity of conflict-defining parameters mentioned above makes it clear that conflicts cannot be defined by any one single parameter but instead should be differentiated according to a configuration of several factors. It is this elaboration that led Louis Kriesberg to offer an integrated, comprehensive criterion for classifying conflict on the intractable–tractable dimension. On one pole of this dimension are found tractable conflicts that are over goals of low importance and last a short period of time, during which the parties in dispute view the conflicts as solvable and are interested in resolving them quickly through negotiation. The other pole is constituted by intractable conflicts, which are prolonged; neither side perceives them as resolvable; they involve great animosity and vicious cycles of violence; they include vast mobilization of society members; and they are inherently self-perpetuating. Using this bipolar dimension that Kriesberg devised, different conflicts can be situated on the intractable–tractable spectrum according to their characteristics and can also shift along the spectrum as a result of significant changes in

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the conflict dynamics. Over the years, other scholars, such as D ­ aniel Bar-Tal, have further refined the existing ­parameters and added additional ones, and today the following features constitute the acceptable conceptualization of intractable conflicts: •• They are protracted. Intractable conflicts persist for a long time, at least a generation. Their long duration implies that the parties in conflict have had many confrontational experiences, and as a result, they have accumulated animosity and hostility. As the years pass, group members focus on negative experiences, remember them, and transmit them to the younger generation, who never knew a peaceful reality and are socialized within the context of the conflict. Moreover, the duration of intractable conflicts forces group members to adapt their lives to face the continuously stressful situation. •• Intractable conflicts involve extreme violence. Intractable conflicts involve physical violence in which group members are killed and wounded in wars, small-scale military engagements, or terrorist attacks. Such violence occurs over time, with fluctuating frequency and intensity. Over the years, not only soldiers are wounded or killed but also civilians, including women and children, and civil property is often destroyed. Additionally, intractable conflicts frequently create refugees and sometimes involve atrocities, including mass killing, “ethnic cleansing,” and even genocide. The consequences of physical violence, especially the loss of life, have an immense emotional impact on all group members. They perceive the violence as intentionally inflicted by the opposing party, as unjustified, sudden, untimely, and especially as violating the sanctity of life. •• Parties engaged in an intractable conflict are deeply invested in the conflictual situation. Parties engaged in an intractable conflict make vast material (e.g., military, technological, and economic) and psychological investments in order to cope successfully with the situation. These investments include mobilization of society members, training of the military, development of military industries, acquisition of weapons, development of supportive infrastructure in all spheres of collective life, and the formation of an ideology to explain and justify the conflict. All require human effort and material resources on the part of both individuals and groups. •• Intractable conflicts are total. Intractable conflicts are existential from the point of view of the participating parties. They are perceived as being about essential and basic goals, needs, and/or values that are regarded as indispensable for the group’s existence and/or survival. They usually concern a number of conflictive domains such as territory, self-determination, autonomy, statehood, resources, identity, economic equality, cultural freedom, free religious practice, central values, and the like, a reality that enhances their totality.

•• Intractable conflicts are of zero-sum nature. Intractable conflicts are all-out conflicts, without compromises and with adherence to all the original goals. Each side focuses only on its own needs, perceiving them as essential for its survival, and therefore neither side can consider compromise and/or concession. In addition, parties engaged in intractable conflict perceive any loss suffered by the other side as their own gain, and, conversely, any gains of the other side as their own loss. This characteristic of conflicts touches many aspects of group life and adds special tension and stress. This zero-sum competition is not restricted to the bilateral conflict relationship but also affects relations with third parties and fans out into the international arena. That is, each side tries to maximize support and aid from the international community and minimize that offered to the opponent. •• Intractable conflicts are perceived as irresolvable. Society members involved in intractable conflict do not perceive any possibility of resolving the conflict peacefully. Many different reasons may underlie their perception—for example, a long history of failed attempts at peaceful resolution, the resistance of involved societies to change their conflict’s goals, or a lack of accommodating leadership. Since neither side can win, both sides expect the conflict to continue and involve violent confrontations. They take all the necessary steps to prepare themselves for a long conflict, and this requires major adjustments on the part of the groups involved. •• Intractable conflicts are central. Intractable conflicts occupy a central place in the lives of the individual group members and the group as a whole. Members of the society are involved constantly and continuously with the conflict. It means that thoughts related to the conflict are easily accessible and are relevant to many decisions that society members make for both personal and collective purposes. The centrality of the intractable conflict is further reflected in its high salience on the public agenda. The media, leadership, and other societal institutions are greatly and continuously preoccupied with the intractable conflict.

The Psychological Dimension of Intractable Conflict Conflicts, both tractable and intractable, tend to erupt over real objective issues such as territories, natural resources, self-determination, statehood, religious dogmas, and basic values. However, while such issues must be addressed in the attempts to resolve conflict, the fact that in their essence conflicts possess psychological ­subjective features and are accompanied by sociopsychological dynamics influences their nature and requires thorough consideration of these factors in order to understand as well as resolve and prevent these conflicts (see Bar-Tal, 2011; Fitzduff & Stout, 2006; Kelman,

Intractable Conflicts

2007; Tropp, 2012). With this in mind, the seven ­features mentioned earlier can be clearly divided into features of either objective or subjective nature. While the objective factors such as duration, material investment, or the presence of violence are more intuitive, the subjective factors can often go unnoticed both by the external spectators and even by the parties participating in the conflicts themselves. These subjective features are usually just as crucial to the comprehension, management, and resolution of conflicts as the more objective ones. It is for this reason that we will focus on this more subjective and psychological dimension of the intractable conflict from here on out.

The Intractable Conflict Self-Perpetuating Cycle What is it precisely that causes the intractability of intractable conflicts? The contemporary literature on intractable conflicts describes a self-perpetuating cycle that when complete leads to conflict intractability. First, as a result of the exposure to the extreme conditions of a long-lasting violent conflict, societies in such conflicts develop specific needs in their struggle for survival. Two of the most basic needs in this regard are maintaining a sense of normality in light of the abnormal situation that conflicts bring about and the need to mobilize society for the collective conflict effort. In the next stage of the cycle, once these needs arise, psychological mechanisms develop in order to address them. For example, perceptions of in-group righteousness or out-group delegitimization can provide a sense of purpose and reason in the face of the doubt and helplessness that intractable conflicts often evoke. In other words, such psychological mechanisms are what people use in the attempt to try to live a normal life in abnormal conflict circumstances. Similarly, psychological mechanisms enable mobilizing the members of a given society without doubt or delay, which is crucial in an intractable conflict scenario. The development of these mechanisms turns in time into a complex sociopsychological infrastructure that encompasses both these elements and provides continuous psychological support and social mobilization. This infrastructure has been termed the culture of conflict or the psychological infrastructure of the conflict, and it consists of three main aspects: the ethos of conflict, collective memory, and collective emotional sentiments (or orientation). The developed infrastructure underlies the evolved culture of conflict and lays the groundwork for the reconstruction of a collective identity with characteristics reflecting the conflict context. Ethos of conflict is defined as “the configuration of  central societal beliefs that provide dominant ­

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characterization to the society and [give] it a ­particular orientation” (Bar-Tal, 2000, p. xiv). It provides the shared mental basis for societal membership, binds the members of society together, gives meaning to societal life, imparts legitimacy to social order, and enables an understanding of society’s present and past concerns as well as its future aspirations. The ethos of conflict is composed of the following eight interrelated themes of societal beliefs (Bar-Tal, 2000; Rouhana & Bar-Tal, 1998):

1. Societal beliefs about the justness of one's own goals



2. Societal beliefs about security



3. Societal beliefs of positive collective self-image



4. Societal beliefs of one's own victimization



5. Societal beliefs of delegitimizing the opponent



6. Societal beliefs of patriotism



7. Societal beliefs of unity



8. Societal beliefs of peace

Ethos of conflict is a relatively stable worldview, which creates a conceptual framework that allows human beings to organize and comprehend the prolonged context of conflict in which they live and act toward its preservation or alteration in accordance with this standpoint. Collective memory is defined, according to Wulf Kansteiner, as representations of the past, remembered by society members as the history of the group and providing the epistemic foundation for the group’s existence and its continuity. Collective memory constructs the narratives, the symbols, the models, and the myths related to the past that mold the culture of the group. Societal beliefs of collective memory, as a narrative, in the case of intractable conflict, evolve to present the history of the conflict to society members.

Emotional Sentiments The nature of long-term intractable conflicts creates fertile ground for the continuation and aggregation of emotions beyond the immediate time frame. Hence, during the escalation of a conflict, alongside the cognitive aspects of the psychological repertoire of the ­conflict (i.e., collective memory and ethos of conflict), societies involved in intractable conflicts develop a set of collective emotional sentiments that is dominated primarily by hatred, despair, and fear (see Halperin et al., 2011). While emotions are multicomponential responses to specific events, sentiments are enduring

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configurations of emotions or a temporally stable emotional disposition toward a person, group, or symbol. Since most members of society do not experience many of the conflict-related events directly, these sentiments should be seen as group-based emotional sentiments, often targeted at another group. Once these sentiments take root, the members of the conflicting societies tend to become overly sensitized to the corresponding ­emotions, namely hatred, despair, and fear. This oversensitization cultivates constant negative emotions toward the out-group simply as a by-product of the sentiments even if the actual interactions do not necessarily call for such emotions. The final stage in the intractable conflict cycle is when this sociopsychological infrastructure turns into a sociopsychological barrier in the face of new opportunities to promote conflict resolution and peacemaking. These psychological barriers, which are based on the psychological infrastructure described, obstruct and inhibit the penetration of any new, alternative information that could potentially facilitate progress toward peace. It leads to a selective collection of information, which means that group members tend to search for and absorb information that is in line with their repertoire while ignoring contradictory information, which is viewed as invalid. Eventually, on the basis of such top-down information processing, society members ­ tend to use their conflict-supporting beliefs as the main, if not only, input to be taken into account in making attributions, evaluations, judgments, or decisions about the conflict (see, for example, Sibley, Liu, Duckitt, & Khan, 2008; Skitka, Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson, & Chamberlin, 2002). From an emotional perspective, several emotional sentiments can become sociopsychological barriers to conflict resolution. The most destructive emotional barrier that influences beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors is hatred. In most cases, hatred involves appraisal of the behavior of an out-group as stemming from a deeprooted, permanent evil character. As a result, hatred is associated with very low expectations for positive change and with high levels of despair, which altogether feed the conflict’s continuation and the escalation. Despair, or the lack of hope, plays a significant role as a barrier to the resolution of conflicts as well. High levels of despair, or the lack of hope, do not allow members of groups that are involved in violent conflicts to imagine a future that is different from the past or to come up with creative solutions to the disputes at the core of the conflict. The absence of the belief that peaceful resolution of the conflict is possible prevents society members from even entertaining risk taking and compromising, and so it stabilizes the escalation stage of the conflict. Finally, fear may prevent attempts to break the vicious

cycle of violence. More specifically, research suggests that experiences of threat and fear increase conservatism, prejudice, ethnocentrism, and intolerance. Last but not least, mistrust is a very potent barrier that plays a major role in strengthening the conflict and preventing its peaceful resolution. It denotes lasting expectations that the rival intends to harm the in-group and is capable of doing so. Although these barriers originate in psychological mechanisms designed to assist the conflicting societies in coping with their challenging reality, they end up ironically being the leading factors in the perpetuation of the conflicts. For as long as such psychological mechanisms subsist, the initial conflict-inducing needs only grow, the conflict perpetuating psychological infrastructure is fortified, and the intractable conflict cycle will continue. Eran Halperin and Aharon Levy See also Bureaucratic Politics; Civil Wars; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Deterrence and International Relations; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Greed Versus Grievance; Military Action; Nonviolence; Rational Choice; Relative Deprivation Theory; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution; Social Identity Theory; System Justification

Further Readings Arnold, M. B. (1960). Emotion and personality (Vol. 1 and 2). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Azar, E. E. (1990). The management of protracted social conflict. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing. Bar-Tal, D. (2000). Shared beliefs in a society: Social psychological analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Bar-Tal, D. (2007). Sociopsychological foundations of intractable conflicts. American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 1430–1453. Bar-Tal, D. (Ed.). (2011). Intergroup conflicts and their resolution: Social psychological perspective. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Bar-Tal, D. (2012). Intractable conflict. In D. J. Christie (Ed.), Encyclopedia of peace psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Bar-Tal, D. (2013). Intractable conflicts: Psychological foundations and dynamics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Bar-Tal, D., & Halperin, E. (2011). Conflict resolution, sociopsychological barriers to. In D. J. Christie (Ed.), The encyclopedia of peace psychology (pp. 223–228). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Bar-Tal, D., Sharvit, K., Halperin, E., & Zafran, A. (2012). Ethos of conflict: The concept and its measurement. Peace & Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 18(1), 40–61. Burton, J. W. (1987). Resolving deep-rooted conflict: A handbook. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Irrationality Cairns, E., & Roe, M. (Eds.). (2003). The role of memory in ethnic conflict. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohrs, J. C. (2012). Ideologies and violent conflict. In L. R. Tropp (Ed.), Oxford handbook of intergroup conflict. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Coleman, P. T. (2000). Intractable conflict. In D. Deutsch & P. T. Coleman (Eds.), The handbook of conflict resolution: Theory and practice (pp. 428–450). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. de Rivera, J., & Paez, D. (Eds.). (2007). Emotional climate, human security, and culture of peace. Journal of Social Issues, 63(2). Deutsch, M. (1973). The resolution of conflict. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Duckitt, J., & Fisher, K. (2003). The impact of social threat on worldview and ideological attitudes. Political Psychology, 24, 199–222. Feldman, S., & Stenner, K. (1997). Perceived threat and authoritarianism. Psychological Psychology, 18, 741–770. Fitzduff, M. (2006). Ending wars: Developments, theories, and practices. In M. Fitzduff & C. E. Stout (Eds.), The psychology of resolving global conflicts: From war to peace (Vol. 1, pp. ix–xl). Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Halperin, E., Russel, A. G., Dweck, C. S., & Gross, J. J. (2011). Anger, hatred, and the quest for peace: Anger can be constructive in the absence of hatred. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 55(2), 274–291. Halperin, E., Sharvit, K., & Gross, J. J. (2011). Emotions and emotion regulation in conflicts. In D. Bar-Tal (Ed.), Intergroup conflicts and their resolution: A social psychological perspective (pp. 83–103). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Jarymowicz, M., & Bar-Tal, D. (2006). The dominance of fear over hope in the life of individuals and collectives. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 367–392. Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M., & Napier, J. L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions and elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 307–337. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375. Kansteiner, W. (2002). Finding meaning in memory: A methodological critique of collective memory studies. History and Theory, 41, 179–197. Kelman, H. C. (2007). Social-psychological dimensions of international conflict. In I. W. Zartman (Ed.), Peacemaking in international conflict: Methods and techniques (Rev. ed., ­pp. 61–107). Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Kramer, R. M. (2004). Collective paranoia: Distrust between social groups. In R. Hardin (Ed.), Distrust: Russell Sage Foundation series on trust (pp. 136–166). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

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Kriesberg, L. (1998). Intractable conflicts. In E. Weiner (Ed.), The handbook of interethnic coexistence (pp. 332–342). New York, NY: Continuum. Mor, B. D., & Maoz, Z. (1999). Learning and the evolution of enduring rivalries: A strategic approach. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 17, 1–48. Pennebaker, J. W., Paez, D., & Rimé, B. (Eds.). (1997). Collective memory of political events: Social psychological perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Petersen, R. G. (2002). Understanding ethnic violence: Fear, hatred, and resentment in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Rouhana, N. N., & Bar-Tal, D. (1998). Psychological dynamics of intractable conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian case. American Psychologist, 53, 761–770. Scheff, T. J. (1994). Bloody revenge: Emotions, nationalism, and war. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sibley, C. S., Liu, J. H., Duckitt, J., & Khan, S. S. (2008). Social representations of history and the legitimation of social inequality: The form and function of historical negation. European Journal of Psychology, 38, 542–565. Skitka, L. J., Mullen, E., Griffin, T., Hutchinson, S., & Chamberlin, B. (2002). Dispositions, ideological scripts, or motivated correction? Understanding ideological differences in attributions for social problems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 470–487. Smith, E. R., Seger, C. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2007). Can emotions be truly group level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 431–446. Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 23–45). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Thackrah, J. R. (2009). The Routledge companion to military conflict since 1945. New York, NY: Routledge. Tint, B. (2010). History, memory, and intractable conflict. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 27(3), 239–256. Tropp, L. R. (Ed.). (2012). Oxford handbook of intergroup conflict. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary study. London, England: SAGE. Wertsch, J. (2002). Voices of collective remembering. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Irrationality Irrationality refers to attitudes, beliefs, or choices of individuals or societies that are determined by something other than rational deliberation or that fail to correspond to reason. Although much of the concern with irrationality in politics relates to matters of individual psychology, deliberation—the careful assessment

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or weighing of considerations—can be understood both as a cognitive process of an individual mind and as a social process of back-and-forth communication among a group of decision makers. This means irrationality’s connections to politics are fundamental and direct as well as complex. Whenever deliberation (individual or social) is absent, fails, breaks down, or is otherwise ineffective, irrationality is said to be present. This entry looks first at the influential argument from Western antiquity equating politics with reason. It contrasts this with the view that politics instead is essentially irrational or that irrationality is an ineradicable part of political life. The entry concludes by outlining some issues raised by ­analysts of mass democracy, most notably the question of whether public opinion in modern democracies is irrational and, if so, whether the public’s irrationality might be intentional, perhaps even an instance of “rational irrationality.”

Is Politics Rational? It is common to think of irrationality as a quality or feature of a belief—that is, to think that it is the content of an idea or proposition itself that can be judged deficient in or counter to reason. Thus, we may deem a belief irrational because it is extraordinary or at odds with common sense. This is not, strictly speaking, accurate. Rather than the belief’s content, it is the grounds upon which it is held or accepted that makes it rational (or irrational). Some widely accepted beliefs may be irrational (e.g., beliefs stemming from unexamined prejudice) if they are unjustified by any adequate reasoning. Other beliefs—such as the belief that the Earth is round—may seem extraordinary or even far-fetched yet may be rational if supported by well-founded and valid logical deduction, empirical evidence, or some other recognized form of rational deliberation. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and ­Aristotle were preoccupied with identifying and codifying the processes or rules of rational deliberation. In his Republic, Plato argued that only a very small elite is capable of even undertaking the training in systemic thought (including music, geometry, and logical reasoning) necessary to access Reason. The vast majority of people, he believed, formed attitudes, beliefs, or choices irrationally on the basis of their bodily appetites, on the one hand, or—less frequently—out of a kind of competitive passion or spiritedness. Justice itself depended on the governance of the irrational majority by rational philosopher-kings. Aristotle—committed to Plato’s call for the sovereignty of reason—politicized rationality by extending it beyond his teacher’s notion of rarefied contemplation to

include the activity of politics, which he saw as an ongoing process of worldly social deliberation. Because of their fundamental natures, the good life for humans meant pursuing reason, either in the form of philosophical contemplation (an option limited to a few) or in the pursuit of politics (open to a wider class of citizens, though still seriously delimited by birth, gender, and, to some extent, level of material well-being). For Plato, the reign of irrationality meant injustice. It meant this for Aristotle too—though for the latter it was also tantamount to the breakdown of politics itself. Rationality and reason were good in themselves. The irrational was, at best, an instrumental good. Quite often, it was antithetical to the good. Even aside from this rationalistic and essentialist understanding of politics, the presence of irrationality has typically been taken to be a bad thing in politics, as leading to various ineffective or counterproductive ­policies, to a lack of social coordination, or to the manipulation and oppression of some by others. Thus, the founders of the United States—like other Enlightenmentera thinkers—worried, for example, about predatory demagogues or the effects of factional allegiances, panics, and excessive enthusiasms; and Karl Marx developed notions such as “false consciousness” and “commodity fetishism,” whereby whole economic classes could be subjugated with the aid of their own irrationalities. At the same time, many thinkers have contended that politics is inherently irrational, dealing as it does with values or so-called essentially contested concepts—ideas such as liberty or justice whose very meanings are commonly objects of political contestation. For different reasons, then, value pluralists—those who despair of any logical hierarchy or systematic ordering of fundamental human values; rhetoricians, who from classical times have argued for the indispensability of passion and emotion in motivating political actors; mystics, Romantics, and intuitionists, who accept nonrational sources of truth; and various subjectivists and irrationalists, who would concur with the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s claim that reason should be recognized ultimately as a tool of the ­passions—all converge on an irrational vision of politics or reject its definition in terms of rationality alone.

Rational Irrationality? Deliberation has often been taken as an especially pressing problem for democracies, which rely on wideranging participation in authoritative decision making. The first empirical studies of public opinion, following the invention of scientific polling in the early 20th century, seemed to confirm the worst fears of earlier critics of democracy. Public opinion, especially of mass publics

Islam Versus Islamism

in modern large-scale democracies, seemed woefully uninformed as well as irrational about public affairs. Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter suggested that the public’s irrationality stemmed from the mind’s psychological unsuitability to complex, large-scale contexts. Others have sought to vindicate the public, discerning informal, though effective, forms of reasoning using cognitive shortcuts or intellectual divisions of labor. Still others, applying a formal, means–end notion of rationality inspired by economics, have argued that the individual, correctly perceiving the insignificance of her vote in a massive electorate, might rationally eschew deliberation in favor of more emotionally ­satisfying position-taking, even if those attitudes and positions proved irrational from society’s point of view. Indeed, the fact that something can be deemed rational (or irrational) from the perspective of either the individual or society makes it possible for the same ­ belief, attitude, or choice to be both rational and irrational simultaneously. Tom Hoffman See also Dogmatism; Emotions and Political Decision Making; False Consciousness; Mass Political Behavior; Propaganda

Further Readings Caplan, B. (2007). The myth of the rational voter: Why democracies choose bad policies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Converse, P. (1964). The nature of belief-systems in mass publics. In David Apter (Ed.), Ideology and discontent (pp. 206–261). New York, NY: Free Press. McMahon, D. M. (2001). Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French counter-enlightenment and the making of modernity. New York, NY: Oxford University.

Islam Versus Islamism Islam is a monotheistic religion that originated in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century CE. Its founder, the prophet Muhammad (570–632 CE), is said to have received revelations from God, which are contained in Islam’s sacred book, the Qur’an. The Qur’an can be interpreted as apolitical, advocating no particular political system or governance model. Those who interpret Islam as apolitical highlight its focus on the greatness of God (Allah in Arabic) along with human conduct and interaction at the individual and community levels. However, immediately following his death, Muhammad’s companions established a caliphate, the

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first Arab-Muslim Empire, which sought to establish Islam’s political authority across the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Islamism, an ideology that utilizes Islam for political purposes, was born of this fusion of Islam and politics. This entry provides a detailed overview of Islam and Islamism based on scriptural references, ­historic accounts, and scholarly literature. It identifies the main differences between these two terms and addresses the competing perspectives concerning the place of politics in Islam.

Islam The word Islam is Arabic, derived from the root salema meaning submission. The followers of Islam, known as Muslims, are those who submit to God. The will of God is known through the Qur’an but has been subject to varied interpretations throughout Islam’s 1,500-year history. It is in the Qur’an that the word Islam is first used in general reference to a way of life involving submission to God. The Qur’an refers to Islam in terms of faith (iman) and religion (din), but more than 90% of these references are to the former rather than the latter. As noted by John Tolan in his book Saracens, until the 1500s, scholars of the Christian world seldom acknowledged Islam as a faith or religion or referred to it and its followers as Islam and Muslims respectively. Instead, ethnic references like “Arabs,” “Moors,” “Turks,” and “Saracens” as well as biblical terms such as “Ishmaelites” and “Hagarenes” were used. Later, European colonial powers continued to use alternative descriptions such as “Mohammedanism” and “Mohammedans” in reference to Islam and Muslims. Muslim objections to the use of such terms are based on the God-centric orientation of Islam whereby god is the absolute object of worship and Muhammad is considered a mere messenger of God.

Foundation The sources on which Muslims and academics base their knowledge of Islam include the Qur’an, which has been traced to the lifetime of Muhammad, as well as the prophetic traditions (hadith) and biographies of Muhammad (sira), both of which are dated to the decades and centuries after Muhammad’s death. ­Collectively, these sources tell of a man born in Mecca, a town of commercial and religious significance within Arabia, the inhabitants of which were mostly nomadic, tribal, and warring. The harshness of the desert environment and Arab customs are contrasted with ­ Muhammad’s compassion and gentleness. His sense of socioeconomic justice, charisma, and resolve overcome

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the disadvantages imposed on him as an orphan raised in a patriarchal, tribal society. Muhammad’s ideas concerning monotheism, human dignity, and purpose of life contrast starkly with those of his polytheistic tribesmen, the Quraysh. As described in the Qur’an, Islam does not see itself as a new religion but as a renewal or revival of the other monotheistic faiths within the Abrahamic family, namely Judaism and Christianity. The Qur’an considers Islam as “the same religion has he established for you as that which He enjoined on Noah. That which he sent by inspiration to thee and that which we enjoined on Abraham, Moses and Jesus” (Qur’an 42:13). The ­ teachings, traditions, laws, and personalities (God, ­ Satan, angels, and prophets) found within Islam, as described in the Qur’an, are often identical or bear striking resemblance to those found in Judaism and Christianity. A 2012 Pew Research Center study titled The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity found universal agreement among Muslims that Islam is a religion based on five pillars that include belief in God and acknowledgment of Muhammad as a prophet, daily prayers, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Most Muslims understand Islam to be a way of life that guides one in accordance with God’s will in respect to the worship of God and coexistence with fellow human beings. While the former incorporates ideas about creation, accountability, and the afterlife, the latter advocates such principles and values as benevolence, compassion, dignity, harmony, honesty, justice, security, and well-being.

Relations With Non-Muslims The story of Islam’s advent is marked by the adversity endured by Muhammad and his early companions. This includes 13 years of humiliation and persecution while living in Mecca, followed by armed battles for survival once the small band of Muslims migrated to a new home in Medina in 622 CE. As reflected in the Qur’anic verses revealed in Mecca compared with the Medina verses, following independence from the Quraysh’s control, Islam evolved from a concentration on faith in God, prayer, and charity to include rituals, socioeconomic order, and laws befitting the spatial, social, and historic context of Muhammad and the first generation of Muslims. Moreover, as the contest between Muhammad and the Quraysh tribal leaders intensified after 622 CE, Islam’s survival depended on Muhammad’s diplomatic and military capabilities. The Qur’an makes no provision for any sanction or punishment for those who choose not to profess Islam. In contrast to exclusivist uses of the terms “Islam” and “Muslim” by classical and contemporary Muslim

theologians and jurists, the Qur’an’s use of these terms is far more inclusive and pluralist, extending to all who submit to God. Qur’anic verses that state that the only religion accepted by God is Islam (Qur’an 3:19, 3:85, 5:3, 9:33, and 48:28) seemingly contradict other verses that state that there is no coercion in religion (Qur’an 2:256, 10:99, and 109:6), declare great rewards for all those who have faith in God and do righteous deeds (Qur’an 2:25, 3:57, 4:122, 5:9, 6:82, 7:42, 8:74, 9:88, 10:4, 20:82, 24:55, 30:15, 41:8, 48:29, 57:7, 65:11, and 95:6), and permit jihad for the general defense of monotheists (Qur’an 22:39–40). These verses suggest that the Qur’an uses the terms “Islam” and “Muslim” literally, applying them to faiths based on submission to God and adherents who submit to God, respectively. The Qur’an refers to the prophets who preceded ­Muhammad as Muslims, as they submitted themselves to the will of God (Qur’an 3:67 and 2:140). Qur’anic verses that may be read in support of a hostile response to non-Muslims and the supremacy of Islam, such as 9:5 and 9:29, should be read in their historic context, specifically, the battles fought between the Muslims and polytheistic Arab tribes during the last decade of Muhammad’s life. Even within the context of such hostilities, the Qur’an maintained that hatred of others should not prevent them from being treated justly (Qur’an 5:8); that the polytheistic Arabs may be invited (Qur’an 9:6–7) but not compelled to accept Islam (10:99); treated with forgiveness (Qur’an 45:14), ­kindness, and equality (Qur’an 60:8); and that peaceful relations should be pursued (Qur’an 4:90 and 8:61). Outside of the context of war and hostility, the Qur’an does not endorse a posture of adversity toward nonMuslims. Submission to the will of God is regarded as a preferable way of life for human beings but is regarded as a matter of conviction that some human beings will embrace, while others remain free to reject it. While Muhammad’s diplomatic and military conduct toward the polytheistic Arabs was existential for Islam and guided, in part, by Islamic principles and values, they were not part of the religion per se. Rather, beyond the Qur’an’s guidance in respect to certain matters of worship, personal conduct, and socioeconomic order as well as some overarching principles, values, and laws, Muhammad and his companions continued to adhere to the Arab cultural norms of the time. Herein resides the great challenge for Muslims in understanding and applying Islam beyond the spatial, social, and historic context of Muhammad’s life. The majority of Muslims have taken a contextual approach, while many Islamists tend to generalize and universalize all aspects of the life of Muhammad and his companions, essentially defining all aspects of their life experiences as Islam.

Islam Versus Islamism

Islamism Islamism is a political ideology that considers Islam to be more than a religion or faith, often referred to as political Islam. Mostly due to Muhammad’s diplomatic and military conduct toward the polytheistic Arabs, politics is commonly understood to be part of Islam, and as such, when most people speak of Islam today, it is actually Islamism to which they refer. As Muslims have historically accepted this underlying assertion of Islamism and called the fusion of Islam with nonIslamic Arab customs and politics “Islam,” the wider world has had little reason or capacity to question it.

Origins and Development In response to the emergence of militant Islamist groups and, later, Islamist political parties in the 1970s and 1980s, Western governments and academics have tended to use the word “Islamist” to distinguish between the mainstream majority of Muslims and the highly politicized, fundamentalist groups and parties using Islam in attempts to control Muslim states and societies. However, the idea of politics being part of Islam has been left unchallenged. Islamism, explains former Islamist Maajid Nawaz, “isn’t a religious movement with ­political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences” (p. 86). Furthermore, Olivier Roy explains that the struggle of Muslims to separate religion from politics is “to save Islam from politics” rather than in the case of Western secularization, where the process was to “save politics from religion” (p. 91). Drawing on elements of Islam, selected textual references, as well as experiences in the life of Muhammad and his companions beyond the religious, Islamism contends that Islam has a particular political system, which it calls a caliphate. Other elements of Islamism include a view of sharia as a law code rather than as a set of values, principles, norms, and laws that guide a Muslim in respect to relations with God and fellow human beings. Islamists consider the establishment of an “Islamic” state based on the implementation of a sharia law code as a religious obligation. By extension, all other systems of organizing and governing state and society are considered ungodly and must be opposed.

The Islamic State The idea of an Islamic state characterized by the implementation of a sharia law code is a modern phenomenon developed by Abul A’la Maududi (d. 1979) in the context of British colonial rule and the identity politics of the Indian subcontinent in the years preceding partition. In response to the Muslim League’s call for a

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Muslim state of Pakistan, Hindu calls for a secular India, and communist calls for a socialist state, Maududi perceived a threat to Islamic identity and called for the establishment of “Allah’s government,” hukumat-e-ilahiya or an Islamic state. Early advocates of the Islamic state include Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), who wrote in the context of Egypt’s postcolonial authoritarian rule, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989), who, in the context of Iran’s Islamic Revolution to overthrow the U.S.–imposed Pahlavi dynasty, helped to ­ popu­ larize the  vision of an Islamic state among Muslim masses globally and make it a central pillar of Islamism from the late 20th century. Other Muslim groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir also championed Islamism and actively supported replacing the governments of particular Muslim countries, including Bangladesh, Egypt, and ­ Pakistan, with a caliphate. To understand Islamism as a social and political force that swept across the Muslim world in the second half of the 20th century, one must appreciate the psychological, social, economic, and political impacts of European colonial rule on most Muslim-majority countries. A legacy of anti-Western sentiments, frag­ mentation of legal codes, interreligious and interethnic conflict, poverty and underdevelopment, and unrepresentative authoritarian rule remained after independence was eventually achieved. In the aftermath of European colonial rule, the newly formed Muslim nation-states faced significant social, political, and economic difficulties, which encouraged the growing demand for a home-grown alternative. The failure of various Western-inspired ideologies such as socialism and nationalism, coupled with the humiliating defeat Israel inflicted on the joint forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, led to the emergence of modern Islamism in the 1970s. At an ideological level, Islamism rejects what it deems Western values, norms, systems, and institutions. At a social level, it emphasizes outward manifestations of so-called Islamic identity including beards for men, head scarves and often face veils for women, and strict gender segregation. At a political level, Islamism’s main goal is the establishment of a so-called Islamic state or caliphate based on the implementation of a sharia law code that prioritizes the role of the state in the enforcement of sexual morality, physical punishments for violators, curtailment of human rights and civil liberties, subjugation of religious minorities, and persecution of both political and religious dissidents.

Legitimacy of the Caliphate While it is difficult to determine when Muslims first began to accept the fusion of Islam and politics, the

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Islam Versus Islamism

process began following the death of Muhammad in 632 CE. His companions, Abu Bakr (d. 634 CE), Umar bin al-Khattab (d. 644 CE), Uthman bin Affan (d. 656 CE), and Ali bin Abi Talib (d. 661 CE) established and led in succession the first Arab-Muslim Empire, the Rashidun Caliphate. The Qur’an, however, does not use the terms “caliph” and “caliphate” in reference to a political system but in relation to the responsibility shared by all human beings concerning life on Earth (Qur’an 2:30 and 6:165). Critics of contemporary “Islamism” point out that neither the Qur’an nor the hadith advocate any political model or system, and Muhammad is not known to have instructed his companions to establish a caliphate as part of a political order within Islam. From the 11th century until today, Islamist thought has declared the caliphate to be the “Islamic” system of government. Muslim scholars such as Abu al-Hasan al-Marwardi (d. 1058) are notable for defining the caliphate as the “Islamic” political system and did so based on the prevailing norms of the Muslim empires that followed after the death of Muhammad. However, critics would argue that they were able to make only very superficial, tangential, and misleading references to the Qur’an and hadith to support their claims. With the last of the Muslim empires, the Ottoman ­Caliphate, facing imminent demise, the caliphate was defended by religious scholars such as Rashid Rida (d. 1935), who in 1923 wrote al-Khilafah al-Uzhmah (The Grand Caliphate), claiming that the Qur’an and hadith affirm the caliphate as an obligatory system for Muslims. However, the seminal work of Ali Abd al-Raziq (d. 1966), Al-Islam wa Usul al-Hukm: Bahth fi al-Khalifah wa al-Hukumah fi al-Islam (Islam and the Foundations of Rule: Research on the Caliphate and Government in Islam), written in 1925, presents a compelling argument that the caliphate is a human innovation rather than a religious imperative. Based on in-depth analysis of Islamic sources, including the Qur’an, hadith, sira, classical works of Muslim political thought, and Islamic history, Al-Raziq determines that neither the Qur’an nor Muhammad articulated a specific form of government. He observes that the Qur’anic verses and hadith that are quoted in support of the caliphate institution, such as verse 4:59, are ambiguous, imprecise, and taken out of context and do not qualify as evidence from a scholarly standpoint, although extensively quoted by classical scholars in support of the caliphate. In respect to his claim that the Qur’an and hadith offer no support or evidence for an “Islamic” political institution called a caliphate, Al-Raziq states, If there were one single evidence in the Qur’an, these scholars would have never hesitated to refer to it and

praise it. Or even if there were in the Noble Book what resembled an evidence for wujub al-Imamah, someone among the supporters of Khilafah [caliphate] would have tried to turn any such resemblance into evidence. However, the fair scholars failed to find hujah or evidence in favor of their opinion in God’s Book. Thus they left the Book and went to find evidence in the claim of Ijma’ [consensus among legal scholars or jurists] at times, and Qiyas (reasoning by way of analogy), at other times. (cited in Ali, 2009, p. 73)

Abu Bakr assumed the title of Khalifat Rasul Allah (caliph/successor to God’s messenger). His reign was marked by the so-called wars of apostasy (rida) against those who were supposedly apostates (murtaddun) for not accepting his political authority, which was construed as a renouncement of Islam. Abu Bakr’s ­ closeness to Muhammad added to the religious legitimacy that the caliphate acquired. Subsequent generations of ­Muslims accepted the caliphate as a religious institution demanded by Islam in spite of the absence of supporting references in the Qur’an and hadith. Although ­Muhammad fulfilled many of the roles and responsibilities associated with statesmanship, including leading armies and appointing military commanders, as well as engaging in diplomacy and negotiations, these acts were for the protection of the Muslim community and survival of the Islamic religion; they were not religious mandates or for the purpose of establishing a state. They were incidental to, not part of, Islam. Halim Rane See also Clash of Civilizations; Islamic State; Jihad; Nationalism; Pluralism; Political Ideology

Further Readings AbuSulayman, A. (1993). Towards an Islamic theory of international relations: New directions for methodology and thought. Herndon, VA: The International Institute of Islamic Thought. Ali, S. (2009). A religion, not a state: Ali Abd al-Raziq’s Islamic justification of political secularism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Esposito, J. (1999). The Islamic threat: Myth or reality? New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nawaz, M. (2012). Radical. London, England: Random House. Rahman, F. (1982). Islam and modernity: Transformation of an intellectual tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rane, H. (2009). Reconstructing jihad amid competing international norms. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Rane, H. (2010). Islam and contemporary civilization: Evolving ideas, transforming relations. Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Press.

Islamic State Roy, O. (2004). Globalized Islam: The search for a new ummah. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Tolan, J. V. (2002). Saracens: Islam in the medieval European imagination. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Islamic State The Islamic State (IS) has emerged as modern history’s most successful and richest jihadist group. It has overshadowed al Qaeda, of which it was a part until 2014, with its ability to conquer territory, hold on to it, and establish the infrastructure of a state. With the declaration of a caliphate, it has also created a major divide and rivalry among jihadists and segments of the Salafi community that empathize in one way or another with jihadism. Under air attack from a U.S.–led coalition since the summer of 2014 and confronting a Russian military assault that began in October 2015, IS has largely as of this writing been able to hold its ground. In doing so, it shares some characteristics with primarily African liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the Sudanese People’s Liberation Front (SPLA), the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), that sought to control territory rather than rely exclusively on political violence. A difference is that IS is ideologically driven by religious rather than nationalist concepts of statehood. The countercultural group’s resilience and attraction are manifold and tailored to multiple target audiences. These audiences include true believers; Sunni Muslims who see IS as the best of available albeit bad choices; tribes whose relations with the Iraqi and Syrian states have ruptured; marginalized and disenfranchised youth in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Asia; repressed ethnic groups like China’s Uighurs; youth in search of adventure and glory; and lone wolves whose psychological weakness it exploits. Its apocalypticism, a major characteristic that sets it apart from other jihadist groups like al Qaeda, resonated at a time when Sunni Muslims witnessed the collapse of a long-standing regional order in the Near East, the Middle East, and North Africa; the rise of sectarian and ethnic claims; and convulsions in places frequently associated with prophecies. It also sparked the fancy of those who wanted to be in the right place at the end of time.

The Challenge Brutality and public display of violence in nation and state building has been a fixture of history dating back

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to the ancient Israelites, the Mongols, and in Muslim history the Wahhabis and more recently the Taliban. Nonetheless, IS’s brutality has been abhorrent to many Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Nonetheless, beheadings, incinerations of people, mass burials, crucifixions of enemy military personnel, and its slave markets have served to attract fighters willing to further the cause. To be sure, IS has no monopoly on brutality even if it ensures that its violence is better publicized than the cruelty of both regional governments and insurgent groups, and some of its actions, such as slavery and incineration, are unique to the group. Yet while military efforts to curtail if not destroy it may ultimately succeed, destruction is unlikely to quash or resolve the issues that fueled its attraction and rise. In addition, IS has been able to evoke hostile responses that have aligned a formidable array of opponents against it but that ironically create some of the building blocks of its strength. Those blocks include relatively ineffective Western military intervention; a perception of Russia as an occupying force as a result of its military operations in Syria; a regional and global race to fund and arm various rebel groups and fight proxy wars in Syria and Iraq; sectarian policies that undermine institutions and nation-states; and increased repression by governments. As a result, IS’s resilience is for example a reflection of the murky, shifting politics of Saudi-led Gulf region support of jihadist groups, including at times IS, despite the obvious danger of backlash. The risk of backlash was evident in the group’s declared targeting of the Saudi kingdom and attacks in 2015 on Shiite mosques there and in Kuwait and on Saudi security personnel. The entity’s continued existence and control of tens of thousands of square miles punctured the notion that Iraq and Syria could be restored as nationstates. The U.S. effort to definitively defeat IS was further undermined by the fact that allies such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia represent ideologies, policies, and models of governance that have failed to deliver and have fueled the proliferation of Sunni jihadist sympathies. IS’s challenge to Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations is many sided: an Islamic republic rather than a monarchy established on the back of a truly popular revolt that propagates a revolutionary instead of a ­status-quo approach to geopolitics. IS’s declaration in June 2014 of a caliphate based on the prophetic method, a model arguably set out by the prophet Muhammad in the formative years of Islam, by implication dismissed the Islamic credentials of Saudi and other rulers. It propagated political activism and jihadism rather than the notion of the kingdom and others in the Middle East and North Africa of a quietist Sunni precept of obedience to the ruler.

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Without the condition of the caliphate being realized, all power is simply worldly kingship, domination and governance, accompanied by destruction, corruption, injustice, coercion and fear, and the degradation and decline of humans to the level of animals. This is the truth of the succession to God, for which God has ­created us,

IS said in its declaration of the caliphate. In doing so, it also rejected the notion that political conflict occurred exclusively within the boundaries of or between sovereign nation-states and called into question the regional order in the Middle East and North Africa. It further challenged traditional Islamic thought that argued that modern nation-states and their institutions could serve as frameworks for Islamic rule simply by introducing Islamic law. The ideological chasm IS evoked in the non-Muslim world as well as among Muslims revealed much about the psychological traumas the group has exploited. In the West, the threat posed by IS was equated with genocide as in the Holocaust and the mass murder in Rwanda and the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Sunni Muslims harked back to the Khawarij, seventh-century militants who revolted against Caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib. Shiites associate IS with the Umayyads, the first Sunni dynasty that followed the Prophet’s first four successors and was born in battle against Ali and his successor son Hasan ibn 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, to whom Shiites trace their roots. IS’s challenge was all the more startling even if it parted ways with Wahhabism when it came to politics because its religious precepts are grounded in and closely aligned with Saudi Arabia’s austere interpretation of Islam that rejects innovation and foreign cultural influences and selectively accepts the authority of medieval Muslim scholars. IS believes that it has introduced a legal system and social contract that is rooted in a literal reading of early Islamic scholarship, notions of state building, and law. The social contract involves subjects performing their Islamic obligations in exchange for accountable government and legally enforceable rights.

Origins Founded in 2004 as al Qaeda in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who ran a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan, IS was not simply ­a product of resistance to the United States’ ill-­conceived 2003 invasion of Iraq but more importantly of a ­fundamental crisis of Sunni Arab politics. A cache of documents belonging to one of the architects of IS that was obtained by the German magazine Der Spiegel

illustrated the jihadists' alliance with former Baathists who had been cached by U.S. administrators but who had practical experience in establishing and administering an autocracy. They showed how a former Iraqi military officer designed in neat diagrams the structure of a future Islamic state divided into provincial councils that would be dominated by intelligence and security services. The documents highlighted a key difference between IS and its jihadist predecessors as well as approaches of disgruntled tribes in which IS operated. Instead of seeking to topple a government, IS focused on building a state of its own, albeit with expansionary ambitions based on legal notions of reconquering territory expropriated by Crusaders and colonialists, disputed land rights in times of conflict, and war booty. In doing so, IS broke with al Qaeda’s effort to win popular support and opted instead for cementing its authority on fear and intimidation. IS’s statecraft was heavily influenced by The Management of Savagery, a book that propagated the calculated use of ritualized and well-­publicized brutality as a means of garnering respect and fear among both enemies and supporters. The book, which operationally focuses exclusively on the Muslim world, was believed to have been authored by Abu Bakr Naji, an Islamist strategist associated with al Qaeda. Its notion of territorial conquest harked back to Islam’s earliest victory and underwrites the Islamist motto that “Islam is the solution.” IS benefited from the fact that the Iraqi government was too weak to stop it, while the Syrian regime saw the rise of IS as a way to justify its assertion that its war was not against freedom-seeking rebels but against terrorists. It also profited from the effectiveness of sectarian conflict and political violence in forging identities and shaping popular behavior. IS moreover drew on a core cultural strength by wrapping itself in the glory of Islam’s earliest history. Muslim collective memory, unlike that of Judaism, which is shaped by notions of exile, or of Christians, who are informed by perceptions of persecution, is centered on past military, political, cultural, and scientific glory. Islam’s most important icons that are still in existence, like the Kaaba in Mecca, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, predate or date from that period. It is a memory of a history that dominated the world for two thirds of the time since Islam was born some 1,300 years ago and which many in the Muslim world would like to see resurrected. Finally, IS built on a century-old history of Islamist activists who since the abolition of the caliphate by Mustafa Kemal, also known as Ataturk, the visionary who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the ­Ottoman Empire, saw the resurrection of the institution

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as the panacea for the Muslim world’s ills. They ranged from Hassan Al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the ­Muslim Brotherhood, to Osama bin Laden, even if they differed on how and when the caliphate should be restored.

Resurrecting the Caliphate Devised with Baathist help, the IS plan involved the provision of financial and other services like the operation of schools, day-care centers, media, and public transportation. It envisioned a state and institutions that have the making of sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of a total institution in which all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority that controls all aspects of life. The documents suggested that IS had anticipated the need to properly set up the administration of a state with a functioning bureaucracy and authority. Its councils included an advisory Shura Council that in theory had the power to depose the caliph but in practice made recommendations for senior appointments and offered nonbinding advice on issues of war and peace and day-to-day issues that were not explicitly covered by the Qur’an or the Sunnah (the teachings, deeds, and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad). IS’s Ahl al-Hal wal Aqd (Those Who Loosen and Bind), the equivalent of a parliament that is rooted in Islamic jurisprudence and includes members of the Shura Council as well as local leaders, was the institution that in 2014 appointed Iraqi Islamic scholar Ibrahim al-Badri, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an alleged descendent of the Prophet, as caliph. Other councils provide Islamic guidance, operate the judiciary, oversee media policy, manage finance and budgets, supervise the military, oversee security and intelligence, and administer IS’s provinces. IS’s legal system sees the caliph as a custodian of divine law with the power to declare law and policy on the basis of classical Muslim theory of the policy of sharia or religiously legitimate governance, siyasa sharia. That theory allows for both religious courts and the authority of officials like inspectors, military personnel, and the caliph to take legal decisions, particularly with regard to citizenship, land, trade, and war, that are in line with existing laws and benefit the Muslim community. At its core, the system demarcated the relationship between government and the people, defined as subjects as based on accountability and Islamic justice. It also created a social contract rooted in law between the caliph and the people. In addition to the court system, IS enforced its laws through police forces like the Islamic police, which were responsible for civil law and public safety, and the Hisba, a morality

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law enforcement agency similar to Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or Mutaween. Hisba’s task was to “promote virtue and prevent vice, to dry up sources of evil, prevent the manifestation of disobedience, and urge Muslims toward well-being.” On that basis, IS was able to institutionalize policies governing everything from war to taxation and levies, labor, commerce, health, real estate, agriculture, the environment, and the administration of sharia justice. Absentee landlords, for example, who receive rents from property owned in IS-controlled territory, received payments with officially documented taxes deducted by the group’s administration. Those payments, alongside revenues from confiscated assets rather than income from oil, constituted the basis of IS’s funding. In delivering social services, IS fixed power lines, dug sewage systems, and painted sidewalks in northern Syria. It enforced food security controls, searching markets for expired food and sick animals. It ran a regular bus service across what was once the border between Syria and Iraq and reopened a luxury hotel in Mosul, where newlyweds were offered a free three-night stay, meals and all. It advised wounded residents that they no longer needed to travel to Turkey to acquire prosthetic limbs because they were being produced domestically in the Islamic State. In doing so, IS offered a semblance of order, albeit a harsh one, in a region that had succumbed to mayhem and bitter sectarian warfare.

Reshaping Education IS also focused on shaping its next generation through education, in a model not unlike the system implemented in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, in the belief that children are less corrupted by infidel values and more able to adapt to its own system of values. To that effect, teachers in IS-controlled territory were forced to sign statements of repentance, retrained, and indoctrinated; foreign fighters were recruited as instructors; and curriculums were rewritten. Music, art, science, biology, history, philosophy, and sports were replaced with Islamic studies, mathematics, Arabic, and physical and military training. Girls, who were obliged to wear a hijab from the age of six, were segregated from boys. IS’s jihadist ideology and military training were at the core of the Islamic State’s education system. The product was frequently on display in IS video clips that showed children cheering IS forces, attending executions, training to fight, and learning how to use automatic weapons in ambushes and plant improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In focusing on education, IS was following the example of newly independent states that, after

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throwing off the shackles of colonialism, needed a new national narrative that countered the allegedly civilizing mission of the former colonial power. It introduced an element of heroism as part of the development of a shared identity and vision and allowed the new rulers to consolidate power. IS’s narrative was articulated in its educational curriculum directives that replaced Syria’s official designation as the Syrian Arab Republic with the Islamic State and banned the Syrian national anthem. Concepts of patriotism and Arab nationalism made way for adherence to Islam, the community of the faithful, strict monotheism, and the notion of Muslim land on which God’s path governs. The homeland was God’s rather than that of its inhabitants. Institutionalization in territories controlled by IS meant that the state’s neighbors were forced to deal with the reality of its existence, as evidenced by the problems posed by travelers carrying IS identity papers.

A Region in Transition Despite its unprecedented brutality and intolerant ideology, IS suggested a radicalization of what initially were peaceful attempts at regime change in the Middle East and North Africa. This was in the face of counterrevolutionary policies by autocrats who were equally brutal in their repression of dissent and no less willing to risk the region’s being engulfed in sectarian strife in their bid to retain absolute power. The brutal suppression, with the help of Saudi troops, of an initially nonconfessional popular revolt in Bahrain in 2011 and the violent forcing of the transition of peaceful antigovernment protest into bloody civil war in Syria by the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, were prime examples. IS’s rise suggested that the Middle East and North Africa continued to be in transition, albeit one that was messy, ugly, and bloody, as much because of retrograde forces like IS that had taken the lead in response to counterrevolutionary forces determined to avert change at whatever cost. As a result, a defeat of IS, with or without a bringing in from the cold of other less apocalyptic and more gradualist Islamists and jihadists, was likely to do little

to halt radicalization or prevent the emergence of a yet more extreme group that, in much the same way that IS eclipsed al Qaeda, would become a focal point. Moreover, a defeat in Syria and Iraq would not necessarily lead to IS’s demise in the Sinai, Libya, or Nigeria. Although IS may prove to be transitory, jihadist ideology itself is likely to retain its appeal until its root causes are squarely addressed, beginning with the encouragement of inclusive rather than sectarian rule in Damascus and Baghdad. James M. Dorsey See also Absolutism; al Qaeda; Asymmetric Warfare; Clash of Civilizations; Ethnocentrism; Greed Versus Grievance; Human Trafficking; Insurgency; Patriarchy; Religiosity; Significance, Need for; Springboard Model of Dictatorship; Utopia

Further Readings Burke, J. (2015, August 20). The truth about the caliphate. Prospect Magazine. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ features/state-of-terror Dorsey, J. M. (2015, August 23). Thinking the unthinkable: Coming to grips with the survival of the Islamic State, the turbulent world of Middle East soccer. http://mideastsoccer .blogspot.sg/2015/08/thinking-unthinkable-coming-to-grips .html Harling, P., & Birke, S. (2015, March 3). The Islamic State through the looking-glass, international crisis group. http:// www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/ op-eds/harling-the-islamic-state-through-the-looking-glass .aspx March, A. F., & Revkin, M. (2015, April 15). Caliphate of law, ISIS’ ground rules, foreign affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs .com/articles/syria/2015–04–15/caliphate-law McCants, W. (2015). The ISIS apocalypse: The history, strategy, and doomsday vision of the Islamic State. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Reuter, C. (2015, April 18). The terror strategist: Secret files reveal the structure of Islamic State. Der Spiegel. http://www .spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-showstructure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html

J and believers would argue that jihad does not mean holy war as is popularly assumed. This basic and continuous jihad traces its roots to the Qur’an and the early history of Islam. “The Muslim, in fact, must live in a permanent state of struggle against his/her lower self,” wrote Islam scholar Y. A. Dimmock (2014, n.p.). The struggle for self-improvement and control of base instincts was in effect a building block of an endeavor to improve society and counter issues such as anarchy and injustice. It also amounted to a way to ensure that lesser jihads, the battles against enemies of Islam, were righteous and constituted just cause. This notion of the greater jihad as a spiritual and purifying endeavor aimed at self-improvement and putting greater emphasis on one’s soul rather than worldly possessions was fostered primarily by ascetics and mystics who were concerned about the rise of an Islamic order that was defined by its affluence. Some scholars argue that the notion of Islam as a struggle for self-improvement in religious and communal rather than political and territorial terms became more preeminent as early Muslim conquests moved farther away from the Arab heartland, making it more difficult for individual Muslims to participate. These scholars often note that the Qur’an, despite defining the personal jihad as the greater effort, differentiates between those who participate in the armed defense of Islam and those who focus on self-improvement, as expressed in Surah 4, ayah 95 of the Qur’an:

Jihad Long-standing prejudice and political violence in the name of Islam has turned the word jihad into a loaded term that has defined misperceptions and frequent lack of understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. The notion of jihad has also reinforced segments of both communities in their belief that ­Muslims and non-Muslims are locked into an epic clash of civilizations.

Definition and Significance Despite misconceptions and popular perceptions of the concept of jihad as one that is exclusionary and intrinsically hostile to others, and that justifies brutal violence, jihad means something very different and far more benign to most Islamic scholars and Muslims. The word jihad is derived from the Arab root jahada, which means to strive in the name of God and relates primarily to questions of intent and devotion. Key here is the notion of a righteous cause before God and that a Muslim’s actions are worthy of divine reward when they are undertaken with proper intent and conform to divine command. As a result, for a majority of scholars and Muslims, jihad means struggle, striving, or exerting best effort, an activity that covers a range of activities primarily aimed at improving oneself. To them, jihad is primarily a spiritual undertaking. “Jihad in the Qur’an implies a total devotion to God through a consecration, dedication and even oblation of oneself to His way,” said Islam scholar Paul L. Heck (2004, p. 98). On a personal level, it involves a struggle with oneself to be a good Muslim or believer as well as endeavor to inform others about the faith of Islam. Most scholars

Those of the believers who stay at home suffering no injury are not equal to those who fight for the cause of Allah with their possessions and persons. Allah has raised those who fight with their possessions and persons one degree over those who stay at home; and to each Allah has promised the fairest good. Yet Allah has granted a great reward to those who fight and not to those who stay at home.

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The definition of jihad as righteous cause defensive in nature and intended to benefit a moral order that serves either Muslim hegemony or Muslim society is complicated by the fact that the concept’s meaning has varied throughout history depending on the needs and circumstances of the Muslim community. As a result, the concept’s enduring relevance and definitions that are history specific are often confused by both Muslims and non-Muslims in contemporary debate about jihad. Nevertheless, irrespective of timing and interpre­ tation, the definition of jihad encompasses spiritual, rhetorical, scholarly, and/or military exertion to serve God. This exertion can range from peaceful soulsearching to opposition to allegedly false beliefs to physical resistance to oppression as a last resort. This definition goes back to the Hijra, the forced migration of early Muslims in 622 from Mecca to Medina to escape persecution. It licensed Muslims to wage a just war to defend themselves against those who sought to harm them irrespective of whether they were Muslims. The concept of a just war is initially defined by primary Islamic texts in the Qur’an that portray God’s granting of permission to the Prophet Mohammed and his early followers to fight their persecutors in seventh-century Arabia. Surah 60, ayah 8 of the Qur’an says, “Allah does not forbid you to be righteous and act justly toward those who do not fight you because of religion and do ­not  expel you from your homes. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly.” Ayah 9 of the same surah goes ­on  to say, “Allah only forbids you to make allies of those who fight you because of religion and expel ­you from your homes and aid in your expulsion. Any of you who befriend them (and become their allies) are transgressors.”

Islamic Law and the Use of Force The use of force in jihad is rarely and only in extreme circumstances justified in Islamic law and is subject to strict Quranic legal precepts and rules of engagement, including a ban on harming innocents, including women, children, and invalids. An armed jihad, the only legal form of warfare in Islamic law, has to be declared by a duly constituted state authority advised by scholars who certify that Islam and Muslims are under threat and that violence is imperative for their defense. The rules further oblige Muslims to accept an enemy’s peaceful overtures. The importance of force in jihad is put in perspective by words reportedly spoken by the Prophet Mohammed to his followers after he returned from a military campaign: “This day we have returned from the minor jihad to the major jihad,” the Prophet said, explaining that he

was referring to a return from armed battle to peaceful battle for self-control and betterment. It is in the realm of interpretation of the meaning of jihad that religious scholars and governments have been waging a battle for the definition of the concept of jihad that aims to shape concepts of governance in the Muslim world. That is nowhere more the case than in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Both sides of the divide often spin their interpretation, in part by curtailing Quranic texts or quoting them out of context to avoid a different conclusion that would stem from referral to the full, literal text. The jihadist reinterpretation of the concept of jihad is enabled by the fact that the rules of engagement are determined not only by the Qur’an but also the hadith and a body of classical law that form the sharia, developed over a period of 1,000 years between 800 CE and 1800 CE that is less pacifist than the holy book. Driving the reinterpretation are differences between the historical texts and subsequent legal treatises dealing with the definition of God as the sole ruler of the universe. The differences are highlighted by the fact that the Prophet Mohammed never employed the term “jihad” for his campaigns and that Muslim conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries were only defined as jihads after the fact by later generations. Jihadist reinterpretations are aided by the fact that the Qur’an frequently employs militaristic vocabulary in its references to jihad even if military concepts may not have been the primary intent. Throughout Islamic history, particularly in the early period when Islam witnessed its greatest missionary expansion, the norm was that the armies of the leader viewed themselves as holy warriors. They would invade foreign lands, where nonbelievers were given a choice between conversion or, in the case of Jews and Christians, political submission. Submission involved the protection of the Muslim government and the right to retain their faith in exchange for payment of a poll tax. Communities that refused the offer were confronted until defeated. Rulers and warriors either killed the male members of defeated pagan communities and enslaved their women and children or opted to treat them as having surrendered voluntarily. Jews and Christians were exempted because they were believed to have had a divine revelation, and their faith was viewed as having been acknowledged by God. In expanding the realm of Islam, the ruler was executing a perceived divine order. Cynics would argue that Islam provided justification for imperial ambitions much as Western nations later colonized and spread their culture and religion (Christianity). Nonetheless,

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scholars and believers saw the missionary campaigns, which attracted a large number of volunteers and donors, as noble endeavors to fulfil God’s wish. Their belief, irrespective of their interpretation of Islam, is, down to the present day, grounded in Surah 9, ayah 111 of the Qur’an, which states: Allah has bought from the believers and their wealth in return for Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah, kill and get killed. That is a true promise from Him in the Torah, the Gospel and the Qur’an; and who fulfils His promise better than Allah? Rejoice then at the bargain you have made with Him for that is the great triumph.

Their perceptions of missionary jihad were akin to Western support for Christian missionaries. In contrast to the West that distinguished between soldiers and missionaries who followed in their wake, Muslim fighters were both missionaries and soldiers at the same time. As a result, they represented a fusion of religion and politics that distinguished Islam from proselytization by religions that preceded it. While that fusion remains, state-sponsored missionary warfare effectively ended with the decline of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century.

Interpretation by Contemporary Jihadists In a radical and disputed reinterpretation of the terms under which an armed jihad can be declared, contemporary jihadists have abrogated the right to either declare offensive war until all non-Muslims convert or submit to Islamic rule or cast their campaigns as defensive, aimed at purifying Muslim lands or reclaiming territory once under Muslim rule. Similarly, they have defended their killing of civilians with classic collateral-damage arguments. The jihadist notion of jihad is rooted in the belief that Islam is weak and needs to regain and re-create Muslim sovereignty rather than expand its realm. They define their jihad as defensive in a world in which Islam is under attack. Defensiveness moreover gives legitimacy to their endeavor and obliges individual Muslims to participate. In abrogating the right to declare and wage jihad, jihadists ironically fall back on a tradition populated by those they would consider heretics who at various points in history challenged the Islamic character of existing states. Kharijites, those who defected, were the first to do so in the seventh century when Islam was emerging. They were followed by the Shi’ites, who are denounced by Sunni Muslim jihadists as heretics. By contrast, Sunni Muslims by and large, including

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contemporary Islamist groups and movements, largely accepted their states as being Islamist even if they criticize the degree to which the state embraces Islamic law. As a result, the jihadist reinterpretation laid bare a major conceptual divide between conservative regimes, particularly those who cloak themselves in the mantle of Islam, and jihadists over what circumstances constitute oppression or the kind of injustice that would justify jihad against the existing order. Conservative Sunni Muslim regimes and their coterie of religious scholars define jihad as legitimate only if mandated by the ruler. Religious scholars supportive of often autocratic, if not despotic, regimes further mold the meaning of jihad to suit the ruler’s political interests. Their rulings claim greater legitimacy because they are grounded in an often ultraconservative, sectarian interpretation of Islam. It is on that basis, for example, that Saudi scholars fulminate against Shiite Muslims and provide legitimacy to repression of popular will, as occurred with the squashing of the 2011 popular revolt in Bahrain, the repression of peaceful protest in Syria that provoked a civil war, and the Saudi military intervention in Yemen in 2015. In a similar way, Iranian rulers use religion to justify not only their own dictatorship but also the rule of other dictators, such as Assad in Syria. Jihadists reject the quietist, status-quo interpretation of jihad. They argue that an unjust ruler justifies if not mandates jihad to be waged against him. In fact, militants throughout Islamic history have frequently employed their interpretation of jihad to justify their fights against an established Islamic order. Contemporary jihadist efforts to create alternative concepts of governance are reinforced by the emergence of militant Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah and the rise of jihadist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Nonetheless, leaders of political Islam such as Qatarbased imam Youssef al-Qaradawi have backpedaled on their initial support in the 1990s of violent jihad in, for example, the Palestinian struggle against Israel. They realized that their fatwas endorsing violence could be turned against them and used against Muslims. The role of violence in jihad has been further debated in Islamist circles in the wake of the 2011 Arab popular revolts; the wars in Syria, Egypt, and Yemen; and the 2013 military coup in Egypt. The militant Islamist and jihadist concepts of jihad have fueled misconceptions of the notion dating back as far as World War I, an era of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims that was colored by ­European fears of Pan-Islamism. Fatwas issued in late 1914 by the Ottoman sultan, who had aligned himself with Christian powers in Austria and Germany, and signed by Muslim scholars that called for jihad against the Allied powers,

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reinforced fears in some segments of the Muslim community of religious dominance as well as notions that the West was confronting an “Islamic menace.” They also were controversial in Muslim circles because of the sultan’s alliance with non-Muslim powers. As a result, the authenticity of pronouncements of jihad have repeatedly been questioned because of alleged involvement of external forces. A century ago, it was German involvement in Ottoman war propaganda that earned the sultan’s World War I fatwas the epitaph Made in Germany. Today, it is Saudi Wahhabism as the intellectual feeding ground of jihadist thought, and, in the case of the Islamic State, the role played by former Iraqi Baathist officers and officials in its organization and governance. In fact, the lines between jihadist thought, particularly as it regards jihad, and precepts of some conservative Muslim rulers and their supportive ulema (the body of mullahs) become blurred as they regard issues of individual and communal self-improvement through implementation and adherence to Islamic law in everyday life. In many ways, there is a great deal of communality in the way Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State interpret the law and the often harsh penalties they administer to alleged violators. Contemporary jihadists like 20th-century Ottomans built their pronouncements of jihad on a modernist Ottoman tradition of the state, co-opting the concept of jihad that had framed the sultans’ battles with European powers since the late 18th century. As a result, co-­optation of jihad as a people’s war was well established in Muslim nationalist discourse by the time Sultan Mehmet V issued his fatwas at the beginning of World War I. Nationalist concepts of jihad were also central to anticolonial protests and movements starting in the 1920s. Embedded in this nationalist concept of jihad was a harking back to Islam’s past in what Ottoman scholar Alp Yenen described as necromancy. It is that necromancy that fuels a longing for the restoration of the caliphate and charts the evolution from nationalist to jihadist concepts of jihad exemplified by al Qaeda and the Islamic State, involving mobilization in a bid to engage communities in violent efforts to achieve political transition. James M. Dorsey See also Activism; al Qaeda; Contact Theory; Islam Versus Islamism; Islamic State; Lone Wolf Terrorism; Religiosity; Significance, Need for; Tolerance for Ambiguity

Further Readings Aksakal, M. (2011). “Holy war made in Germany”? Ottoman origins of the 1914 jihad. War in History, 18(2), 184–199.

Cook, D. (2015). Understanding jihad. Sacramento: University of California Press. Kindle edition. Crone, P. (2007). “Jihad”: Idea and history. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/ jihad_4579.jsp. Accessed 20 June 2007. Dimmock, Y. A. (2014). A study of jihad from the Quran and hadith. https://archive.org/details/JihadAStudyFromQuran AndHadith. Accessed September 12, 2014. Heck, P. L. (2004). Jihad revisited. Journal of Religious Ethics 32(1), 95–128. Yenen, A. (2014). Legacies of jihad 100 years after World War I. Ginko Library Blog. https://www.academia.edu/17784710/ Yenen_A._Alp._Legacies_of_Jihad_100_Years_after_World_ War_I._Gingko_Library_Blog_November_14_2014. Accessed 14 November 2014.

Judicial Appointments Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the president is given the authority to nominate federal judges to district courts, courts of appeals, and the Supreme Court by and with the consent of the Senate. In the American system of checks and balances, this provides the Senate with a check on presidential power, and both the president and Senate have a check on the courts. All federal judgeships carry a lifetime tenure (with good behavior), making judicial appointments critical resources and important decisions for presidents. While presidents serve 4 to 8 years in the White House, their appointed judges and justices can serve for decades and continue their influence well beyond the terms of their presidencies. Over time, filling vacancies on the federal courts allows the president to align the judiciary with public opinion. It is not necessarily that the courts follow public opinion as much as it is that the nomination process will increasingly bring the judicial branch into line with the national ruling majority. Federal appellate courts play a critical supervisory role in the judicial system. Very few disputes make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, effectively making the courts of appeals courts of last resort for many cases. The influence of the lower federal courts moves both up and down the hierarchy. Lower courts help shape and frame issues as cases move up the judicial hierarchy toward the Supreme Court. And once the Supreme Court makes a decision, the lower courts have to apply the new precedent as it heads back down the ladder.

Lower Federal Court Appointments Although the Constitution specifies one procedure for the appointment of lower-court judges and Supreme Court justices, in reality the process differs by level. As

Judicial Appointments

the appointment process moves up the judicial ladder, the influence of the president rises. At the district court level, senators have significant influence. That influence declines a bit at the court of appeals level. At the Supreme Court level, the reality is closest to the constitutional design; the president dominates the process. Historically, presidents viewed district court positions as useful bargaining chips to trade for immediate support for their other policy designs. District court appointments are dominated by the unwritten but traditionally inviolate custom of “senatorial courtesy.” When a district court vacancy arises, rather than simply appoint a judge, the president must clear the potential nominee with the senator from the state of the vacancy (if they are from the same party). If the president neglects to follow this procedure, the senator will invoke senatorial courtesy, and the Senate will reject the nomination. If presidents once considered district court appointments to be cushy landing spots for friends or a trading chip valuable to senators, they understand today the significance of the lower courts. Recent presidents tried to reclaim their constitutional prerogative but with little success. Federal courts of appeals are shared by numerous states, so vacancies are rotated. For these positions, senators do not choose the nominee, but they can exercise a veto over the preferred candidate if the president does not consult with them. The selection of lower-court judges has migrated from patronage to substantively political. The increased ideological and political tenor of the appointments increasingly leads to more careful screening from presidents and senators. The process has been thrown wide open with greater activism by interest groups across the entire political spectrum. While the appointment process continues to carry remnants of the patronage system, it is increasingly partisan. Nominations for the courts of appeals are increasingly beginning to look like Supreme Court nominations, which is to say more contentious.

U.S. Supreme Court Appointments Most of the attention to judicial appointments focuses on the Supreme Court. At that level, it is the president who controls the agenda. The president will typically vet a short list of candidates and ultimately choose one. The nominee then faces the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will make a recommendation to the entire body. Presidents have traditionally tried to use appointments to shore up their party’s strength ideologically and demographically. It was not unusual to choose someone from a certain part of the country or to have a Catholic or Jewish seat on the Court. More recently, such demographical considerations have become secondary. Presidents try to find nominees who reflect their

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views and, if they are successful, they can shape the direction of the Court. Presidents are not always successful in predicting the subsequent behavior of the justices they nominate. In response to a question at his final press conference about whether he made any mistakes as president, Dwight Eisenhower reportedly replied, “Yes, two, and they are both on the Supreme Court (Earl Warren and William Brennan).” Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan had numerous opportunities to appoint justices, and each helped shape the arc of judicial decision making for a generation. Some argue that the nomination process has gotten more partisan and contentious over the past generation. The nomination and ultimate rejection of Robert Bork in 1987 is often considered a consequential moment that altered the process and made it more partisan. But bitterly contested confirmation battles are not a recent phenomenon. On average, presidents see about 75% of their Supreme Court nominees confirmed. Many of the rejections are the result of the confluence of a number of factors: the president is a lame duck, the other party controls the Senate, and the president’s popularity is relatively low. At all levels, presidents are having an increasingly difficult time getting their nominees confirmed. This may encourage them to nominate more moderate candidates. State courts vary in how they choose their judges. Some follow an appointment process that looks like the federal government’s. But increasingly more states allow the voters to have some say, whether through partisan or nonpartisan elections or retention elections in meritbased systems. Richard L. Pacelle Jr. See also Advocacy; Conservatism; Identity Politics; Lobbying; Partisanship; Public Opinion; Rule of Law; Women and Leadership

Further Readings Abraham, H. J. (2008). Justices, presidents, and senators: A history of the U.S. Supreme Court appointments from Washington to Bush II (5th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Collins, P. M., Jr., & Ringhand, L. A. (2013). Supreme Court confirmation hearings and constitutional change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, L., & Segal, J. (2005). Advice and consent: The politics of judicial appointments. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Steigerwalt, A. (2010). Battle over the bench: Senators, interest groups, and lower court confirmations. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Judicial Review

Judicial Review Judicial review is the power of a court to examine the actions of the executive and legislative branches. More precisely, judicial review is the authority of a court to declare an act of Congress (state legislature) or the president (governor) null and void and in violation of the Constitution. In the American system of checks and balances, it is the most important check that the courts have over the other branches of government. The power does not have to be exercised to be consequential. The fact that the courts have the power of judicial review often means that legislatures will not pass flawed or constitutionally suspect laws.

Origin and Development in the United States Judicial review is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Rather, Chief Justice John Marshall created the power in Marbury v. Madison (1803). In the Marbury decision, Marshall declared that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” thus establishing the doctrine of judicial review. After the decision in Marbury (which declared a portion of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789 null), the Court did not exercise the power to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional for over a half century until the ill-fated Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision. There is debate concerning whether the framers of the Constitution meant to provide the courts with judicial review or whether it was implied. In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton implied that the judiciary would have the right to review the work of the other branches. But given his characterization of the judiciary as “the least dangerous branch of government,” it is likely that the intent was not to provide broad power to the courts. In explaining how the Supreme Court operated, Justice Owen Roberts wrote in United States v. Butler (1935), When an act of Congress is appropriately challenged in the courts as not conforming to the constitutional mandate the judicial branch of the Government has only one duty,—to lay the article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged and to decide whether the latter squares with the former.

Judicial review is not exercised cavalierly. On average, the Supreme Court has used the power to strike down federal legislation less than once a year. The Court is much more likely to use judicial review to

invalidate a state action as violating the Constitution than an act of Congress or the president. Indeed, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked, “I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an act of Congress void. . . . I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States” (1934, p. 102). Invalidating laws that restricted a woman’s right to an abortion, that mandated separation of the races, and that restricted same-sex marriages are examples of judicial review of state laws.

Controversies Surrounding the Use of Judicial Review The power of judicial review is not without controversy. The most significant critiques are the undemocratic nature of judicial review and that its use expands the role of the courts as policy-makers. To those who see judicial review as being antidemocratic, the major implication of judicial review is that an unelected judicial branch can declare an act passed by legislators and executives null and void and thus substitute their judgment for that of the elected officials. When the Supreme Court reviews and upholds a law, it legitimizes that act and transfers its legitimacy to the other branches. By contrast, when it overturns an act of Congress or the president, it may delegitimize those branches to a degree. The broad use of judicial review is also considered to be the exercise of judicial activism. When analysts define activism and restraint, they typically do so in reference to judicial review and the willingness of the Court to use it. Judicial activists would be willing to use judicial review to strike offending legislation. Proponents of judicial restraint, on the other hand, would be reluctant to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. The authority to exercise judicial review has unquestionably made the judiciary stronger and more of a policy-maker than the framers intended. While most argue that judicial review is a necessary component in a vibrant system of checks and balances, the use of judicial review has frequently gotten the Supreme Court into a political maelstrom that threatened the legitimacy of the judiciary. The decision in Dred Scott, invalidating the Missouri Compromise, did not cause the Civil War, but it probably hastened it. The Court’s narrow interpretation of the New Deal led the Court to strike down numerous elements of the New Deal. This enraged President ­ Franklin Roosevelt, who responded with an attack on the recalcitrant “Nine Old Men” highlighted by his so-called Court Packing Plan to change the number of justices.

Just War Theory

Judicial Review Outside the United States The authority and perceived benefits of judicial review have spread to other countries around the world. Many of the new constitutions of emerging countries and those rebuilding after World War II have provided their courts with the power to declare acts of their legislatures and executives null and void. Adding judicial review to new or revised constitutions in democratizing countries was seen as an effective check on authoritarianism and too much executive power. While all appellate state and federal courts in the United States possess this authority, its use in other nations varies. Some countries have systems that look like those of the United States. Others limit judicial review to special constitutional courts. The United States, like most nations, restricts judicial review to actual cases and controversies and does not permit courts to make advisory opinions about hypothetical cases. There are nations, such as France and Spain, that permit their courts to make constitutional determinations even in the absence of an actual dispute or while a piece of legislation is pending. Richard L. Pacelle Jr. See also Allegiances; Brand Identity and Loyalty; Bureaucratic Politics; Judicial Appointments; Political Deliberation; Pressure Groups; Social Networking

Further Readings Bickel, A. M. (1962). The least dangerous branch: The Supreme Court at the bar of politics. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Holmes, O. W., Jr. (1913). Law in the Court. Address to the Harvard Law School Association of New York. New York City (February 15, 1913). In Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1934). Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Pacelle, R. L. (2002). The role of the Supreme Court in American politics: The least dangerous branch? Boulder, CO: Westview. United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936).

Just War Theory Just war theory is a philosophical tradition of applied ethics concerned with the morality of war and peace. ­It gives society a useful moral guide for tempering the human will to war with the better angels of our nature. The premise of just war theory is that immoral acts like  killing can be justified under certain conditions. ­ Broad moral principles and ethical rules specify those

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conditions so that war’s violence might be restrained as much as possible. Just war theory helps connect ideal moral philosophy with the violent tendencies of human behavior and has been used historically to shape Western cultural attitudes toward war.

The History of Just War Theory Dating back to ancient Greece, just war theory is one of the oldest and continuously relevant traditions in Western civilization. In the Greco-Roman era, the philosophers Plato (427–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and the Roman senator Cicero (106–43 BCE) articulate secular conceptions of just war. Augustine (354–430 CE) infused the Greco-Roman tradition with early Christian values. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, through the Dark Ages and Crusades, the Catholic Church was the repository of just war thinking. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is recognized as the most important just war philosopher of the high Middle Ages. Europe’s colonization of the Americas prompted thinkers like Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) to consider the moral implications of war and conquest. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe’s Wars of Religion prompted men like Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1704), and Emmerich Vattel (1714–1767) to integrate just war principles into state-based international law and diplomacy. Though it was not recognized until much later, John Locke (1632–1704) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) contributed to just war theory with their philosophies about individual rights and legitimate government. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just war principles were codified in international laws such as the Hague Conventions. After World War II, just war theory helped frame international humanitarian law like the Geneva Conventions and the institutions for prosecuting war crimes such as the International Criminal Court. It also helped shape debates about nuclear weapons and cold war competition. In the 21st century, just war principles provide guidance on questions about human rights, humanitarian inter­ vention, and terrorism.

The Philosophy of Just War Theory As a philosophy, just war theory occupies a middle ground between realism and pacifism. Generally, it can be divided into three major categories that correspond with the chronological timeline of a conflict. Jus ad bellum addresses the justness of going to war in the first place. Jus in bello addresses the justness of conduct once war has begun. Jus post bellum assesses the justness of war’s end. Each category has a series of criteria and stipulations. It is important to remember that they are

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Justice Motive

not intended to make up a “checklist” of just war. Rather they are interlocking parts of a comprehensive whole, evaluated on their ability to minimize human suffering and protect human rights in times of war. The exact meaning of each moral provision is a matter of debate. Some are philosophically and politically controversial. Some are extremely difficult to implement, and  some may be violated under extraordinary ­ circumstances. Jus ad bellum applies exclusively to heads of state and top political officers who make the crucial decision to begin armed conflict. There are six criteria that must be fulfilled for any particular war to be considered just. First and foremost, the cause must be just. This usually means the defense of oneself or another from attack, the protection of innocents from unjust regimes, or punishment for uncorrected wrongdoing. Second, a just war must be motivated by the right moral intentions with no ulterior motives. Third, war must be authorized by an appropriate authority through a due process that is publically visible. Fourth, a just war can only be undertaken as a last resort after due diligence is exercised to exhaust peaceful alternatives. Fifth, there must be a high probability of success to bring justice to a conflict situation. Sixth, proportionality dictates that a war must have positive outcomes that outweigh the necessary evils. These six principles are cumulative, which means that they must all be satisfied for a war to be considered just. Jus in bello refers to means by which soldiers fight. Its criteria are more concrete and are often codified in international law. Jus in bello principles are not cumulative, and some are more salient than others. The first provision is that no illegal weapons, like chemicals or poison gas, should be used since they cause undue suffering. The second is the principle of discrimination, which requires that weapons be used only to target other combatants, not civilians. The third is proportionality, which dictates that soldiers must use only the amount of force appropriate for achieving an objective. A fourth is “benign quarantine” or the fair treatment of prisoners of war. Fifth is that no combatant may resort to means of war that are intrinsically evil like torture or rape. Sixth, there must be no reprisals or threats of reprisals that would escalate violence beyond what is necessary. Importantly, jus in bello demands that a state must respect the rights of its own citizens in a time of war. Jus post bellum refers to the just conclusion of wars on the principle that war’s end must bring the reinstatement of rights. The first is proportionality, which requires that any peace settlement be proportional and nonretributive. Second, all the basic rights that were violated by war must be restored. Third, the principle of discrimination must distinguish between leaders,

soldiers, and civilians in negotiating any postwar settlement. Fourth, proportionate punishment must be delivered to rights-violating parties on all sides of a conflict. Fifth, victims must be reasonably compensated for their losses sustained during war. Sixth, rehabilitation of an unjust society’s institutions must be undertaken to ensure that it respects human rights into the future. Aaron Ettinger See also Asymmetric Warfare; Civil Wars; Deterrence and International Relations; Ethics of Political Behavior; Human Rights; International Humanitarian Law; Nuclear Taboo; Pacifism; Peacemaking; Political Morality; Realism; StateSponsored Terror; Wars of Attrition

Further Readings Johnson, J. T. (1981). The just war tradition and the restraint of war. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Orend, B. (2006). The morality of war. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Regan, R. (1996). Just war: Principles and cases. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America. Walzer, M. (1977). Just and unjust wars: A moral argument with historical illustrations. New York, NY: Basic Books. Walzer, M. (2004). Arguing about war. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Justice Motive The question of justice is as old as humanity itself, and history provides us with endless examples of interpersonal and intergroup conflicts in which lives were lost and resources allocated in order to do “what is right.” From a psychological perspective, it is impossible to determine what “right” means in any objective and independent fashion. Thus, a political and social psychological framework is needed to address two critical justice-related questions: Why do people care about justice? And why do people sometimes accept the suffering of others while at other times reacting strongly to injustice? These are the fundamental questions that research on the justice motive attempts to answer, a concept defined as the extent to which people are motivated to promote fairness. This entry reviews the basic assumptions of the justice motive and compares it with self-interest, highlighting the circumstances under which the justice motive prevails. It then describes three branches of research in which the justice motive is

Justice Motive

central; just-world phenomenon, relative deprivation, and equity theory.

Basic Assumptions of the Justice Motive Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in justice motive research, argued that people care about justice because they learn very early in life that there is a fundamental rule about how the world works: people receive rewards or punishments according to what they deserve. This “deserve” framework, or “personal contract,” is so pervasive as a navigational guide for all social interactions that it becomes a fundamental axiom for how people live, experience, and evaluate their lives. As such, people expect everyone, including themselves, in all circumstances to be governed and regulated by the law of deservingness. They expect that those who work the hardest will obtain the greatest rewards, and those who engage in negative actions will be punished accordingly. People expect the world to be governed by merit. Since deserving is such a fundamental rule, any personal or observed injustice is experienced as a threat to this shared and basic worldview. Thus, an individual will react to this threat either by taking action to rectify the unjust situation or, alternatively, by engaging in “psychological action,” designed to reinterpret the situation so that it appears just. Both behavioral and psychological actions are motivated by the justice motive and are meant to restore an individual’s worldview that the world is indeed a just place.

The Justice Motive Versus Self-Interest Human beings evolved to be self-interested, motivated to maximize gain and minimize loss, while also needing to live in groups and share scarce resources with others. As such, people quickly learn that maximum self-­ interest can only be achieved by everyone adhering to the social contract of deserving, a social contract that specifies how resources should be distributed. If the social contract is not respected, the limited resources will be depleted, and many if not all in the group will lose access to the resource, possibly triggering the demise of the group. In this sense, respecting and defending the rule of deserving can be seen as essentially self-interest. This is indeed the position of some researchers concerning the justice motive. Some proponents of the justice motive take an alternate position, contending that the justice motive and self-interest are different forces. These two motives can be active simultaneously (e.g., African Americans protesting inequalities in civil rights), but there are also clear instances in which people will appear to act against their self-interest for the sake of justice (e.g.,

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privileged White Americans protesting racial inequalities in civil rights). Consequently, the unresolved question that remains is this: When are people more likely to act solely based on the justice motive? The role of the justice motive is clearly nuanced. For example, research suggests that many individual (e.g., automatic vs. thoughtful cognitive processing) and contextual (e.g., high-impact vs. low-impact situations) factors will be important determinants of when and what form the justice motive will take. Thus, when individuals encounter a victim who is clearly suffering and feel powerless to change the situation, the automatic justice motive will be activated. In such a situation, individuals are more likely to take psychological actions (such as blaming the victim for the situation) to restore justice in the world. This automatic justice reaction would give way to a more thoughtful process if individuals are confronted with a low-impact situation or if they have the opportunity to actively engage in the restoration of justice.

The Justice Motive in Psychological Research Three different lines of inquiry are related to the justice motive: just-world phenomenon, relative deprivation theory, and equity theory. The just-world phenomenon is directly derived from the justice motive and has been particularly useful in understanding when and why people engage in victim blaming. Because people are motivated to perceive the world as a just place, they will perceive the world through that lens. Accordingly, observing an innocent person receive a negative outcome threatens the basic assumption that the world is just. Individuals may psychologically cope with this threat and restore justice by concluding that the innocent victim in fact deserved the negative outcome. By blaming victims of rape, spousal abuse, and indeed entire disadvantaged groups for their negative circumstance, observers, and indeed participants, can maintain their belief in a just world. Relative deprivation theory posits that individuals evaluate their current situation by making comparisons. These comparisons may be with others (groups or individuals) or with themselves in time (past or future). If the comparison is negative and, crucially, if the person believes that his or her relative position is undeserved, the individual will experience frustration, or relative deprivation. The justice motive proponents would argue that the justice motive is at the origin of relative deprivation. Without the sense of injustice, there would be neither the experience of relative deprivation nor the drive to engage in collective action designed to restore justice.

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Equity theory postulates that a social encounter is perceived as just if all individuals or groups receive outcomes that are proportional to their contribution. Two individuals may receive different rewards, but if these are proportional to their contributions, then both individuals receive what they deserve. The justice motive is central, since when either or both individuals or groups in a relationship perceive inequity, they are motivated to take either psychological or actual steps to restore justice. To conclude, people seem to care profoundly about the world being a just place. Only in the context of a just world will people have a clearly defined template to guide the navigation of their social, economic, and political world. Thus, people tend to see the world as just, even when it is not, and if they do perceive injustice, they will take inordinate steps to restore justice. Diana Cárdenas, Roxane de la Sablonnière, and Donald M. Taylor

See also Blaming the Victim; Distributive Justice; Equity Theory; Procedural Justice; Relative Deprivation Theory

Further Readings Hafer, C. L., & Bègue, L. (2005). Experimental research on justworld theory: Problems, developments, and future challenges. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 128–167. doi:10.1037/00332909.131.1.128 Jost, J. T., & Kay, A. C. (2010). Social justice: History, theory, and research. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1122–1165). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Lerner, M. J. (1977). The justice motive: Some hypotheses as to its origins and forms. Journal of Personality, 45, 1–52. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1977.tb00591.x Lerner, M. J. (2003). The justice motive: Where social psychologists found it, how they lost it, and why they may not find it again. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 388–399. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0704_10

K budgetary choice—notably the use of budget deficits to pump-prime the economy—producing political business cycles as a result. In a nutshell, Keynesian economics consists of three central tenets:

Keynesian Economics In the midst of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Due to its real-world relevance and its revolutionary impact on macroeconomic research, Keynes has since been regarded as the founder of modern macroeconomics. Prior to Keynes, mainstream, classical economists believed that supply creates its own demand (Say’s Law)—whatever is supplied would ultimately be demanded at some (“the” equilibrium) price. Under perfect price flexibility, there is absolutely no room for excess production and surplus labor. However, Keynes warns about the possibility of ­supply-demand imbalances, exhibiting especially in the form of unemployment. Goods produced may be left unsold, however cheaply producers are willing to sell them. Workers may not be able to get a job, however big a pay cut they are willing to accept. He argues that such imbalances—known as general glut (or excessive saving)—are due largely to demand deficiencies. Prices are flexible only up to a certain (say, zero) level. Commodity/labor markets may fail to clear, however, at “positive” levels of prices/wages when demand for goods/labor is excessively low—for example, when supply and demand intersect in the negative quadrant. In reality, prices may be rigid even in the positive quadrant. Imbalances between supply and demand are then not self-correcting and can result in prolonged periods of stagnation. Viewing such situations as market failure, Keynes advocates government intervention to revive the economy. The impact of Keynesian economics on political behavior is most clearly seen through its theory of economic policy. This has attracted the attention of policymakers and affected the democratic politics of



1. Rigid or slow adjustment in prices (especially wages), implying possible existence of output/employment gaps.



2. Demand shocks as the main source of economic fluctuations.



3. Useful role of active stabilization policies.

Each of these three tenets is elaborated, and their interrelations explained, in the following sections. In particular, this entry focuses on the contraction phases of the business cycle and provides a coherent account of the sources of recessions/depressions and their consequences, as well as their policy implications.

Wage Rigidity and Unemployment Before Keynes, classical economists held that whatever happens to supply and/or demand, the labor market would automatically adjust via wage changes to bring about full employment. During bad times, for instance, when demand for labor is low, workers would simply accept lower salaries in order to secure their jobs. Under such a presumption, whatever unemployment we observe would be “natural”—due either to search frictions or to structural shifts in the economy. There is simply no such thing as cyclical unemployment—that is, any unemployment over and above the natural level. Keynes points out that, in practice, wages may not be as flexible as the classical economists wish. As an example, consider a contract between employers and 429

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employees that fixes the nominal wage at a certain level—call it W0—within a given period. Suppose full employment is attained at an initial price level P0, where the implied real wage w0 ( = W0/P0) equates labor supply to labor demand. If there is an unexpected fall in the price level (say, to P1 w0), inducing an excess supply of labor, there will be a rise in unemployment. Conversely, an unanticipated rise in the price level would lead to over-full employment. Besides labor contracts, rigid or slow adjustment in wages could be a result of minimum-wage laws or labor-union monopsony. Under nominal-wage rigidity (whatever its reason), any shocks that drag the general price level below its initial, expected position would jack up the real wage to create cyclical unemployment. (Under wage indexation, deflationary/disinflationary shocks would produce similar results.) Such unanticipated price-level shifts may in turn be caused by either a positive output-supply shock or a negative outputdemand shock. Alternatively, any disturbance that would induce a rise in the supply of labor and/or a decline in the demand for labor could also give rise to unemployment at the given wage.

Demand Shocks as Drivers of Business Cycles Here follows a logically consistent explanation of unemployment that attempts to accommodate all the above shock possibilities. In so doing, we can better understand why Keynesians believe that, as engines of business cycles, demand shocks play a more important role than supply shocks.

Adverse Supply Shock as a Cause of Unemployment? First, suppose the economy is hit by a negative productivity shock, such as a sudden surge in oil prices. The shock would dampen the marginal productivities of and reduce the demand for all variable factor inputs, including labor. On the other hand, the shock, if large and persistent, may also shrink people’s wealth, inducing them to lengthen their work hours via the wealth effect. At any initial wage level, such changes would end up generating an excess supply of labor (i.e., unemployment) while lowering employment (under the short-side rule). But that is not the end of the story. Coupled with the adverse productivity change, the fall in labor employment would reduce aggregate supply (AS) of goods without directly affecting demand (AD). The result is a rise in the general price level (P) and a fall in real output (y). Given the fixed nominal

wage, the real wage would drop—that is, w↓  = W0/ (P↑)—thus narrowing the gap between labor supply and labor demand and offsetting (at least partially) the initial effects of the shock on (un)­employment. In other words, unemployment may not be too serious in this case and may even vanish if the price level soars sufficiently to bring the real wage down to its marketclearing level. Moreover, the countercyclicality of the price level—negative correlation between P and y—is counterfactual. For these reasons, Keynesians (unlike the classical economists) do not put much emphasis on supply shocks as drivers of business cycles.

Adverse Demand Shock as a Cause of Unemployment? Second, consider a negative demand shock arising from, say, a dip in consumer/investor confidence. The consequent decline in consumption/investment spending would lower AD, without directly affecting AS. The result is a drop in both P and y. Given the fixed nominal wage, the real wage would go up—that is, w↑ = W0/ (P↓)—thus creating an excess supply of labor. This unemployment phenomenon would be even more serious in the case of imperfectly competitive firms whose (derived) demand for labor would also fall along with AD. In such a case, the change in labor demand would reduce employment and thus AS as well and hence reinforce the adverse effect of the demand shock on output (although the price level may rebound a little in response to the fall in AS to slightly relieve the unemployment pressure). Relative to supply disturbances, therefore, demand disturbances can create stronger output and (un)employment effects and rightly predict the pro-cyclicality of the price level.

Turning Points (and Persistence of Business-Cycle Movements): The Multiplier–Accelerator Process Apart from its role as an impulse, the AD channel can also help us understand why, even in the absence of shock reversals and stabilization policies, the economy could automatically turn around—from recession to recovery (rising from a trough) or the other way round (falling off a peak). First, consider the uphill path. Suppose a positive shock triggers a rise in consumption spending, which generates higher income for some producers. Given the marginal propensity to consume is positive but less than unity, they would spend some fraction of their income on goods supplied by some other producers—who, in turn, would earn extra income and would use part of it

Keynesian Economics

to buy goods from yet others, and so on. This multiplier process is one reason the initial impact of the shock would spread across firms, markets, sectors, and eventually the entire economy and why it would spread over time to make cyclical movements persistent. The other reason lies in the accelerator process, whereby a faster rate of growth of output would give rise to more optimistic expectations among business firms toward the future and thus encourage them to increase their investment spending. The rise in investment would again raise national income via the multiplier effect and then further raise output via the accelerator effect. Interaction between the two effects would keep pushing the economy upward. Is it ever going to reach a peak, and is it ever going to be over the hill? Yes, the peak (boom) is reached when the economy hits a bottleneck—that is, a capacity constraint that limits further expansion of the economy—due to gestation lags in the accumulation ­ of capital (e.g., machines and equipment) and especially to the 24-hour upper bound on the daily supply of each worker’s labor hours. As soon as output growth slows down, firms become pessimistic and would then put off their investment plans. Together with its multiplier counterpart, the accelerator process would take a 180-degree turn, from an expansion phase to a contraction phase in economic activities. This brings us to the downhill path. Those people who first suffer income losses would now spend less on goods supplied by some producers—who, in turn, would earn lower income and thus buy less from others, and so forth. As national income continues to fall via this multiplier process, investment would follow suit via the accelerator process. Interaction between the two effects would keep dragging the economy downward. Up to this point, the contraction phase is like a mirror image of the expansion phase.

Is the Economy Ever Going to Hit Bottom, and Is It Ever Going to Recover? Yes, the trough (depression) is reached when the economy’s old capital has been fully depleted after firms have chosen not to invest in new capital, but simply let old capital depreciate, for a sufficiently long period. At this instant, basic subsistence demand for consumption is enough to give firms the incentive to resume their new investment. As soon as investment spending turns positive again, output would start growing and investors would regain their confidence. Together with its accelerator counterpart, the multiplier process would take a 180-degree turn, from contraction to expansion. So we are back to ground zero, and the cycle would start all over again.

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Stabilization Policies Even though, in the absence of further negative demand shocks and with the passage of time, the economy would bounce back from a recession/depression via the multiplier-accelerator process, this road to recovery may be unduly long and painful, especially to the jobless. Keynes thus views business fluctuations as manifestations of market failure and strongly advocates government intervention via active countercyclical policies. Macro stabilization policies can be classified into two broad categories—fiscal policy (by the Treasury, or fiscal authority) and monetary policy (by the central bank, or monetary authority). In what follows, the focus is on the use of expansionary policies to combat unemployment—first explaining the logic behind Keynesian policies and then presenting some caveats about their effectiveness during extreme times.

Fiscal Stimulus Believing that output decline and unemployment are results of inadequate private demand, one obvious solution is to let the government jazz up its own expenditure, say, on infrastructure investment. On the other hand, it can try to stimulate private spending via tax cuts or transfers/subsidies—such as reduction in income or sales taxes (which would boost private consumption via a rise in the consumer’s after-tax income or a fall in after-tax commodity prices) or investment tax credit (which would boost private investment). Either way, the fiscal authority can replenish demand (AD) and fill the output/employment gap. Via the multiplier, a onedollar increase in either public or private spending should be able to generate a more-than-one-dollar increase in output. So, like magic, the problem is easily and speedily solved! All this sounds too good to be true. First, a transitory surge in fiscal expenditure may fail to bring about a one-for-one increase in AD. This is because public spending may compete with private spending for society’s limited resources, thus bidding up the interest rate (which reflects the cost of current resources relative to the future) and making it more costly for the private sector to finance its investment. This is called the crowding-out effect. Second, unless the Treasury has piled up a lot of ­fiscal reserves from previous years, it has to find some way to finance its budget deficits generated from a rise in its expenditure and/or a fall in its tax revenue. Concerns abound about deficit financing via an issue of Treasury bills or longer-term bonds—as this may create a debt burden for the next generation. A tax hike or spending cut would be needed sometime in the future

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to retire the debt. Similar problems would also arise under external (rather than internal) debt-financing. These difficulties would be all the more profound in the case of protracted recessions and ever-growing twin deficits (i.e., coexistence of fiscal and trade deficits). If the monetary authority is eventually forced to print new money to help the fiscal authority pay off its a­ccumulated deficits (i.e., to monetize its debt), this may also exhaust the bank’s foreign-exchange reserves and invite speculative attacks on its currency, leading to massive devaluation and perhaps an ultimate collapse of its exchange-rate peg against other ­currencies as well. Last but not least, lots of uncertainty is involved in the practical formulation of fiscal policy—including time lags and possible errors at the data-collection stage, at the problem-identification stage, at the decision stage, at the implementation stage, and between the time the policy is introduced and the time when it starts taking effect. Poor timing could possibly turn what is meant to be a stabilization (countercyclical) policy into a destabilizing (procyclical) one. Due to these policy lags, for instance, a fiscal expansion intended to tackle a recession may begin to work only after the economy has already reversed its path and may end up overheating the economy. Time lags may thus transform an intended fiscal change into an unintended fiscal shock.

Monetary Expansion Fiscal policy may be too slow to respond to cycles and crises because of its long decision lags—major fiscal changes have to be approved by the legislature after many rounds of debates and discussions. In this regard, monetary policy is much speedier. Monetary-policy committees can call ad hoc meetings (in addition to regular ones) to address urgent economic conditions. Believing, once again, that output decline and unemployment are results of deficient demand, monetary expansion can be used to stimulate private spending via a downward adjustment in the interest rate. This can be achieved either directly via a cut in the policy rate or indirectly via an increase in money supply (through open-market purchases of government bonds). So, like magic, the problem is easily solved! Again, this sounds too good to be true. One obstacle that confronts many central banks during times of economic depression is the liquidity trap. This is the situation in which the interest rate has fallen so low that people find holding money (the most liquid asset on Earth) more attractive than holding other financial assets, so that their demand for money as a store of value becomes infinitely interest elastic. In this case, the central bank cannot cut the (nominal) interest rate below its zero lower bound. Conventional monetary policy fails,

and fiscal policy may not work either (due to the problems listed earlier). Monetary growth under inflation targeting and forward guidance have been proposed as ways to raise people’s inflation expectations so as to drive the real interest rate (equal to the nominal rate minus expected inflation) to a negative level to prompt private spending. But there is a credibility concern—about the central bank’s ability to commit. Flexible use of open market operations—allowing the central bank to purchase long-term bonds and even private assets (rather than Treasury bills) using newly printed money—has also been suggested and actually implemented during the Great Recession in order to reduce long-term interest rates (via an operation twist of the yield curve) to stimulate both short- and long-term investment. The effectiveness of this unconventional policy measure, known as quantitative (and credit) easing, is subject to debate. After extended periods of economic setback, when people’s pessimism about the future has grown so deep that their consumption/investment demands may have become essentially interest inelastic, any policy that attempts to lower the interest rate without uplifting their confidence is bound to fail.

Conclusion Keynesian economics has sometimes been labeled depression economics—gaining its prominence especially during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Its emphasis on the role of sticky prices/wages under imperfectly competitive goods/labor markets in amplifying and drawing out the dynamic macro effects of aggregatedemand shocks presents one useful p ­ erspective to business fluctuations and provides a good justification for stabilization policies (despite suspicion about their effectiveness). The contrast between downward rigidity and upward flexibility of prices may also help explain ­business-cycle asymmetry. Alternative p ­ erspectives stress the importance of other forms of imperfections or frictions (e.g., asymmetric information and financial constraints) or other kinds of disturbance (e.g., financial shocks) in other (e.g., capital) markets, with somewhat different policy implications. But in terms of their method­ ology,  almost all schools of macroeconomic thought ­have converged on one approach—namely, calibration (or moment-matching) exercises and impulseresponse analysis, often known as RBC (real business cycles). In that sense, we do have a macro synthesis— even though not all economists would want to be crowned Keynesian. Chi-Wa Yuen See also Crisis Decision Making and Management; Free Market

Keynesian Economics

Further Readings Blinder, A. S. (2008). Keynesian Economics. In D. R. Henderson (Ed.), Concise encyclopedia of economics (2nd ed.). Library of Economics and Liberty. Available at http://www.econlib .org/library/Enc1/KeynesianEconomics.html Buchanan, J. M., & Wagner, R. E. (1977). Democracy in deficit: The political legacy of Lord Keynes. Library of Economics and Liberty. Available at http://www.econlib.org/library/ Buchanan/buchCv8.html De Vroey, M. (2016). A history of macroeconomics from Keynes to Lucas and beyond. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Dubois, E. (2016). Political business cycles 40 years after Nordhaus. Public Choice, 166(1), 235–259. Hicks, J. R. (1937). Mr Keynes and the classics: A suggested interpretation. Econometrica, 5(2), 147–159.

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Krugman, P. R. (2009). The return of depression economics and the crisis of 2008. New York, NY: Norton. Leijonhufvud, A. (1968). On Keynesian economics and the economics of Keynes. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Mankiw, N. G., et al. (1993). Symposium on Keynesian economics today. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7(Winter), 3–82. Snowdon, B., & Vane, H. R. (2005). Modern macroeconomics: Its origins, development, and current state. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Woodford, M. (2009). Convergence in macroeconomics: Elements of the new synthesis. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 1(January), 267–279.

L Many scholars now avoid the term language death, preferring to call the process language endangerment. Firstly, the metaphor of death is not a positive one; also, a language may be endangered in some places or in some situations but not in all; and it is possible to bring a “dead” or “dying” language not normally spoken in everyday life back into use, as in the case of Hebrew in Israel, or to improve the prestige and expand the use of an endangered language, as in the case of Irish in ­Ireland and Welsh in Wales, thus reversing centuries of decline and belying predictions of imminent death. Often, such language revivals are implemented as part of government policies that reinforce the identity of the group by using its language as a symbol and a unifying force.

Language Death Language death is the disappearance of a language. This occurs when all members of a community cease to speak their own traditional language, normally after the language has been endangered for some time, owing to negative attitudes and social factors that disfavor its use. This entry discusses the processes of language endangerment and the triggers that often lead to language death. It also discusses some political and educational strategies to revitalize languages facing extinction and gives some brief case studies.

Overview The most pessimistic estimates suggest that up to 90% of the world’s 6,000 or so languages are endangered, and that half or more may disappear in this century. One website that attempts to identify and enumerate the world’s languages and assess how many are dying is Ethnologue; but even this site no longer lists the many languages that ceased to be spoken more than fifty years ago. Worldwide, we are now losing nearly one language per week. The death of a language can also mean the loss of a major component of the identity and self-esteem of the group who speaks it, and of much or all of the cultural knowledge contained in it. Thus language death is a biodiversity issue like the loss of animal and plant diversity. There may be other important consequences; for example, many modern medicines originated from traditional plant knowledge, and much of the remaining genetic diversity of food crops is in the hands of small traditional societies whose languages, and the ways of life and traditional knowledge embedded in them, are endangered.

Language Endangerment Language endangerment is in most cases a gradual ­process in which a language is used in fewer and fewer situations by fewer and fewer people. It should be distinguished from language change through time, which is a normal process; Old English gradually evolved into modern English, which means that Old English is no longer spoken, but its modern descendant is the least endangered language in the world. One could say that it is the world’s most dangerous language, as it is replacing so many other languages in so many countries, as well as being used as an international language and in many new situations such as the Internet and interactive social media generally. At the same time, English continues to evolve and to borrow new words from other languages all over the world; some of these loanwords came from indigenous languages which are no longer spoken in what is now the United States, Australia, and so on.

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Factors in Language Endangerment There are many factors that either favor or retard language death; their relative importance differs between societies. One of the strongest is attitudes about language and group identity: whether language is a core element of cultural identity, whether it is normal to be bilingual, attitudes of outsiders to the group, and so on. Others include demography (population and its concentration); geography (isolation; contact with other groups in the same area; mobility); economics (subsistence; cash crops or work; local resources); religion (which may be more or less important, and unite or divide a group); history (awareness and knowledge about group background; traditional oral or written records); family structure (marrying inside the group or outside; where newly married couples live; who cares for children); education; degree of political and social integration and contact; and external dangers such as disease, displacement, war, and so on.

Stages of Language Endangerment UNESCO uses a six-point scale of language endangerment: Safe, Vulnerable, Definitely Endangered, Severely Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Extinct. This is of course an oversimplification; the process is a continuum. Joshua Fishman’s Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) has eight numbered points from Level 1 corresponding to UNESCO’s Safe to Level 8 corresponding to UNESCO’s Critically Endangered; this has recently been expanded to a 13-point scale, the Extended GIDS, which includes a finer gradation in the middle of the scale as well as Level 0 International, Level 9 Dormant, and Level 10 Extinct; the Ethnologue uses this scale. Dormant languages are no longer spoken, but serve as a reminder of heritage identity for an ethnic community; these are also called sleeping languages, and are potential candidates for revival. The critical factor in endangerment is the transmission of the language to children in the home. Where this is broken, a language can decline rapidly. For example, the Tujia nationality in China has more than 8.3 million people spread over four provinces, but its two languages are hardly being learned by children, and only in very limited areas. There are now fewer than 60,000 speakers of Biji Tujia in one county and fewer than a thousand speakers of Moji Tujia in one township; very few of these speakers are children. This is down from more than 170,000 speakers of these two languages in 1982, which represents a precipitous decline since 1850 when the language was spoken over a much wider area. One might expect that endangerment and death would lead to gradual simplification of a language, but

in fact initially, the reverse can happen: A double system can develop which incorporates elements from the replacing language into the endangered language. As endangerment progresses further, there are more and more people with incomplete knowledge, usually known as semispeakers. They may be able to use the language to some degree, but with different structure from the traditional speakers. In the final stage, there may be some people with passive ability to understand and to use a few phrases.

Language Policy and Language Endangerment Language policy in a nation-state has a critical effect on languages not selected for official status. In most nation-states, one national language is promoted through government, media, education, and so on, and other local languages are discouraged and hence may become endangered. In some nation-states, more than one language may have official status, but even that does not necessarily prevent language endangerment. In Switzerland, for example, four languages have official status: German, French, Italian, and Romansh; the fourth is a recently created composite based on five very distinct longestablished related varieties spoken in the southeastern canton of Graubunden, all with long written and spoken traditions but each endangered to some degree and some nearing death. The imposition of the new literary standard Romansh in 1982 has further weakened all the existing spoken varieties, which now have a new artificial competitor with high status and official backing, but in reality almost no speakers. Children who learn the new standard in school cannot use it to communicate with older people, and older people almost universally dislike it and do not wish to learn or use it. Thus, despite having the status of a national language since 1938 and an official language since 1996, Romansh is still in decline. Another widespread pattern in developed nations is a new tolerance of and even support for indigenous minority languages which have long been discouraged and in many cases suppressed through assimilationist policies. Nearly all such minority languages are ­endangered, and many are no longer spoken. This is happening with many languages of Original Nations in Canada, of the Indian tribes in the United States, Aboriginal languages in Australia, and so on. This major policy shift means that there are now widespread revival efforts, in most cases struggling to overcome entrenched negative attitudes, generations of assimilation, lack of viable well-documented materials to use in the revival, and lack of fluent speakers to provide a

Language Death

model for speech for younger people. In many cases, these revival efforts are based mainly in schools and rarely use the target languages in daily speech; but even such limited use may have important symbolic value. Some large-scale reversals of language endangerment are going on where there is one large indigenous minority community with a strong sociocultural identity and recent political recognition of language rights, as in the case of Ma¯ori in New Zealand or Hawai‘ian in Hawai‘i. There, school-based programs such as language nests bring preschool children together with older adult speakers, overcoming the problem that the parents’ generation may be unable to transmit the language; active cultural programs reinforce positive attitudes as well as providing places to use the endangered language; additionally, government policies and symbolic public use of the language reinforce the message that it has a valuable place in the community.

Language Endangerment Around the World Yiddish is an example of a language whose death has long been predicted, but which is vigorous in part of the Jewish community. The destruction of Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities in Europe up to 1945, the shift away from Yiddish among most Jewish immigrant groups elsewhere, and the replacement of Yiddish and other Jewish diaspora languages by Hebrew in Israel stopped Yiddish being spoken in its traditional area and among non-Orthodox European-background Jewish communities in Israel and elsewhere. However, it is universally spoken by some rapidly expanding Orthodox Jewish groups in family, social, and business settings. Most language endangerment and language death in the world is going on in developing nations where there is a great deal of ethnolinguistic diversity. For example, Myanmar has 135 indigenous ethnic groups and some immigrant groups, but only one official language. The Anung language of northern Myanmar and nearby in China is one example; with no monolingual speakers, this language is well on the way to being replaced by other languages. It has no separate official recognition in either country; almost none of the Anung in China speak the language, and less than half those in ­Myanmar do. Another kind of endangerment, less catastrophic for the ongoing survival of a language but no less traumatic for local members of the community, is the loss of language knowledge in immigrant communities; while the language may still be spoken in the original country, it can disappear over one or two generations in an immigrant setting. The rate of language shift differs greatly across communities; some maintain their languages

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more strongly; others assimilate very rapidly. In ­Australia, for example, the Maltese and Dutch communities have almost completely assimilated after one generation, while much of the Greek and Chinese communities are transmitting their languages over multiple generations. Conversely, it can sometimes happen that an immigrant community preserves a language which has disappeared in the original country, as in the case of some of the languages from eastern Indonesia still spoken among immigrant groups who came to the Netherlands in the late 1940s and early 1950s but almost gone in Indonesia under pressure from the national language, Indonesian. This includes various languages from the Maluku region: Ewaw has persisted more strongly in the Netherlands than in Indonesia. External factors can lead to endangerment and death, and not just of the language, as in the case of many indigenous languages of Brazil. Introduced diseases, displacement from traditional territory, economic and social marginalization, and even enslavement and murder have been the lot of groups such as the Ka’apor. Similarly, events surrounding the Indonesian takeover in 1975 have accelerated the imminent death of Maku’a in Timor Leste. In conclusion, language death is a complex and somewhat unpredictable process which can be reversed in favorable circumstances by policy decisions and appropriate educational and other action. It is now threatening a large proportion of our human language diversity, but many communities have started to react to this challenge. David Bradley See also Attitudes; Ethnic Revival; Ethnicity; National Language

Further Readings Bradley, D., & Bradley, M. (Eds.). (2002). Language endangerment and language maintenance. London, England: RoutledgeCurzon. Brassett, P. R., & Brassett, C. (2005). Diachronic and synchronic overview of the Tujia language of Central South China. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 173, 75–97. Brenzinger, M. (Ed.). (2007). Language diversity endangered. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Clyne, M. G. (1991). Community languages: The Australian experience. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (2014). Language death (Canto Classics ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, J. A. (1981). Never say die! A thousand years of Yiddish in Jewish life and letters. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.

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Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Lewis, M. P., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2016). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (19th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Retrieved from http://ethnologue.com

Legitimacy, Forms

of

Legitimacy is a general perception or assumption that a social entity and its actions are desirable, appropriate, or worthy of support. Legitimacy may refer to a broad range of social entities or actions, including governments, authorities, organizations, individuals, borders, and resource distributions. Legitimacy is important as people internalize the values and norms of what they view as legitimate authorities. People are also more likely to voluntarily comply with commands and requests as well as independently pursue goals commensurate with the authorities’ goals. Legitimacy reduces authorities’ reliance on costly and unreliable incentives or sanctions, and it generates behaviors that sustain social order and stability. Legitimacy takes different forms; different forms of legitimacy represent different claims and justification for authority. They also reflect different concerns and evaluative processes among the people evaluating authorities. Forms in many cases represent reactions to the weaknesses and failings of other forms. Actions and appeals acceptable within one form of legitimacy may undermine legitimacy within a different form. For example, appeals to history and tradition may undermine the position of a government in the eyes of an electorate that craves charismatic leadership and change. This entry first clarifies the distinction between legitimacy as a collective and individual phenomenon before continuing with a description of Max Weber’s three forms of legitimate domination, and more recent descriptions of legitimacy forms. Finally, the entry looks at some of the antecedents to change between forms of legitimacy.

Collective and Individual Legitimacy Legitimacy spans multiple levels of analysis. On the one hand, legitimacy reflects collective legitimization processes through which social communities develop a common shared understanding of the values, norms, and practices of an authority as legitimate. On the other hand, people individually evaluate the legitimacy of the same values, norms, and practices. While individual

evaluations form part of and influence collective ­processes, collective processes influence individual processes. Weber refers to legitimacy at the collective level as validity. Validity at the collective level implies fulfilling two conditions: (1) that some people within the collective must consider an authority or its policies legitimate, and (2) that the people who do not view an authority as legitimate understand that other people see the authority as legitimate and accept that this understanding governs behavior. People who do not see the values, norms, and practices of a political regime as appropriate or legitimate may still contribute to the validity of the authority by instrumentally conforming to the values and norms of the people who do. Thus, individual evaluations of legitimacy or propriety can differ from the collective validity. People may accept and work from the premise that authority is legitimate while privately seeing the same authority as inappropriate. As people increasingly share and act on valid values, norms, and practices, these become codified and sanctioned, limiting the room for dissenting views or practices. With time, valid values, norms, and practices become objectified and codified into rules and regulations that constrain and bind individual behaviors and evaluations.

Traditional, Charismatic, and Rational-Legal Bases of Legitimacy Max Weber offered probably the most widely known typology of legitimacy. Weber’s intent was to describe the basis for voluntary domination or authority. In so doing, he sought to explain political stability and change over time. According to Weber, there are three main forms of legitimate political domination, each of which makes different claims or justification for domination. Traditional authority rests on the sanctity of age-old rules and traditions. Dominant individuals and groups here have privileges vested in traditions or explained as ordained by religious laws or the sanctity of traditions. A mutual set of rights and obligations may define the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups. Hence, a patriarch should protect his family while expecting obedience in return. Adherents to a t­ raditional authority see traditional values, norms, and practices as inherently valuable and worthy of protection. Examples of traditional authority include patriarchal family ­structures, traditional monarchies, and religious organizations (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church). Charismatic authority rests on people’s relationship to an exceptional individual and the norms and values espoused by this individual. Weber describes charismatic

Legitimacy, Forms of

authority as a revolutionary force, which promises to transform existing values, norms, and practices. Charismatic authority, hence, is the antithesis of traditional or rational-legal authority. Followers assign charisma to potential leaders during periods of crisis and upheavals in the expectation that the leader will instigate and lead great transformative deeds. Just as followers can assign charisma to individuals, the same followers can easily also withdraw charisma when leaders fail to live up to their promises as in losing wars, or failing to redistribute wealth. Because charismatic authority rests on an expectation of individuals performing great deeds, charismatic authority tends to be unstable and change into more stable forms such as traditional or rational-legal authority. Hence, Weber sees charismatic authority as an impermanent source of legitimacy, marking a transition between more stable forms of legitimacy. In rational-legal authority, legitimacy resides with a system of impersonal rules and procedures. Unlike charismatic authority, legitimacy rests not in one exceptional individual but in the rationality and capacity of a system to produce sound policies and correct errors. Weber saw the bureaucratic machine as the manifestation of a rational-legal order in which all individuals, including those at the top of the hierarchy, are bound by the same set of rules and procedures. Rights to make decisions are circumscribed by rules and assigned according to competence. An individual, as a result, may distrust the person holding an office yet simultaneously have faith in the office and the system’s capacity to sanction and eventually replace the person.

Instrumental, Moral, Relational, and Cognitive Legitimacy More recent works on legitimacy have looked at legitimacy from the perspective of the people or organizations evaluating the legitimacy of an authority. Such classifications differentiate between an instrumental form of legitimacy, a relational form, a moral form, and a cognitive form. The first three are content based, in that they imply an evaluation of an authority based on some criteria (e.g., the morality of an authority), whereas the last, cognitive legitimacy, represents a legitimacy assumed to be based on familiarity. Instrumental legitimacy rests on people’s experience or assumptions about how an authority is likely to affect their interests. Politicians’ legitimacy in specific voter groups (e.g., unionized labor or small-business owners) or segments will often reflect their history of serving, and standing up for, the interest of such groups. Relational legitimacy rests less on material outcomes and more on individuals’ experience of being accorded

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respect, dignity, and status and having their social identity and self-worth affirmed. Tom R. Tyler thus shows how people’s responses to policies or court decisions are more influenced by their experience of the fairness of the procedure leading up to a decision than by the actual outcome of a policy or court decision. Relational legitimacy, Tyler finds, is important in situations where people see themselves sharing a common identity with the authority. Instrumental concerns tend to outweigh relational concerns in situations where people see themselves as alienated or disconnected from authorities or a larger society. Moral legitimacy rests on a positive normative evaluation of an authority that extends beyond self-interest. People may care deeply about a government’s policy toward the poor, or its environmental policies, even where such policies do not directly influence their material well-being. Politicians may in some cases attempt to recast self-interested concerns into moral and universal concerns to achieve greater moral legitimacy. Whereas the first three forms of legitimacy entail active support for an authority, cognitive legitimacy implies the absence of questions or challenges to authorities. One source of legitimacy is familiarity or comprehensibility and people’s preference for what is known, tested, and familiar. People view prototypical leaders or leaders that fit our preconceptions about what leadership is or should be as more credible and legitimate than less typical leaders. Taken for granted, unquestioned and often implicit assumptions form an even stronger form of cognitive legitimacy in which people can have difficulties envisioning other forms of authority as rivals to the present form. Cognitive legitimacy is likely to reflect the validity of the social order or a collective legitimacy. The four forms of legitimacy can be seen as different dimensions of legitimacy. The legitimacy of a government, for instance, could include all four dimensions. We may think that the government serves our interests (small businesses), and simultaneously think that the government in serving our interests also serves the larger interests of society (with small business contributing to economic growth and the greater good). We may also feel comfortable about the government because its policies are well known and well tested through many years in office (cognitive legitimacy). The same dimensions also apply to Weber’s three forms of legitimacy. Hence, traditional legitimacy is likely to rest on cognitive legitimacy and taken-for-granted assumptions about how things have been and should continue to be. Traditional authority is also likely to be associated with moral legitimacy as people seek to explain the existing order in moral and, in some cases, religious terms.

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Charismatic authority being about change and transformation is more likely to reflect substantive, contentoriented processing and be associated with moral and relational legitimacy.

Legitimacy and Change The legitimacy of a given authority ultimately relies on the authority satisfying people’s material and immaterial needs. Failing to satisfy such needs is likely to raise questions about the legitimacy of a given authority and, if persisting over time, lead to the delegitimization of the authority and the eventual introduction and legitimization of social change. Several kinds of events can cause people to question the legitimacy of an authority. First, jolts in the form of sudden societal changes, technological changes, economic downturns, or wars may lead people to reevaluate previous assessments with respect to legitimacy. Jolts may induce a shift from a more assumption-based cognitive form of legitimacy to a more active, content- and substance-based evaluation as people realize that previous assumptions may no longer be tenable in the face of new events. Second, contradictions between different value and norm systems can lead people to question the legitimacy of a given authority. More diverse, multicultural societies and a more active and diverse set of organizational stakeholders mean that people are more likely to be exposed to a variety of different values and norms. Readily available templates for alternative norm and value systems are likely to undermine the taken-for-granted nature of any one authority. Third, Weber describes how intellectual rationalization through education or the development of a rational-legal authority is also likely to weaken the magic or sacredness of traditions vital to traditional or charismatic legitimacy. Finally, education and greater access to resources may make people less susceptible to accepting a subservient position associated with a given form of authority. As people see themselves capable of gaining access and influence in the political system, they may be more likely to challenge traditional or autocratic forms of authority in search of greater influence and access to resources. Svein Tvedt Johansen See also Bureaucratic Structure; Charisma; Patriarchy; Procedural Justice; Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness; System Justification

Further Readings Dornbusch, S. M., & Scott, R. W. (1975). Evaluation and the exercise of authority. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006). Legitimacy as a social process. Annual Review of Sociology, 32, 53–78. Jost, J. T., & Orsolya, H. (2002). The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology. European Review of Social Psychology, 13(1), 111–153. Seo, M., & Creed, W. E. D. (2002). Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change: A dialectical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27, 222–247. Suchman, M. C. (1995). Managing legitimacy: Strategic and institutional approaches. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 571–610. Tost, L. P. (2011). An integrative model of legitimacy judgments. Academy of Management Review, 36(4), 686–710. Tyler, T. R. (2006). Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 375–400. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zelditch, M., Jr. (2001). Theories of legitimacy. In J. T. Jost & B. Major (Eds.), The psychology of legitimacy (pp. 33–53). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Liberalism The philosophical tradition of liberalism informs many familiar political values and principles, including liberty, individual rights, limited government, toleration, autonomy, private property, and consent of the governed. These ideas gained momentum during the early modern era and Enlightenment and found articulation in the French and American revolutions. They continued to develop (and be challenged) throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They are central to liberal democracies around the world, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. This entry focuses on liberalism as a philosophical tradition that has shaped American politics, outlining the historical development of liberalism as an idea and describing some of the main philosophical questions it raises. In American popular political discourse, liberalism often refers to the left side of the political spectrum and the Democratic Party (socialism and social democracy, which enjoy more influence outside the United States, stray further from canonical liberal precepts, although they may overlap). But liberalism as a tradition informs a much broader range of American political positions, including libertarianism and neoliberalism, which are on the right side of the political spectrum. One might wonder how one philosophical tradition can provide a foundation for both the Democratic Party and the far right, libertarian Tea Party; this entry will address that question. It is worth noting that liberalism concerns not

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only political and moral issues but also economics and the distribution of resources, as discussed in the following sections.

Liberalism and Democracy Liberalism is concerned with the rule of law, individual rights, and limits on government. Liberal societies have civil liberties such as free speech, a free press, free ­exercise of religion, and so on. Liberal societies protect citizens from arbitrary rule and provide important safeguards for the criminally accused, including habeas corpus (the right to be brought before a judge and charged with a crime), the right to legal counsel, the right to be judged by a jury of one's peers, and so on. The American Bill of Rights is a liberal document par excellence. But liberalism is not synonymous with democracy. In direct democracies (such as ancient Athens), citizens participated directly in governing, attending assemblies and voting on laws and war strategies. Modern states are too large to allow for direct political participation. Furthermore, modern citizens are not prepared to devote so much of their personal time to politics (indeed, ancient Athenian citizens could only afford to govern because they held slaves). In modern democracies, citizens elect representatives to govern on their behalf (this system of government is more properly referred to as republican, but “democracy” is also acceptable). Democracy is defined by “rule of the people,” either directly, as in Athens, or indirectly through representatives, as in the United States. Liberalism is defined by what government may and may not do to its citizens. There is no logically necessary relationship between liberalism and democracy. A nondemocratic society could protect civil liberties and individual freedoms. And democracies do not always protect individual liberties, as evidenced by the democratic majorities that established Jim Crow laws (which segregated and disenfranchised Blacks) in the American South prior to the civil rights movement. Enshrining individual rights in a constitution ensures that democratic majorities cannot easily take them away from vulnerable minorities. This is a clear example of liberal principles being deployed to protect against the potential tyranny of a democratic majority.

A History of the Idea The ideas that are collectively known as liberalism began to emerge in the early modern period and were more fully fleshed out during the Enlightenment era and the 19th century. Many key liberal concepts find their

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genesis in social contract theory. Thomas Hobbes is generally credited as the first social contract thinker. Writing in the 1640s during the English Civil War, Hobbes argues in Leviathan that it is rational for individuals to give up some of their natural freedoms (in what he believed would be an anarchic and warlike state of nature) in exchange for protection from a sovereign or state. This exchange of freedom for protection was the first social contract. Later thinkers found Hobbes’s hypothetical contract to be unsatisfying, as Hobbes believed that even the most dictatorial sovereign was better than no state at all. John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, written in 1689, promotes a limited, constitutional government with a separation of powers between legislative and executive functions. Importantly, he develops the principle of consent of the governed, whereby a government’s right to rule is granted by the people. According to Locke’s idea of the social contract, people give up their natural liberty in order to receive security from a constitutionally limited government, which must protect not just life and limb (as Hobbes suggested) but also civil liberty and property. Locke is also known for his steadfast defense of religious toleration—an unusual and provocative view at the time. Social contract theory supposes that the contract construct is a useful way to think about political legitimacy, but it does not purport to describe a literal contract between parties. Rather, it describes what rational individuals would do, under the right circumstances. This idea receives further refinement from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, written in 1762. Rousseau advocates for plebiscitary democracy, in which citizens gather regularly to vote on two questions: (1) whether to maintain the current form of government, and (2) whether to leave government in the hands of current leaders. Clearly, Rousseau’s ideas are more explicitly democratic than previous social contract thinkers. Rousseau’s contemporary Immanuel Kant is also identified with social contract thought. In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant develops the idea of the categorical imperative, which says that morally “right” actions are those which one could logically will (wish) to become universal law. Hence, lying is wrong not because it violates the Golden Rule, but rather because it is illogical to will that everyone would lie, since lies only work when they are rare. For Kant, individuals become autonomous when they choose to live according to the categorical imperative. Similarly, rulers are just when they make laws which they believe could have been rationally willed by the people. Political legitimacy is again bolstered here by a social contract which secures the hypothetical consent of the governed.

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An overview of the historical development of liberalism would not be complete without also discussing John Stuart Mill, whose 1859 On Liberty lays out principles so familiar to the modern reader that it is easy to underestimate their historical significance. Mill defends absolute freedom of speech because even the most despicable ideas might contain a partial truth and, even if they do not, they force individuals to better defend their convictions. Mill also urges individuals to free themselves from social pressures and the “despotism of culture,” which unnecessarily limit the choices people make. This allows eccentric geniuses to flourish, which furthers societal progress. Moreover, when individualism reigns, each individual can compare different lifestyles and choose the one that is right for him or her. Individualism and toleration are central tenets of liberalism.

Contemporary Debates: Fairness, Autonomy, and Faith Philosophical interest in liberalism waned in the early and middle parts of the 20th century but was revived by the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. Rawls’s work revolves around a famous thought experiment known as the original position, which asks readers to imagine themselves behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents them from knowing anything about themselves, including their gender, age, race and ethnicity, class, and religion. They are then asked to choose principles of justice from this position of ­ignorance. Under these conditions, Rawls believes that individuals would be especially keen to protect the wellbeing of the worst off in society, since no one would know if they themselves actually occupy that position. Hence, the original position is constructed so that rational self-interest compels individuals to consider the needs of the worst off in society, modeling a hypothetical social contract. Rawls calls this justice as fairness. In his later works, Rawls refines his theory, positing that a fair society is one whose laws are acceptable to all reasonable citizens, regardless of their religious and philosophical differences. This is known as “political liberalism,” which is liberal insofar as it does not explicitly privilege any particular worldview, but rather demonstrates tolerance and accommodation toward all of them, as far as this is possible. Like the original position, this is a procedural account of justice, which means that justness is a function of a fair procedure rather than some predetermined value. Political liberalism is lauded by some as the most promising way to establish justice in diverse societies, but others insist that it surreptitiously privileges hyperindividualism and secularism. This speaks to two different views of moral psychology and selfhood. Liberals

presume that individuals are capable of choosing what kind of life they want to live, based upon a rational evaluation of choices and ultimate values. This view of personhood harks back to Millian individualism and Kant’s account of autonomy. Communitarians believe that individuals are ineluctably shaped by their community; they see self-realization as a discovery rather than a choice. This view of personhood accepts that faith, tradition, and community play a large role in character development. Religious thinkers join in this critique of Rawlsian liberalism; they regard faith as an endowment and not a choice. They reject Rawls’s suggestion that justice is best served by putting fundamental differences aside when thinking about fair political outcomes. For them, justice depends at least in part upon realizing their religious values in the political sphere. Other critics raise a related question regarding the liberal emphasis on individual rights. When interests are framed as rights, they become enforceable claims against other individuals and institutions. This emphasis on “what’s mine” comes at the expense of thinking about how individuals are interrelated and interdependent. According to this line of reasoning, liberal political discourse, not to mention laws, neglect duties and focus only on individualistic rights, which encourages antagonistic litigation over neighborly cooperation. Even if this critique points to a real weakness in liberal theory, liberals typically respond that individuals would be much worse off without rights to protect them from government and from each other. Rights may not be enough, but they are all that the vulnerable have to call upon when they are subject to exploitation and abuse.

Liberalism and Politics Beginning in the 1930s, liberalism took on new life in American politics even as philosophical interest was declining. During the Great Depression, Franklin ­Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s New Deal provided relief to Americans through programs like Social Security, ­ expansive labor laws, and ambitious public works projects that employed millions of Americans. The New Deal found theoretical justification in Keynesian economics and directly from John Maynard Keynes, who insisted that the Great Depression could not be overcome without massive deficit spending and government intervention in the economy. To be liberal in this era was to support FDR and his New Deal policies. In his 1941 State of the Union Address, FDR outlined Four Freedoms which everyone in the world should enjoy: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The most distinctive of these is freedom from want,

Liberalism

which suggests a right to basic necessities without which one cannot be truly free. FDR elaborated further in his 1944 Second Bill of Rights, which included the rights to employment, housing, education, and health care. Essentially, FDR is describing a modern welfare state. One may also discern the seed of universal human rights here, in whose establishment Eleanor Roosevelt played a vital role. This understanding of a regulated market economy and a social safety net was received wisdom for decades to come and reigned over the prosperity of postwar America. But it inspired a backlash among conservative economists including Friedrich Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman, who insisted that government intervention and regulation tends to do more harm than good. Faith in the free market became a central feature of President Ronald Reagan’s popularity in the 1980s. Free market ideals found their most serious philosophical treatment in Robert Nozick’s libertarian treatise, ­Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argues that individual liberty necessitates a free market and necessarily results in dramatic inequalities, since adults must be free to spend their money as they wish. For Nozick, individual freedom is so important that it can never be infringed or limited for the greater good. This position allows Nozick to compare taxation to slavery, since the state is “forcibly” taking the value of one’s labor without permission. This antipathy to basic government services and legitimacy can be seen in the Tea Party movement, which emerged in 2008 as a far-right faction within the Republican Party. Since its inception, the Tea Party has forced mainstream Republican candidates and officials to move further to the right in order to maintain the support of a constituency that has not, as of 2016, showed signs of moderating. Tea Party supporters accept the free market faith of Hayek and the Friedmans as well as the most extreme reading of Nozick, rejecting the legitimacy of a large swath of government activities. Conservatives, libertarians, and Tea Party supporters are sometimes identified as classical liberals, or neoliberals, as they find philosophical justification for their positions within the liberal tradition, particularly Locke. Perhaps surprisingly, this liberal tradition also provides the justificatory framework for modern progressives who trace their lineage to FDR; this position has been called the new liberalism, welfare liberalism, or revisionist liberalism. What this means is that political ­conservatives share a philosophical heritage with the Democratic Party and progressives more generally. This is not meant to paper over the differences between the two main parties in American politics, but it should serve as a reminder that both share a set of basic values

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centering on limited government and individual rights and liberties. The differences concern what kind of rights, specifically, and what kinds of limits on government. Democrats accept a larger role for government in maintaining a good quality of life for citizens, through economic intervention, environmental regulation, and social welfare. They accept FDR’s claim that one cannot be free under conditions of want. Republicans accept these governmental activities over a smaller set of cases or not at all, as they believe that government invariably reduces individual liberty. Many conservatives also argue that market forces are generally more efficient than government. One way to navigate these differences is with the assistance of philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty. Negative liberty is liberty from interference and refers, essentially, to our capacity to act unimpeded. Positive liberty is liberty to determine the direction of one’s own life. Negative liberty concerns limits on government, whereas positive liberty places demands upon government, insofar as government assistance might help an individual become master of her own destiny. Berlin augurs that negative and positive liberty represent two enduring human needs which cannot both be fully satisfied. It would seem that in contemporary U.S. politics many voters have already unwittingly chosen one side or the other. Since the early 2000s, there has been a growing interest in studying possible cognitive differences between liberals and conservatives. Philosophically, liberals appear more predisposed to accepting a diminished account of free will whereas conservatives are more likely to believe that individuals are singularly responsible for their actions. For example, when considering the situation of a single mother on welfare, liberals are more likely to focus on the confluence of factors which led to her circumstances, many of them beyond her control, whereas conservatives are more likely to consider what kinds of carefully tailored interventions will most quickly allow her to take full responsibility for her family again. Additionally, cognitive neuroscientists have found preliminary evidence suggesting that conservatives have more gray matter in the parts of the brain which respond to fear and disgust, while liberals have more gray matter in the parts of the brain that manage ambiguity and uncertainty. A growing number of scientists have come to accept the possibility that liberals and conservatives are indeed “wired differently.” What this means politically is unclear. Winston Churchill is sometimes credited with this adage: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart. If you’re still a liberal when you’re forty, you have no brain.” This speaks to liberalism’s popular image as sentimental and unrealistic. As a political

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ideology, liberalism is attacked from both sides. Far-left progressives, feminists, and socialists find liberalism to be too consumed with individualism and market-based rights. Communitarians and conservatives see liberalism as too individualistic and secular, while libertarians find it too amenable to government intervention. But liberalism continues to invite productive philosophical inquiries just as it continues to welcome a broad range of political adherents, thanks to the immense appeal of liberty, individual rights, and limited government. Olivia Newman See also Conservatism; Democracy; Distributive Justice; Legitimacy, Forms of; Political Ideology; Procedural Justice; Social Contract; Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory

Further Readings Berlin, I. (2002). Liberty: Incorporating four essays on liberty. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Gray, J. (1995). Liberalism (2nd ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651) Kant, I. (1993). Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals ­(J. Ellington, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Original work published 1785) Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689) Mill, J. S. (1991). On liberty and other essays (J. Gray, Ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1859) Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York, NY: Basic Books. Rawls, J. (1991). A theory of justice, revised edition. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1996). Political liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Rousseau, J. (1997). The social contract and other later political writings (V. Gourevitch, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1762)

Life Cycle Effects Life cycle effects refer to changes to political attitudes and behaviors associated with the specific phase of an individual’s life. Specifically, the engagement of the self at a certain age with the external context determines the individual’s political attitude and behavior. The cause of the change is the conjunction of endogenous and

exogenous factors. The endogenous factor is the political behavior of individuals differing depending on their age, whereas the exogenous factor of the change implies that the changes are driven by external contexts within which the individual experiences a maturational process. While studying the impact of life cycle effects on political behavior, scholars typically attempt to explain the relationship between different political behaviors and the different phases of the individual’s life. This entry provides a brief discussion of the development of major scholarly approaches for understanding life cycle effects and a short introduction to the impact of life cycle effects on various types of political behavior.

Historical and Theoretical Origins One of the first difficulties students may encounter in studying the effects of the life cycle on political behavior is with the term life cycle itself. The concept of life cycle effects originated within sociology and psychology. Originally, scholars used the life cycle as a metaphor to describe the similar basic sequence that everyone goes through during their life journey; despite everyone having a unique life experience, and different individuals reaching stages of the life cycle at different ages, a similar underlying order throughout the individual’s life course remains. Specifically, as the individual ages, he or she goes through the same set of periods, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and old age, though these may be defined differently in different cultures. Following the work of psychologists such as Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson, adult development theory provides a theoretical explanation for the sequence of human beings’ change and how the change is related to aging. Based on adult development theory, each of the life stages can be viewed as a major segment of the total life cycle. Each individual’s attitude and behavior change gradually within each development phase, and a major life experience is required as a transition for the shift from one stage to the next in the individual’s life cycle. In this sense, without having a significant lifechanging experience, an individual may not move to the next stage of the life cycle. Specifically, aging itself has a rather limited influence on an individual’s development, if not taking exogenous factors into account. Exogenous social forces thus play a more influential role in shaping the life cycle and its developmental consequences. For instance, while in some cultures people are encouraged to get married earlier, individuals who reside in most industrialized countries wait for a couple more years before committing to a marriage and family, and this kind of critical life-change experience has a significant influence on the individual’s roles and rights

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in a given society. However, despite people’s not entering the same phase of life at the same age, getting married and having a family can be viewed as an important step during the maturation process, and that may have impacts on an individual’s attitudes and behavior. The major contribution of adult development theory has been to further confirm that age-related patterns of political behavior exist and that it would be worthwhile to study the variation of political behavior in different life stages. However, some scholars argue that the more critical concern about the effects of the life cycle on political behavior has little to do with existent agerelated patterns, but is rather whether the effects are stable and lasting. Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and child development research indicated that (a) the child’s ability to conceptualize and understand politics is limited; and (b) the child’s ability to grasp political information and to become aware of politics improves gradually through the maturational process, but these abilities occur only in late childhood. Having ample discussions on different approaches to studying the relationship between life cycle and political behavior reflects the need to further study the concept of the life cycle. Undoubtedly, the individual’s attitudinal change is not merely because of the increasing age by years, but the meaning of a particular age associated with the external social contexts within which the individual interacts. Most existing studies on the effects of the life cycle thus can be organized around the major stage of life and behavior for each of these stages.

Life Cycle Effects and Political Interests Despite having great difficulties in determining which stage of the individual’s life cycle has the stronger impact, there is little doubt about the influence derived from switching from one stage to the next in the life cycle on ­attitudinal and behavior variation. Specifically, the individual’s political attitude and behavioral change are associated with each of the distinct sets of preferences at certain phases of the life cycle. Since there is no clear answer to how to determine different stages of the individual’s life cycle, existing studies normally divide the life cycle into three stages: (a) childhood and adolescence (young); (b) between childhood and retirement, an amorphous time that is broadly defined as adulthood (middle age); and (c) retirement or the final segment starting at around 65 (old age). Nevertheless, to what degree the mediated process of switching stages in the life cycle changes political attitudes and behavior remains unclear. To illustrate, some people are more interested in politics than others, but there have been only a few studies on development of political interests. While it is reasonable to assume that politically interested people would

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be more knowledgeable about politics; more likely to vote; and more likely to participate in politics in various ways, understanding the development of their political interests over the individual’s life cycle is important. If the individual’s political interests reveal a clear variation across different stages of their life cycle, the effects of each stage may play an influential role in determining the individual’s political interests. According to existing research, in comparison with elderly and middle-aged citizens, young people are less likely to pay attention to political news and have less interest in politics; however, young people also increase their political interests relatively faster than the other two groups. The life cycle effects interpretation of the development of political interests is that when people age, their political interests would be boosted to a certain level at the second phase of the life cycle and remain steady throughout their life course thereafter. If merely observing a steady pattern of political interests over time, either staying at low or high levels, some may suggest that the outcome indicates that the driving factor behind stabilized political interests may not be life cycle effects. For instance, a politician may have a relatively higher level of political interest than the general public beginning at a very young age and this level of political interest may remain throughout his or her life cycle. Although the level of political interest does not have significant variation, the effects of the life cycle still have an impact on his or her political behavior in terms of when and how he participates in politics. To demonstrate that the influence of the individual’s maturational process through various life stages makes a significant contribution to attitudinal and behavioral variation, along with the same logical line, researchers study various types of political behavior and attempt to find the corresponding effects of a specific life stage on individuals’ decisions.

Life Cycle Effects on Party Identification and Political Ideology Among studies on various types of political attitudes and behavior, partisan attachment and political ideology are the most commonly studied for life cycle effects. Early studies on political socialization that focused on political attitude formation during childhood and early adolescence argued that party identification would be intensified as an individual develops. By studying why and how the individual stabilizes political attitudes, political knowledge, political interests, and behavior, researchers demonstrated that young adults are less likely to have a firm attitudes toward certain issues and that their behaviors are relatively inconsistent at the early stage of their adolescent years. However, political

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socialization studies have demonstrated that young adults are willing to learn more about politics and that their political intellectual sophistication therefore increases rapidly in early adulthood. Thus, while individuals become more capable of understanding the world of politics, these young adults gradually become more sophisticated citizens due to the maturation process and become more likely to identify whether their issue preferences are aligned with politicians and a political party. Accordingly, as individuals age, they would have stronger political identification aligned with a specific political party and political ­ideology. During the second segment of the life cycle— namely, the adulthood period—individuals tend to have better cognitive skills and experience a variety of significant transitions linked to school graduation, family duty, commitment to marriage, parenthood, and social responsibility, through which individuals would pay more attention to politics, especially when the issues are perceived as relevant to their interests. As for individuals at the final stage of their life cycle, political socialization research indicates that their political ideology and partisan attachment are relatively more stable than during the two previous segments of the life cycle. Although in the final stage of life aging gradually causes a decline in the individual’s physical strength, the strength of political ideology and partisanship linked to individuals’ intellectual skills derived from accumulated experience increases with age. Accordingly, as life continues, the effects of the life cycle on political ideology and partisan attachment would be to strengthen the individual’s identification.

Life Cycle Effects on Political Participation Since there is no difference derived from switching between stages of the individual’s life cycle, the maturational process does not seem to have any impact on political ideology and partisanship. Yet, it may have various degrees of influence on different types of political participation. Among various types of political participation, almost the only individual political behavior studied meticulously for life cycle effects is electoral behavior. Given that election to office is the most important means of obtaining political power, electoral studies provide insights into the relationship between life cycle effects and political behavior in both democratic and nondemocratic societies. Specifically, the focus on agerelated life cycle effects on electoral behavior has prompted researchers to identify characteristic of political attitudes and behaviors at various stages of life. Studies have shown that young people are less likely to vote than older age-groups because they view the act of voting differently, and similar results have appeared in

both new and advanced democracies. Since young citizens are less deferential and less likely to agree with the norm that voting is a civic duty, they do not feel irresponsible over not voting. In contrast to young adults, ­middle-aged individuals tend to be less liberal, but not as conservative, as their senior fellow citizens; in addition, they are more likely to participate in conventional ­political activities. These findings have been attributed to middle-aged citizens typically belonging to groups with a relatively commanding position in a given society, and thus they feel a stronger responsibility to engage in ­politics. The effects of the life cycle on elderly citizens’ participation, on the other hand, remain unclear. The lifecycle effects interpretation for elderly citizens has not been widely accepted. Some studies have found that participation in conventional political activities declines after middle age, whereas some researchers argue that the level of political participation is higher for elderly ­citizens, as measured by voting turnout in particular. The level of conventional participation for elderly citizens almost always surpasses that of young adults. For instance, studies on national elections across ­American, European, and Asian countries all indicate that young citizens are less likely to vote than older ­voters, in young and mature democracies alike. Participation in unconventional politics, on the contrary, is skewed to young adults. Research indicates that youth, with its idealistic propensity to rebel against authority and tradition, has been a major force in pushing democratic development forward and generating new social norms for a given society. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that young people are more prone to protest because they have less access to political power and fewer commitments associated with their civic duty. To illustrate further, previous analysis of the link between protest and age in European countries finds a clear pattern of life cycle effects, by which youth are more likely to join protests and dissenting political activities, whereas the trend starts to decline at the beginning of late middle age. Similarly, studies of the relationship between unconventional participation and age in Asian new democracies demonstrate that people in their 20s to 40s are more likely to engage in social movements, and that the intention declines as the individual ages. Though these studies are interesting and the effects of the life cycle on political behavior seem inevitable across countries, the most difficult question remains: How does one disentangle life cycle effects from the related generational phenomenon and period effects?

Measuring Life Cycle Effects in the Future In the past 50 years, the salience of the relationship between age-specific development and behavioral

Lobbying

variation has stimulated social scientists to investigate life cycle interpretations of political behavior. The individual’s biological age is used as a conventional way to distinguish between three life phases: youth, adulthood, and old age. Researchers may categorize, for example, those under 30 as youth, respondents ages 31 to 64 as adults, and finally, respondents ages 65 or older as the old-age category. This coding of age categories may vary, depending on the local perception of age. Nevertheless, research finds that youth political participation in unconventional political activities is usually higher than in the adult and old-age categories in a given society. Meanwhile, ­ research also indicates that the middle-aged tend to be less liberal than the youth but not as conservative as the old, and the old-age group are the least likely to engage in unconventional participation. From a life cycle effects perspective, the possible life cycle effects interpretation of this outcome is that individuals at the early stage of the life cycle are more liberal and eager to express their attitudes directly than are their older fellow citizens. The effect of the life cycle on unconventional participation is that youth have a higher intention to join, but the motivation declines with age. The relationship between the life cycle and political behavior has been discussed and explored from various theoretical perspectives. While the existence of life cycle effects on political behavior is quite clear, there is a long-standing analytic difficulty in determining whether the conceptualization, estimation, and interpretation of the possible contribution of age-related changes are exclusively due to life cycle effects. Specifically, the challenge for understanding life cycle effects is to disentangle the effects of the life cycle from other confounding effects. A variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies have been adopted to study life cycle effects. Currently, some conventional qualitative approaches include life-history reviews, case studies, in-depth interviews, and life-stories exploration. Meanwhile, the standard quantitative methods entail cohort analysis, longitudinal panel studies, cross-sectional comparison, and age-period–cohort analysis. This methodological pluralism reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the life cycle effects and the need for further understanding different theoretical approaches. In summary, studies on life cycle effects on political behavior offer unique opportunities to interconnect individuals’ age, their political behavior, and the impact of external social factors. Future methodological advances will enable researchers to extend our understanding of life cycle effects. Dennis Lu-Chung Weng and Ching-Hsing Wang

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See also Civic Engagement; Group Ideologies; Identity Politics; Political Ideology; Political Participation; Political Socialization; Social Movements

Further Readings Alwin, D. F., & Krosnick, J. A. (1991). Aging, cohorts, and the stability of sociopolitical orientations over the life span. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 169–195. Elder, G. H. (1998). The life course as developmental theory. Child Development, 69(1), 1–12. Erikson, E. H., & Erikson, J. M. (1998). The life cycle completed (Extended version.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Jennings, M. K., & Niemi, R. G. (2014). Generations and politics: A panel study of young adults and their parents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jennings, M. K., & Niemi, R. G. (2015). Political character of adolescence: The influence of families and schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinson, D. J. (1978). The seasons of a man’s life. New York, NY: Random House. Nie, N. H., Verba, S., & Kim, J. O. (1974). Political participation and the life cycle. Comparative Politics, 6(3), 319–340. Piaget, J. (1985). The equilibration of cognitive structures: The central problem of intellectual development. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Prior, M. (2010). You’ve either got it or you don’t? The stability of political interest over the life cycle. Journal of Politics, 72(03), 747–766. Sears, D. O., & Funk, C. L. (1999). Evidence of the long-term persistence of adults’ political predispositions. Journal of Politics, 61, 1–28. Stoker, L., & Jennings, M. K. (1995). Life-cycle transitions and political participation: The case of marriage. American Political Science Review, 89(2), 421–433.

Lobbying Lobbying is an effort made by individuals or groups to convey information to governmental, administrative, or regulatory officials, in an attempt to influence decision outcomes. This entry provides an overview of lobbying, describes the advocacy groups and officials involved and the incentives they face, discusses theoretical and empirical outcomes, and examines how lobbying and transparency vary across countries.

Overview Lobbying occurs when a government or governmentlike body has the power to implement a law, policy, or procedure, and individuals, firms, or groups attempt to exert influence in the decision. John Figueiredo and

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Lobbying

Brian Richter suggest that lobbyists can convey information through a combination of statistics, facts, arguments, messages, forecasts, threats, commitments, and signals to politicians, staffs, and agencies. Lobbying activities are broad and varied, and include testifying in front of administrative hearings and tribunals, meetings with officials, aiding in the drafting of legislation, the solicitation or direct writing of letters and petitions, and potentially other favors like dinners, flights, and so on. Although sometimes compared pejoratively to bribery and blackmail, lobbying as defined here is limited to a set of legal activities, used to directly convey information. It is important to note, however, that boundaries between legal and illegal activities can be fuzzy, and laws on what constitutes a permissible form of lobbying vary across institutions and countries. Lobbying is a channel through which citizens express their positions on issues to elected or appointed ­representatives. Other channels include campaign contributions, publicly endorsing particular candidates, grassroots political campaigns, and media campaigns and advertising. Although a donation to an elected representative is likely money spent to advocate for one’s position, lobbying is differentiated from direct campaign contributions. Instead, lobbying is the attempt to sway a decision by providing an official with information. There is speculation that the term lobbying originated from advocates waiting in lobbies and halls outside of legislative and administrative offices in an attempt to influence the officials meeting inside during breaks.

Who Lobbies? While individuals and firms can undertake direct lobbying efforts, a more specialized organization, known as an advocacy group, is often a key player. Also referred to as interest groups, constituency groups, pressure groups, or special interest groups, these are coalitions of firms, individuals, and other organizations formed to lobby one or more governmental, administrative, or regulatory organizations on issues of mutual interest. Examples of advocacy groups in the United States include the Sierra Club, which lobbies for environmental and conservation policies; the National Rifle Association (NRA), which lobbies for gun ownership protections; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lobbies for the interest of its business members; and the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), which advocates for persons ages 50 and above. Self-interest is the motivation for interest groups to engage in lobbying. In the United States, most lobby groups represent firms and trade organizations whose financial well-being is directly affected by the officials the groups lobby. Alternatively, individuals, groups, or

firms may lobby in favor or against a particular issue to capture indirect benefits; for instance, environmental groups lobby for outcomes consistent with the preferences of their individual members. However, lobbying is expensive, so parties with more to gain or lose when officials make decisions are more likely to participate in lobbying and spend more money lobbying. Questions of fairness naturally arise. Pressure groups may try to secure benefits at the expense of the general public through direct revenue transfers, ­targeted regulation, or reduced stringency of regulation or taxation. This rent-seeking behavior occurs because pressure groups may advocate for narrow self-interest—very profitable to a few—while the general public lacks a comparable advocate—marginally expensive to many. In the United States, lobbying to legislators and administrative agencies has become a substantial industry, with firms specializing in advocacy for hire. These firms and the individuals working for them are referred to as lobbyists, as are individuals who work exerting influence directly for an advocacy organization. Many lobbyists are trained as lawyers and are often retired politicians, staffers, and agency officials whose knowledge of the law and connections allow them to market their influence to a variety of advocacy groups, firms, and individuals. Thus, professional lobbyists often advocate on behalf of groups, firms, and individuals, rather than on issues in their own self-interest. Firms involved in lobbying the U.S. federal government are referred to as K Street lobbyists due to the large number that locate on that street in Washington, D.C. They are often criticized for having undue influence over policy. While firms engaged in lobbying are likely to locate in Washington, D.C., the nature of lobbying is such that these firms may be advocating on behalf of the ­Northeastern banking industry, airplane manufacturing unions in Seattle, a foreign government, or any of a large number of other interests. The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group located in Washington, D.C., tracks lobbying and campaign contributions in the United ­ States. They use information available through the 1995 ­Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) to show that in 2012, $3.31 billion was spent on federal lobbying. In contrast, direct campaign contributions for the 2012 election cycle, a 2-year total of spending that included the most expensive presidential campaign in history, totaled around $2.3 billion. For that same election cycle, Super PACs, expenditure-only campaign committees that rose to prominence after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, raised around $828 million. These ­figures indicate the prominent role lobbying plays in American politics.

Lobbying

The Lobbying Process The lobbying process takes place under the rules, if any, that govern the decision making of officials. The rules establish the amount of discretion an official has and over what margins these decisions affect constituents. Officials may consider both external factors, the effects on others, and internal factors, such as personal beliefs, in making a decision. External factors include the benefits and costs of the decision to society; the distribution of these benefits and costs on individuals, groups, or firms; the effect on voting behavior; and the effect on campaign contributions. Internal factors include morals and beliefs; loyalty to or trust in a person, group, or firm; and the proclivity for risky versus safe actions. To inform their decisions, officials may solicit input from affected parties, which in turn creates a setting for groups to advocate for a particular outcome. A complex set of incentives face an official, and they vary depending on the type of position. An elected official faces reelection pressure and may undertake ­ decisions in an attempt to maximize votes. However, maximizing votes may involve more than taking the most popular political position, as interest groups can work to mobilize or suppress voting, mail or televise advertisements for or against a candidate, and solicit donations. A regulatory agency official overseen by elected officials has different incentives. Anthony Downs describes bureaucratic officials as interested in power, income, prestige, security, convenience, loyalty, pride in excellent work, and desire to serve the public interest. Advocacy groups can exert influence over agency officials by providing them with information to help them achieve excellence in their work, appealing for them to do the right thing, or even by the promise of later employment. While there is a quid pro quo element to the lobbying process—favors granted by interest groups are often done with the expectation that the official will be supportive of the group—there is not always a direct or explicit agreement. Often, lobby groups seek access to officials through gifts, events, and donations. The expectation is not necessarily that officials will support a particular policy position, but rather that these groups will have a forum to directly advocate for their position. Individuals, groups, and firms can use this forum to attempt to sway the official into making a particular decision. Ultimately, the official makes the final decision. However, given the limited information available to politicians and agency officials regarding citizen demands, policy costs, and distributions, there is often reliance on interest groups as sources of information on benefits and costs and to generate political support for taking action. Legislation or rules may be drafted in close consultation

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with advocacy groups. For instance, in 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan, and lobbyists for large banks drafted key legislation in 2013 to roll back provisions of earlier banking laws.

Is Lobbying Good or Bad? Lobbying may be viewed as beneficial or harmful, depending on the level of independence exerted by an official, the question being considered, and the groups involved. For instance, the American Medical Association (AMA) might lobby a legislature making a decision about vaccination rules to convey information about the position on vaccinations of American doctors, and most citizens would view this as beneficial. If the same legislature were considering regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, however, the input of America’s Power, a pro-coal lobbyist, might be viewed more skeptically. Gary Becker suggested that competition among interest groups could lead to more efficient political decisions. Lobbyists spend money to purchase desired outcomes, and the competition among interest groups is analogous to competition among buyers and sellers of goods and services in a market. In this competitive process, no party gains all that it desires as politicians balance group demands and weigh the tax costs facing the broad electorate. The key aspect of this view is that lobbying can improve outcomes. Consider politicians determining an acceptable level of emissions who only visit with lobbyists from the emitting firm. The lobbyists’ message would likely downplay the health effects of the emissions. If an environmental organization were also able to lobby the politician, these lobbyists could provide an alternative message, emphasizing the health effects on the politicians’ constituents. The outcome of the competitive lobbying process is likely to reveal more information and lead to better decisions. Countervailing lobbying power, however, is not always observed. The classic example from Bruce ­Yandle is termed Bootleggers and Baptists in reference to the apparent inconsistency of both interested lobby groups supporting Sunday liquor prohibitions. In fact, when each group’s incentives are considered, the outcome makes sense. Baptists dislike alcohol and strongly advocate for its prohibition. Bootleggers sell alcohol illegally and therefore benefit as the sole proprietors of alcohol on Sundays. In this case, apparently opposed interests lobby for the same law: alcohol prohibition. The general public, which must spend more and buy illegal alcohol, or abstain completely, is made worse off. There is evidence that, on many issues, opposing interests lobby on both sides, creating the countervailing forces Becker describes. However, individuals do not

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have a strong interest in most policies and may be affected only slightly. This limits the time and energy devoted to lobbying by the general public. The general public faces a collective action problem, wherein each person benefits too little to lobby individually. Because coordinating across millions of people to join forces to lobby is difficult and expensive, individuals will not be represented by lobbyists in most cases. Concentrated interests, who individually benefit enough to make lobbying worthwhile, can extract concessions at the expense of the general public.

The Effect of Lobbying Empirical analysis of a number of institutional settings on a variety of policy issues has shown that expenditures by lobby groups have resulted in policy outcomes benefiting the lobbying organization. Settings where lobbying has been shown to affect outcomes include trade policy and tariffs, taxation, and budgets and appropriations. Lobbying effects are not limited to groups that benefit via direct financial avenues. For instance, lobbying by environmental interest groups has been shown to have an effect on which species are listed under the Endangered Species Act and the extent to which areas are protected by environmental rules. Lobbying can affect policy outcomes by increasing the knowledge of an official, changing the calculus of the political effect of a decision, or creating a financial or other direct incentive for the decision maker. Lobbying may also lead to agency officials becoming closely linked to industry groups in a process called agency capture. Capture occurs when industry lobbyists and regulators have repeated interactions over time, leading the agency to favor the industry in its rulings. Eventually, the regulator may cease to view itself as separate from the industry it regulates. A recent example of capture occurred in the years preceding the Deepwater Horizon (BP) Oil Spill in 2010. The agency tasked with regulating oil firms, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), became closely linked to the industry. Agency officials received sports tickets, meals, and other gifts from industry lobbyists. MMS officials often found work in the oil industry after leaving their positions. In return, agency officials rubber-stamped regulatory filings and environmental compliance audits. The closeness of the relationship contributed to lax regulatory oversight, identified as a factor in the spill. Many of the actions occurred in the gray area between legal and illegal activity, and some convictions relating to lying and conflict of interest occurred. The MMS was ultimately disbanded and split into three agencies in an attempt to avoid future issues of capture.

Lobbying and Transparency Across Countries The culture of lobbying varies across countries by the transparency with which it occurs, the degree to which it is regulated, and the extent to which lobbying relationships are formalized. In some countries, political officials and corporations interact directly. Companies in many countries have in-house political and governmental relations departments, while others utilize law firms specializing in lobbying activities. Political institutions are directly related to the extent of lobbying, with lobbying more common in countries exhibiting political stability and those with parliamentary systems. Several authors have suggested that in countries transitioning toward democracy and market economies, lobbying serves as an important substitute to corruption, replacing bribes as a key instrument of policy influence. Because disclosure rules in the United States make data publicly available for analysis, a good deal of literature has focused on American lobbying. The United States and Canada both have mandatory reporting systems for lobbyists, with the stringency of the rules often increased after public reports of questionable or illegal lobbying activities surface. While European countries impose strict limits on political-campaign contributions, they have less stringent lobbying disclosure rules. Still, rules governing lobbyists have emerged in response to scandal in Europe as in the United States. Lobbying became an issue in Britain in the 1990s when members of Parliament (MPs) were paid in exchange for asking planted questions in parliamentary sessions. Elements of lobbying regulation that vary by country include (1) which lobbyists are required to register, (2) the information lobbyists are required to disclose when they register, (3) which public officials must disclose meetings with interest groups, (4) the extent to which laws are enforced and penalties are harsh, and (5) the existence and content of a lobbyist code of conduct. In Europe, lobby registries have been put in place in Lithuania (2001), Poland (2005), Hungary (2006, ­ repealed in 2011), the European Commission (2008), Macedonia (2008), France (2010), Slovenia (2010), and Austria (2011). As of the mid-2010s, new laws and bills regulating lobbying are being drafted and debated in Brazil, Chile, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In Latin America, lobbying has long been synonymous with corruption and back-room deals. In the past, the region has been characterized by strong centralized governments with close ties to business interests. These governance issues are similar to those in other ­developing countries throughout the world, and some relationships between business groups and leaders are more akin to corruption than lobbying. As public participation in

Locus of Control

these governments has increased, there have been enhanced efforts at political transparency to formalize a legal lobbying culture. The first law in Latin America regulating lobbying was enacted in 2003 in Peru. In 2009, Chile also passed a bill to create integrity and transparency in the lobbying process. An emerging area of lobbying is the international public lobbying that occurs when a country lobbies for its national political agenda at multinational political institutions such as the European Union (EU) or the United Nations (UN). Brussels is currently the second largest lobbying arena in the world behind Washington, D.C., and along the Rue Belliard, Brussels’s version of K Street, lobbyists attempt to influence the European Commission. The increasing complexity and authority of the European parliament has necessitated more information collection and hence the growth of a lobbying industry. As of 2010, there were approximately 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels attempting to influence EU policies. Undoubtedly, interest groups and lobbying play an important role in shaping political outcomes across the world. While lobbying can become problematic when groups use influence to gain special advantages at the expense of the general public, solutions are not obvious. The complete elimination of lobbying would likely lead advocacy groups and firms to substitute direct bribery and corruption. Formal registries and transparency rules offer one potential avenue to reveal more information to the general public on who lobbies, while still allowing groups to convey information to officials. Eric C. Edwards and Sara A. Sutherland See also Bureaucratic Politics; Bureaucratic Structure; Collective Action; Economics and Political Behavior; Free Rider Problem; Political Participation; Rent-Seeking Behavior; Social Welfare

Further Readings Ando, A. W. (1999). Waiting to be protected under the Endangered Species Act: The political economy of regulatory delay. Journal of Law and Economics, 42(1), 29–60. Baumgartner, F. R., Berry, J. M., Hojnacki, M., Leech, B. L., & Kimball, D. C. (2009). Lobbying and policy change: Who wins, who loses, and why. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Becker, G. S. (1983). A theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 98(3), 371–400. De Figueiredo, J. M., & Richter, B. K. (2014). Advancing the empirical research on lobbying. Annual Review of Political Science, 17, 163–185.

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Downs, A., & Rand Corporation. (1967). Inside bureaucracy. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Edwards, E. C., Cristi, O., Edwards, G., & Libecap, G. D. (2016). An illiquid market in the desert: The role of interest groups in shaping environmental regulation (No. w21869). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research. Yandle, B. (1983). Bootleggers and Baptists: The education of a regulatory economist. Regulation, 7(3), 12.

Locus

of

Control

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.” This quote from William Jennings Bryan, a politician from Nebraska in the early 1900s, is an excellent illustration of a concept central to Julian B. Rotter’s social learning theory, namely locus of control. Bryan’s quote is consistent with Rotter’s suggestion that individuals develop a generalized expectancy about their control over outcomes in their environment. Moreover, it conveys the message that control over one’s destiny can be internal (a choice) or external (chance). In line with this quote, Rotter proposes that some individuals live in an environment where many of the outcomes they experience are believed to be the result of their own efforts. As a result of living in such an environment, they develop an internal locus of control. To paraphrase English poet William Ernest Henley, such individuals believe that they are the masters of their own fate and the captains of their souls. On the other hand, some individuals live in an environment where there is little connection between outcomes and one’s actions. For example, if a person is a member of a society where nepotism (i.e., favoring one’s family member over other individuals) is a common practice, such an individual is likely to believe that chance rather than ability or effort is responsible for the various outcomes in his or her life. Consequently, such individuals develop an external locus of control. Rotter’s concept of locus of control has generated a considerable amount of research since it was initially proposed in 1966. In agreement with this statement, social scientists have studied locus of control as a personality characteristic and across domains such as health, school, and politics. Locus of control has also been evaluated in 43 different countries. A brief overview of research on locus of control shows that women have been found to be more external than men on their perception of control; socialization is the major explanation as to why this is the case. Furthermore, Rotter’s proposition that an internal locus of control is linked

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Lone Wolf Terrorism

to American culture because it is highly valued within this context has also been confirmed. Consistent with this proposition, members of collectivistic cultures (e.g., Asians) have been found to have a more external locus of control than members of individualistic cultures (e.g., Americans). Differential socialization among the two groups can explain these differences in that, in individualistic cultures such as the one in the United States, members of such a culture are reared in a manner in which they are given opportunities to influence their environment. Conversely, members of collectivistic cultures are not reared in this way. Rather, they are reared to adjust to their environment. Finally, researchers tested 6,554 children ranging in age from 9 to 14, as well as 18,310 college students, in order to examine whether or not locus of control has changed from 1960 to 2002 in American society. Across a 42-year time span, young Americans have come to believe that their life is controlled by external factors rather than internal factors. Such a result confirms the idea that American society has changed over time. Individuals feel more alienated, are more cynical, and blame others for negative events to a greater extent than in the past. Such changes have led young ­Americans to believe in the impact of their environment.

Locus of Control and Politics Researchers have demonstrated that individuals with an external locus of control believe in conspiracy theories and are more persuadable. Feeling capable of exercising sociopolitical control has also been found to be associated with less alienation and a willingness to lead. With respect to the link between political affiliation and locus of control, Republicans, in the 1970s, were shown by social scientists to have more of an internal locus of control than Democrats. Forty years later, researchers continue to find that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents differ in terms of their locus of control: Democrats and Independents display more external locus of control than Republicans do. When the concept of locus of control was first proposed, researchers were quick to demonstrate a link between locus of control and activism. In short, individuals who believed they could change the world (internal locus of control) tried to do so by taking part in political activities such as signing a petition or marching for a cause. However, the search for a link between an internal locus of control and activism led to equivocal results, forcing social scientists to explain the contradictory findings. One solution to this problem came in the form of developing a measure capable of specifically assessing an individual’s political locus of

control. Using such a domain-specific measure of locus of control helped researchers to discover that college students who believe they have control over political and social events (an internal sociopolitical locus of control) registered to vote, voted in a mayoral election, participated in student politics, boycotted a product in the past year, and wrote a letter to a public official or newspaper. College students with an internal sociopolitical locus of control have also reported that they are more likely in the future to engage in high-risk activism, such as taking part in political activities which might threaten their personal safety or lead to their arrest. Stéphane Perreault  See also Collective Action; Egoistical Relative Deprivation; SelfEsteem; Self-Help Ideology

Further Readings Paulhus, D. (1983). Sphere-specific measures of perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 1253–1265. Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80, 1–28. Sweetser, K. D. (2014). Partisan personality: The psychological differences between Democrats and Republicans, and independents somewhere in between. American Behavioral Scientist, 58, 1183–1194. Twenge, J. M., Zhang, L., & Im, C. (2004). It’s beyond my control: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of increasing externality in locus of control, 1960–2002. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 308–319.

Lone Wolf Terrorism Lone wolf terrorism refers to politically motivated violence perpetrated by an individual who acts alone, who is not a member of a terrorist group or network, and whose plot is executed by the individual without any direct outside command or direction. Lone wolf terrorism is a tactic that has been employed by radical actors from a myriad of ideological milieus as well as by radicalized individuals with mental health problems. This entry concisely introduces lone wolf terrorism and discusses what is currently known about the topic. The entry concludes with a reflection on the implications of lone wolf terrorism for countering ­violent extremism.

Lone Wolf Terrorism

Historical and Contemporary Patterns Despite the spike in political and media attention since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, lone wolf terrorism is not a recent phenomenon. Terrorist attacks carried out by solo actors can be traced to the individual anarchists who carried out assassinations and bombings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the second half of the 20th century, White supremacy groups began to promote “leaderless resistance” and articulated an emergent strategic rationale for lone wolf terrorism: an extremist group, no matter how secret or well organized, cannot evade law enforcement; therefore, armed resistance is more readily accomplished by lone actors. A similar mindset informs the calls by al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS), and affiliated networks on their supporters to strike against enemy targets in the West. Such encouragement has occurred primarily through online platforms such as the electronic magazines Inspire (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP) and Dabiq (ISIS) and through online messaging and videos. In September 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani urged supporters to “rise and defend your state from wherever you may be,” advising them to keep plots small and simple, and involve as few people as possible. Lone wolf terrorist attacks reveal how the messages communicated by these extremist groups can be attached, and sometimes even retrofitted, to very personal causes and psychological needs, such as a search for recognition, notoriety, personal redemption, or belonging. Lone wolf terrorists combine various political grievances with any number of highly personal vendettas in complex ways. The diverse ideological milieus from which attacks have sprung point to a key feature of lone wolf terrorists: there is no uniform profile. Though mostly male, lone wolf terrorists have diverse backgrounds in terms of their political grievances, age (15–88), marital status, educational attainment, employment history, criminal history, mental health, and so forth.

Radicalization Lone wolf terrorism is a small but rapidly expanding area of research. It is only since the mid-2000s that scholars have begun to systematically investigate the issue in earnest. To date, there are only a handful of empirically based academic studies of lone wolf terrorism. A key question that these studies have sought to address is how lone wolf terrorists radicalize into violent action, and how this compares with the violent radicalization of group-based terrorist actors.

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The archetypal lone wolf terrorist who lives in social isolation or self-imposed reclusion, such as “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski or “Olympic Park Bomber” Eric Rudolph, has become a figure of folk legend that permeates popular culture as well as the official counterterrorism discourse. This representation is ­somewhat deceiving because it conceals the dynamic relations between lone wolf terrorists, their social ­environment, and the wider society. The broader social context matters a great deal for understanding lone wolf terrorism. External social influences and interaction points may be found at different stages of the lone wolf terrorist attack cycle, for instance in relation to ideological formation, affinity with online sympathizers, and the broadcasting of intent. In the time leading up to lone wolf terrorist attacks, other people generally know about the offender’s grievance, extremist views, or intent to engage in violence. Lone wolf terrorists often broadcast their beliefs and even their intent to commit violence using media technologies such as websites, online forums, YouTube, or Instagram. In this context, recent research highlights the ways in which the Internet and social media empower lone wolf terrorists to obtain information and publicize their cause. Radicalization into violent action is a process that can develop over years, only rarely occurs suddenly, and involves both cognitive and emotional facets. A lone wolf terrorist often identifies as a member of an aggressed group and experiences a sense of humiliation, alienation, and victimization, associated with an increasingly strong hate of the perceived enemy. Engagement with an extremist subculture can be a transformative experience that enables an identity shift in which lone actors come to see themselves as being enmeshed in greater struggles that give their own actions and existence moral meaning. This identity shift is often accompanied by a sense of resistance, empowerment, moral superiority, and selfrighteousness. The terrorist attack becomes the catalyst to achievement of the lone wolf’s mission to force society to see the world from his or her perspective.

Implications for Counterterrorism Lone wolf terrorism poses particular challenges to counterterrorism, which has traditionally focused on group-based terrorist actors. Scientific knowledge about lone wolf terrorism is relatively recent, and there is still much about it that is not yet known. The topic merits further attention, specifically regarding the ways the emergent evidence base can inform policies and programs aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism. Ramón Spaaij

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See also Internet Jihadism; Jihad; Political Ideology; Radicalization; Terrorism, Theories and Models

Further Readings Gill, P. (2015). Lone-actor terrorists: A behavioural analysis. London, England: Routledge.

Simon, J. D. (2013). Lone wolf terrorism: Understanding the growing threat. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Spaaij, R. (2012). Understanding lone wolf terrorism: Global patterns, motivations and prevention. New York, NY: Springer. Spaaij, R., & Hamm, M. S. (2015). Key issues and research agendas in lone wolf terrorism. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 38, 167–178. doi:10.1080/10576 10X.2014.986979

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Political Behavior

Editorial Board Editor Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University

Editorial Board Rom Harré Oxford University Leonie Huddy Stony Brook University Deborah Prentice Princeton University Donald M. Taylor McGill University Tom Tyler Yale Law School Michael Wessells Columbia University

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Political Behavior 2

Editor Georgetown University

FOR INFORMATION:

Copyright © 2017 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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Names: Moghaddam, Fathali M., editor. Title: SAGE encyclopedia of political behavior / editor, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Georgetown University. Description: First edition. | Thousand Oaks, California : SAGE Publications, Inc., [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017004456 | ISBN 9781483391168 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Political psychology. | Political science– Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC JA74.5 .S23 2017 | DDC 320.01/9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004456

Acquisitions Editor: Maureen Adams Editorial Assistant: Jordan Enobakhare Developmental Editor: Sanford Robinson Production Editor: Jane Haenel Reference Systems Manager: Leticia Gutierrez Copy Editors: Diane DiMura, Kim Husband Typesetter: Hurix Systems Pvt. Ltd. Proofreaders: Scott Oney, Susan Schon Indexer: Robie Grant Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Kate Brummitt

17  18  19  20  21  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents Volume 2 List of Entries   vii Reader’s Guide   xi Entries M 455 T 821 N 511 U 859 O 551 V 885 P 563 W 903 R 679 Y 917 S 729 Index  919

To the memory of Hannah Arendt 1906–1975

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

List of Entries Absolutism Activism Advocacy Affirmative Action Aggressive Capitulation Agonism al Qaeda Alienation Allegiances Allocation American Dream. See Self-Help Ideology American Exceptionalism Anti-Semitism Art in Political Campaigns Assassinations/Violence in Politics Assimilation Asymmetric Warfare Attitudes Attribution Theory Authoritarian Personality Authoritarianism

Civilian Intervention Civil-Military Relations Clash of Civilizations Clientelism Closure, Need for Cognitive Dissonance Collective Action Command of the Commons Communism. See Socialism and Communism Competitive Authoritarianism Confirmation Bias Conflict Theory. See Conflict Theory, Realistic; Social Dominance Theory; Social Identity Theory Conflict Theory, Realistic Conflicts, Protracted Conformity Conservatism Conspiracies Contact Theory Corporatism Corruption Counter-Elite Counterinsurgency Crisis Decision Making and Management Cyberactivism Cyberwar

Bandwagoning State Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Bellicism Bicameralism Biopolitics Blaming the Victim Blue-Dog Democrats Brand Identity and Loyalty Bully Pulpit Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic Structure Business in Politics

Death of Leaders Decision Making Decision Making, Political. See Political Deliberation Defense Planning Democracy Dependency Theory Deterrence and Crime Deterrence and International Relations Development, Theories of Deviance and Control Dictatorship Diplomacy Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Discrimination Disengagement Distributive Justice Districting

Calculus of Dissent Capitalism Caste System Charisma Citizenship Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Civic Engagement Civil Disobedience Civil Wars vii

viii   List of Entries

“Do No Harm” as a Code of Action Dogmatism Dominant Power Politics Drones Duverger’s Law on Elections Economic Judgment Economic-Based Voting Blocs Economics and Political Behavior Ecopolitics Egocentrism Egoistical Relative Deprivation Election Rigging Election Turnouts. See Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Electoral Systems Electoralism Elite Decision Making Elite Theory (Pareto) Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions and Voting End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) End of History Thesis for Corporate Law End to Terrorism, Theories of Energy Competition English-Only Movement Environmental Skepticism Equality of Opportunity Equity Theory Essentialism Ethics in Politics. See Political Morality Ethics of Political Behavior Ethnic Revival Ethnicity Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Ethnocentrism European Union Expected-Utility Model Extended Contact Extradition False Consciousness Fascism Feckless Pluralism Feminism First Ladies Followership and Personality Framing Effects Fraternal Deprivation. See Group Relative Deprivation Free Market Free Rider Problem F-Scale Functionalism Gender Bias Genetic Determinism. See Genetic Essentialism

Genetic Essentialism Genocide Gerontology, Sociopolitical Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff Globalization Governmentality Gray Political Organizations. See Advocacy Greed Versus Grievance Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership Group Ideologies Group Relative Deprivation Groupthink Hearts and Minds Approach Hegemony Heuristics Hierarchy of Needs Hostage Taking Human Duties Human Rights Human Trafficking Hybrid Regimes Hypocrisy Paradigm Identity Politics Images and Theory in International Relations Imagined Contact Immigration Implicit Association Test Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting Indoctrination Insurgency International Criminal Court International Humanitarian Law International Security Internet Jihadism Intractable Conflicts Irrationality Islam Versus Islamism Islamic State Jihad Judicial Appointments Judicial Review Just War Theory Justice Motive Keynesian Economics Language Death Legitimacy, Forms of Liberalism Life Cycle Effects Lobbying

List of Entries   ix

Locus of Control Lone Wolf Terrorism Machiavellianism Malthusian Cycle Management. See Crisis Decision Making and Management Maritime Terrorism Marxism Mass Communication Mass Political Behavior Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Media Framing Mediation Skills Meritocracy Migration Military Action Minority Voters Mission Statements Modernization Theory Moral Dilemmas Moral Hazard Morality and Politics Motivated Reasoning Multiculturalism Multilateralism Mutual Radicalization Name Order Narcissism Narcissistic Personality Inventory Narcoterrorism National Character National Language Nationalism NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Negative Peace Neoliberalism Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power New Left News, Television Non-Aligned Nations Nonviolence North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nuclear Taboo Obedience Oligarchy Omniculturalism Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Pacifism Parental Worldview and Children Parliamentarism Partisanship

Party Identification Party List Party Systems Patriarchy Patrimonialism Patriotism Peacemaking Personality Traits Persuasion. See Hearts and Minds Approach Physical Appearance and Political Candidates. See Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Pluralism Political Apologies Political Campaigns Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Political Crimes Political Deliberation Political Discourse Political Ideology Political Indoctrination Political Mandates Political Morality Political Participation Political Persuasion and Rhetoric Political Plasticity Political Psychologies of Terrorism Political Socialization Political Symbolism Politics After Tragedy Polling Positioning Theory Positive Peace Poverty Trap Powerlessness Praetorianism Prejudice Presidential Character. See Barber’s Typology of ­Presidential Character Presidentialism Pressure Groups Print Media Prisoner’s Dilemma Procedural Justice Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Profiling Proletariat and Capitalism Propaganda Prospect Theory Psychobiography Psychodynamic Theory Public Goods Public Opinion Race and Ethnicity Racism. See Symbolic Racism

x   List of Entries

Radicalization Rational Choice Rawls, John. See Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Realism Realistic Conflict Theory. See Conflict Theory, Realistic Reasoning, Motivated. See Motivated Reasoning Reconciliation Refugees Relative Deprivation Theory Religion-Based Voting Blocs Religiosity Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior Representative Democracy Resource Mobilization Retributive Justice Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution Risky Shift Ritual in Politics Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral Rule of Law Rural Voters Saber Rattling Self-Categorization Theory Self-Esteem Self-Help Ideology Selfish Gene Significance, Need for Similarity-Attraction Slavery in America Sleeper Effect Social Capital Social Categories Social Class Social Cognition Social Contract Social Darwinism Social Dominance Orientation Social Dominance Theory Social Identity Theory Social Influence Social Investment Theory Social Movements Social Networking Social Revolts Social Stratification and Inequality Social Welfare Socialism and Communism Sociobiology Source Bias “Spoiler” Effect in Politics Springboard Model of Dictatorship Stability-Instability Paradox Stag Hunt

State Development State-Sponsored Terror Stereotypes Strong President Model Suburban Voters Sultanism Symbolic Racism System Justification Talking Heads and Political Campaigns Term Limits Terror Management Theory Terrorism, Theories and Models Terrorist Networks Theories of Development. See Development, Theories of Theories of Terrorism. See Terrorism, Theories and Models Theories of Voting Behavior. See Voting Behavior, Theories of Third Party Tokenism Tolerance for Ambiguity Torture Totalitarianism Trafficking of Persons. See Human Trafficking Tragedy of the Commons Transitioning Fragile States Transitology Trust Unicameralism United Nations United Nations Security Council Universal Declaration of Human Rights Urban Voters Utopia Values Values and Politics Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Voter Disenfranchisement Voter Identification Voter Mobility Voting, History of Voting Behavior, Theories of Voting Blocs. See Economic-Based Voting Blocs; ­Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs; Religion-Based Voting Blocs Wars of Attrition Weber’s Protestant Ethic Women and Leadership Women’s Liberation Movement Youth and Political Change

Reader’s Guide The Reader’s Guide is provided to aid readers in identifying entries on related topics. It classifies entries into 11 general topical categories: (1) Cognitive Processes; (2) Group Identities and Influence; (3) Individual Political Behavior; (4) International/Comparative Perspectives; (5) Justice and Political Behavior; (6) Media, Discourse, and Communications; (7) Policies and Political Behavior; (8) Political Systems; (9) Security and Terrorism; (10) Social Political Movements; (11) Theories of Political Behavior; and (12) Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns. Entries may appear in multiple categories, and often do. Cognitive Processes

Assimilation Civil Disobedience Conflicts, Protracted Conformity Death of Leaders Deviance and Control Egocentrism Ethnic Revival Ethnicity Ethnocentrism Feminism First Ladies Gender Bias Genetic Essentialism Genocide Group Ideologies Groupthink Identity Politics Intractable Conflicts Mass Political Behavior Mutual Radicalization National Character Nationalism Nonviolence Obedience Patriotism Political Plasticity Political Psychologies of Terrorism Pressure Groups Race and Ethnicity Slavery in America Social Class Social Networking Social Stratification and Inequality Sociobiology

Attribution Theory Closure, Need for Collective Action Confirmation Bias Decision Making Hearts and Minds Approach Images and Theory in International Relations Insurgency Locus of Control Moral Dilemmas Morality and Politics Political Morality Political Plasticity Prejudice Risky Shift Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral Self-Categorization Theory Significance, Need for Similarity-Attraction Social Categories Social Cognition Source Bias Stereotypes Symbolic Racism Tolerance for Ambiguity Group Identities and Influence Activism Aggressive Capitulation Agonism American Exceptionalism xi

xii   Reader’s Guide

Values and Politics Women and Leadership Individual Political Behavior Attitudes Authoritarian Personality Authoritarianism Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Bully Pulpit Charisma Cognitive Dissonance Cyberactivism Economics and Political Behavior Emotions and Voting False Consciousness Followership and Personality F-Scale Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership Irrationality Lone Wolf Terrorism Machiavellianism Military Action Narcissism Narcissistic Personality Inventory Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Parental Worldview and Children Patrimonialism Political Plasticity Powerlessness Praetorianism Psychobiography Psychodynamic Theory Saber Rattling Self-Esteem Selfish Gene Sultanism Values and Politics International/Comparative Perspectives Allegiances Bandwagoning State Calculus of Dissent Civic Engagement Civil Wars Civilian Intervention Dependency Theory Economic Judgment Ecopolitics Energy Competition

European Union Free Market Globalization Hegemony International Criminal Court International Humanitarian Law International Security Judicial Review Language Death Migration Modernization Theory Multilateralism National Language Non-Aligned Nations North Atlantic Treaty Organization Political Crimes Poverty Trap Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior United Nations United Nations Security Council Universal Declaration of Human Rights Justice and Political Behavior Affirmative Action Anti-Semitism Biopolitics Blaming the Victim Command of the Commons Corruption Discrimination Distributive Justice “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action Equality of Opportunity Equity Theory Ethics of Political Behavior Free Rider Problem Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff Governmentality Greed Versus Grievance Human Duties Human Rights Judicial Appointments Just War Theory Justice Motive Moral Hazard Political Plasticity Procedural Justice Profiling Public Goods Retributive Justice Rule of Law

Reader’s Guide   xiii

Stag Hunt Tokenism Torture Tragedy of the Commons Utopia Media, Discourse, and Communications Art in Political Campaigns Assassinations/Violence in Politics Business in Politics Conspiracies Cyberactivism Cyberwar Diplomacy Dogmatism Hypocrisy Paradigm Mass Communication Media Framing Mediation Skills Mission Statements Mutual Radicalization Name Order News, Television Personality Traits Political Apologies Political Campaigns Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Political Deliberation Political Discourse Political Indoctrination Political Mandates Political Persuasion and Rhetoric Political Socialization Political Symbolism Politics After Tragedy Polling Print Media Propaganda Public Opinion Source Bias Talking Heads and Political Campaigns Policies and Political Behavior Caste System Citizenship Civil-Military Relations Counterinsurgency Crisis Decision Making and Management Defense Planning Deterrence and Crime Deterrence and International Relations

Districting End to Terrorism, Theories of English-Only Movement Environmental Skepticism Extradition Feckless Pluralism Hearts and Minds Approach Immigration Keynesian Economics Multiculturalism Negative Peace Omniculturalism Peacemaking Positive Peace Public Goods Reconciliation Refugees Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior Social Welfare “Spoiler” Effect in Politics State-Sponsored Terror Third Party Values and Politics Political Systems Bicameralism Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic Structure Capitalism Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Clientelism Competitive Authoritarianism Conservatism Corporatism Democracy Dictatorship Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Duverger’s Law on Elections Election Rigging Electoral Systems Electoralism Fascism Hybrid Regimes Islam Versus Islamism Marxism Oligarchy Parliamentarism Partisanship Patriarchy Political Ideology Presidentialism

xiv   Reader’s Guide

Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Proletariat and Capitalism Public Goods Representative Democracy Socialism and Communism Strong President Model Term Limits Totalitarianism Unicameralism Security and Terrorism al Qaeda Asymmetric Warfare Drones Hostage Taking Human Trafficking Islamic State Maritime Terrorism Mutual Radicalization Narcoterrorism Nuclear Taboo Political Psychologies of Terrorism Refugees State Development State-Sponsored Terror Terrorism, Theories and Models Terrorist Networks Transitioning Fragile States Wars of Attrition Social Political Movements Alienation Biopolitics Brand Identification and Loyalty Cyberactivism Gerontology, Sociopolitical Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Internet Jihadism Islam Versus Islamism Jihad Mutual Radicalization Neoliberalism Pluralism Political Plasticity Radicalization Ritual in Politics Self-Help Ideology Social Darwinism Social Influence Social Movements Social Revolts

Values Values and Politics Women’s Liberation Movement Youth and Political Change Theories of Political Behavior Absolutism Bellicism Clash of Civilizations Conflict Theory, Realistic Contact Theory Counter-Elite Development, Theories of Dominant Power Politics Egoistical Relative Deprivation Elite Decision Making Elite Theory (Pareto) End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) End of History Thesis for Corporate Law End to Terrorism, Theories of Essentialism Extended Contact Functionalism Group Relative Deprivation Imagined Contact Indoctrination Legitimacy, Forms of Liberalism Malthusian Cycle Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Meritocracy Nationalism New Left Pacifism Positioning Theory Prisoner’s Dilemma Realism Relative Deprivation Theory Resource Mobilization Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution Sleeper Effect Social Contract Social Dominance Orientation Social Dominance Theory Social Identity Theory Social Investment Theory Springboard Model of Dictatorship Stability-Instability Paradox State-Sponsored Terror System Justification Terror Management Theory Terrorism, Theories and Models

Reader’s Guide   xv

Transitology Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Voting Behavior, Theories of Weber’s Protestant Ethic Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns Advocacy Allocation Blue-Dog Democrats Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Decision Making Disengagement Economic-Based Voting Blocs Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions and Voting Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Expected-Utility Model Framing Effects Heuristics Hierarchy of Needs Implicit Association Test Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting

Life Cycle Effects Lobbying Minority Voters Motivated Reasoning Party Identification Party List Party Systems Political Participation Political Plasticity Prospect Theory Rational Choice Religion-Based Voting Blocs Religiosity Rural Voters Social Capital Suburban Voters Trust Urban Voters Voter Disenfranchisement Voter Identification Voter Mobility Voting, History of Voting Behavior, Theories of

M The Origins of Machiavellianism

Machiavellianism

The idea that Machiavellianism can be treated as an aspect of personality originates in the work of psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis, which was conducted during the 1960s and 1970s. They built on work by social scientists like Theodor Adorno, who, in the aftermath of World War II, sought to identify psychological characteristics associated with seeking and retaining power. Christie and Geis were particularly interested in whether employment conditions, which at that time were being influenced by an increasing pace of organizational change, were increasing the likelihood that “Machiavellian” managers would succeed in the workplace. They proposed the idea that people vary in their willingness to engage in manipulation and powerseeking behavior (i.e., Machiavellianism) and that these differences would therefore influence behavior in work and other contexts. In order to test their propositions, Christie and Geis embarked on a program of research aimed at developing a scale that could reliably assess Machiavellianism. This began with Richard Christie identifying and extracting 71 statements from Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses that could be used as items on a questionnaire that respondents could agree or disagree with (e.g., “it is wise to flatter important people” and “never tell anyone the real reason you did something unless it is useful to do so”), and in a subsequent series of social psychological studies (described by some as a showcase example of successful attitude scale construction), Christie and Geis established the validity and ­reliability of Machiavellianism as a psychological construct. This work resulted in the 20-item Mach IV scale, now the most widely used questionnaire for discriminating between individuals’ propensity to engage in manipulative behavior and Machiavellian tactics.

Machiavellianism is a psychological construct that has been studied for more than 40 years. It refers to a personality trait (i.e., a relatively stable and defining feature of an individual) that is characterized by a person’s propensity to engage in cunning and manipulation in order to achieve their political ends. Machiavellianism is important in the context of political behavior, because it has been found to influence the way individuals behave at work and in political roles.

Overview Born in 1469 in Renaissance Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian author, historian, and ­ ­politician. Now recognized as a founder of modern political science, Machiavelli wrote his book The Prince to help the young prince Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici acquire techniques of leadership, and more than half a millennium later, it continues to provide insight into strategies for acquiring, accumulating, and leveraging power. In more recent decades, social scientists have studied Machiavellianism, a psychological construct inspired by and named after Machiavelli that differentiates between people in their propensity to seek, acquire, and wield power. The following sections provide an introduction to the development of Machiavellianism as a personality construct, an ­ overview of findings from research investigating ­ Machiavellianism and political behavior, and work conceptualizing Machiavellianism as one of a “dark triad” of personality traits capable of explaining ­dysfunctional leadership. 455

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Machiavellianism

There are now a substantial number of studies that have used the Mach IV scale. These have found that people who score highly on Machiavellianism ­(Hi-Machs) typically have a less conventional view of morality and show lower levels of empathy; they are therefore more willing to manipulate, lie, and exploit others in order to achieve personal goals. In contrast, people who score low on Machiavellianism (Lo-Machs) prefer to accommodate others, are usually more easily persuaded than Hi-Machs, and tend to be more idealistic and moral. In their research, Christie and Geis found no relationship between Machiavellianism and cognitive ability, class, nationality, or sex, although more recent work has found that men score higher than women. Interestingly, Christie and Geis did find a correlation with age, with younger respondents generally scoring higher on Machiavellianism than older ones.

influence, are generally more rational than sensitive, and concentrate on winning. They therefore are less likely to focus on ideals and more on getting things done. Similarly, higher levels of Machiavellianism might be a distinct advantage in roles that require ruthless determination to achieve goals. That said, evidence that high Machiavellianism is beneficial for the individual himself or herself is less conclusive. A recent meta-analysis found a small negative correlation between employee Machiavellianism and job performance. Moreover, researchers have pointed out that although Hi-Machs might be very willing to manipulate and deceive people, they may not necessarily have a superior ability to do so. As such, Machiavellianism may be moderated by other individual characteristics like empathy, political skill, and experience.

Machiavellianism in the Workplace

Machiavellianism and Political Leadership

Although the relationship between Machiavellianism and political behavior has been explored in many different settings, most research has looked at the impact of Machiavellianism on workplace behavior. For example, studies have found that employees who score high on Machiavellianism tend to engage in more office politics. Other studies show that Hi-Machs are more likely to make unethical decisions and use deceit to influence others at work and are less likely to demonstrate ­organizational citizenship behavior. Hi-Machs also tend to see their work environment as more political than Lo-Machs, possibly because manipulation and opportunism are more personally salient activities that make Hi-Machs more inclined to interpret actions and events in political terms. Not surprisingly, Machiavellianism is often seen as a “dark” and disruptive personality characteristic that has mostly negative consequences for other people. Certainly leaders who are rated more Machiavellian by followers are also more likely to be perceived as politically oriented and less concerned about other people or motivated by prosocial values. However, Machiavellianism can have more positive consequences for the Machiavellian actor. For example, their greater willingness to use influence tactics and engage in political behavior may help Hi-Machs to facilitate the political connections that make it easier to secure resource-rich positions, including opportunities to control others. Indeed, some researchers have also questioned the generally negative modern portrayal of Machiavellian leaders as manipulative and immoral. They suggest that many of the tactics described by Machiavelli are not only less dreadful than commonly assumed but also potentially very useful. For instance, Hi-Machs tend to resist social

The popular television series House of Cards bears witness to stereotypes of political leaders as highly ­ Machiavellian in their use of covert influence tactics, manipulation, and deceit to acquire and retain power. It is therefore not too surprising that researchers have also been intrigued by the significance of Machiavellianism for effective political leadership. Unlike studies of Machiavellianism in the workplace, many of which ask employees at lower organizational levels to rate their own Machiavellianism, leaders—and especially political leaders—are notoriously reluctant to disclose information that might portray them in a negative light. As a consequence, most studies of political leaders have asked observers to rate the Machiavellianism of wellknown public leaders or used histriometric methods to code evidence of Machiavellian behavior and decision making from sources like historical biographies and political speeches. One of the first people to do this was Dean Simonton, in his study of 39 American presidents. Seven raters coded a range of biographical materials for each of the presidents using 300 personality descriptors listed in the Gough Adjective Checklist. Subsequent analysis of the data revealed 14 personality factors, one of which, “Machiavellianism,” included the descriptors: sly, deceitful, unscrupulous, evasive, shrewd, and greedy (which loaded positively) and sincere and honest (which loaded negatively). When he compared ratings for each of the presidents with other biographical and performance data, Simonton found a positive correlation between Machiavellianism and the total number of acts passed during a president’s administration as well as the number of legislative victories, both of which suggest a positive relationship with political effectiveness. In

Malthusian Cycle

terms of background, presidents who had attended law school were also rated more Machiavellian. Subsequent researchers have also looked at whether Machiavellianism is positively associated with charismatic leadership among American presidents. This has involved asking undergraduate students to assess 39 anonymized presidential profiles using an adaptation of the Mach IV, then comparing average scores for each president with archival measures of presidential effectiveness. This research has also found a positive correlation with charismatic leadership, suggesting that Machiavellianism may be useful, because it helps presidents depersonalize decision making, become more detached, and act confidently when advancing their goals. Although self-report data from political leaders is rare, one study asked local politicians (i.e., legislators in local government) to complete the Mach IV and then compared their self-rated Machiavellianism with anonymized performance data for these politicians provided by their political colleagues and employed officers as part of a leadership development program. The researchers found that politicians who rated themselves high on Machiavellianism were also judged more secretive and likely to engage in politicking by their colleagues. These politicians also described themselves as more likely to engage in political “blood sports.” However, high Machiavellianism was associated with being judged less effective as a legislator, and the researchers suggest that politically astute individuals may well be more aware of the disadvantages of being seen to engage in Machiavellian tactics. Thus success in political contexts may well depend on being skilled at using Machiavellian tactics in more subtle or covert ways that are less easy to observe.

Machiavellianism and the “Dark Triad” Since 2000, interest has been growing in the relationship between Machiavellianism and the personality traits narcissism and psychopathy. Together these three traits are commonly referred to as the Dark Triad—or “dark personality”—and are conceptualized as occupying the middle ground between normal personality and clinical-level pathology. According to researchers, all three traits contribute in varying degrees to creating a socially malevolent character who may be predisposed to self-promotion, duplicity, coldness, and aggression. While there is considerable evidence that these represent independent facets of personality, there is some indication that together they may prove especially ­disruptive— particularly for others around them. As relatively little research has investigated the Dark Triad in relation to the emergence of and consequences for political behavior, it presents an intriguing opportunity to further

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understand the impact of Machiavellianism in politics and work. Joanne Silvester See also Attitudes; Authoritarian Personality; Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character; Corruption; Dictatorship; Followership and Personality; Narcissism; Personality Traits; Values

Further Readings Biberman, G. (1985). Personality and characteristic work attitudes of persons with high, moderate and low political tendencies. Psychological Reports, 57, 1303–1310. Christie, R., & Geis, F. L. (1970). Studies in Machiavellianism. New York: Academic Press. Deluga, R. J. (2001). American presidential Machiavellianism: Implications for charismatic leadership and rated performance. Leadership Quarterly, 12, 339–363. Drory, A., & Gluskinos, U. M. (1980). Machiavellianism and leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 65, 81–86. Grams, W. C., & Rogers, R. W. (1990). Power and personality: Effects of Machiavellianism, need for approval, and motivation on use of influence tactics. Journal of General Psychology, 117, 71–82. Machiavelli, N. (1961). The Prince (G. Bull, trans.). London: Penguin. [Original work published in 1531]. O’Boyle, E. H., Jr., Forsyth, D. R., Banks, G. C., & McDaniel, M. A. (2012). A meta-analysis of the dark triad and work behavior: A social exchange perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97, 557–579. Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556–563. Silvester, J., Wyatt, M., & Randall, R. (2014). Politician personality, Machiavellianism, and political skill as predictors of performance ratings in political roles. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 87, 258–279. Simonton, D. K. (1986). Presidential personality: Biographical use of the Gough Adjective Check List. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 149–160.

Malthusian Cycle Malthusian cycles are political-demographic cycles that were typical for complex premodern societies. Due to a number of mechanisms, within the premodern social systems (and some would argue even in the 21st century), population growth tended to produce a set of imbalances and strains, eventually resulting in politicaldemographic collapses and substantial population

Malthusian Cycle

decline. After stabilization, the population growth usually restarted—marking the beginning of a new ­ Malthusian political demographic cycle. This entry provides an overview of elements of the Malthusian cycle dynamics, a consideration of its political aspects, a summary of theories and mathematical models that have been advanced to explain the Malthusian cycles, and a discussion of the escape from the Malthusian trap and its political consequences.

Overview The main assumptions of the original theory of Thomas Malthus (formulated in 1798) is that the population multiplies geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16…), whereas the production of food grows arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4…). In modern academic language, the same idea is usually expressed in a slightly different way—the exponential growth of population is accompanied by the lineal increase in the production of the means of subsistence. As a result, according to Malthus, the population growth outstrips the food supply, leading to the decline of living standards to the bare survival level (this effect is also known as the “Malthusian Trap”). Note that further academic research has demonstrated that in some respects, the Malthusian assumptions are true but only with very significant qualifications. Premodern human populations tended to grow exponentially (but only in conditions of the absence of any significant resource limitations), and such a growth tended to be accompanied by a quasi-lineal economic growth (due to Ricardo’s “Law of Diminishing Returns”). However, in premodern social systems (due to very slow rates of technological growth), the absence of significant resource limitations could not continue for long. Malthusian economic demographic dynamics resulted in the decline of the standards of ­living of the majority of population to a bare survival level, growth of mortality and—consequently—to the slowdown of the population growth rates. Thus, in Malthusian systems, the population growth cannot ­continue exponentially for long. This was noticed already in 1838 by Pierre François Verhulst, who demonstrated that in Malthusian systems, population grows not exponentially but logistically, as described by the logistic mathematical model (1) proposed by him: dN N = r(1 − )N , dt K

The dynamics generated by this model are shown in Figure 1. Logistic growth represents growth with saturation, which gives the following dynamics: accelerating growth rate at the beginning of the process is replaced by a slowdown in growth and the stabilization of ­population just below K level (whereas a sort of quasiexponential growth is only observed at the initial phases of the process). Verhulst’s description of the Malthusian population dynamics is much more realistic than the one proposed by Malthus himself and has served as a basis of mathematical population biology to the present day. On the other hand, it can be applied only to complex Malthusian social systems, with very serious reservations. In practice, the population approaching the carryingcapacity ceiling implies very serious decline of living standards, and in complex Malthusian systems, this would result not in population stabilization but in sociopolitical destabilization, state breakdown, and political-demographic collapse. Thus, the basic logic of the Malthusian cycle looks as follows: after the population reaches the ceiling of the carrying capacity of land, its growth rate declines toward zero values, and the system experiences significant stress with a sharp decline of living standards of the majority of the population, increasing severity of famines, growing rebellions, and political instability. Most complex agrarian systems had considerable reserves for stability; however, within 50 to 150 years these reserves usually got exhausted, and the system experienced a political-demographic collapse, when increasingly severe famines, epidemics, increasing internal warfare, and other disasters led to a considerable decline of population. As a result of this collapse, free resources became available, per-capita production and consumption increased again, the population growth resumed, and a new demographic cycle started. Sergey A. Nefedov provides the following verbal description of the Malthusian political-demographic 350,000 300,000 250,000 Population

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200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000

(1)

0

0

50

100

150

Time (years)

where N is population, r is rate of natural growth in total absence of resource limitations, and K is m ­ aximum carrying capacity.

Figure 1  Dynamics Generated by Logistic Model Note: r = 0.04, K = 300,000, and N0 = 5,000.

200

250

Malthusian Cycle

cycles. Every demographic cycle starts with a recovery phase, which is characterized by the presence of vacant land, population growth, increase in cultivated areas, and construction of new settlements as well as reconstruction of earlier settlements (destroyed during the preceding political-demographic collapse), low bread prices, high cost of labor, low rents, a relatively high level of consumption, limited development of cities, crafts, and usury. After exhausting the resources of free land, the “compression” phase begins; this phase is characterized by the lack of available land, high land prices, peasant land shortages, the ruin of peasant proprietors, the spread of usury, high rents, growth of large estates, low per-capita calorie intake by the general population, decline in real wages, low cost of labor, high bread prices, frequent reports of famine and natural disasters, suspension of population growth, migration of the impoverished peasants to the cities where they try to make a living by crafts and petty trade, the growth of cities, the development of crafts and trade, a large number of unemployed and the poor, food riots and rebellions, the intensification of popular movements under the banner of property redistribution and social justice, attempts to carry out social reforms to alleviate the plight of the people, irrigation works, incentive policies for colonization and emigration, and eventually external wars to acquire new lands and reduce demographic pressure. Ultimately, the growing disproportion between population and available food resources leads to political-demographic collapse; this period is characterized by famine, epidemics, riots and civil wars, external invasions, destruction of large masses of population (demographic catastrophe), destruction or desolation of many cities, the decline of handicrafts and trade, the high price of bread, low land prices, destruction of a significant number of large land owners and redistribution of wealth, social reforms, in some cases having revolutionary scope. Note that this verbal model specifies a number of direct and indirect indicators that can be used to identify political-demographic cycles and their phases. Using such indirect data, as well as his system of qualitative indicators of various phases of demographic cycles, Nefedov and Turchin have managed to detect more than 40 political-demographic cycles in the history of various ancient and medieval societies of Eurasia and North Africa. Thus they demonstrated that the demographic cycles are not specific to Chinese and European history only but should be regarded as a general feature of complex agrarian system dynamics.

Demographic Structural Theories of Malthusian Cycles Jack Goldstone has proposed a demographic structural theory of political-demographic cycles that has been

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further developed by Peter Turchin. Within this theory, political-demographic collapses are explained not as direct results of overpopulation but rather through indirect influences of population growth on the sociopolitical structures. First, Goldstone notes that the population growth in excess of the productivity gains of the land leads to the growth of staples’ prices that exceeds an agrarian state’s possibilities to increase its revenues. On the other hand, the growth of population leads by itself to the increase of an agrarian state’s expenses. Usually, an agrarian state could not find any other way to answer these problems but to raise taxes, notwithstanding the resistance of both elites and commoners. However, due to Malthusian economic demographic dynamics, these attempts fail to compensate for explosively growing expenses. Thus, even the increase in taxes could not prevent a fiscal crisis that turn out to be a logical result of the Malthusian cycle. Second, fast population growth is accompanied by an even higher growth of the elite population (who tend to have higher levels of reproductive success). Thus the number of aspirants for elite positions in the state apparatus grows even faster than the total population, which leads to further growth of financial strains as the elite apply serious pressure upon the state in order to increase the number of elite positions. In addition, this leads to the growth of the competition within elites for the elite positions and, hence, to the splits within the ruling class. Third, the population growth leads to the growth of rents, impoverishment of peasants, migration to cities, decline of real wages, bread riots, and mass discontent. Fourth, rapid population growth leads to the expansion of youth cohorts. This part of the population is most inclined to radicalism and suffers especially from the lack of employment opportunities. In addition, this part of the population is especially well mobilized for various revolts, rebellions, and civil wars. Fifth, the growing elite competition and popular discontent leads to the development of ideological conflicts, producing ideological “banners” for future ­ rebellions. According to Goldstone, all these tendencies lead to the state breakdown that triggers an all-out politicaldemographic collapse, after which a new cycle would develop.

Political-Demographic Cycles in the Premodern Islamic Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Premodern political-demographic cycles display a very considerable regional variability. By now, special attention has been paid to the study of the political

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demographic cycles in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa that differed in a very substantial way from the ones in the other premodern civilizations. The carrying capacity in the premodern Middle East is shown to have grown considerably higher than the population, whereas the population growth was significantly slower than throughout the world system ­(outside the Middle East). This phenomenon could be at least partly accounted for by the mechanisms of political-demographic cycles typical for the Islamic Middle East. Medieval Middle Eastern political-demographic cycles had a rather short length (approximately 90 years). During the relatively short Middle Eastern political-demographic cycles, population simply had not enough time to reach the carrying capacity of land. Political-demographic collapses took place well before the population reached the carrying capacity level, and the Medieval Middle East suffered from underpopulation rather than overpopulation. The population of medieval MENA fluctuated well below the carrying capacity. Thus the political-demographic cycle models that connect demographic collapses with the ecological niche saturation and that describe rather well politicaldemographic dynamics of premodern China do not appear appropriate for the medieval Middle East. Hence, it might not be a coincidence that the mathematical model that appears to be more appropriate for describing the political-demographic dynamics of the medieval MENA than the rest of the models is the one that was developed by Turchin in an attempt to formulate in a mathematical form some part of the theory of Abd al-Rahmaˉn Ibn Khalduˉn (1332–1406). Note that Ibn Khalduˉn spent his life just in the medieval MENA region. Turchin developed two “Ibn Khalduˉn models,” within which political-demographic collapses are produced not by actual overpopulation but rather by elite overpopulation. Elite overproduction can take place in a generally underpopulated country (or at least in a country whose population is still significantly below the saturation level). Hence, these models suggest a direction within which the political-demographic dynamics of the medieval MENA could be adequately described. However, these models fail to describe adequately the political-demographic dynamics of the medieval MENA. Though Turchin’s models were no doubt inspired by Ibn Khalduˉn’s treatise, Turchin moved rather far from the original Ibn Khalduˉn’s theory in the process of the model development, and thus, not so much of it survived in the final versions of the ­models. It has been shown that in order to produce a mathematical model describing the medieval MENA

political-demographic dynamics in a more accurate way, it makes sense to try to follow Ibn Khalduˉn’s theory more closely. Ibn Khalduˉn’s observations on the role of climatic fluctuations as an important factor of political-­ demographic dynamics appear to be of special interest. It has been shown that by taking them into consideration, it is possible to develop the basic mathematical model that describes the medieval MENA politicaldemographic dynamics more accurately. As in Turchin’s extended model, in the basic model of the medieval MENA political-demographic cycles, the increase of the natural elite growth rate leads to a decline in the length of the political-demographic cycles, whereas its decrease results in the lengthening of those cycles. Thus, it turns out to be possible to produce the model that describes rather adequately the basic features of medieval European political-demographic dynamics through the decrease by four times of the MENA natural elite growth rate coefficient (which would correspond to the strictly monogamous reproduction context typical for all the medieval European Christians, including the elites). One of the main simplifying assumptions of the basic model is that the technologically determined carrying capacity of land is assumed to be constant. In reality, of course, it was not a constant but a variable with a pronounced long-term upward trend dynamic. This trend is conditioned by technological innovations whose intensity also tends to grow. In this way, this variable is treated in our extended model, which makes it possible to investigate numerically the influence of the “secular cycle” structure on the “millennial” economic and demographic trends. The extended model also takes into account the “Boserupian” effect—such that relative overpopulation creates powerful stimuli for generating and introducing innovations that raise the carrying capacity of land. The numerical investigation of this model suggests that within the European (monogamous) versions of the model, subsistence technologies do tend to develop faster than they do within the MENA (polygynous) versions. The comparison of population at cycle peaks indicates that, within the MENA model, population tends to approach the ceiling of the carrying capacity of land to a much smaller degree than is observed within the European version of the model. It is remarkable that within the MENA model, a significant increase in the carrying capacity could take place without parallel demographic growth. What is more, for considerable periods of time, the growth of carrying capacity can be accompanied by a certain population decline, which appears to have been actually observed for certain parts of medieval MENA history.

Malthusian Cycle

It has been shown with respect to Egypt that the closest fit with the actually observed long-term politicaldemographic dynamics in the 1st to 18th centuries CE is observed when one brings the model closer to the Egyptian history realities. This allows us to take into consideration the fact that during the aforementioned period covered, one observes the transition from strictly monogamous elites to elites who practiced polygyny in a rather extensive way. This model provides a ­mathematical description of the phenomenon that has been detected through the analysis of the economicdemographic dynamics of Egypt in the 1st to 18th centuries: significant increases in the carrying capacity of land were accompanied by a comparatively insignificant population growth. Thus, such models suggest possible ways to account for this phenomenon.

Escape From the Malthusian Trap and “a Trap at the Escape From the Trap” Malthus is often called a “prophet of the past,” and this statement is not without certain grounds. His theory described rather accurately the demographic and economic dynamics of complex agrarian societies caught in the Malthusian trap (in fact, these were the only societies known to Malthus). However, a true historical paradox was that precisely in that very time when Malthus formulated his famous theory and in that very country where he did this, we could observe the start of the first successful escape from the Malthusian trap. It was in Britain immediately after Malthus that the Malthusian theory first stopped working. Britain in the 19th century (and, soon after, many other Western European countries) stepped on the path of modern economic growth and successful modernization. Counter to Malthus’s expectations, they managed to achieve a more or less sustainable economic growth far exceeding the population growth rate. In fact, this led to a significant decline of mortality rates (which was later named “the first phase of demographic transition”) and hence to a dramatic increase of population growth rates. But successful modernization allowed Western Europe (and its offshoots) to increase the economic growth rates over population growth rates. Contrary to Malthus’s expectations, in the 19th century, the explosive growth of the Western European populations was accompanied by even faster economic growth, which allowed them to escape the Malthusian trap, in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. This escape was finalized by the second phase of the demographic transition characterized by a sharp fertility decline, which finally eliminated the risk of the population growth to exceed the economic growth rate. Afterward, the Western European escape from the Malthusian trap

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was followed by almost all the other regions and countries of the world, and by now the only macro-region of the world where the risk of Malthusian collapses remains substantial is tropical Africa. However, paradoxically, the very escape from the Malthusian trap tends to systematically generate serious political upheavals. The emergence of major sociopolitical upheavals following escape from the Malthusian trap is not an abnormal but a regular phenomenon, as discussed in what follows. The start of the escape from the Malthusian trap tends to bring about a precipitous death rate decline and, consequently, an explosive acceleration of the population growth rates (which in itself can lead to a certain increase in sociopolitical tensions). The start of the escape is accompanied by especially strong decreases in infant and under-age-5 mortality, which raises the proportion of youth in the overall population (and especially in the adult population)—the so-called youth bulge. This increases sharply the proportion of the part of population most inclined to radicalism. The explosive growth of the young population requires the creation of enormous numbers of new jobs, which is a serious economic problem. The youth unemployment growth can have a particularly strong destabilizing effect, creating an “army” of potential ­ participants for various political upheavals, including civil wars, revolutions, and state breakdowns. Escape from the Malthusian trap stimulates a vigorous growth of the urban population. Besides, ­ excessive population is pressed out from the countryside by the growth of agricultural labor productivity. Massive rural-urban migration almost inevitably creates a significant number of those dissatisfied with their current position, as initially most of the rural-urban ­ migrants can only get unskilled, low-paid jobs and low-quality accommodation. Escape from the Malthusian trap is achieved through the development of new economic sectors as well as declines of the old sectors. Such structural changes cannot proceed painlessly, as many workers have skills that are no longer valued and are obliged to take up lowpaying, unskilled jobs, which makes them socially discontented. The young people make up the majority of ruralurban migrants, so the “youth bulge” and intensive urbanization factors act together, producing a particularly strong destabilizing effect. Not only does the most radically inclined part of the population rocket up in numbers, but it also gets concentrated in major cities/ political centers. This can result in serious political destabilization even against the background of a rather stable economic growth. The probability of political destabilization naturally increases dramatically if an

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economic crisis occurs or if the government loses its legitimacy owing to any other causes (such as military defeats). Andrey Korotayev See also Civil Wars; Modernization Theory; Radicalization; Social Revolts; Social Stratification and Inequality; State Development; Youth and Political Change

Further Readings Chu, C. Y. C., & Lee, R. D. (1994). Famine, revolt, and the dynastic cycle: Population dynamics in historic China. Journal of Population Economics, 7(4), 351–378. Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world. Berkeley: University of California Press. Korotayev, A., & Khaltourina, D. (2006). Introduction to social macrodynamics: Secular cycles and millennial trends in Africa. Moscow, Russia: KomKniga/URSS. Korotayev, A. V., Malkov, S. Y., & Grinin, L. E. (2014). A trap at the escape from the trap? Some demographic structural factors of political instability in modernizing social systems. History & Mathematics, 4, 201–267. Korotayev, A., Malkov, A., & Khaltourina, D. (2006). Introduction to social macrodynamics: Secular cycles and millennial trends. Moscow, Russia: KomKniga/URSS. Korotayev, A., & Zinkina, J. (2015). East Africa in the Malthusian trap? Journal of Developing Societies, 31(3), 385–420. Korotayev, A., Zinkina, J., Kobzeva, S., Bozhevolnov, J., Khaltourina, D., Malkov, A., & Malkov, S. (2011). Demographic-structural factors of political instability in modern Africa and West Asia. Cliodynamics, 2(2), 276–303. Lee, H. F., & Zhang, D. D. (2010). Changes in climate and secular population cycles in China, 1000 CE to 1911. Climate Research, 42(3), 235–246. Malthus, T. (1798). An essay on the principle of population, as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers. London, England: St. Paul’s Church-yard. Nefedov, S. A. (2004). A model of demographic cycles in traditional societies: The case of ancient China. Social Evolution & History, 3(1), 69–80. Nefedov, S. A. (2013). Modeling Malthusian dynamics in preindustrial societies. Cliodynamics, 4(2), 229–240. Ricardo, D. (1817). On the principles of political economy and taxation. London, England: John Murray. Turchin, P. (2003). Historical dynamics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Turchin, P., & Korotayev, A. (2006). Population density and warfare: A reconsideration. Social Evolution & History, 5(2), 121–158. Turchin, P., & Nefedov, S. (2009). Secular cycles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Verhulst, P.-F. (1838). Notice sur la loi que la population suit dans son accroissement. [Instruction on the law that the population follows in its growth.] Correspondance mathématique et physique, 10, 113–121. Usher, D. (1989). The dynastic cycle and the stationary state. American Economic Review, 79, 1031–1044.

Management See Crisis Decision Making and Management

Maritime Terrorism Maritime terrorism includes any violent act with political ends against “ships, cargo and passengers, ports and port facilities and critical maritime infrastructure” (European Commission, 2014). The Asia Pacific (CSCAP) Working Group has offered an extensive definition that includes “. . . the undertaking of terrorist acts and activities within the maritime environment, using or against vessels or fixed platforms at sea or in port, or against any one of their passengers or personnel, against coastal facilities or settlements, including tourist resorts, port areas and port towns or cities” (quoted in Chalk, 2008, p. 8). These definitions, although not globally accepted, nonetheless contribute to the better understanding of the threat and form the basis to further discuss and debate the nature, typology, and implications of the phenomenon. As of 2015, less than 2% of the recorded international terrorist attacks were of maritime nature. Until 2008, the RAND terrorist database suggested that of the 40,126 terrorist attacks recorded between 1968 and 2007 worldwide, only 136 occurred in the maritime domain. However, because terrorist tactics are unpredictable and highly dependent on innovation and surprise, the international community considers the risk very high and the potential of more maritime terrorist attacks to occur quite likely. Four different types of maritime terrorism can be identified based on two criteria: the use of the maritime space and the selection of target. The first refers to the utilization of the maritime space as the medium through which terrorist attacks could be launched against land-based targets. An example of such a major attack is the Mumbai bombings that took place on November 26, 2008. Ten terrorists in inflatable speedboats disembarked in the port and ­carried out a series of 12 coordinated attacks.

Maritime Terrorism

The second type includes the use of ships to support capacity building for terrorist groups. An example is the incident of the vessel Karine A, which was seized in the Red Sea on January 3, 2002, transporting armaments for strikes against Israel. The third type includes the hijacking of seagoing ­vessels and hostage taking of the passengers by terrorists for use as a negotiation tool to achieve their political goals. Several maritime terrorism incidents of this type have been witnessed; the infamous hijacking of the Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean is perhaps the most well known. The incident occurred on October 7, 1985, when the Palestinian Liberation Front seized the ­Italian-flagged cruiser off the Egyptian coast and held 511 passengers as hostages, demanding the release of Palestinian fighters from Israeli jails. A wheelchair-bound Jewish American passenger was killed and then pushed overboard during the incident. In another similar incident, Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Abu Nidal Organization launched an attack against the Greekflagged cruiser City of Poros on July 11, 1985. The ship was hijacked near the coast of the island of Aegina. Nine tourists were killed, and another 98 were injured. The fourth and perhaps most obvious type involves terrorist attacks against seagoing targets of high status, which can be understood as a symbolic challenge and trauma to great powers’ prestige and dominance. The two more significant incidents of this type took place off Yemen in 2000 and 2002, respectively. More precisely, on October 12, 2000, the U.S. guided missile destroyer USS Cole was struck by an anchor-handling skiff loaded with explosives in a suicide attack in the port of Aden. The casualties were 17 dead and 39 wounded, but beyond the significant death toll, it was the first time ever that a symbol of U.S. military power suffered such an unprecedented hit at sea by a terrorist group. Furthermore, on October 6, 2002, again off Yemen, the French oil tanker M/V Limburg was attacked. This was another symbolic attack of terrorist groups at sea, against the Western exploitation of natural resources and economic dominance. Although only one crew member was killed, there was an enormous ecological catastrophe, with almost 100,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden. Al Qaeda took responsibility for both the aforementioned attacks. Another significant maritime terrorism attack took place in Manila Bay off Corregidor Island on February 27, 2004, and the perpetrator was Abu Sayaf; it was the bombing on Super Ferry 14, which killed 116 people, making it probably the maritime terrorist act with the highest number of casualties ever. In the past six years, there has been only one significant terrorist incident against a vessel; on July 27, 2010, the oil tanker M/V M

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Star was attacked in a similar way as USS Cole when a speedboat driven by a suicide bomber crashed into it at the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in injuring one crew member. An al Qaeda-affiliated group, Abdallah Azzam Brigades, took responsibility for the incident. The above typology has been developed on the basis of incidents and attacks which have actually occurred. However, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against the United States, several scenarios have been considered that could have devastating implications. These scenarios include, for example, the use of a merchant vessel beyond suspicion to transport a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) in a major port or the deliberate sinking of a similar vessel to close a choke point and disrupt primary sea lanes of seaborne trade and maritime transportation. Scenarios of this kind moved the international community to act proactively and develop conventions, such as the Suppression of Unlawful Acts (SUA) Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation and the International Ship and Port Facility (ISPS) code, in order to enhance port security and implement robust maritime security governance. Yet the successful implementation of these conventions requires higher levels of international cooperation and compliance at the global level; their adoption has definitely been a significant step forward, but their efficiency and sufficiency remains to be seen. Math Noortmann and Ioannis Chapsos See also Political Psychologies of Terrorism; Terror Management Theory; Terrorism, Theories and Models; Terrorist Networks

Further Readings Chalk, P. (2008). The maritime dimension of international security: Terrorism, piracy, and challenges for the United States. RAND Corporation. http://www.rand.org/pubs/ monographs/2008/RAND_MG697.pdf European Commission Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council. (2014, March 6). For an open and secure global maritime domain: Elements for a European Union maritime security strategy. Available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1395676 070971&uri=CELEX:52014JC0009 Guy, P. (2011). Maritime terrorism. Centre for Security Studies Occasional Paper 2. Hull, UK: University of Hull. Hoffman, B. (2006). Inside terrorism (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lutz, F., Roell, P., & Thiele, R. (2013). Maritime security— perspectives for a comprehensive approach. ISPSW Strategy Series, No. 222, April 2013. Nincic, D. (2012, July 16). Maritime terrorism: How real is the threat? Fair Observer. Available at: https://www.fairobserver. com/region/north_america/maritime-terrorism-how-real-threat/

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Marxism

Marxism The Great Recession that commenced in 2008 and the failure of the economies of the most advanced capitalist countries to have fully recovered have put the Marxist alternative on the table in a way not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The lack of consensus among mainstream economists about what’s ailing capitalism is equally responsible for that opening. Yet its defenders argue there is no alternative to capitalism; everything else that’s been tried has failed. The Marxist project, in particular, they allege, was problematic from the beginning. This entry considers the claim of the supposedly flawed origins of Marxism. Its focus, therefore, is not restricted to what has been done in the name of “Marxism.” Not long before his death in 1883, Karl Marx recognized the growing misuses of his ideas, prompting him to have said famously—according to his partner Friedrich Engels—that if this is “Marxism,” then “I am no Marxist.” What, then, did Marx understand his project to be, and what happened to it after his death? To answer those two questions, Engels, who outlived Marx by 12 years, is treated as integral to the project, which was first and foremost political; that the two were closely joined politically at the hip is undeniable.

The Structure/Logic of the Capitalist Mode of Production Most striking about the beginning of the Great Recession of 2008 was how the actions of so few, maybe a handful or two of Wall Street investors, affected the fortunes of so many—globally. The private-property basis of capitalism, its veritable foundation, made that possible. That the majority couldn’t vote on the decisions of the few revealed its inherently undemocratic character. It was just that issue, how to realize the ­“sovereignty of the people,” or “true democracy,” that set the young Marx (b. 1818) in monarchical Germany on the course to communist conclusions. Two hundred years earlier, the most radical party in the English Civil Wars had reached similar conclusions, namely, that only with the end of class society could real democracy be realized. Marx’s trajectory was informed by the lessons he drew about the other side of the Atlantic. Instructive about the United States was that, unlike Europe, it began without the baggage of a feudal past. Yet within a few generations, sharp class distinctions had emerged, and not just those associated with chattel slavery. Inequalities in wealth led ineluctably to inequalities in political outcomes. At the same time, the United States

was clearly the most politically liberal country in the Atlantic world. How to explain, then, the discrepancy between political democracy and class inequality? If the United States was the best that political democracy had to offer, then clearly something else was required to realize the “sovereignty of the people.” Marx’s new intellectual partner in 1845, Engels (b. 1820), thought that an examination of political economy might provide the answer to what had emerged in the United States. The logic of market relations combined with private ownership of the means of production revealed a tendency toward the increasing concentration of wealth and all the negatives for democracy. Was there a solution to this problem? ­Political developments in Europe suggested an answer. Capitalist relations of production had brought into existence a new class of toilers, the proletariat. Not only did they, like other toilers such as the peasantry, have a class interest in ending social inequality, but they uniquely had the capacity to actually do so. Marx’s earliest findings on the political economy of capitalism were published in the Communist Manifesto that he, then 29, and Engels, then 27, composed in 1848. Capitalism was a mode of production unlike any other in history; it created unprecedented wealth, more “than have all preceding generations together.” A “constant revolutionizing of production,” as they put it, that penetrated “every quarter of the globe” led to “universal interdependence of nations” unlike ever before. The result, also, was the commodification of everything (e.g., today’s for-profit higher education). But the “constant revolutionizing” meant that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”; consider the collapse of the venerable 158-year old New York investment firm Lehman Brothers in 2008. Capitalism was “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” It conjured up “crises” because occasionally it produced too many goods and services for the market to bear—“overproduction” (e.g., too many houses in 2007). Capitalism was the first mode of production in which a crisis was due not to scarcity but rather having too much—not for human needs but for the market. Only under capitalism can the phenomenon of too many houses and homelessness coexist in the same time and place. Subsequent research, which Marx distilled in his magnum opus, Capital, in 1867 (and later volumes that Engels edited), provided an explanation for overproduction and thus the boom-and-bust character of the capitalist mode of production. The “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” over time, due to the increasing substitution of machinery for “living labor,” the real source of surplus value and, thus, profits, necessitated more

Marxism

output to compensate for the decline. Hence, also, capital’s constant drive to lower wage costs. As a hedge, the investment in paper values, what Marx called “fictitious capital,” with often higher returns than in the production of goods and services, would increasingly hold sway; consider today’s multitrillion-dollar credit-default swap market. Such investments inevitably bred speculative bubbles, “fits of giddiness” as Marx called them— another destabilizing feature of capitalism. The unplanned anarchistic/private-property basis of capitalism meant that overproduction could only be discovered in hindsight, when it was too late. Those who subscribe to Marx’s thesis about falling profit rates argued that the 1974–1975 and 1981–1982 recessions spelled the beginning of the end of the postWorld War II boom that had lifted the standard of living of most workers in advanced capitalist countries. It was only a matter of time before working-class resistance would begin to build. Wage rates have indeed been stagnant or declining since then. What was not anticipated, particularly in the case of the United States, was the extent to which the capitalist state, through the Federal Reserve Bank, would enable the use of credit to perpetuate the American dream for many workers— through credit cards and/or their houses as a source of cash, like an automated teller machine. That all came to a virtual halt in 2008 (except, interestingly, for student loans), with only a partial rebound since then. The resistance so far has mainly taken the electoral road, as exemplified by the 2016 candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. That both campaigns have an echo in many other advanced capitalist countries testifies to the systemic nature of the crisis.

The Agency of the Working Class Once Marx and Engels (hereafter M&E) discovered the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, they were obligated to link up with them. As Marx had put it in his Theses on Feuerbach in 1845, it was not enough to have interpreted the world; it was necessary to change it. That required action and organization. A political party, the Communist League, and a theoretical statement for its orientation, the Communist Manifesto, were the most immediate products of that connection. The Manifesto, contrary to a frequent charge, never claimed that socialist revolution was inevitable. A close reading of the entire document makes this clear. What it declared was that once classes emerged millennia ago, the class struggle was inevitable; its outcome in terms of winners and losers, however, was not. The document was intended, exactly for that reason, to give the working class a better-than-even chance in achieving success. The word “inevitable” (unvermeidlich in the original)

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appears only once and is immediately followed by instructions about how the proletariat should conduct itself in the class struggle to be victorious. If victory was inevitable, there would have been no need for the Manifesto. Neither, as is often alleged, did the document ignore the state and forms of governance. The Manifesto was informed by the premise that the prerequisite for the socialist revolution was the bourgeois democratic revolution. This is why Engels could convincingly say four decades later in response to a critic who made a similar charge: Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat. (M&E, Collected Works [hereafter, MECW], vol. 27, p. 271)

The document was put to the test of the class struggle hardly before its ink had dried. The 1848–1849 revolutions, the “European Spring,” proved to be M&E’s baptism of fire. When it became clear, however, that the upsurge was ebbing, M&E and other comrades retreated from the battlefield in Germany and relocated in London. In anticipation of a renewal of the struggle, the immediate task was to draw a balance sheet and prepare for the next round. The key lesson of the German theater of the ­European Spring was that the liberal bourgeoisie could not be counted on to advance the democratic revolution; the Manifesto held open that possibility. With whom, then, could Germany’s still-small working class ally itself for the expected revival of the revolution? M&E’s “Address of Central Authority to the League, March 1850,” spoke to that very question. The alternative to the liberals was the petit bourgeoisie, but it too had prevaricated during the 18-month upheavals. Therefore, to avoid betrayal, the worker’s movement had to be organized “independently,” a word that appears on almost every one of the document’s 11 pages. An alliance with the petit bourgeoisie was just that and not unity. The document’s call for workers to have their own government, their own slate of candidates in elections, and their own militia in the next upsurge anticipated and arguably served as the playbook for the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Another address by M&E 4 months later pointed to the peasantry as another potential ally—also in anticipation of Lenin’s strategy. Marx’s most famous balance sheet on the European Spring was his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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(1852), about the French theater of action. Among its many insights is his trenchant opening thesis: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Thus, Marx’s answer to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism or, as it would later be called, agency versus structures. After the decade-long lull in the class struggle, it was the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) that brought Marx back into active political work, in defense of the Union against the slave-holding Confederacy. His assessment of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, the beginning of the abolition of slavery, ­brilliantly illustrated his point about agency and structures. ­“Lincoln’s place in the history of the United States and all of mankind will . . . be next to that of Washington.” Lincoln was a sui generis figure in the annals of history: He is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian . . . an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. . . . The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this ­demonstration that, given its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world. (MECW, vol. 19, p. 250)

Opportunities for upward mobility in the United States, in combination with political structures and contingency, made it possible for someone like Lincoln, of humble background, to do what he did—which could not have happened in Europe. Marx’s return to active politics enabled his quick ascent in 1864–1865 to become the de facto head of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), or First International, giving him international prominence for the first time. His indefatigable effort to make independent working-class political action the hallmark of the organization’s program—the key lesson of the European Spring—helped to spawn what became Europe’s mass working-class political parties. When the working class in Paris in 1871 rose up in an attempt to take power for the first time—the Paris Commune—Marx penned the most popular work in his lifetime, The Civil War in France (1871). Written on behalf of the IWA, it defended the insurgents. Though drowned in blood, the Commune taught a profound lesson, prompting M&E to make their only correction to the Manifesto. “One thing especially was proved by the Commune . . . the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purpose” (MECW, vol. 23, p. 175). The

bourgeois republic, in other words, could not be a vehicle for socialist transformation—a lesson either ignored or unknown by many a worker’s movement party ever since and, tragically, to their peril. The most notable recent casualties, arguably, are the Syriza Party in Greece and the Worker’s Party in Brazil. The Commune revealed that a new kind of state was needed for such a transformation—a lesson Lenin would seize upon. As the mass working-class parties in Europe began to emerge, later forming the Socialist or Second International, M&E realized that they needed to mount another struggle—against reformism and its twin ­malady “parliamentary cretinism.” The belief that capitalism could be reformed rather than gotten rid of (the former) and that work in the parliamentary arena was the be-all and end-all of politics (the latter) contradicted M&E’s most basic positions. They mounted, beginning in 1879, a campaign against both tendencies, specifically in the German party. Two related practices needed to be nipped in the bud. One, the growing tendency to give more weight to the party’s members in parliament over its rank and file; the other, the support that the parliamentary group lent to prime minister Otto Bismarck’s state-centric policies. About the latter, Engels declared, “Social-Democratic deputies must always uphold the vital principle of consenting to nothing that increases the power of the government vis-à-vis the people” (MECW, vol. 45, p. 424). Only in hindsight would it be clear that M&E were unsuccessful on both counts. Twentieth and twentieth-first century social democracy—what U.S. senator and 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders identifies with—instantiate both tendencies, with all the problematic consequences for the working class that M&E foresaw. Consider, for example, the unpopular labor reform laws enacted in 2016 by the Socialist-led government in France, which enable corporations more easily to move jobs offshore and increase workers’ hours without overtime pay. Toward the end of their lives, M&E looked eastward. “Russia,” they wrote in 1882 in the preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto, “forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.” And their youth were exemplary, as Engels noted in 1872: “As far as talent and character are concerned, some of these are absolutely among the very best in our party. They have a stoicism, strength of character and at the same time a grasp of theory which are truly admirable” (MECW, vol. 44, p. 396). But a Russian revolution was inextricably linked to the class struggle in Europe. Such an overturn, Engels opined 18 months before his death in 1895, would “give the labor movement of the West fresh impetus and create new, better conditions in which to carry on the

Marxism

struggle, thus hastening the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, without which present-day Russia can never achieve a socialist transformation” (MECW, vol. 27, p. 433). Contrary, therefore, to all future Stalinist distortions of M&E’s views, Russia could “never achieve a socialist transformation” without a socialist revolution in the West.

Marxism After Marx and Engels What gave Russian youth such a “grasp of theory” is that they, unlike their counterparts in Western Europe, were deeply immersed in the laboratory of the class struggle—and, thus, more likely to test M&E’s ideas. The sclerotic 300-year old Romanov dynasty was on its deathbed from at least the last quarter of the 19th century, increasingly unstable and fraught with rebellion such as the 1905–1907 revolution—the beginning of the end of the monarchy. And no Russian epitomized Engels’s foresight about their youth as did Lenin (1870– 1924). His also-prescient point made in 1901 that unless the revolutionary movement already had a party in place, it would be “too late to form the organization in times of explosion and outbursts; the party must be in a state of readiness to launch activity at a moment’s notice” (Lenin. Collected Works [LCW], vol. 5, p. 18). That was the premise for his famous and often misunderstood pamphlet a year later, What Is to Be Done? Systematic party building, which included Lenin’s decade-long work in the electoral and parliamentary arenas in Russia between 1905 and 1915, goes a long way toward explaining Bolshevik ascent in 1917. Lenin’s playbook was none other than M&E’s “Address of March 1850.” His main task that year was to make the case—through “patient explaining”—that the representative governance practiced by the workers, soldiers, and peasant councils—that is, soviets—were a form of representative democracy superior to the parliamentary forms with which they competed for influence and, ultimately, state power. Soviets in his view were akin to the Paris Commune that Marx had lauded in his Civil War in France, a new kind of state form required for socialist transformation. Lenin’s preparatory work (in combination with mass opposition to the carnage of the First World War) was also decisive in explaining the relative ease with which the Bolsheviks could lead workers and peasants to power on October 25, 1917—for the first time in the annals of the class struggle. Never did Lenin claim that the conquest meant that socialism had been instituted in Russia. Like M&E, he knew that an economically underdeveloped country like Russia was incapable of such a transition without the assistance of at least a major advanced capitalist country in Western Europe whose workers had taken state power; that never happened. What existed in the

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Soviet Union, as stated in Lenin’s final pronouncement in 1922, was, in sobering terms, “a worker’s state with bureaucratic distortions” (LCW, vol. 32, p. 48). The Soviet Union was, at best, a provisional model until “the victory of the proletarian revolution in at least one of the advanced countries” (LCW, vol. 31, p. 21). About a recently drafted blueprint for a model communist party, it was “too Russian,” wrote Lenin, and aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere “cannot be content in hanging it in a corner like an icon and praying to it” (LCW, vol. 33, p. 431). From his sickbed in 1922–1923, he mounted his last and ultimately unsuccessful fight against the increasing bureaucratization of the revolution led by Joseph Stalin (1878–1953). Lenin’s final stroke in March 1923 ended that effort. It was Stalin, Lenin’s successor, who, after having jailed or assassinated virtually every other leading Bolshevik, and having mummified and iconized Lenin, declared in 1936 socialism’s triumph in the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), Lenin’s second in command in the 1917 revolution, vehemently disagreed. From exile, he provided later that year the most convincing Marxist explanation for what had gone wrong with the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky’s thesis was that Stalinism, with all its deadly consequences (including the degradation of the environment), constituted a counterrevolution in which the bureaucracy usurped political power that had momentarily been in the hands of Russia’s workers and peasants after October 1917. (For a contemporary analogy, consider Egypt’s “Arab Spring,” prematurely ended by a new military dictatorship.) The debilitating toll of the civil war, in which the United States and Allied powers participated against the Soviet government, and the failure of the revolution to spread westward were the necessary if not sufficient reasons for that overturn. For a moment, between 1918 and 1923, socialist revolution in Germany seemed like a possibility. Fascism was bred on the ashes of those demoralizing missed opportunities. In his Mexican exile in 1940, Trotsky, who foresaw and sought to deter the fascist threat, was murdered by one of Stalin’s many assassins, a fate similar to that of other Bolsheviks. By 1928, Stalin had consolidated his rule in the Soviet Union. That was when the largest number of aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere, mostly fledgling ­parties, affiliated with the Communist or Third International based in Moscow. That embrace meant, as Trotsky put it, that they were “doomed to degeneration.” Rather than “Marxism,” or “Marxism-Leninism” as they assumed, they actually imbibed Stalinism in one form or another with all the tragic consequences. Except for the few nuclei that traced their origins to the Bolsheviks via Trotsky, no other current in the world that claimed to be “Marxist” escaped the degenerating

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influence of Stalinism (the one exception arguably resides in Cuba, for a unique set of circumstances)— explaining why virtually none of them has been able to take advantage of the current capitalist crisis. And that capitalism’s well-being now depends on the economic performance of a Stalinist party in power, in Beijing, speaks volumes about this unprecedented and unforeseen world-historic moment. To claim, therefore, that the Marxist project has never succeeded is to assume that it was actually realized somewhere. Nothing in the entire corpus ­ of writings of M&E and Lenin sustains such a claim. The burden of proof is on those who think Stalin knew better to explain why. Again, the still-unfolding crisis of global capitalism and the inability of its policy-makers to offer solutions mean that Marxism can get a hearing not seen since the last major economic crisis, the Great Depression. The response in the United States to the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, a self-styled socialist—but who the Manifesto would have labeled a “bourgeois socialist”—registers that fact. A truly meaningful hearing, however, will require knowledge of the real ­ Marx and Engels, not some caricatured or defanged version, and what happened to their project after their deaths—as this essay is intended to aid and abet. August H. Nimtz See also Capitalism; Democracy; Dictatorship; Political Ideology; Proletariat and Capitalism; Social Stratification and Inequality

Further Readings Lenin, V. I. (1976). Collected works [LCW]. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1975–2003). Collected works [MECW]. New York, NY: International Publishers. Nimtz, A. H. (2000). Marx and Engels. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nimtz, A. H. (2003). Marx, Tocqueville, and race in America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Nimtz, A. H. (2014). Lenin’s electoral strategy (2 vols.). New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan. Roberts, M. (2016). The long depression. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Mass Communication Although researchers and pundits describing mass communication sometimes focus on the type of ­technology involved (e.g., newspaper or television), a productive way to consider mass communication involves audience.

Mass communication involves the presentation and interpretation of information among a large, relatively heterogeneous audience, typically as a result of an effort by a professional organization. For much of the 20th century, mass communication efforts involved a single entity reaching many people with information, or a oneto-many model of communication; in the 21st century, new communication technologies facilitate many-tomany communication as well. The one- (or few-) tomany aspect of mass communication separated the phenomenon from other forms of mediated ­communication, such as person-to-person telegrams or telephone calls. The introduction of Internet-based technologies and what are now called social media sites, such as Facebook or Twitter, means that it is now possible for a message to go from one person to many people without content originating from a formal organization, per se, although we can continue to distinguish between a conversation among a dozen friends and the spread of a message among a million people who mostly do not know each other directly. Because mass communication functions to offer surveillance information to a geographically dispersed society, political behavior and mass communication have been intertwined in many countries for hundreds of years; mass media coverage of a speech in a capital city can reach voters thousands of miles away through a television broadcast or via the Internet. Examples in the political arena include the broadcasting of political addresses and opposition responses; propaganda films; political opinion columns in newspapers; syndicated (that is, broadcast in multiple markets) and satellite political talk radio; magazine coverage of political topics and figures; and webcasts of “extra” content, such as interview footage. This entry broadly describes the development of mass communication, with reference to political behavior and examples from the United States.

History of Mass Media Newspapers were the first medium to provide regularly scheduled information cheaply to large numbers of people. They could reliably deliver strategic messages as well as update readers on recent developments. In the 1700s and early 1800s, many American newspapers were allied to political parties, which helped to cover their expenses. By the mid-1800s, a more commercial model was common in which newspapers sought advertisers. Under either model, however, a newspaper’s reach was limited by the speed of the press and the logistics of getting copies to readers. Magazines became popular in the second half of the 1800s, in many cases published weekly or monthly and aimed at a specific market (e.g., homemakers or bicyclists) but with the same kind of economic limitations. Presses were a

Mass Communication

significant capital expense, and there was fierce competition for readers and revenue, limiting the number of newspapers and magazines serving any particular market. At the turn of the 1900s, motion pictures developed. They quickly became popular entertainment, which in some cases had political intentions (for example, the film Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith) but nonetheless required time and capital to produce, making them unsuited for daily information updates. Motion pictures also required dedicated equipment and real estate for presentation to the public. The investment necessary to produce and distribute motion pictures tended to limit the number of movie studios, and the competition for viewers tended to limit the number of movie houses in any particular location. By the 1920s, radio could nearly instantaneously transmit news and entertainment to masses of people at the same time. It did not take a great deal of equipment to set up, and inexpensive radio sets proliferated in homes. American listeners did not have to pay to listen once they’d paid for their sets, so they listened throughout the day—but that meant that revenues had to come from advertisers. Signals could travel only within a certain range, and so stations were limited by the ability of audiences to receive their programming and the ability of stations to find sponsors that wanted to place messages in those specific geographical regions. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, the British Broadcasting Service is funded through an annual licensing fee paid by consumers, although non–BBC stations run on an advertising-based business model. Television, appearing on the American landscape in the mid- to late 1940s, was more expensive to produce, and the electronic spectrum on which stations could broadcast had by this time become regulated by the government. American television markets and business models grew in the footprint of radio with over-the-air broadcasters, and so again, the number of television broadcasters was limited. By the 1960s, pundits were debating the role of visual broadcasts of debates in determining election outcomes such as the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential contest in the United States. From approximately 1950 to the mid-1980s, the mass media market described earlier—newspapers/ magazines, movies, radio, and television—was financially stable. In each case, the newspaper, studio, or network produced essentially the same output for all of its customers on the one-to-many model. Substantial formative work on theories of mass communication was done during this period, such as Donald Shaw’s and Maxwell McCombs’s theory of agenda-setting (1972), which holds that mass media coverage in a market tends to determine what issues people feel are

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important, although the coverage may not reliably determine exactly how people feel about those issues. Other theories of effects of mass media with implications for politics include priming (the process by which a message causes a mental concept to come to mind in the receiver); media framing (efforts by a communicator to determine what aspects of an issue are uppermost in the mind of the receiver); and the notion of the spiral of silence (when an issue receives relatively less coverage in the media, causing supporters to think it has less support, so they are less vocal about it, and therefore it receives even less coverage, and so on). In the 1980s, the emergence of cable television first began to fracture stable media markets in the United States. Cable television delivered by satellite had been available since the 1970s, but because the spectrum it occupied was much wider than the over-the-air signal then being used by the networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC), it was possible for many kinds of channels to be offered. Channels arose offering only Christian programming or only news or only pop music videos. By the 1980s, niche programming was a viable business model in demand in major markets. The other major mass media developments of the 1980s were the spread of videocassette recorders and rise of personal computing. Videocassette recorders allowed people to time-shift their consumption of mass media for the first time and to fast-forward or edit out commercials. These were not market-shaking developments at the time, but they were indicators of what people would do with technology when they got the chance. Videocassette recorders (and later digital video recorders and digital video disc players) also opened a tremendous in-home market for motion pictures separate from theatrical release. The rise of personal computing was not in and of itself a major driver of mass behavior, but the presence of computers in homes meant that when the Internet became available in the 1990s, people were equipped to take advantage of it. The emergence of the Internet offered a vast store of information (and misinformation) and interaction possibilities for political engagement.

Mass Media Versus Niche Media and Demographics A typical commercial approach for decision making by mass media institutions has been to be everything to everybody. The Super Bowl is a good example: Super Bowl advertising is colossally expensive because it is one time during the year that an advertiser is guaranteed attention from a broad cross-section of the entire United States population. Niche programming works differently; it gets a much smaller audience, but by appealing to that audience’s interest, it gets more of it.

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By specializing in (for example) Christian programming or news or pop music, an advertiser knows more and more about the audience he or she is paying for, enabling that advertiser to sell the audience more and more product. From the advertiser’s view, the outlay is smaller and the rate of return on investment higher.

Mass Media and Politics in the Internet Age In terms of mobilization of populations, either for the purpose of getting people to vote for particular candidates or to engage in particular government initiatives, mass media offer a potentially powerful tool for politicians and political organizations. Organizations can pay to produce advertising campaigns and can purchase time and space to ensure that those advertisements reach intended audiences. Not all researchers and professional observers accept the notion that such campaigns have predictable effects, however, and there is long-standing debate on the actual potential for political advertising campaigns to influence audiences. Beyond formal advertising campaigns, numerous other types of mass communication content are relevant to political behavior. Television news programming, for example, has reached large audiences in countries like the United States for decades, and coverage of a political movement or political candidate holds potential to reach many viewers. Recent structural changes in the nature of news programming in many countries also are relevant to this topic. When a media corporation is in the business of being everything to everybody, it cannot afford to offend large segments of its audience. The programming it generates must appeal to the broadest possible swath of listeners/readers/viewers if the network is to be profitable. Extremes are forsaken in the interest of holding onto the attention of as many audience members as possible. When audience members can go online to get news and entertainment not available in their market, however, the traditional grounding of mass media in that geographical market becomes less relevant. People consume more media, and that consumption drives further programming decisions. Extreme presentations and formats that draw attention away from other programming can become profitable. This pattern, in turn, could affect political discourse.

Social Media Versus News Media When audience members can log onto a listserv, social media site, or other Internet connection and communicate with people anywhere at any time, traditional news media become less important. People who hold views unrepresented in the mass media can get reinforcement unavailable in their morning paper, during their morning drive, or on their evening news show. Smaller or less

represented groups of people can become more vocal and come to greater prominence than they would have, for example, in the days of only three communications networks in the United States. A downside of traditional news media’s becoming less important is the diminishing depth of coverage by traditional journalists. In a democracy, traditional news coverage has the important function (or at least goal) of holding the powerful to account. In a market economy, such coverage has the important function of providing accurate information by which people can make informed decisions. In light of that notion, decline in the size of news audiences in various markets in the current media environment remains a concern for many professionals, researchers, and pundits. Jeannette H. Porter and Brian G. Southwell See also Media Framing; News, Television; Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of; Political Discourse; Print Media; Propaganda; Talking Heads and Political Campaigns

Further Readings Anderson, C. (2008). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more (1st pbk. ed.). New York, NY: Hyperion. Chaffee, S. H., & Metzger, M. J. (2001). The end of mass communication? Mass Communication & Society, 4, 365–379. McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of the mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, 176–187. McLeod, D. M., Kosicki, G. M., & McLeod, J. M. (2009). Political communication effects. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed.; pp. 228–251). New York, NY: Routledge. Noelle-Neumann, E. (1984). The spiral of silence: Public opinion—our social skin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Perloff, R. M. (2015). Mass communication research at the crossroads: Definitional issues and theoretical directions for mass and political communication scholarship in an age of online media. Mass Communication and Society, 18, 531–556. doi:10.1080/15205436.2014.946997 Starr, P. (2004). The creation of the media: Political origins of modern communications. New York, NY: Basic Books. Wright, C. R. (1986). Mass communication: A sociological perspective. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill College.

Mass Political Behavior Mass political behavior is the study of how average citizens form and express opinions about politics and

Mass Political Behavior

decide how to engage with the political system through voting or other forms of political participation. Political scientists interested in mass political behavior have drawn on a variety of disciplinary approaches to understand the topic, including history, economics, sociology, and more recently, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. Political psychologists interested in understanding mass political behavior have applied social psychological theories of attitudes, emotion, social cognition, and social identity to help improve our understanding of political behavior. This entry provides a brief overview of how psychology has been used to study public opinion, voting behavior, and political participation.

Public Opinion Public opinion is the study of political attitudes in the aggregate, focused on measuring how the public feels about policy issues. The study of public opinion is often based on large-scale survey data collection, with a focus on understanding the following aspects of public opinion: direction, stability, intensity, and salience. Direction refers to the extent to which the public supports or opposes a given policy issue, while stability focuses on the extent to which public opinion remains stable over time. Intensity is an indicator of how strong people’s attitudes are, or how important the issue is to them. Finally, salience refers to the extent to which the issue is at the forefront of political discussion and debate. Elected officials are most likely to pay attention to public opinion when public opinion has a clear direction (the public either supports or opposes the issue), is stable over time, and is high in intensity and salience. The traditional view of public opinion in political science is that it is mainly the product of socialization, whether that involves influence from family, peers, or social organizations. More recently, political scientists have also begun to examine biological and genetic explanations for political attitudes. The conscientiousness and openness facets of personality, for example, have been found to be correlated with political ideology while also being associated with the expression of particular genes. Psychological approaches have focused on understanding how political attitudes may be tied to core values or underlying needs and goals.

Voting Behavior One of the key forms of mass political behavior that political scientists have been interested in trying to explain is voting behavior, both in terms of explaining voter turnout (whether people decide to vote in any given election) and vote choice (who someone decides to vote for). Voter turnout in the United States has

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historically been low relative to turnout in a number of other democracies, for a variety of reasons. From a rational choice theory perspective, voter turnout has been explained as the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis. From this view, it may not be necessary to vote if one thinks that his or her vote will not really influence the outcome of the election or if voting is viewed as unnecessarily difficult, such as having to register to vote in advance of an election or show proper identification in some states. Psychologically speaking, people may choose not to vote if they are disengaged from politics or fail to perceive a meaningful choice between candidates. Scholars of mass political behavior are also interested in explaining vote choice, or which candidate someone decides to vote for when they do vote. Historically, it was assumed that citizens made this decision on the basis of the issues—examining where parties or candidates stood on the issues that were most important to them and voting accordingly. Over time, research has shown that psychological factors also impact vote choice, and perhaps to a greater degree than the traditional view of voting as the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis. People often vote based on political party identification, which can serve as a useful voting heuristic or mental shortcut. People form attachments to political parties (e.g., Democrats, Republicans), and these attachments can lead them to vote for candidates who share their political identity. Research has increasingly shown that people pay attention not just to issues but to candidate personality traits (e.g., competence, trustworthiness) and physical appearance. Recent work has even shown that people can make fairly accurate snap judgments of these traits in others just by viewing a picture of a face.

Political Participation Political scientists interested in mass political behavior have also been interested in the study of political participation more generally, understanding why people engage in a variety of forms of participation (not just voting). Other types of political participation might include attending a rally or a protest, contacting an elected official, or volunteering in one’s local community. Historically, this work has focused on demographic variables as a way to explain who participates in politics. Individuals higher in socioeconomic status, for example, are more likely to participate, perhaps because they have higher levels of education, more disposable income, and more free time. Political sophistication, or possessing a high level of political knowledge, also tends to predict higher levels of participation. More recent work has shown that psychological factors are relevant here, too. It is important to understand

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what motivates people to engage in political action. Recent work has suggested that factors like political trust (how much you trust the government) and political efficacy (whether you think your behavior will make a difference) are important here. People may be more likely to engage in traditional forms of political participation (voting, contacting an elected official) when both trust and efficacy are high. If trust in government is low but efficacy is high, people are more likely to engage in nontraditional forms of participation such as protest. If they perceive their efficacy as low, people are less likely to participate in any form. Ingrid J. Haas and Stephen P. Schneider See also Economics and Political Behavior; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Party Identification; Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of; Political Ideology; Political Participation; Political Socialization; Public Opinion; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American voter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Delli Carpini, M. X., & Keeter, S. (1996). What Americans know about politics and why it matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Lodge, M., & Taber, C. S. (2013). The rationalizing voter. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Zaller, J. R. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Land, water, food, energy, and shelter—scarce material resources are critical to the survival of any social group. Without securing scarce material resources for their group, group members may lose their capacity to satisfy their basic physical needs for nourishment and become susceptible to threats from their natural environment. Given the basic necessity of acquiring essential material resources, rational theories of intergroup materialism in social and political psychology propose that conflict arises between social groups when they must compete for the same scarce material resources. These theories assume that people are rational and engage in intergroup conflict and competition as a

strategy for maximizing their group’s resource supply. Such a perspective is appealing because it can be intuitively applied to many real-world intergroup conflicts. For example, the 2003 war between the United States and Iraq is considered by some political analysts to have been a dispute over oil, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and Palestine is often viewed as a dispute over territory. Rational perspectives of intergroup materialism are also appealing because they provide a practical means for reducing intergroup conflict. Indeed, if conflict occurs between groups because of competition over scarce resources, then intergroup harmony may arise when cooperation rather than competition is needed to achieve desired superordinate goals shared by both groups. For example, a reduction of intergroup conflict is often seen in intergroup politics when different subgroups within a larger nation set aside old differences when they must work together in order to resolve a novel threat posed to their superordinate national group by other outside groups or by natural and economic disasters. This entry examines two highly influential rational theories of intergroup materialism: realistic conflict theory and game theory. First, classic experiments that provide support for these two frameworks are highlighted, and their implications for real-world intergroup relations are discussed. Next, a more psychological perspective of intergroup materialism is reviewed, which challenges rational intergroup theories of materialism. The entry concludes with an evolutionary perspective designed as an integration of rational intergroup ­theories of intergroup materialism with psychological theories of intergroup materialism.

Rational Perspectives of Intergroup Materialism Realistic Conflict Theory Realistic conflict theory (RCT) proposes that conflict between groups arises when in-group members perceive that intergroup competition is needed in order to acquire desired and limited material resources for their in-group. Thus, the root cause of conflict is the intergroup structure that requires groups to compete for scarce resources. The psychological processes associated with RCT, including ethnocentrism and negative stereotypes, are the consequences not the cause of intergroup conflict. Precisely because of its rational and intuitively appealing underpinnings, RCT has had a major impact not only in the political domain but also in the related areas of organizational behavior and intergroup relations more generally. Equally important for the appeal

Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives

of RCT is that its principles point to the implementation of superordinate goals as a clearly defined strategy for resolving intergroup conflict. RCT proposes that intergroup conflict can be diminished when group members perceive that intergroup cooperation is necessary for achieving superordinate goals that are coveted by both groups. Psychologist Donald Campbell was one of the first scholars to formally describe the principles of realistic conflict theory. However, RCT became most widely recognized through a series of experiments conducted by Muzafer Sherif. Between 1949 and 1954, Sherif and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments with boys attending summer camp. In the initial stage of these experiments, boys were divided into two groups and engaged in cooperative intragroup activities as a means of developing a cohesive in-group culture. Next, the two groups were placed in a competitive intergroup context, in which the two groups had to compete with each other for points (scarce material resources) that could be used to acquire prizes desired by each group. It was during this stage of the experiment that serious intergroup hostility erupted between the two groups. Critically, however, in the third stage of the experiment, Sherif was able to diffuse the intergroup tension by having both groups cooperate in order to achieve superordinate goals as a means of acquiring desired resources for their groups. The process of cooperating together on superordinate goals was so powerful that by the end of the experiment, the members of both groups preferred being mixed together rather than remaining in their separate groups. In sum, the Sherif camp experiments provided powerful evidence for the proposition that intergroup conflict stems from the necessity of intergroup competition, while positive intergroup relations arise from the need for intergroup cooperation. With respect to real-world intergroup relations, RCT suggests that in order to diffuse an intergroup conflict, it is necessary to remove group members’ perceptions that they must compete with the other group for scarce resources. Furthermore, a potentially powerful strategy for inducing positive relations between groups is to introduce a superordinate goal that requires the cooperation of both groups. A striking real-world application of superordinate goals for reducing intergroup conflict has been youth soccer programs in Israel that involve both Palestinian and Israeli children forming mixed teams and working together in order to achieve the superordinate goal of enjoying and mastering the game of soccer. Realistic conflict theory is both theoretically and practically useful because it provides valuable insights into what factors may induce conflict (intergroup competition) and reduce conflict (intergroup cooperation).

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A potential limitation of RCT, however, is that it does not specify what factors naturally promote either competition or cooperation between groups in the first place. Indeed, in the Sherif camp experiments, it was the camp counselors and not the group members themselves who initiated either intergroup competition or intergroup cooperation. These limitations have been partially addressed by game theory.

Game Theory Game theory is a broad research domain that uses decision-making games as a means of examining what contextual factors may promote individuals or groups to adopt either cooperative or competitive strategies in order to acquire scarce material resources. The most commonly used paradigm is the Prisoner’s Dilemma game; a two-person, non–zero-sum, mixed-motive game. The game is designed such that if both players choose to cooperate, then both players do well. If both players choose to compete, then both players do poorly. However, if one player competes while the other cooperates, the player who competed will reap the largest possible payoff, while the player who cooperated will receive the worst possible payoff. The game is a non–zero-sum game because it is possible for both players to gain, for both players to lose, or for one player to gain while the other player loses. The game is a mixedmotive game because both cooperative and competitive strategies have potential benefits and costs to the player. When communication is not possible between players, participants tend to assume that the game is a competitive game and take on competitive strategies. However, when discussion is permitted between players or when the game is presented to players as a cooperative game, players become more likely to favor cooperative strategies. Research using the Prisoner’s Dilemma game highlights how the nature of the social context appears to be a key determinant of whether people adopt cooperative as opposed to competitive strategies. Initially, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game was used to model competition and cooperation in dyads. More recently, Nir Halevy and Gary Bornstein and colleagues have developed the intergroup prisoner’s dilemmamaximizing difference game (IPD-MD) to model both intragroup and intergroup competition/cooperation simultaneously in intergroup contexts. The IPD-MD game is played between members of two groups, with each group consisting of three players. Group members are given an initial endowment of 10 monetary units. Each player then chooses how much of their endowment to assign to either a within-group pool or a between-group pool. Additionally, players have the option of holding on to some or all of their endowment.

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For each monetary unit a player assigns to the withingroup pool, each player within the in-group, including the player who donated, makes a gain of one monetary unit. Adopting this strategy is referred to as in-group love. For each monetary unit a player assigns to the between-group pool, each player within the in-group makes a gain of one monetary unit; however, each member of the out-group also loses one monetary unit. Adopting this strategy is referred to as out-group hate. Finally, for each monetary unit kept by a player, that player makes a personal gain of two monetary units, however, other in-group members will make no gain. This strategy is referred to as a selfish or egoistic strategy. In the IPD-MD, the strategy that yields the most resources for each individual player is for all members in both groups to engage in in-group love. However, if players are motivated to maximize the relative difference between their in-group and the out-group, they may engage in out-group hate. Critically, however, engaging in out-group hate can lead to very destructive consequences for members of both groups. Indeed, if all the players in both groups engage in out-group hate, then all members of both groups will gain zero monetary units. Although complex, the IPD-MD highlights both the importance of intragroup cooperation within groups (in-group love) and the potentially disastrous consequences of intergroup competition between groups (out-group hate). Experiments utilizing the IPD-MD indicate that in general, people favor in-group love over out-group hate. On average, people assign less than 10% of their endowment to the between-group pool and assign 50% to 70% of their endowment to the within-group pool. It is primarily in intergroup contexts in which in-group members are given information that the out-group had previously engaged in out-group hate that in-group members also begin to favor a hateful strategy toward the out-group. In summary, game theory research using the IPDMD provides an optimistic and rational perspective of intergroup relations. In general, groups do not seem motivated to compete with out-groups per se; rather, they are simply motivated to maintain and grow their own group’s supply of scarce material resources. It is only in social contexts in which group members perceive that competition is normative or perceive that the out-group is motivated to actively compete with their in-group that they will, in turn, choose to compete with the out-group.

Summary Taken together, realistic conflict theory and game theory provide an intuitive and rational perspective for

understanding when and why members of different social groups engage in intergroup competition or intergroup cooperation. Rational perspectives of intergroup materialism assume that group members are motivated by the overarching goal of maximizing the total amount of scarce material resources for their in-group. As such, intergroup conflict and competition will arise when group members perceive that competition is necessary for maximizing their group’s material resources. However, when groups are placed in an intergroup context in which competition is not necessary for acquiring scarce material resources, intergroup conflict is less likely. Indeed, the boys in the Sherif camp experiments embraced the chance to work together on superordinate goals, and people generally tend to engage in in-group love (giving to their in-group) rather than out-group hate (taking from the out-group) in the IPD-MD. However, while RCT and game theory provide compelling evidence that people often have the rational overarching goal of maximizing in-group gains, psychological processes are not highlighted in these theories. That is, important psychological processes such as ethnocentrism are considered not as the root cause of conflict but as the result of intergroup contexts that necessitate competition.

Psychological Perspectives of Intergroup Materialism For many years, realistic conflict theory was the sole intergroup theory that explained the genesis of intergroup conflict. However, in the 1970s, Henri Tajfel and his colleagues challenged RCT’s assumption that intergroup conflict is necessarily the result of competition over scarce material resources. In a classic set of minimalist group experiments, Tajfel randomly categorized people into two groups based on arbitrary methods of categorization. These groups were described as minimalist because in-group members never learned who belonged to their in-group or the out-group. Following categorization, participants completed a series of payoff matrixes in which they chose among different distribution options for assigning valued resources to their in-group and the out-group. Importantly, participants were told that they themselves would not be given the resources they assigned to their in-group. The matrixes consisted of several different distribution options and were quite complex. However, the different distribution options can generally be classified as: (1) promoting equality between the two groups, (2) maximizing the overall combined gain of both groups, (3) maximizing the overall gain of the in-group, and (4) maximizing the relative difference between the in-group and the ­out-group, at a cost to the overall gain of the in-group.

Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives

As would be expected, some participants favored equality, while others favored payoffs that maximized the overall gains of the two groups combined. However, a striking result of these experiments was that the mere categorization of individuals into two distinct minimalist groups was sufficient to motivate many in-group members to engage in in-group bias (i.e., options that maximized either overall in-group gains or the relative difference between the in-group and the out-group). Furthermore, participants often sought to maximize the relative difference between their in-group and the outgroup, even when doing so came at a cost to the total amount of resources gained by the in-group. At first glance, choosing to maximize between-group differences appears to be counterintuitive or even irrational. Why would group members sacrifice their group’s material resources to maximize the relative difference in resources between their in-group and the outgroup? To provide a theoretical explanation for the results of the minimalist group experiments, Tajfel and John Turner developed social identity theory (SIT). Social identity theory postulates that a component of people’s identity or sense of self is derived from the social identities they associate with their social groups. As a consequence of this interrelation between social identity and personal identity, Tajfel and Turner reasoned that an individual’s own sense of self-worth or self-esteem is derived from how relatively positive they perceive their social group to be in comparison to other relevant out-groups. In other words, people answer the question “Am I worthy?” by determining whether their social groups are worthy relative to other social groups. It is this link between personal esteem and social identity that may explain why people often engage in demonstrations of national pride and become so invested in international competitions such as the Olympics. With respect to intergroup materialism, SIT proposes that scarce material resources may have a value to group members that goes beyond their practical utility for satisfying basic physical needs. Rather, scarce ­material resources are symbolically tied to the overall positive value of one’s in-group relative to relevant outgroups. And critically, by maximizing between-group differences in scarce resources, group members have the psychological payoff of boosting their personal selfesteem. Therefore, in contrast to RCT and game theory, SIT proposes that intergroup conflict may arise not only when group members feel the need to compete in order to maximize overall group resources but when group members are motivated to create a positive social ­identity by maximizing the relative between-group differences in resources between their in-group and the out-group. Thus, in contrast to RCT, social identity theory views ethnocentrism (i.e., the desire to be better

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than other groups) as the catalyst for intergroup competition rather than strictly a consequence of intergroup competition.

An Integrative Perspective The preceding sections of this entry have reviewed influential rational perspectives of intergroup materialism and widely accepted psychological perspectives of intergroup materialism. Rational theories of intergroup materialism, such as realistic conflict theory and game theory, propose that group members are motivated to maximize their in-group’s overall resource supply, as doing so is critical for the physical well-being of in-group members. Conversely, psychological theories of intergroup materialism, including social identity theory, propose that group members may also be ­ ­motivated to maximize the relative between-group differences in scarce resources, as doing so may have important psychological implications for the self-esteem and ultimately the well-being of in-group members. Rational theories of intergroup materialism and psychological theories of intergroup materialism are founded on two potentially conflicting needs of group members. That is, rational theories of intergroup materialism are founded on the physical and rational need that group members have for securing scarce resources that are pivotal for their group’s survival. Conversely, psychological theories of intergroup materialism are founded on the psychological need that group members may have to maintain the positive self-esteem that is defined and supported by a positive social identity. From an evolutionary perspective, a pivotal question arises: Why would people evolve in such a way that their physical need to secure scarce resources for their group is in conflict with their psychological need to feel positive self-esteem? Indeed, would it not be more adaptive if group members derived their psychological sense of self-worth from the total amount of material resources controlled by their in-group rather than from the relative amount of resources their in-group controls compared with other out-groups? By deriving self-esteem from the in-group’s total group worth rather than its relative group worth, group members could boost their self-esteem while simultaneously maximizing their group’s material resources. To address this paradox, we suggest moving toward an integrative perspective of intergroup materialism. Core to this integrative perspective is the consideration of how maximizing between-group differences in resources, at least in the short term, may be advantageous to the group’s long-term capacity to secure scarce material resources. Indeed, by maximizing relative between-group differences in the short term, groups

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may be able to create a favorable relative power hierarchy between their in-group and the out-group. Over time, such a favorable power hierarchy may facilitate in-group members in out-competing rival out-groups and maximizing the overall amount of resources that can be acquired by their in-group. From such an integrative perspective, insight can be gained as to how the psychological need that group members have to view their social groups as positive relative to other groups may at the same time facilitate the physical and rational need group members have to secure scarce material resources for their own in-group. Frank Jake Kachanoff and Donald M. Taylor See also Capitalism; Corporatism; Development, Theories of; Distributive Justice; Free Market; Hierarchy of Needs; Keynesian Economics; Malthusian Cycle; Rational Choice; Rentier State; Rent-Seeking Behavior; Resource Mobilization; Stag Hunt

Further Readings Bornstein, G. (2003). Intergroup conflict: Individual, group, and collective interests. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 129–145. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0702_ 129–145. Campbell, D. T. (1965). Ethnocentric and other altruistic motives. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 13, pp. 283–311). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Halevy, N., Bornstein, G., & Sagiv, L. (2008). “In-group love” and “out-group hate” as motives for individual participation in intergroup conflict: A new game paradigm. Psychological Science, 19, 405–411. doi:10.1177/1368430210371639 Halevy, N., Chou, E. Y., Cohen, T. R., & Bornstein, G. (2010). Relative deprivation and intergroup competition. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 13, 685–700. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02100.x LeVine, R. A., & Campbell, D. T. (1972). Ethnocentrism: Theories of conflict, ethnic attitudes, and group behavior. New York, NY: Wiley. Sherif, M. (1966). Group conflict and cooperation: Their social psychology. London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sherif, M., & Sherif, C. W. (1966). Groups in harmony and tension: An integration of studies on intergroup relations. New York, NY: Octagon Books. Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223, 96–102. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Worchel & S. Austin (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 7–24). Chicago, IL: Nelson Hall.

Media Framing The concept of media framing refers to the way in which the news media organize and provide meaning to a news story by emphasizing some parts of reality and disregarding other parts. These patterns of emphasis and exclusion in news coverage create frames that can have considerable effects on news consumers’ perceptions and attitudes regarding the given issue or event. This entry briefly elaborates on the concept of media framing, presents key types of media frames, and introduces the research on media framing effects.

Media Frames as Frames of Emphasis Media framing has been investigated in several different fields of study, including sociology, communication, media studies, psychology, and political science. While some studies have investigated the antecedents of media framing (frame building), the majority of studies focus on the effects that such media frames have on the political beliefs and attitudes of news consumers. It is important to note that studies on media framing effects generally use relatively broad definitions of frames. While the studies often reference the classical “Asian disease” studies conducted in cognitive psychology by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the studies by Tversky and Kahneman were on frames of equivalence—in other words, frames that contained the exact same information and only differed in the way in which this information was presented. In contrast, studies of media framing have generally applied a less strict definition of framing in which frames can contain different information. These frames are often referred to as frames of emphasis. This more lenient definition of frames has been criticized by some scholars, who have argued that the term framing has become too encompassing and vague and that the term framing should be used exclusively when investigating equivalency frames.

Different Types of Media Frames One of the key distinctions within the study of media frames is between issue-specific frames and generic frames. While studies of issue-specific frames focus on a particular issue (e.g., nuclear energy, the death penalty, national security), generic frames are frames that are generalizable across different issues. Several experimental studies have shown that media framing of a particular issue can exert substantial effects on news consumers’ policy attitudes regarding this issue. For example, news consumers show much greater tolerance toward a hate group rally when the news media cover such a rally through a frame

Mediation Skills

emphasizing free-speech considerations relative to when the media use a frame which emphasizes considerations regarding public order. Within the studies on generic media frames, a classic study is Shanto Iyengar’s investigation into the effect of episodic versus thematic frames. Episodic news framing covers issues through specific events or cases, for example covering the issue of poverty by reporting on the situation of a particular person, whereas thematic framing places issues in a more general context, for example by focusing on unemployment and poverty statistics. While Iyengar’s study suggested that episodic framing made news consumers more likely to hold individuals—the poor, for instance—responsible for their own situation, later studies on episodic framing have shown that this effect is highly dependent on the particular characteristics of the depicted individuals. Another generic media frame that has received widespread scholarly attention is the strategic game frame. When covering political news through this frame, the media portrays politics as a game in which political actors compete for popularity. The focus in this frame is thus on the strategy and motives of politicians, not on substantive policy issues. Several studies have shown that the media’s use of this frame can increase the level of political cynicism among news consumers.

critics have argued that by expanding the meaning of framing effects in such a way, the term has become so encompassing that it potentially includes all types of communication effects and becomes indistinguishable from more general concepts such as persuasion.

Measuring Media Frames Finally, it is worth noting that two main approaches have been used for identifying media frames in empirical analyses of media content. Some studies code the dominant frame of a news story by reading the entire story and making an overall assessment of which frame is used. This approach is also sometimes referred to as a holistic analysis of frames, and the dominant frame is sometimes referred to as a story’s meta-frame. Other studies have measured media frames by coding for the presence or absence of specific indicators, sometimes even specific words, associated with a particular frame. Proponents of the latter approach often contend that this indicator approach (also termed device-oriented technique) results in more reliable data, while proponents of the former approach argue that a coding of dominant frames yields more valid results. The choice between the two approaches is always to some degree dependent on the specific purpose of a study and the frames under investigation.

The Mechanisms of Media Framing Effects The effects of media framing on news consumers have been investigated with two principal research designs. First, effect studies have been based on randomized controlled experiments, in which subjects are exposed to different media frames and subsequently surveyed on their attitudes or beliefs. (The news frames used in these experiments are sometimes taken from actual news coverage, sometimes produced specifically for the purpose of the experiment.) Second, other effect studies have tried to gauge the effect of media framing by merging data from traditional surveys on media consumption and attitudes with content analyses of actual media content. Theoretically, media framing effect studies are concerned with the process by which media frames affect the individual frames that individuals use when making sense of an issue (sometimes also denoted frames in thought and cognitive schemas). Some studies of media framing effects have specifically reserved the term framing effect for shifts in attitudes that are caused by a change in the perceived importance (or accessibility) of a particular consideration already held by the individual. However, many other studies have used the term framing effects to denote practically all effects of media content, regardless of the specific psychological mechanism through which effects take place. Again, some

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Rasmus T. Pedersen See also Framing Effects; Mass Communication; News, Television; Print Media; Prospect Theory

Further Readings D’Angelo, P., & Kuypers, J. A. (Eds.). (2010). Doing news framing analysis: Empirical and theoretical perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge. De Vreese, C. H. (2005). News framing: Theory and typology. Information Design Journal + Document Design, 13, 51–62. Nelson, T. E., Clawson, R. A., & Oxley, Z. M. (1997). Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and its effect on tolerance. American Political Science Review, 91, 567–583. Scheufele, D. A. (1999). Framing as a theory of media effects. Journal of Communication, 49, 103–122.

Mediation Skills Mediation is commonly understood to be an extension of the negotiation process. It involves the intervention of a neutral third party to help disputing parties resolve or manage their disputes and conflicts. While mediator

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styles and behaviors vary widely, the core understanding of mediation as facilitated negotiation remains. This entry briefly introduces mediation as a problemsolving process, distinguishes it from the adjudication process, and discusses its advantages and disadvantages. It then focuses on two major categories of mediation skills and concludes with a brief discussion of how mediation skills should advance ethical mediation practice.

Problem-Solving Process Mediation is a voluntary, consensual process governed by the principle of informed consent. This means that parties who enter into the mediation process need to understand what mediation is, and they also need to understand the terms of any agreement that they reach in mediation. The foundational principle of mediation is self-determination, which means that the parties who are affected by a dispute decide the outcome of that dispute. This is quite different from an adjudication process such as a trial or arbitration, where the judge or arbitrator decides the outcome of a dispute. Mediation emphasizes joint problem solving and often requires compromise. The goal is not to determine who is right and who is wrong, or who wins and who loses, as would happen in court with a judge. Rather, mediation offers both disputing parties the potential for mutual gain and the ability to craft their own creative solutions.

Advantages and Disadvantages Mediation is often quicker and less expensive than going to court to resolve a dispute. It is a confidential process and is not bound by the legal rules of evidence or civil procedure that often cause expense and delay in court. In mediation, some mediators keep the parties together at all times. Others meet with the parties separately. In both cases, parties are encouraged to express their feelings and emotions, consider the values that are important to them, and then reach their own agreement based on those values. For some parties, money may be an important value. Other parties may be more interested in an apology. Because they are allowed to participate fully in the decision-making process, many parties report a high degree of satisfaction with mediation. Moreover, because the parties themselves decide the outcome of their agreements, they are more likely to comply with their agreements. Some scholars, however, have expressed concerns that mediation could result in unfairness if individuals make agreements in mediation without knowledge of their legal rights or when one of the parties in the

mediation has greater bargaining power, either because of economic strength or general knowledge of the law. Additionally, not every case is suitable for mediation, as for example when one of the parties may not be acting in good faith or when a court precedent is necessary.

Communication Skills The mediator directs the communication process and thus must be able to engage in effective listening, questioning, and framing. • Listening: Parties in conflict need to feel that they have been heard. Good listening requires that the mediator carefully pay attention to parties with an ­ empathetic and nonjudgmental ear. Having heard the parties speak, the mediator reflects what she understands to be their concerns and acknowledges their emotions—It sounds like this is a stressful situation for you, Mr. Jones. • Questioning: Mediators must also be skilled in effective questioning. Parties do not typically present all the information that is necessary in their opening statements, and mediators must probe in a nonjudgmental fashion to understand what is important to parties, their priorities, and real interests. A useful technique for questioning is reality testing. This involves asking parties questions in a manner that helps them to reconsider their original position—Mr. Jones, you are proposing a settlement of $1,000. Can you help me understand how you plan to make this payment while you are still unemployed? • Framing: Mediators sometimes assist parties in reaching a settlement by changing their perspective or frame of reference regarding particular situations. Conflict often lies not in objective reality but in how parties view a situation. For example, if one of the parties in a mediation uses inflammatory and accusatory language about the other party, calling that party an idiot for blaring music late at night, using the skill of reframing, the mediator would paraphrase the statement in more neutral terms—It sounds as if you have serious concerns with the level of noise coming from X’s apartment late at night. Is that right?

Management Skills In addition to directing the communication process, mediators must structure the parties’ discussions in a positive, problem-solving atmosphere and help them develop a constructive dialogue. This includes keeping parties engaged in the process, helping them to identify their interests and to understand the difference between

Meritocracy

their positions and interests. Once interests are identified, the mediator is able to help the parties develop options for settling the dispute. Mediators must understand some of the barriers to successful negotiation, including cultural differences, and utilize strategies to manage them. Finally, mediators must be able to use strategies to move the parties past a deadlock. This involves the skills of persuasion and problem solving to help parties understand the other person’s viewpoint.

Commitment to Ethical Practice No amount of communications and management expertise is likely to be successful unless the mediator is able to gain the parties’ trust. This can be achieved through a commitment to ethical mediation practice. It is critical that mediators respect confidences and act with integrity, competence, diligence, neutrality, and fairness. Jacqueline Nolan-Haley See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Decision Making; Diplomacy; Framing Effects; Peacemaking; Reconciliation

Further Readings Bowling, D., & Hoffman, D. (2003). Bringing peace into the room. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Frenkel, D., & Stark, J. (2012). The practice of mediation (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Wolters Kluwer. Nolan-Haley, J. (1998–1999). Informed consent in mediation: A guiding principle for truly educated decisionmaking, 74 Notre Dame L. Rev. 775 (pp. 775–840). Available at http:// ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship/274 Waldman, E. (2011). Mediation ethics: Cases and commentaries. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Meritocracy Meritocracy is any social system that advances and rewards individuals on the bases of their abilities, talents, and efforts rather than their class, wealth, origins, or demographics. In a true meritocracy, the positions of highest power, status, and/or authority are achieved by the individuals of greatest merit. According to this meritocratic distributive principle, individuals advance in society and are rewarded economic and socially valued resources based solely upon their demonstrated or tested intelligence, competence, abilities, efforts, and performance; any other individual ascriptive characteristics are deemed irrelevant to succeed in a given task, position, or role.

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The term meritocracy is also used to refer to those individuals whose successful achievement in society is based entirely on intelligence, competence, abilities, and talents. It also refers to leadership that is selected solely on the basis of merit.

Origins of the Term Meritocracy The word meritocracy is the combination of the Latin root merit (mereo¯ meaning “I earn”) and the Ancient Greek suffix -cracy (kratia meaning “power,” “rule”). Meritocracy therefore refers to a social system in which the individuals who have power (and who rule) are those who have earned their ruling positions through ability and competence. According to early philosophers such as Aristotle, at least four principles may guide the distribution of resources and outcomes in society: merit, need, equality, and utility. Of all of these, merit has come to be the predominant guiding ideology in advanced economies like that of the United States, which has at its core an emphasis on individual achievement and demonstrable effort and ability. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), in his book Democracy in America, emphasized “equality of opportunity” rather than equality of result by arguing that in the United States, an individual may achieve success not by virtue of heredity but by one’s own merit, creating, as Thomas Jefferson put it, an “aristocracy of talent.” While historical discussions of meritocracy are clearly documented (e.g., Aristotle, Confucius, Jefferson, and de Tocqueville), the popular contemporary definition of meritocracy is often attributed to British sociologist and politician Michael Young. In his 1958 dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, Young formulated meritocracy as a system in which social and economic goods as well as positions in society are distributed solely on the bases of individual merit. In this work, “merit is equated with intelligence plus effort,” and individuals who have merit are identified at an early age and selected for additional education, training, and development. Since the 2000s, with the proliferation of institutions and organizational processes promoting opportunity, fairness, and diversity, merit has been widely considered a legitimate principle for guiding workplace decisions (in contrast to class, wealth, origins, or demographics, among others). In the United States, for example, the idea that selecting individuals based on ability and competence is “meritocratic” and provides opportunity for all is at the core of the “American Dream.” Across the world, the introduction and implementation of meritocratic processes and ensuring meritocratic outcomes is now considered a sign of development and progress

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(and even fairness). In the context of for-profit organizations, for example, employers have adopted meritbased reward systems to encourage and reward the performance of their workers, where performance on the job counts as merit. These formalization efforts regarding the hiring of job applicants and the distribution of rewards among employees based entirely on individuals’ merit have been portrayed as illustrations of meritocracy. A critical aspect of any meritocracy is, therefore, understanding the kinds of merits that are socially valued and desirable in a given society or social setting at a given time. Merit has usually been measured using a combination of ascriptive attributes, such as intelligence, physical and mental abilities, personality, effort, attitude, motivation, work ethic, moral character, and integrity, as well as acquired attributes through learning and experience in schools and organizations, such as skills, expertise, knowledge, and other educational and professional accomplishments.

Defining and Measuring Merit At the core of any meritocracy lies the critical definition of merit. How is merit defined and measured in a given society or social setting? While advocates of meritocracy tend to agree that “merit” itself should be the primary consideration when advancing and rewarding individuals, less agreement exists as to what the precise definition of merit is. There is agreement regarding what merit is not: That is, the notion of merit is clearly distinguished from any aristocratic- and class-based criteria (such as class position, wealth, and family privilege) for assessing individuals’ talents and determining an individual’s success in society. Many experts have raised the concern that we lack a clear and objective understanding of “merit.” What is considered meritorious depends on which attributes are considered the most worthy/valued at a given point in time in a particular society, organization, or social group and even in a given area of study or practice. For example, when employers advertise jobs to recruit and screen job seekers, they typically search for merit, coding it using the qualifications (including highest educational level achieved), cognitive and physical abilities, personality, and technical skills and experience required for successful performance. Thus, the definition of merit may depend on the competencies and abilities needed to succeed in a particular task, position, or role. Related to the problem of defining merit is the problem of its measurement. How merit is measured may also depend on the chosen field of study or practice at a particular time and in a particular social context. A common measure of merit is demonstrated or tested

attributes such as competencies, skills, and abilities, quantified by IQ/EQ/personality tests and other standardized achievement exams. In the context of education, colleges and universities, for example, rely in part on standardized test scores and grades to screen and select the best candidates from pools of student applicants. In the context of government and public ­ institutions, key administrative roles are assigned to individuals who have the “merits,” such as satisfactory completion of certain credentials, degrees, experience, and training programs and/or the demonstration of certain competencies and skills through standardized evaluations and tests. Another measurement of merit, especially common in the context of for-profit organizations, has been the individual’s performance of the duties and tasks associated with a given activity, position, or role. It has also been the individual’s contributions to the success of the organization he or she works for. Proponents of this performance-driven measurement of merit contend that all individuals who best perform the tasks required for the position should be included in the pool of eligible candidates to compete for higher positions and greater rewards. This claim implies that the selection of individuals into positions and the distribution of rewards should only be judged with respect to those attributes relevant to the successful performance of the given position’s tasks and responsibilities. Thus, personal ­ attributes deemed irrelevant should not be considered during such a selection process.

Understanding Meritocracy, Inequality, and Opportunity Related to the idea of meritocracy are the concepts of inequality in outcomes and equality of opportunity. The notion of meritocracy allows for the existence of inequality in the distribution of social/economic resources and positions of power/status/authority, as long as there exists equal opportunity for all individuals to succeed based on their own merits. Hence, the operation of a true meritocracy relies on two fundamental conditions. First, meritocracy maintains and legitimizes inequality in the distribution of socially desirable goods and positions. Indeed, advocates of meritocracy strongly favor inequality in o ­ utcomes (as inequality may motivate individuals), provided societal institutions and processes are in place to help “level the playing field” among individuals so they can access positions and rewards based on their merits. Second, meritocracy relies on the provision of equal opportunity for all individuals in a society or social organization so that those individuals with relevant merits have the chance to advance to higher positions

Meritocracy

and/or obtain desirable social and economic resources. This presupposes that the resources necessary to help individuals succeed in society are provided to all on an equal basis. One example of an ideal meritocracy in education consists of providing all children with free education of equal quality regardless of their (parents’) class, wealth, origins, family background, demographics, or other irrelevant individual ascriptive characteristics. Thus, only those children with the relevant merits, regardless of family or socioeconomic background, can learn, develop, and compete for jobs in a given area of study or practice. One other example of an ideal meritocracy in the workplace consists of using merit-based employment processes and standards in which merit is the primary deciding factor when hiring from a pool of job applicants or when allocating hires into positions.

Achieving Meritocracy in Practice For many decades, managers and practitioners have strongly believed that they need to recruit and retain the best people. To do so, they have aimed to encourage meritocracies in their work organizations—that is, screening, hiring, rewarding, and promoting top talent based primarily on merit. As such, the most progressive companies have designed and implemented practices and procedures for ensuring that job applicants and employees are judged solely by their skills, abilities, efforts, and performance, regardless of their class, wealth, origins, family background, or demographics. Companies might, for example, take great efforts to show their commitment to meritocracy by implementing performance reward systems that incentivize employees based entirely on their work productivity. Given the pervasiveness of merit as a principle governing decision making in contemporary organizations, social scientists have paid close attention to the role of merit in explaining the persistence of unequal distribution of positions and outcomes. For example, researchers in the social psychological tradition have suggested that merit justifies beliefs that help legitimize the (unequal) status quo in society. Such beliefs may allow individuals and groups at the top of the status hierarchy to use “merit” to justify and sustain their privileged status and reduce resistance from lower-status groups. Others have examined the extent to which democracy can be reconciled in practice with political meritocracy—that is, a political system aimed at selecting and promoting the most meritorious politicians to the highest leadership positions of government. Scholars have further warned that achieving a true meritocracy is difficult. In particular, there is concern that meritocracy in reality may not bring equality of

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opportunity to all individuals, as it may not necessarily eliminate the influence of factors such as class, wealth, origins, or demographic biases in decisions regarding who has access to educational and employment opportunities. It has also been claimed that meritocracy in practice does not always guarantee a meritocratic distribution of positions and rewards. Along these lines, nonmeritocratic outcomes based on the gender and race of employees have been found in companies committed to merit-driven employment systems intended to hire, develop, and reward top talent. In the United States, for example, research has shown that women, ethnic minorities, and non–U.S.–born employees do not necessarily receive the same merit-based bonuses compared with White men, despite holding the same jobs, working in the same work units, having the same supervisors, the same human capital, and importantly, receiving the same performance score (i.e., equal merit). The extent to which organizational cultures and practices designed to promote meritocracy in the workplace may actually accomplish the opposite result is another important concern. A series of lab experiments, for example, has shown that when a study participant was randomly assigned to an organization whose core values emphasize meritocratic distributive principles, participants awarded a larger monetary reward to a male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Such gender difference in the monetary reward was not found among study participants who were randomly assigned to an organizational setting whose core values did not emphasize such meritocratic distributive principles. This counterintuitive “paradox of meritocracy” effect builds on other research showing that the more objective, fair, and unbiased decision makers believe themselves to be, the more biased they tend to be in their evaluations of individuals based on demographic characteristics. When people think they are being objective, fair, and unbiased, they may fail to monitor their own behavior, which consequently may lead them to exhibit the most bias. Empirical studies have revealed that many kinds of biases/stereotypes (related to, for example, class, wealth, gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, age, religion, or disability) affect how decision makers evaluate others, often in ways that advantage certain high-status groups. In conclusion, meritocracy cannot be taken for granted, and indeed, the pursuit of meritocracy in practice is more challenging than it first appears to be: Under certain conditions, being strongly committed to meritocratic principles may allow decision makers to perceive their evaluations and employment decisions as being correct, fair, and meritocratic, leading them ironically to be less meritocratic in their decisions. Consequently, it has been proposed that organizational

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processes implemented to foster meritocracy should be carefully designed and executed in order to avoid potential non–merit-related principles when advancing and rewarding individuals. Emilio J. Castilla See also Discrimination; Stereotypes

Further Readings Alon, S., & Tienda, M. (2007). Diversity, opportunity, and the shifting meritocracy in higher education. American Sociological Review, 72(4), 487–511. Arrow, K., Bowles, S., & Durlauf, S. (1999). Meritocracy and economic inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bell, D. A., & Li, C. (2013). The East Asian challenge for democracy: Political meritocracy in comparative perspective. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Castilla, E. J. (2008). Gender, race, and meritocracy in organizational careers. American Journal of Sociology, 113(6), 1479–1526. Castilla, E. J. (2015). Accounting for the gap: A firm study manipulating organizational accountability in pay decisions. Organization Science, 26(2), 311–333. Castilla, E. J., & Benard, S. (2010). The paradox of meritocracy in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(4), 543–676. Goldthorpe, J., & Jackson, M. (2008). Education-based meritocracy: The barriers to its realization. In A. Lareau & D. Conley (Eds.), Social class: How does it work? (pp. 93–117). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Ladd, E. C., & Bowman, K. H. (1998). Attitudes toward economic inequality. Washington, DC: EI Press. Lamont, M. (2010). How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lamont, M., Tsay, A., Abbott, A., & Guetzkow, J. (2003). From character to intellect: Changing conceptions of merit in the social sciences and the humanities, 1951–1971. Poetics, 31(1), 23–49. Longoria, R. T. (2009). Meritocracy and Americans’ views on distributive justice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McCoy, S. K., & Major, B. (2007). Priming meritocracy and the psychological justification of inequality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(3), 341–351. McNamee, S. J., & Miller, R. K. (2004). The meritocracy myth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Peterson, T., Saporta, I., & Seidel, M.-D. L. (2000). Offering a job: Meritocracy and social networks. American Journal of Sociology, 106(3), 763–816. Rissing, B. A., & Castilla, E. J. (2014). House of green cards: Statistical or preference-based inequality in the employment of foreign nationals. American Sociological Review, 79(6), 1226–1255.

Scully, M. A. (1997). Meritocracy. In R. E. Freeman & P. H. Werhane (Eds.), Blackwell encyclopedic dictionary of business ethics. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Townsend, P. (2010). The meaning of poverty. British Journal of Sociology, 61(s1), 85–102. Young, M. (1958/1994). The rise of the meritocracy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Migration The population of an area increases or decreases as a result of shifts in three variables: the number of births in that area, the number of deaths, and the balance of movements into and out of the area, or net migration. Hence, migration is essentially a demographic variable. However, it is more than this. The movements into and out of any area are both caused by and cause economic, social and political change. This entry summarizes some of what we know about migration and economic and social change and goes on to focus on what may still be the least-understood dimension in the migration-anddevelopment debate: the linkages between migration and political development and vice versa.

Background At the global level, the accepted figure for the number of international migrants in 2013 was 247 million, or just over 3% of the world’s population, a proportion that had not changed over the previous 25 years (World Bank, 2015, but see also the database at United Nations, 2013). Clearly, global averages are not particularly meaningful. Migration is concentrated in a number of important corridors and in a relatively small number of destination countries in North America, Australasia, and Europe, even if a number of destination areas in the so-called global South have also emerged, such as the Gulf States, Malaysia, and Singapore. In addition, it is estimated that about 740 million people were away from their place of birth but within the country of their birth around 2010 (UNDP, 2009). Such an estimate has to be treated with care, but the main point is that the majority of migrants today move within the borders of their own country. While migration as a whole does influence the growth of a population, from a development point of view, it is the composition of the inflows and outflows that is of greater importance. It is too simplistic to ­subsume all migration into a single category. The composition of the flows in terms of age, gender, and educational attainment is fundamental to any analysis, as is also whether the migration is more forced or voluntary,

Migration

longer term or shorter term, or whether it represents internal movements within a country or from one country to another. These factors themselves change ­ over time, making migration one of the more difficult issues to study but also one of the more problematic upon which to collect the necessary data to enable robust analyses. In the early 21st century, the whole issue of migration has become one of great public and political debate throughout much of the world, as well as proving singularly intractable to deal with in terms of policy.

Migration: Economic and Social Dimensions The main thrust in the literature on migration has been on social and, more particularly, economic aspects. The underlying so-called drivers of migration are primarily seen to be differences in living standards from one area to another. However, it is not simply a matter of poor people moving toward wealthy areas: People need physical capital in order to afford to move, as well as social capital in terms of education that widens their horizons so that they are aware of opportunities elsewhere. Social capital in the form of networks of friends and relatives already in destination areas also channels information to potential migrants, as well as helping those who decide to migrate to adjust after they arrive. Although the poorest of the poor may migrate, they are unlikely to move internationally but will move only locally and internally and often for short periods of time. At the micro level, migration may be conceptualized as mainly the result of individual decisions to increase income, the neoclassical approaches, although a broader consensus seems to have crystallized around the ideas that decisions to move more are likely to have been the result of family or group decisions in the context of ­risk-minimizing strategies, the so-called new economics of labor migration (NELM) approaches. At the macro level, more structural approaches associated with ­migration systems and transition theory have provided analytical frameworks to assess the changing global patterns of migration and development. Migration has also emerged as a major world business, with smugglers and traffickers facilitating the entry of people into states as illegal or irregular migrants, an activity that thrives in and around conflict zones. At the level of policy and in the migration and development debate in the early 21st century, the emphasis has again been on the more economic factors and particularly on the money sent back by migrants to their home areas. Estimated at around $US583 billion in 2014, of which some $436 billion was sent from the developed to the developing world (World Bank, 2015),

483

such vast amounts are seen to have considerable development potential. However, while remittances appear to improve the lives of families that receive them, the evidence for remittances generating sustained development more widely is less convincing. Similarly, the evidence for clear negative impacts of the loss of skills on the development of origin countries is equally elusive. That is, an argument for a “brain drain,” even in the health field, is not robust. While remittances and skilled migration continue to exercise the minds of academics and policy-makers alike, it is perhaps in a third area that much of the debate focuses: on the diaspora or the transnational community of migrants outside their country of origin. If the talent and resources in the diaspora can be ­“leveraged” for development in some way, surely that must be positive for countries of origin. Here again, the conclusions are ambivalent, as diasporas are not homogeneous entities but can be factionalized into various groups, each with different and often competing agendas. Nevertheless, much of the focus on these issues has been narrowly economic, with relatively little attention being paid to the central concern of this encyclopedia, which is political behavior, and it is clear that migration is related to political systems.

Migration: Political Dimensions The principal focus on migration and political concerns has related to the creation of forced movers, mainly refugees and asylum seekers, but also the internally ­displaced. That a link between the nature of political systems and observed patterns of migration exists seems axiomatic, but just whether a systematic causal link can be established is more elusive. Perhaps most robustly, the emergence and diffusion of the model of the nation state, with its ideologies of collective identity leading to the expulsion of those who do not fit or do not accept these values, provide fertile ground for the analysis of forced migration. Nevertheless, any such simple association will be challenged by the need to incorporate other aspects of globalization, including the diffusion of a demographic transition that can lead to the emergence of a “youth bulge” and the transition to more educated youth, which raises aspirations and can contribute to conflict in the context of low-growth economies. One of the few generalizations that can be made about migration is that the majority of migrants are young adults and, hence, increases in the number of youth and their ­education levels can be expected to be associated with shifts in migration. Demographic shifts, educational levels, political systems, and migration appear to be associated in intriguing ways that need to be

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Migration

incorporated more fully into the current migration-anddevelopment debate. Another way in which political behavior impacts migration is through the whole area of policy formulation. The emergence of democratic systems in the Americas has been shown to have been associated with an earlier introduction and later persistence of discriminatory and racist immigration policies. Public opinion, populist views, and the role of the media in democratic systems influence the way that policy is designed and implemented. More widely, international forums and multilateral agreements can facilitate the diffusion of models that are seen to work or bring pressure on countries to change policies that are seen to be less desirable or effective. Hence, the architecture of national and international institutions of state and global governance is central to attempts to move toward the more effective management of migration and to the eventual design of the nation. Globally, evidence for a convergence in immigration policies is beginning to emerge. A different perspective emerges from a consideration of the role of the migrants themselves in influencing political behavior. At the most general level, this perspective examines the voting behavior of migrants. Those who participate in the political process in destination countries or areas are considered to be stakeholders, and the incidence of voting is used as one indicator of integration. However, more specifically, migrants may be leaders or innovators in the political life of a nation. Return migration is an integral part of all migration systems and particularly so among the highly skilled and students, both of whom tend to be highly mobile. Those who have experience of working overseas or have been educated outside their country of origin learn new ways of doing things and, if they return, can bring back ideas that can challenge established practices at home. Many of the great revolutionary leaders of the postcolonial world such as Lee Kwan Yew, Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, Jawaharlal Nehru, or Muhammad Ali Jinnah had studied or worked outside their country of birth, for example, before returning home. The role of the returned migrants in both the politics of origin countries and in their administrations is as yet poorly understood. The significance of the diaspora in bringing about such changes may be one of the most important ways in which migration and political behavior are linked. Migration is one of the most obvious facets of globalization but it is not simply a recent phenomenon. It has always reflected the ambitions of nations, kings, emperors, and despots as armies, administrators, and colonizers have been used to extend control over territories and peoples. In effect, the internal flows of people define the extent of political units and, perhaps most

particularly, of states. Underlying all these flows is the control of resources and the linkages with the economic facets discussed earlier in this entry. However, migration is more than just economics. It has powerful social as well as political dimensions and reflects the stages in the development of political systems. Migration itself is highly heterogeneous. It covers a complex range of different types of movers by education and skill level, by degree of agency, whether more forced or voluntary, and by duration and distance. Including all these various types of human movement under a single term can be deceptive, and the use of the word migration has become highly politicized and often very prejudicial. The more neutral term mobility might be a less controversial one while better capturing the essence of a world in which our technology has allowed the emergence of vast systems of relatively short-term movements such as those of intracorporate transferees, less-skilled migrant laborers, and students, as well as hundreds of millions of tourists. In such a world of high mobility, the allegiance of people to territory becomes much more fluid, and migration has emerged as a major issue in national security debates. Migration, in all its complexity, and political development will remain a critical area for research and policy in the years to come. Ronald Skeldon See also Development, Theories of; Globalization; Human Trafficking; Immigration; Refugees; Social Capital; State Development; Youth and Political Change

Further Readings Castles, S., De Haas, H., & Miller, M. J. (2014). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world. Basingstoke, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cornelius, W. A., Tsuda, T., Martin, P. L., & Hollifield, J. F. (Eds.). (2004). Controlling immigration: A global perspective (2nd ed.). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. FitzGerald, D. S., & Cook-Martín, D. (2014). Culling the masses: The democratic origins of racist immigration policy in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldstone, J. A., Kaufmann, E. P., & Toft, M. D. (Eds.). (2012). Political demography: How population changes are reshaping international security and national politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Skeldon, R. (1997). Migration and development: A global perspective. London, England: Longman. United Nations. (2013). International migration. New York, NY: United Nations, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Available at http://www.un.org/ en/development/desa/population/theme/internationalmigration/

Military Action United Nations Development Programme. (2009). Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. Human Development Report 2009. New York, NY: Author. World Bank. (2015). Migration and remittances: Recent developments and outlook. Migration and Development Brief 24, at http://www.worldbank.org/Migrationand DevelopmentBrief24.pdf Zolberg, A. (2006). A nation by design: Immigration policy in the fashioning of America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Military Action Military action has traditionally been an extension of the sociopolitical milieu whereby a state-owned professional or semiprofessional security provider utilizes state-regulated military force in protection of national or communal interests from external threats. Military force, namely executed combined-arms mass violence bringing overwhelming firepower to bear, is the principal means employed during military action. Military action has historically assumed a central role in political discourse and behavior. The very nature of military action has been determined by political and sociological factors, as military action is a sociopolitical phenomenon. In accordance with Carl von Clausewitz’s definition of war as the continuation of politics by other means, military action is the achievement of strategic, political endgames through the management of force on behalf of a political institution—that is, an institution with sociopolitical legitimacy. That is to say, the nature of the political endgame pursued through military action has to be defined by an authority that is responsive to sociopolitical accountability, for example the state. As such, this authority does not only have to retain degrees of sociopolitical legitimacy domestically but also sovereignty and international legitimacy externally. The degree to which this authority is held accountable by sociopolitical discourse depends on the nature of the sociopolitical system through which the authority derives its legitimacy—namely whether sociopolitical affairs are shaped by liberal or authoritarian interaction between society and state. In liberal theory, military action is the product of a trinitarian relationship between society, state, and security provider, whereby society as the principal delegates the maintenance of public security and the protection of national interests to the state. The state in turn executes this duty by relying on an agent to provide force on behalf of society. Here the state provides security as a public good, in other words, based on a societal

485

consensus on what the national interests to be protected are. Rousseau’s normative concept of the volonté générale exactly describes such a societal consensus. The scope and the objective of military action are defined by the general will of society inclusively. The state remains accountable to society throughout the process of planning and prosecution of military action. In the liberal context of being under tight societal scrutiny, military action often falls victim to public sentiments of cost and casualty aversion. When the political ends to be achieved are perceived by society as not worthy of the costs of military action—both financial costs and costs of life— the state has little authority on its own to pursue a military campaign. Usually, military action can only be sold by the state to society for the pursuit of vital national interests that are again defined by society as a volonté générale. Hence, shaping public perception about the cost versus benefit of military action becomes key for the liberal state in order to be able to pursue its political ends through military means. In a nonliberal context, military action is the product of a less inclusive sociopolitical discourse. Political endgames worthy of pursuing are not defined by a volonté générale but by exclusive group interests. Military action is no longer part of an inclusive sociopolitical discourse but an exclusive one shaped by sectarian, kinship, or patrimonial interests. In societies in the Middle East or Africa, the disruption of the trinitarian bond between society, state, and security provider allows the state as the political authority to pursue military action for exclusive interests domestically and externally. National interests are then no longer the product of an inclusive societal discourse but one that deliberately marginalizes certain group interests over others. As a consequence, it becomes possible for the state to instrumentalize the statist security providers to use military action against domestic internal threats. Here, the lines between law enforcement and military action become blurry. The former has traditionally been the task assigned to domestic security providers, with a de-escalatory posture enforcing the law domestically. In the nonliberal context of the developing world, the abuse of military security providers as protectors of exclusive group interests domestically have undermined the ability of these security providers to use overwhelming firepower in an expeditionary capacity overseas. Terrorism stands in contrast to military action, as it is less of a sociopolitical phenomenon. Although often pursuing political ends, terrorism is a form of employing force that is not employed by an authority that holds any degree of sociopolitical legitimacy. For the most part, terrorism is a means by nonstate actors to violently achieve political ends through the employment of nonmilitary violent means. While in military action,

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force is managed by professional or semiprofessional forces in uniform with sociopolitical authority, terrorism uses unrestricted, unconventional means of force employed by irregular nonprofessional combatants to achieve political ends. When acts of terrorism are employed by sociopolitical authorities—even if nonstate actors—terrorism becomes a means of insurgency. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Palestine and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa have employed terrorism as nonstate actors with considerable sociopolitical legitimacy in their communities. Some would even argue that the PLO and ANC provided public security for their communities in a struggle against oppressive authority structures. Unlike military action, terrorism in pursuit of an insurgency strategy is trying to primarily undermine existing authority structure from within, often without the resort to military force. The sociopolitical authority employing an insurgency strategy even with communal consent has no sovereignty and often no international legitimacy. Thus, insurgency does not equal military action even when the insurgent employs military means with sociopolitical legitimacy. Andreas Krieg See also Civil Wars; Civil-Military Relations; Crisis Decision Making and Management; Disengagement; Elite Decision Making; Insurgency; Negative Peace; Nonviolence; Pacifism; Realism; Saber Rattling; Tragedy of the Commons; United Nations Security Council; Wars of Attrition

Further Readings Gat, A. (2001). A history of military thought—from Enlightenment to the Cold War. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Van Creveld, M. (1991). The transformation of war. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. von Clausewitz, C. (1940). On war (J. J. Graham, Trans.). London, England: Kegan Paul, French, Truebner.

Minority Voters The continued diversification of the U.S. electorate makes this entry focused on minority voters both important and timely. The 2016 electorate, or eligible voter population, is noted as the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse in American history. By the November 2016 Election Day, Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American voters made up nearly one in three eligible voters (31%), up from 29% in 2012.

Shifting demographics, fueled largely by Latino/a population growth, are undoubtedly changing what the American electorate looks like. These changes beg the questions: Do minority voters behave differently from White majority voters? And will these changes affect political outcomes? To assess these important questions, this entry examines the literature on minority political behavior, addressing issues of political participation and policy preferences, with a focus on elucidating differences and similarities between minority voters. The entry concludes with some considerations regarding the future of American politics and how minority voters will largely determine this future.

The Rising Electorate The growth of minority voters in the United States mirrors the growth of minority populations since the early 2000s. According to the Pew Research Center, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for almost 92% of all population growth in the United States between 2000 and 2010, with Latinos/as accounting for more than 56% of the growth. When comparing the growth in eligible voters across time, Latinos/as also show the highest increase, going from only 7% of the eligible electorate in 2000 to 12% for the 2016 election cycle. As Table 1 shows, while the percentage of Black voters remains stable through the years, the number of nonHispanic White voters has actually decreased by 9%. The Asian electorate, although still small, has doubled since 2000 to 4% in 2016. Minority communities are extremely heterogeneous in terms of national origin, religion, language, ethnicity, and gender, among other differences. Thus, it is important for scholars who study political behavior to pay close attention to the diversity and nuanced histories found within minority groups, such as Latinos/as and Asians. A common misconception about Latinos, for example, is that this population holds pro-immigrant policy positions across the board. However, research Table 1 Percentage of Eligible Voters by Race and Ethnicity 2000

2004

2008

2012

2016

Asians

2

3

3

4

4

Blacks

12

12

12

12

12

Latinos

7

8

9

11

12

Whites

78

75

73

71

69

Source: Pew Research Center, 2016

Minority Voters

has found a wide array of opinions concerning immigration among Latinos/as that are influenced by naturalization rates, religion, and time spent in the United States, as well as age. This growing diversity also affects the voting behaviors and opinions of Whites. For example, Whites living in areas with high percentages of Latinos/as tend to hold more negative attitudes toward immigration. However, Whites in areas with greater numbers of Asians tend to favor immigration.

the 2008 and 2012 elections, trumping traditional measures of voting behavior such as party identification and candidate evaluations. Yet it is not clear whether these racial factors extend to other political behaviors, such as policy preferences, or if this “Obama effect” only applies to presidential voting. The next sections focus on the primary theoretical literature on racial and ethnic politics that looks to explain drivers of minority political participation more broadly.

Does Growing Diversity Matter? What We Know About Minority Political Behavior When we look at presidential vote choice, the most basic and most highly cited measure of political behavior, we see a clear pattern of minority voting emerge. As reflected in Table 2, the “rising American electorate” (RAE) is not only growing in share of the vote, but these groups vote remarkably differently from non-Hispanic White voters. RAE voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections, with margins of more than 50%. The non-RAE electorate, however, showed opposite trends, with the majority favoring a Romney presidency. The nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2008 was a turning point in American history. And as such, it marked an important period for the study of minority political behavior. His campaign and presidency have inspired a plethora of studies seeking to understand the drivers of minority presidential voting. These studies have concluded that racial attitudes have indeed played an important role in voting for or against Obama in both

Socioeconomic Theories of Political Participation One of the most dominant theories to explain differences in political participation across the electorate is the socioeconomic theory. This model or theory suggests that individuals with higher socioeconomic (SES) status (e.g., high levels of education and income) are more likely to have high levels of political participation and knowledge. Political scientists have developed a strong connection between education, resources in general, and political participation. Verba and Nie refer to this as the standard socioeconomic model in their book Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (1972). The socioeconomic model has been supported by many scholars in the social sciences. These scholars argue that income, which often provides access to education, reduces the costs to political participation. Therefore, individuals who are more ­educated are equipped to navigate the political system and to overcome bureaucratic barriers to participate. In addition, education facilitates the socialization of individuals to embrace democratic and pluralistic

Table 2  Presidential Vote Among Rising American Electorate 2008–2012 Vote Share

Vote Choice

% 2008

% 2012

Percent Change

12

13

+1

93

6

+87

Latino

9

10

+1

75

23

+52

Asian American

2

3

+1

75

25

+50

Youth

18

19

+1

60

37

+23

Unmarried Women

21

23

+2

67

31

+36

4

5

+1

76

22

+54

53

49

−4

35

63

−28

RAE Groups African American

LGBTQ Non-RAE Source: Barreto, M. (2012).

487

Obama

Romney

Gap

488

Minority Voters

behaviors. According to Verba and Nie, the person most likely to vote is someone who is older, White, educated, female, religious, and wealthy. The majority of studies that have confirmed the SES model have relied on samples of non-Hispanic Whites. However, as studies among minority voters increase, the SES model has become contested. Researchers have found contradictory evidence to the SES model among minority voters. When controlling for differences in SES, Blacks tend to have higher levels of political participation than other groups, including Whites. In 2012, Blacks voted at higher numbers proportionally than Whites despite significant gaps in education, income, employment, and wealth. Similarly, when controlling for differences in SES, Latinos/as have higher levels of nonvoting political participation than Whites and similar levels of turnout as Whites. Asian Americans, who have the highest SES of any racial or ethnic group, often have lower turnout than Whites. All of these examples suggest that the SES model has limited explanatory power when applied to non-White groups. This debate in the literature gave rise to group ­identity theory. This theory suggests that group consciousness (GC) or a sense of cohesiveness within a population is a political resource that can compensate for lower SES levels.

Group Consciousness and Mobilization Theories of group identity and group consciousness argue that because of the historical legacies of racism, Jim Crow, and other forms of oppression of minorities in the U.S. experience, minority voters rely on race for political behavior cues and vote choices. Group identity (GI) refers to an individual’s identification with others within their own social class or racial or ethnic group that is politicized or leads to political action. Linked fate is the recognition that one’s individual status or fate is tied to that of the larger racial or ethnic group. These two concepts have been central components to the study of minority politics and found to be strong motivations to both electoral behavior and policy preferences. GI and GC research has traditionally focused on Black-White relationships and political behaviors. A seminal piece from this literature is Michael Dawson’s (1995) Behind the Mule: Race and Class in AfricanAmerican Politics, where he introduces the concept of the Black utility heuristic. The Black utility heuristic captures the essence of GI and GC arguments: because being Black in America has historically decided the socioeconomic and political opportunities of African Americans in the United States, Black individuals make

political choices based on the perceived interests of Blacks as a group. Work on Latinos/as and Asian Americans is growing both in terms of theoretical conceptions of pan-ethnic groupings and the political behaviors of such groups. Cristina Beltran’s (2010) The Trouble With Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity explores Latino/a identity as a political project arising from political mobilizations of Latin American-origin peoples and immigrants. Yen Espiritu (1992) similarly explores the creation of Asian Americans as a minority group within the context of U.S. society and politics in her book Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Both Beltran and Yen argue about the issues that arise when forcing peoples of different nationalities, religions, and so on into one homogenous umbrella group, including the dangers of recreating histories of repression and colonialism experienced among and between the groups within the umbrella (e.g., Japanese imperial legacies in Southeast Asia or Chinese control of Taiwan). While theoretical arguments regarding the composition and creation of pan-ethnic groups continues, research on political behaviors and outcomes among these groups continues to grow. For example, research finds that those Latinos/as that identify as Latino (rather than White for example) tend to favor Latino candidates over non-Hispanic White candidates. ­ Latinos/as also have higher voting rates in majority-minority districts (districts whose residents are primarily minorities). ­African American voters also participate at higher rates when there is a Black mayor in their city. Interestingly, White voters tend to vote less when they reside in ­majority-minority districts or when their representatives are non-White. However, Asian American candidates are perceived as “neutral minorities” and often are able to create multiracial coalitions and candidate fundraising campaigns during elections. After group consciousness is established, a group is able to mobilize as a cohesive unit. Mobilization theory states that individuals who belong to groups, political and nonpolitical, are more likely to participate in ­politics than individuals who do not belong to groups. Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, in their book Mobilization, Participation, and American Democracy (1993), refer to these groups also as social networks, such as church membership, volunteer groups, years spent in a community, homeownership, and more. Rosenstone and Hansen argue that membership to a group or social network makes individuals more inclined to mobilize under the direction of leadership and on their own. Membership in a minority group (based on, e.g., race/ethnicity or gender) may also

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encourage political participation. Some argue that mobilization may be even stronger among minority groups because they often pool their resources, which leads indirectly to mobilization.

The Future of American Politics This entry has highlighted the complexities and challenges encountered in the study of minority politics. While research in this area of study continues to grow, the saliency of minority political participation also increases. Despite the growth of minority populations and their increasing importance as part of the electorate, however, it is necessary to address the many obstacles still facing these populations. One particularly salient issue is the state of the ­Voting Rights Act (VRA). The VRA signed in 1965 is a victory of the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Among other things, the VRA abolished all laws that had previously been used to bar African Americans from voting (e.g., grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes). The VRA’s Section 5 also required that nine states with the most aggressive anti-Black voting laws gain federal pre-clearance before they passed any type of electoral reform law. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Section 5 of the VRA was unconstitutional. After 2013, there was a dramatic increase in state laws requiring birth certificates, voting identification cards, and other requirements that were found to affect voting access for Blacks, the poor, youth, and Democrats. Gabriel R. Sanchez, Melina Juárez, and Maria Livaudais See also Civic Engagement; Democracy; Ethnicity; EthnicityBased Voting Blocs; Multiculturalism; Pluralism; Symbolic Racism; Voter Identification

Further Readings Baretto, M. (2012). Engaging and mobilizing the rising American electorate beyond 2012. The Voter Participation Center 2013 Summit. http://data.voterparticipation.org/ wp-content/uploads/2016/07/VPC_Summit_4.29_M-Barreto .pdf Barreto, M. A., Nuno, S. A., & Sanchez, G. R. (2009). The disproportionate impact of voter-ID requirements on the electorate—new evidence from Indiana. PS: Political Science and Politics, 42(1), 111–116. Barreto, M. A., Segura, G. M., & Woods, N. D. (2004). The mobilizing effect of majority-minority districts on Latino turnout. American Political Science Review, 98(1), 65–75. Beltran, C. (2010). The trouble with unity: Latino politics and the creation of identity. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

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Dawson, M. C. (1995). Behind the mule: Race and class in African-American politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Espiritu, Y. (1992). Asian American panethnicity: Bridging institutions and identities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gurin, P., Miller, A. H., & Gurin, G. (1980). Stratum identification and consciousness. Social Psychology Quarterly, 43(1), 30–47. Leighley, J. (1996). Group membership and the mobilization of political participation. Journal of Politics, 58(May): 447–463. Leighley, J. E., & Vedlitz, A. (1999). Race, ethnicity, and political participation: Competing models and contrasting explanations. Journal of Politics, 61(4), 1092–1114. Rosenstone, S. J., & Hansen, J. M. (1993). Mobilization, participation, and American democracy. New York: Pearson. Stokes-Brown, A. K. (2006). Racial identity and Latino vote choice. American Politics Research, 34(5), 627–652. Verba, S., & Nie, N. H. (1972). Participation in America: Political democracy and social equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weisberg, H. F., & Devine, C. J. (2010). Racial attitude effects on voting in the 2008 presidential election: Examining the unconventional factors shaping vote choice in a most unconventional election. Electoral Studies, 29, 569–581.

Mission Statements A mission statement is a written articulation of the purpose and focus of an entity such as an organization, a group, or a person. With descriptions of peripheral components, it serves internally to guide the priority of activities and allocation of resources to achieve longterm goals or a vision of the entity. A mission statement provides guidelines and goals for everyday behavior, shaping power relationships that exist between people within an entity. It also defines the interdependence with external constituencies by communicating an assurance of certain expectations about the entity. In doing so, it creates a framework for all constituents and can reduce political wrangling. However, it is not a legal claim, and the promise is not binding. Stakeholders have no indemnity against the entity’s failure to deliver. It is a living document owing to the fact that the entity can redefine, amend, or change the mission statement as the entity evolves over time.

Origins and Adoption Mission statements were used as early as the 1960s in the military. Peter Drucker’s management handbook (1974) introduced them as an organizational tool.

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Business use became popular by the 1990s. The United States Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 requires federal departments and agencies to provide a mission statement that covers their major functions and operations as part of strategic planning to align government service performance with vital public needs. The act mandates a formal process that gives Congress direct control over activities of federal agencies and grants Americans more access to shape public services. Some state legislatures also require state agencies to provide mission statements for their annual budget-planning process. Since then, academic institutions as well as nonprofit organizations worldwide create and use mission statements to define themselves. Mission statements are also used in work units such as programs, departments, and teams. Personal mission statements have been made popular by self-help books written by Stephen Covey since the 1990s and are sometimes written as a component of the graduate school application process.

Mission Statements in Public Service and Nonprofits Government agencies address their mission statements to service users, employees, Congress, and the public. Their key components may include a purpose, self-­ definition, vision, goals, philosophy, and values. For example, a mission statement of the  Internal Revenue Service  is “to provide America’s taxpayers top-quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all.” Such a statement creates service expectations among the constituents and a standard to measure the performance of the entity’s delivery. It is further elaborated by a set of formal documents including a strategic plan, a performance plan, and an annual performance and accountability report. Not-for-profit organizations’ mission statements often reflect the shared values of beneficiaries, members, volunteers, partners, donors, patrons, workers, trustees, regulators, and the public. For example, Oxfam’s mission statement is “to create lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and social injustice.” Organizations ­ communicate their mission statements to stakeholders through annual reports, pamphlets, posters, office ­displays, and websites.

Mission Statements in Business Company or corporate mission statements are widely used by business entities to communicate their vision to stakeholders such as customers, investors, employees, suppliers, the board of directors, regulatory agencies, and the public. Mission statements for businesses may

provide information about their target customers, principal offering, geographical domain, technology, philosophy, competitive strategy, concern for employees, self-concept, or desired public image. In practice, businesses often craft concise statements of purpose to facilitate communication to their widest audiences. For example, Google’s mission statement at one time was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Other details become peripheral components explained in longer documents. These components, often found in annual reports, include descriptions of corporate identity, core values, philosophies, short-term goals, long-term aspirations or visions, strategies, objectives, and employee codes of conduct. Mission statements in the business plans of start-up companies striving for funding are more likely subject to the influence of investors. Marketing-oriented firms use their mission statements to communicate brand identity and support advertising to consumers. For example, Coca-Cola declares its mission to be “to refresh the world . . . , to inspire moments of optimism and happiness . . . , to create value and make a difference.”

Personal Mission Statements Author Stephen R. Covey promotes the use of personal mission statements as a blueprint for personal success and effective leadership. His assertion postulates that a clear vision of desired direction and destination leads to the physical manifestation of an ideal. Built upon personal values, strengths, and realistic ideals, personal mission statements take a cognitive approach to managing behavior by bringing purpose and focus to life. Highly effective people live by their statements like personal constitutions, which guide major decisions and daily behaviors impacting their interdependence with their family, community, and immediate economic and social networks. While personal mission statements may encompass all aspects of life, they are used as personal proclamations in many graduate school applications or athletic recruiting processes to forcefully and vividly convey personal values and strengths, career preferences, and goals. These statements lay out a commitment to delivery, and outline expectations between the applicants and the recruiting organizations before interdependence is initiated between the two entities.

Mission Statement Effectiveness Effective mission statements lead to desired outcomes and benefit the entities and their constituencies. ­Christopher K. Bart postulates a model of factors that contribute to the effectiveness of mission statements.

Modernization Theory

These include (1) institutional processes that facilitate stakeholders’ influence and satisfaction with the content of mission statements, (2) commitment of internal stakeholders such as management and employees, and (3) a clear and memorable articulation for all. Some researchers have found a positive correlation between financial performance and the use of relatively short mission statements that identify the values of the firms and define their purpose. Similarly, individuals who develop and use personal mission statements have been found to be more effective and successful in achieving their goals than those who do not. Chiranjeev Kohli and Catherine Atwong See also Advocacy; Electoralism; Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts; Indoctrination; News, Television; Political Apologies; Political Discourse; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Positioning Theory; Public Opinion; Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral

Further Readings Abrahams, J. (1995). The mission statement book. New York: Ten Speed Press. 103rd Congress. Government Performance and Result Act of 1993. P.L. 103-62. Washington, DC, January 5, 1993.

Modernization Theory Modernization theory refers to a political science paradigm predominant in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States developed at the end of the global colonial era to account for the differences between developed Western countries and underdeveloped countries and to explain sociopolitical and economic transformations in the latter. Former colonial territories in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were generally considered underdeveloped because of their lack of industrialization. Underdeveloped nations were commonly referred to during this period as Third World countries. Many of these countries were also described as nonaligned, not being committed to either the Soviet or the ­American side during the cold war.

Modern Societies and Traditional Societies Modernization theory was heavily based on 19th-­ century sociological perspectives that relied on the ­fundamental division between traditional and modern societies, with the assumption that the transition from one to the other represents a form of progress and is therefore positive and to be appreciated and promoted.

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Modern societies are characterized as urban, highly industrialized, favoring a nuclear family structure, with higher rates of geographic mobility, self-sustained economic growth through local demand, high levels of mass consumption, and with social mobility based on merit. In contrast, traditional societies are defined as mostly rural, with subsistence agriculture as the main form of production, favoring extended families, low levels of social and geographical mobility, and very low consumption levels. The theory assumes that modernization in Western countries happened more or less naturally but that in the case of underdeveloped countries, the transition from a traditional to a modern society was a technical problem that could be solved through the guidance of industrialized countries and the imitation of their practices and institutions. The theory implied that the modernization of Third World countries was inevitable but could also be predicted and shaped through government intervention. Learning from the experiences and ways of Western countries would save underdeveloped ones from some of the negative consequences of the transition from traditional to modern societies. In terms of political behavior, the modernization process, also called political development, includes equality among individuals in relation to the political system, increased capacity of the political system to affect its environment, and higher levels of structural differentiation and autonomy for political institutions. Other elements of political modernization are high levels of individual participation in the political system and secularization. Because of the capitalist, market-based nature of modern societies and their reliance on the nation-state as a political organizing structure, political behaviors are supposed to be based on strategic-­ instrumental calculations both for individuals participating in the political system and for social movements hoping to create change from the outside. For individuals and groups alike, modernization is neither alienating nor oppressive but empowering, providing a repertoire of rational tools for positive social change. In contrast, traditional cultural values are obstacles to democratic development and political empowerment. The role of women and their political empowerment through the modernization process is recognized as different from that of men but not deeply explored. Researchers in this tradition pointed out that in many Third World countries, women took longer and were less likely to become modern economic and political participants, in part because of the “stubbornness” of traditional cultural values related to gender norms. Women’s desire for autonomy and success would support the modernization process if not by directly ­ modernizing their lives, then by creating expectations of achievements in future generations. The process of

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modernization itself is seen as either gender neutral or particularly positive for women, with the underlying assumption that traditional societies disadvantage women more deeply than do modern ones. Feminist scholars criticize the theory’s lack of recognition that the modernization process cuts women off from their traditional roles and forces them to participate in political and economic institutions in which they are discriminated against by systemic rules and prejudiced individuals. By the same token, gender inequality is not unique to underdeveloped countries, as even the United States and Western European countries evidence persistent gender discrimination, as exemplified by the lower level of women’s representation in important political and financial bodies. In addition to a theoretical perspective, modernization theory offers a value system that holds Western countries to be superior and Western characteristics as more desirable. For example, liberal democracy as established in industrialized Western countries is seen as the only modern political system, while all deviations from this model are viewed as traditional and therefore less desirable. Following the laws of history and progress, all societies converge to a modern form. Underdeveloped countries are supposed to “catch up” to Western societies that had already (supposedly) accomplished the pinnacle of human civilization. Because this process is both natural and inevitable, the theory itself provides few explanations as to the timing and methods of modernization, political or otherwise. Modernization theory followed sociological functionalism, so it assumes that economic, social, and political modernization go hand in hand and that modernization in one area of social life would trigger changes in the others to maintain some sort of systemic equilibrium. Modernization theory assumes a relationship exists between modern political behavior, mostly defined as democratic behavior, and other socioeconomic characteristics. Specifically, economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, media growth, and education are seen as related to modern attitudes vital to political participation. Of these factors, education is considered the most important one. Economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, and media growth accelerate democratic development to the extent that they promote higher levels of education in the general population. The mechanisms of how each of these dimensions affect others are not theorized or studied.

Modernization as a Mandate for Intervention In terms of specific policies in the Western world, ­modernization theory provided justification for interventions in developing countries. Relationships between industrialized and nonindustrialized nations are not supposed to be competitive or adversarial but based on

social harmony and cooperation. The role of the industrialized Western world is one of hegemonic benevolence. Extensive contact and cooperation between industrialized Western nations and developing countries would accelerate the process of political, social, and economic modernization in the latter, reducing the social and human costs associated with the Industrial Revolution. Among the many problems associated with underdeveloped nations, lack of industrialization is considered central. Following old arguments dating back to economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), modernization theory assumed that lack of industrialization was caused by low levels of capital accumulation in these societies. In 1960, Walt W. Rostow proposed that capital did not need to be created in those countries but could be transferred from industrialized societies through foreign aid. Of course, foreign aid not only substitutes for local capital but also can be used to nudge other countries into particular kinds of policies and behaviors; it can be used instead of military intervention to exert influence in underdeveloped countries. Foreign aid is supposed to promote democratic behavior both directly and indirectly. Historically, a small percentage of foreign aid has been especially dedicated to providing technical assistance for the electoral process, strengthening legislatures and the judiciary, and the promotion of civil society organizations including a free press. Indirectly, foreign aid is supposed to promote democracy by funding industrialization and economic growth. In addition, foreign aid has sometimes been conditioned on the enactment of democratic reforms by recipients. Empirical evidence, however, tends to contradict the supposedly benevolent role of foreign aid. Critics of modernization theory pointed out that foreign aid may actually undermine modernization of the political process by the following dynamics:

1. Making governments accountable to foreign donors and not to their citizens.



2. Reinforcing the importance of executive power.



3. Providing incentives to third parties to attempt coups in order to control foreign aid resources.

The development and application of modernization theory happened in the context of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The theory was developed as an alternative to Marxism and was used as a tool to attract developing countries to the United States sphere of control. In particular, the theory provided a way to assure that underdeveloped countries would not see communism as a viable alternative to assure prosperity. By facilitating the process of modernization, political and otherwise, the United States could further its national and economic interests. However,

Modernization Theory

the credibility of the theory was undermined by the commitment of the United States to the use of military force to contain the “communist threat” and by its support of authoritarian regimes as long as they were not of a communist orientation. Elites in industrialized and underdeveloped countries were seen as natural allies in the modernization process and in the fight against the expansion of communism. However, the interests of these local elites did not tend to align with political modernization, which may have led to a reduction in their power. So during this period, and under the banner of modernization theory, the United States developed and maintained relationships with authoritarian regimes that supported capitalist principles and aligned themselves with U.S. interests. These relationships corresponded with a transformation of the definition of political development in the late 1960s and the 1970s, from promoting liberal democracy to promoting order and political stability. Undemocratic, efficient, and legitimate governments were seen as potentially modern. The modernity of a political system was defined in this period as the capacity of a government to maintain the status quo, in particular the position of local elites.

The Rise of Dependency Theory Because of the assumption that Western industrialized countries were in some way better or superior to their nonindustrialized counterparts, many intellectuals and politicians in the developing world, particularly Latin America, found modernization theory both condescending and ethnocentric. They saw the theory as supporting structures of power and domination that substituted for direct military intervention. Foreign and local elites were believed to be in collusion to continue the exploitation of the general population. As a challenge to the theory, social scientists in the Third World developed dependency theory. According to this theory, “cooperation” between Western countries and their former colonies creates dependencies that are the real obstacles to modernization. Differences in financial, technological, and industrial capabilities between countries maintain power imbalances that perpetuate stagnation and underdevelopment. The relationship between industrialized and nonindustrialized countries is always coercive, extractive, and exploitative. To become truly modern, underdeveloped countries need to sever ties with the industrialized world in order to avoid an ever-increasing gap in economic power. Under this paradigm, modernization theory was a new and more pervasive form of cultural and economic imperialism. Following the tenets of dependency theory, developing countries enacted import substitution industrialization, in which they aimed to produce everything they consumed, greatly reducing their dependency on other countries. The goal

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of curtailing dependency was supposed to be achieved by highly taxing imports and providing protections to local industries. In terms of international relations, the basic principle of dependency theory became the protection and support of sovereignty and a rejection of letting other countries influence internal matters both political and economic. The respect of sovereignty then became a more important goal than the achievement of modernization in general or of liberal democracy in particular.

Modernization Theory in Decline The fall of the Soviet Union and regime changes in many communist countries signaled the decline of modernization theory. Without the communist menace to fight, a new ideology of minimum government intervention started to become more popular. Through free trade, neoliberalism seeks to solve the problem of low levels of capital. Capital, goods, and production ­processes should freely move to areas where they can realize the best competitive advantage, and that can only be done through minimum government intervention in economic issues. Although neoliberalism and modernization theory have many elements in common, among them the belief that economic development and democratization are intimately linked, they have fundamentally different ideas about the role of foreign and local governments. While modernization theory sees the promotion of democracy as a task for the government, neoliberalism emphasizes the modernizing qualities of free markets. For example, while low capital levels in developing countries are still seen by neoliberals as a key obstacle for development, the theory recommends substituting private foreign direct investment (FDI) for government foreign aid. Another alternative to foreign aid congruent with neoliberalism is the use of microloans given to individuals underserved by traditional financial systems in underdeveloped countries to j­ump-start entrepreneurial efforts. The argument is that foreign aid creates market distortions and perverse incentives that actually undermine modernizing efforts. In contrast, foreign direct investment harnesses and expands the production capacity of underdeveloped countries in a sustainable way. Similarly, microloans are supposed to harness the power of capitalism to fight poverty. Knowledge and technology transfers happen not as the result of government efforts but as a natural consequence of economic interaction and global production arrangements. In fact, instead of attempting to increase the capacity of government action as modernization theory attempts, the emphasis of neoliberalism is on reducing government both in terms of its size and on the impact of its interventions.

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The U.S. government has continued some of the basic tenets of modernization theory in political relations while abandoning others. For example, foreign aid continues to be used as a strategy to influence the behavior of other countries. In a reverse of the modernization logic, American entanglements with Middle Eastern countries after the attacks of September 11, 2001, sought to build modern, democratic states through direct military intervention without simultaneously addressing other dimensions of the modernization process, in particular secularism. The assumption in this strategy is that the practice of democracy, defined as electoral political participation in a specifically designed electoral system, would help transform culture, moving people toward more modern values. This logic puts political modernization as a cause and not an effect of social and economic development. Perhaps the most dramatic challenges to modernization theory, but also to dependency theory, are the changes in both developed and developing countries due to the wave of globalization by neoliberals that started in the mid-1980s. Assumptions related to the superiority of the West have been questioned under several waves of deindustrialization. Since the 1980s, Western societies have entered a phase of postindustrialism, with a decreased importance placed on manufacturing and the expansion of the service sector as a source of jobs. Countries such as China, Vietnam, and India, formerly considered underdeveloped, have become industrial powerhouses, producing not only basic goods like clothing and shoes but also high-­ technology products such as computers, phones, and electronic devices. Most Western countries are now predominantly service economies, a characteristic not considered as part of the original dichotomy between modern and traditional societies. As China overtakes the United States in terms of economic clout and manufacturing capabilities, it is difficult to think of the country as nonmodern or traditional. Yet the political system in China does not only discourage direct participation, but political and economic institutions are not organized according to what would traditionally be characterized as modern rationality by Western standards. China, and the other countries known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have had a high degree of economic growth, not despite but partly because of the authoritarian nature of their highly interventionist governments. Even outside of the BRICS, formerly underdeveloped countries have managed to move significant percentages of their populations out of poverty without shedding their authoritarian regimes. High levels of industrialization and urbanization have been achieved without any increase in the participation of individuals and social groups in

the political process. By contrast, Western countries have faced disappointing economic growth, higher levels of income inequality, and significant social unrest in the early 21st century. Martha A. Martinez See also Democracy; Dependency Theory; Dictatorship; Globalization; Neoliberalism

Further Readings Bernstein, H. (1971). Modernization theory and the sociological study of development. Journal of Developmental Studies, 7(2), 141–60. doi:10.1080/00220387108421356 Binder, L. (1986). The natural history of development theory. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28(1), 3–33. doi:10.1017/S0010417500011828 Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina [Dependency and development in Latin America]. Berkeley: University of California Press. Huntington, S. P. (1971). The change to change: Modernization, development and politics. Comparative Politics, 3(3), 283–322. doi:10.2307/421470 Ish-Shalom, P. I. K. I. (2006). Theory gets real, and the case for a normative ethic: Rostow, modernization theory, and the alliance for progress. International Studies Quarterly, 50(2), 287–311. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2006.00403.x Jaquette, J. S. (1982). Women and modernization theory: A decade of feminist criticism. World Politics, 34(2), 267–284. doi:10.2307/2010265 Knack, S. (2004). Does foreign aid promote democracy? International Studies Quarterly, 48(1), 251–266. doi:10.1111/j.0020-8833.2004.00299.x Przeworski, A., & Limongi, F. (1997). Modernization: Theories and facts. World Politics, 49, 155–183. doi:10.1353/ wp.1997.0004 Rostow, W. W. (1960). The process of economic growth. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Scott, C. V. (1995). Gender and development: Rethinking modernization and dependency theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. So, A. Y. (1990). Social change and development: Modernization, dependency and world systems theories. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Spybey, T. (1992). Social change, development and dependency. Cambridge, England: Polity.

Moral Dilemmas A moral dilemma can be defined as a situation in which an actor faces conflicting moral requirements (typically two; if three, there is a trilemma) that cannot be

Moral Dilemmas

fulfilled together. This definition implies that not all moral conflicts are also “genuine” moral dilemmas: sometimes one moral requirement overrides the other(s) or a way can be found to serve them together. In moral dilemmas, by contrast, the conflict between incompatible “oughts” is irresolvable. The actor is, as the saying goes, “damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.” Many believe that moral dilemmas occur frequently, in extreme as well as mundane circumstances. One famous example, from Jean-Paul Sartre, concerns a student during the Second World War who faces the choice between joining the Free French Army or staying with his ill and dependent mother. Another notorious case occurs in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, in which a mother in a concentration camp has to decide which of her two children should be murdered so as to avert the killing of both. Less spectacularly, in everyday life, we may have to choose between, for instance, keeping or breaking a promise in the face of other moral obligations.

Moral Dilemmas and Politics Politics is commonly believed to be particularly rife with moral dilemmas. More perhaps than any other sphere, it is deemed the realm in which tough conflicts between competing moral requirements are fought out. After all, if such conflicts were easily resolvable, they would be dealt with elsewhere in society and not be brought to the political arena in the first place. One of the main ethical challenges ascribed to politicians is therefore that they have to deal with (the experience of) moral dilemmas. Several ways have been proposed to do so. One is resigning from office so as to avoid dilemmas altogether (although the decision to resign can bring its own dilemmas). Another is known as the making of “dirty hands,” for instance by choosing either of two bad options, in which case the moral blame should be accepted and, ideally, publicly accounted for. Whether the blame for thus (mis)handling moral dilemmas should be publicly forgiven is a separate question.

The Ubiquity of Moral Dilemmas One of the most controversial unanswered questions in moral philosophy is whether moral dilemmas actually exist. This may be surprising, given their apparent omnipresence in our own lives as well as the extensive research attention they have received from psychologists studying cognition, emotions, and problem solving in the moral domain. Proponents of the existence of moral dilemmas give as their main argument that, in practice, dilemmas are indeed often painfully experienced. Actors opting for one horn of a moral dilemma

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typically feel guilt or regret afterward (technically known as moral residue or remainder). This phenomenological fact is claimed to be a universal feature of the human condition. Critics counter, however, that it was rarely recognized as such in the past. Indeed, the very topic of moral dilemmas was hardly regarded as particularly important in moral and political theory until relatively recently. And what are now used as classic examples of dilemmatic situations (e.g., Antigone’s choice between her religious duty to bury her brother and her political obligation to heed the king’s prohibition to do so) were originally not presented as irresolvable at all: the overriding moral requirement was regarded as quite clear. And even if the “agony of choice” is a common experience, one may ask what exactly this proves about the existence and (ir)resolvability of moral dilemmas.

The Logical Impossibility of Moral Dilemmas Most opponents of the existence of moral dilemmas, however, do not deny the phenomenological point but rather draw on logical arguments. They employ deontic logic (the branch of logic concerned with notions like obligation, permission, and prohibition) to prove that moral dilemmas cannot possibly exist, because assuming their existence would result in logical contradictions. Variations aside, their logical argument basically runs as follows. Suppose some actor finds himself in a moral dilemma in which he ought to do A and at the same time ought to do B but cannot do A and B together, for instance because the fulfillment of the one prevents the fulfillment of the other. Now, it seems that if someone ought to do A and at the same time he ought to do B, he ought to do both A and B together (the ­so-called agglomeration principle). Moreover, the argument continues, it seems that if someone ought to do something, this implies that he also can do it, because without the possibility, there would be no moral obligation to do it (the so-called ought implies can principle). If we now combine these two principles, we see that the actor who ought to do both A and B by implication also can do both A and B. This is at odds, however, with the very definition of a moral dilemma given earlier, according to which he could not do both A and B together. In other words, combining moral dilemmas with the (widely accepted) agglomeration principle and the “ought implies can” principle appears to contradict the possibility of those same moral dilemmas.

Remaining Issues Many authors defending the possibility of moral dilemmas have tried to escape from the deontic argument by

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denying or modifying either the agglomeration principle or the “ought implies can” principle or both. Or they have adapted the initial definition of moral dilemmas, for instance by specifying the meaning of “ought.” The deontic argument is still considered relatively forceful, however, since it does not depend on the truth of one particular moral theory, be it utilitarianism, Kantianism, or some other. Arguments against the existence of moral dilemmas depending on such theories have of course also been put forward, but they notoriously backfire on those theories themselves. (“If utilitarianism denies moral dilemmas, utilitarianism itself must be wrong.”) Other thinkers have accepted the deontic argument and denied the possible existence of moral dilemmas. They maintain that all apparent and experienced moral dilemmas are resolvable in principle if not in practice. Whether this position implies a commitment to moral realism (the idea that moral statements can be “objective,” saying something about “the world”) and/or to value monism (the idea that moral values are not incompatible and incommensurable with one another) is again one of the many issues about moral dilemmas that remains unsettled. Patrick Overeem See also Ethics of Political Behavior; Political Morality

Further Readings Gowans, C. W. (Ed.). (1987). Moral dilemmas. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Mason, H. E. (Ed.). (1996). Moral dilemmas and moral theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Parrish, J. M. (2007). Paradoxes of political ethics: From dirty hands to the invisible hand. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (1988). Moral dilemmas (philosophical theory). Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Moral Hazard Moral hazard is a risk for a person A resulting from the choices of another person B. It denotes the probability that B chooses to consume economic goods because these goods are provided gratuitously by A, against A’s will. The probability of B’s choice represents a risk for A. This risk is called moral hazard. It springs directly from B’s personal preferences and indirectly from the causes of these preferences. The latter can be internal (such as B’s character and worldview) and external (material incentives for B to enrich himself at the expense of A). Moral hazard is a widespread

phenomenon in market, nonmarket, and political behavior. It not only entails waste and third-party damage but can also be the root of systemic risks, most notably on financial markets. The present entry highlights the evolution of moral-hazard theory and then discusses its main causes and consequences.

Evolution of Moral-Hazard Theory The word hazard derives from a medieval game of dice that was imported into England with the Norman Conquest. At the end of the 17th century, mathematicians such as Blaise Pascal and Jacob Bernoulli, at the request of wealthy gamblers, inaugurated the scientific analysis of probable events, as in games of chance. The first practical application of these theories outside of casinos was in the 19th-century insurance business, especially fire insurance and later also life insurance. The insurance literature of those years started using the term “moral hazard” to denote the risks associated with insurance takers who were not averse to the insured risks. For example, selling fire insurance to an arsonist entailed a moral hazard for the insurance company. In the 1960s, economists such as K. J. Arrow, J. M. Buchanan, and M. V. Pauly started analyzing moralhazard problems related to government-sponsored mandatory health insurance. This initial discussion was subsequently extended and applied to many other areas. Following Pauly, most economists tended to neglect the moral disposition of the acting person. They argued that even nonarsonists might be enticed to burn down their houses if the insurance reimbursed at higher levels than the market prices. Economic analyses were therefore focused on the external factors influencing human action such as information, contracts, and material incentives. From the 1980s, following B. Homström and Joseph Stiglitz, the economic literature tended to see moral-hazard problems as resulting from information asymmetries and thus as pervasive in all social interaction, not limited to the insurance business.

Causes Microeconomics textbooks present moral hazard as resulting from the combined effect of three conditions. There must be (1) a contractual relationship between a principal and an agent involving (2) a separation of ownership and control, as well as (3) asymmetric information. The agents (employees, insurance-takers, etc.) control the property of the principals (capitalists, insurance firms, etc.). They are supposed to act in good faith, respecting the rights and interests of the principals. But the principals are not perfectly informed about what the agents really do. The latter may therefore betray their

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fiduciary duty without fearing immediate reprisals. This implies that resources are wasted (economic problem), and it also implies an unjustified redistribution of income and wealth (moral problem). A closer look reveals that the separation of ownership and control is of primary importance, whereas information asymmetries and the presence of a contractual relation are neither necessary nor sufficient, if combined, for the existence of moral hazard. Even if an employee A is better informed about his own activities than employer B, the latter does not necessarily provide gratuitous economic goods to A by paying him a salary. Indeed, B may overcome his deficient knowledge about A’s activities by simple judgment. He may correctly guess the present monetary value of A’s activities and pay him accordingly. Similarly, moral-hazard problems might occur outside of contractual relations. The most important example is the policy-induced moral hazard. Government interventions force the citizens to use their resources differently than they would spontaneously have used them. Through taxation and regulation, the government thus becomes an unwanted co-owner of all those whom it taxes and regulates. The citizens must gratuitously provide economic goods even if they disagree. The very possibility of further interventions therefore represents a moral hazard for the citizens, and this risk occurs outside of any contractual relation.

Similar Cases Moral hazard should not be confused with gifts. A donor may sometimes be exposed to the risk that the beneficiary of his generosity increases his consumption because he expects the gift to be forthcoming. For example, teenagers may increase their food consumption if they enjoy unrestricted access to the family refrigerator. Yet this risk would not be a moral hazard for the parents if the latter willingly accept or even desire this increased consumption. Moral hazard involves undesired loss of property. It should not be confused with risks that do not have this feature. For example, for John, who loves Helen, there is a risk that Helen decides to marry Peter. But this risk is not a moral hazard because Helen is not John’s property. Similarly, the risks of not obtaining a contract for one’s firm, of not acquiring a desired apartment, of not obtaining a table at a coveted restaurant are not moral hazards.

Political Economy of Moral Hazard Where freedom of action prevails, it is possible to minimize moral hazard, for example through background checks on future employees and partners, through

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suitable contractual stipulations such as copayment rules in insurance contracts, or through monitoring and auditing. Ill-designed laws and regulations may hamper such preemptive actions. Moreover, government interventions are a cause of moral-hazard problems in their own right. They may reinforce and perpetuate moral hazard on the market and in society as an unintended consequence of well-intentioned policies. An important and well-known example is the moral hazard created by central banks. The latter may assist commercial banks in times of market stress by increasing the money supply, thus socializing commercial-bank losses at the expense of all other money users. Commercial banks then have a perverse incentive to diminish their own precautions, a moral hazard for the rest of society. Since all commercial banks are likely to behave this way, the entire financial sector can be weakened, creating systemic risks and crises as in 2008. J. Guido Hülsmann See also Calculus of Dissent; Decision Making; Economic Judgment; Free Rider Problem; Prisoner’s Dilemma

Further Readings Baker, T. (1996). On the genealogy of moral hazard. Texas Law Review, 75(2), 237–292. Hülsmann, J. G. (2006). The political economy of moral hazard. Politicke oekonomie, 54(1), 35–47. Pauly, M. V. (1968). The economics of moral hazard: Comment. American Economic Review, 58(3), 531–537.

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If we ask the iconic “person in the street” about morality and politics, we likely receive one of two comments: “Why are politicians such immoral people?” or “What should governments be doing to solve the big ethical problems of poverty, racism, and the environment?” The first reflects a concept of the “good person” and possibly might affect how one votes. The second reflects a (more abstract) belief that political institutions and actors have a moral obligation. These important lay concerns, however, only partly reflect research on morality and political psychology. The ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius had concerns about ethical leadership and the education of the morally exemplary political leader. The ideal “good person” manifested qualities desirable in everyday life but also essential for the proper functioning of the state. Educating the right people well would guarantee the state’s stability and

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flourishing. In more recent times, thinking about ethical questions and the state’s role has tended to be less about individual behavior. Questions about individual behavior in relation to politics tend to focus on potential voting patterns in which moral concerns focus mainly on “social” issues. However, it has become increasingly clear that there are important links between political and moral psychology. Especially in Western thought, there has been a distinction between a public domain, which comprises institutions, social systems, and power relations between groups, and a private domain, which is about individual characteristics and social interactions between people. Political issues are seen as being in the public domain and only touching private life insofar as people have opinions that might affect their (rare) public actions, such as voting. Morality, being a matter of interpersonal behavior or one’s self-regulation and identity, is understood to be in the private domain.

Social Movements: Widening the Civic, Intersecting the Moral An important change occurred in the late 20th century, when areas of life and moral concern hitherto seen as “private” came to be seen as resting on political norms, laws, and power relationships and that in consequence, the legal system should be brought in to regulate them. “The personal is political” was a major watchword for these changes, and they significantly blurred the boundary between public and private. These included establishing gender rights, for example delegitimizing discrimination, violence, sexual harassment and objectification, gay rights, and the rights of minorities. ­Hitherto, these had been seen largely as a matter of individual moral responsibility and, to an extent, also seen in some cases as a legitimate matter of differing personal values. In addition, some areas previously regarded as “public” have entered into the area of private moral responsibility; notably, this is true of environmental issues, whereby most people now feel a personal obligation to help sustain the planet in their private, everyday practices. There was a further effect on both moral and political psychology. Prior to the upsurge of social movements in the West post-1965, most political psychology research on activism focused on national party affiliation and election campaigning (although some international work did address major social change). This research emphasized ideological profiles and demographic variables. The rise of unconventional civic activism—protest—posed new questions; if not driven by party allegiances, what were the ideological motivators? How did activists organize themselves if not

through traditional party structures? An important finding was that many young people are moved to activism by single issues rather than broad “party” ­platforms and that these often have a strong moral component. It appears that the impetus to participate comes from a sense of moral outrage, which also places upon the individual the personal responsibility to become involved. Many young people also become involved through social links, such as friends or groups. The rapid development of social media has dramatically changed the mechanisms by which information and opinions are shared, the speed with which activism can be precipitated, and, significantly, the extent to which individual citizens feel empowered to participate in the democratic process. No longer is the route to mass communication in the hands of media moguls and ­hierarchical power. In addition to blurring the distinction between public and private and between political and moral, these developments have also led to widening the definition of civic participation, the scope of research about it, and also the implications for developing civic education programs. When the “civic” domain is defined more widely to include unconventional activism, community involvement and targets beyond party politics, different possible causal factors must be explored. Theories that focus on partisan structures are incomplete. Education needs to take account of the many skills needed to participate broadly, not just how to promote more future voting. These skills include organizing increasingly for “bottom-up” activism and engagement, where the leadership and development are in the hands of young people rather than solely adults.

The Role of Models and Theories These developments require attention to the variety of factors that contribute to the development of competent civic and moral actors. Political science has tended (implicitly) to regard the developing individual as a passive recipient of socializing forces and the adult as a quasi-rational decision maker. Psychology has increasingly moved to an active model of the human, in which the growing individual develops through active interaction with experience and information and adults actively negotiate meaning and plans for action, alone or with others. Explanations of antecedent or “causal” factors in beliefs, values, or action need to take account of these active processes. The foregoing raises questions for, first, what goals a society has for educating its young people to become effective civic and moral actors, and, second, what ­factors contribute to how people make decisions about political and moral issues and what promotes them to

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take relevant action. These questions are addressed by theories of human development and theories about decision making, ideologies, and motivation. However, there is another important dimension: how should morality be defined? What are its core components? How we think about the nature of morality directly affects how we ask questions about its development and about what are the core features of any moral ­situation— including situations that are related to civic or political issues. There are, broadly, three ways of thinking about morality within social science: reasoning, emotion, and virtue. The first two have been most relevant to research on the intersection of morality and politics. The t­ radition that defines moral functioning in terms of reasoning is exemplified by the writings of the philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1894) and John Rawls (1921–2002), with roots in the work of Plato. The goal is to establish universalizable principles on which to make moral judgments. Being a competent and autonomous moral agent requires understanding, and this is therefore the goal of moral development and, by implication, of moral education. It is presumed that such understanding will inform and motivate appropriate moral action. Research on moral development explores the growth and increasing complexity of reasoning about moral issues; research on adult moral reasoning considers the level of complexity used in and needed for effective moral reasoning. In terms of links to political beliefs or action, research questions are around the relationship between moral reasoning complexity and ideology and whether and how forms of civic engagement are linked to level of complexity.

Moral Reasoning The first systematic work on the development of moral reasoning was done by the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Beginning in the 1930s he observed how children between the ages of 4 and 11 managed questions about lying, cheating, and the fair distribution of rewards and punishment. His theory of cognitive development was that young people progress through increasingly complex stages of understanding, for example, of causality and the nature of the physical world. He found that moral reasoning stages had similar characteristics; for example, the extent to which more than one dimension of the situation could be focused on, and the extent to which rules or norms were seen as absolutes rather than situational or negotiable. Later work, by William Damon and Robert Selman, also showed that the ability to take the perspectives of others in the situation was a core feature of what changed as the complexity of reasoning increased. Work

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on children’s economic understanding and their understanding of social and political institutions showed parallel developmental patterns. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) studied boys initially aged 10, 13, and 16 in his doctoral work. In contrast to Piaget’s and others’ use of story situations close to their experience, he chose dilemmas that were interesting also to adults. They include the story of Heinz, who has to decide whether to steal for his dying wife medicine that the druggist inventor will not sell at a fair price; whether a doctor should accede to the request of a dying woman to ease her pain by mercy killing; and how a military officer should decide whom to send on a likely fatal mission that will save many soldiers’ lives. The original sample of nearly 60 boys was followed up every 3 years over 20 years, providing one of the longest and richest longitudinal studies in psychology and also covering an interesting period in American history and politics. Later interviews also covered a wide range of issues around personal, social, and civic experiences. Kohlberg identified six stages of moral reasoning. Stages 1 to 5 were evident in his data; Stage 6 remained a hypothetical end state, which he identified in a small number of exceptional people. The developmental sequence is most easily conceptualized through ­sociologist Robert Selman’s stages of perspective taking. Stage 1 was rarely found beyond age 10. It reflected a narrowly egocentric perspective and a simple relationship to authority (Heinz should not steal because the law says so, or he should steal because his wife has a lot of money and furniture). At Stage 2, dyadic perspective taking is evident; two people or entities are involved (Heinz should not steal because he might get caught and that would not help his wife; Heinz should steal if he loved his wife, though not if he didn’t). Stage 2 is very evident at age 10 and through to late teens, though declining. Kohlberg labeled stages 1 and 2 “preconventional.” Stage 3 emerges in the early teens and increases in early adulthood. It is still very prevalent in people’s 30s, and other studies suggest it carries over into later life for many people. Stage 3 thought rests on the ability to consider the perspectives of all those concretely present: the main protagonists but also members of the community of which they are part. So social expectations and reputation matter (Heinz should steal the medicine because a good husband would care for his wife; he would not steal it because a good citizen obeys the law). Stage 4, which emerges in the mid-teens and continues to increase in frequency, overtaking Stage 3 in the ­mid-20s, marks a shift from concrete to abstract understanding. Now there is the concept of society as a ­system, with institutions and roles that maintain order and facilitate justice and democracy. The perspective is

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therefore from the point of view of system maintenance, with implications of individual action for and within that. (Heinz should not steal the medicine, because this would break the law that protects everyone’s rights and may set a precedent that could lead to disorder). Kohlberg described Stages 3 and 4 as “conventional” because they tend to support aspects of the status quo. Stage 5, which does not appear until early adulthood and never achieved more than 10% presence even in his oldest respondents, is “postconventional” or “prior to society.” Stage 5 reasoning reflects a perspective that goes beyond current systems and institutions, considering the underlying moral principles that should define laws and rules. (Heinz should steal the medicine in order to demonstrate publicly the injustice that a druggist can charge outrageous prices for a life-saving drug; he should not steal the medicine if the principle that a democratic, ordered society as the best protection of individual rights is paramount. He should seek another means to publicize the druggist’s unjust behavior). Clearly, underpinning moral reasoning stages are conceptions of social systems as well as of individual relationships. Work connecting moral stages to political engagement shows, first, that in lower stages of reasoning people focus on concrete issues and do not see the larger systemic picture, and, second, that higher stages of moral reasoning are more associated with the sense of a personal obligation or responsibility to become involved in an unjust situation. One of the first such studies was on free speech–movement activists in B ­ erkeley in 1964. The data showed that conventional-level reasoners tended not to see the issues as part of a larger moral picture and were not activists. Stage 5 reasoners were activists, and also people in the transition between Stages 4 and 5. Several data sources show that as people move from the structural understanding of Stage 4 and discover a wider range of possible moral positions, they become relativistic and also anti-authority, challenging the status quo, before consolidating a larger and more integrated systemic thinking at Stage 5.

The Limitations of a Reasoning Model These and other studies were largely conducted during a period when the dominant social movements were focused on injustice, inequality, peace, and social identity issues. They tended to find that higher stages of reasoning were associated with more elaborated and more liberal perspectives. Studies of morally exceptional or politically engaged adults, however, do not invariably show a strong correlation with moral stage. The key element there appears to be a sense of personal responsibility and a commitment to a deeply held ideology or value set aligned to one’s identity. This links with

one of the criticisms of morality as reasoning: that it ignores moral affect. The other criticism is that Kohlberg’s model was too tied to a particular dominant cultural ethos about the core of morality: justice. Both these critiques have been influential in recent developments in the intersection of morality and politics. Post-Kantian moral theories based on reasoning presuppose universal moral principles that transcend ­ cultural variations. Kohlberg’s theory rested on the pursuit of justice as the goal of moral functioning. This worked quite well in capturing the reasoning of his male Chicago-based sample and in some later studies with ­ North American males. Two strands of data began to challenge this, initially by failing to capture, and so undervaluing, reasoning at higher stages where the underlying moral principles and beliefs about social ­systems matter. Studies on Israeli kibbutz members suggested that they had a generally higher level of moral reasoning than comparable Americans. The kibbutz system was explicitly democratic and ideologically sophisticated. Studies of less economically developed societies appeared to show less complex moral reasoning, more focused on community and face-to-face moral issues.

The Importance of Culture and Pluralism The implicit “developmental deficit” model for explaining these findings was challenged by Richard Shweder, who worked extensively in India. He found, first, that manifestly sophisticated Indians produced moral arguments that could not be coded according to Kohlberg’s moral judgment coding scheme because they were based on principles that did not fit a justice model. From Shweder’s culturally sensitive analysis emerged three broad moral perspectives, reflecting different salient moral concerns, and different implicit explanations of social structures and functions. He explicitly rejected the idea that any culture was morally monolithic; all three perspectives were evident in all cultures, but with different degrees of salience and possibly also applying in different life domains. The ethic of autonomy, dominant in much Western thought, is about individual will, choice, and personal liberty. Much moral reasoning research assumes this. The ethic of divinity, more alien to a Western secular perspective, is about the self’s relationship with the divine, which underpins identity as well as moral obligations. In the ethic of community, moral obligations are engendered by community interdependence, to which individual self-fulfillment takes second place. Carol Gilligan’s work on gender showed that many female respondents were resistant to following the ­“justice” agenda of Kohlberg’s moral judgment interview. They tended to focus on interpersonal relationships and

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obligations around caring. In some contexts, this led to undervaluing the complexity of reasoning because the relational responses were coded at Stage 3 rather than Stage 4. There is an important distinction in the underlying conceptual frameworks: in the justice ethic, relations between persons or groups are envisaged as separate and potentially in conflict, needing to be balanced. In the caring/relationship ethic, persons and groups are seen as intertwined and the moral goal is to maintain their relationship. From many lively discussions about these issues, ultimately the following emerged: both sexes use both justice and caring/responsibility reasoning but the primary choice of ethic tends to be gendered; in more abstract dilemmas, justice arguments are more evident, but in personal or identity dilemmas, caring/relationship arguments are more prevalent. The gender critique added to other cultural and also feminist theory in demonstrating that in any society there is a plurality of ethical systems, not one universal model. This also makes sense of other emergent cultural ethics, such as filial piety in Asia and honor in many countries, which guide the themes of responses. Further, the diverse cultural ethical theories are evident in political and civic reasoning and institutional practice.

The Role of Emotion and Intuition The philosopher David Hume famously challenged Kant’s focus on reasoning when he argued that often our moral responses are very swift and strongly associated with emotion; only later do we reflect and invoke reason. This debate has been revived especially since the publication in 2001 of an essay by Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.” Often people report a strong moral reaction for which they cannot immediately find a rational justification—for example, disgust or compassion. Personal accounts of moral crises and “triggering events” that precipitate political engagement often contain descriptions of powerful emotions. This challenges the primacy of reasoning. Research on immediate moral emotions has been conducted experimentally using provocative stimulus stories, for example about consensual sibling incest. The work on “moral foundations” by Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and Haidt goes some way to integrating moral emotion and reason and also links this to political ideology. The argument builds first on the pluralist perspective deriving from Shweder and Gilligan, that there are parallel ethical discourses within any culture. Nosek and Haidt argue that different emotions are salient in different implicit moral theories, which inform what is seen as important about moral and therefore political situations or events. They identified five, now six, such “moral foundations.” These are care, fairness,

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authority, sanctity, and liberty. They are reflected in what aspects of the situation are attended to and considered in moral terms. The extent, however, to which these are moral emotions or moral intuitions (fast-­ processed responses) is moot. The political dimensions of this work lie in Haidt and colleagues’ data relating different moral foundations to ideological positions, at least as defined by the left-right spectrum within U.S. politics. Using the original five foundations as cues, self-defining liberals most strongly prioritized care and fairness, whereas selfdefining moderate conservatives gave equal weight to all the foundations, and the more strongly conservative gave greater weight to loyalty and sanctity than to care and fairness. However, when liberty was added as a moral foundation, a rather different pattern emerges: liberals rank care, liberty, and fairness high; libertarian conservatives rank liberty very high, fairness somewhat lower, and the rest much lower; and social conservatives endorse all foundations equally and strongly. Haidt and colleagues consider that these data help to understand why people on different sides of the political spectrum fail to comprehend each other’s moral point of view. The data, however, also demonstrate how problematic it is to use the left-right spectrum as a basis for research on either political or moral beliefs. First, the Right is quite significantly split, on ideology and morality, between social conservatives and economic or libertarian conservatives, and second, the “liberal versus conservative” distinction is peculiarly American and fails to recognize the important psychological and political dimensions of more leftist mainstream political alignments that pertain in most other countries apart from the United States. Moral foundations research does, however, potentially offer a framework within which moral reasoning, moral intuition, and especially the cultural factors contributing to these might be developed. Helen Haste See also Blaming the Victim; Bully Pulpit; Corruption; Human Duties; Human Rights; Just War Theory; Public Opinion; Sleeper Effect; Source Bias; Trust; Values; Women and Leadership; Youth and Political Change

Further Readings Carretero, M., Haste, H., & Bermudez, A. (2016). Civic education. In L. Corno & E. Anderman (Eds.), Handbook of psychology of education (pp. 295–308). New York, NY: Routledge. Colby, A., & Damon, W. (1992). Some do care; contemporary lives of moral commitment. New York, NY: Free Press.

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Colby, A., Kohlberg, L., Hewer, A., Candee, D., Gibbs, J. C., & Power, C. (1987). The measurement of moral judgment. Vol. 2: Standard issue scoring manual. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 101, 366–385. Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Pantheon. Haste, H. (1990). Moral responsibility and moral commitment: The integration of affect and cognition. In T. Wren (Ed.), The moral domain (pp. 315–359). Cambridge: MIT Press. Haste, H. (2013). Deconstructing the elephant and the flag in the lavatory; promises and problems of moral foundations research. Journal of Moral Education, 42(4), 316–329. Haste, H., & Abrahams, S. (2008). Morality, culture and the dialogic self: Taking cultural pluralism seriously. Journal of Moral Education, 37, 357–374. Kohlberg, L. (1971). From is to ought; how to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development. In T. Mischel (Ed.), Cognitive development and epistemology. New York, NY: Academic Press. Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Sherrod, L., Torney-Purta, J., & Flanagan, C. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of research on civic engagement in youth. New York, NY: Wiley. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The ‘Big Three’ of morality (autonomy, community and divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ explanations of suffering. In A. Bandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119–169). New York, NY: Routledge. Walker, L. (1984). Sex differences in the development of moral reasoning: A critical review of the literature. Child Development, 55, 677–691. Weber, C., & Federico, C. M. (2013). Moral foundations and heterogeneity in ideological preferences. Political Psychology, 34, 107–126.

Motivated Reasoning Motivated reasoning is a concept that helps explain how people organize and process information when forming their opinions and attitudes. Motivated reasoning is an umbrella term that encompasses several cognitive information-processing and -management strategies, including (but not limited to) selective

perception, confirmation bias, and selective memory. Specifically, the term motivated reasoning refers to goal-oriented information processing; an important assumption of motivated reasoning is that all information processing is goal driven but that there are ­different goals for different situations. These goals for processing can be accuracy based or directional. Information processing in service of a directional goal motivates individuals to arrive at conclusions that fit with one’s prior held beliefs. When processing is motivated by accuracy goals, people process information to arrive at an accurate and correct decision, regardless of previously held beliefs. Motivated reasoning is particularly common in the political communication literature, particularly for highly partisan issues, such as gun control, climate change, and affirmative action. However, the phenomenon and the mechanisms underlying it have been demonstrated for issues that are less overtly political and/or partisan in nature (e.g., nanotechnology). This entry provides a brief overview of motivated reasoning as a theoretical concept. It begins with a discussion of cognitive dissonance and its links to motivated reasoning followed by a brief overview of the mechanisms underlying the biased processing of information. The entry concludes with a brief discussion of the most commonly cited implication of the phenomenon.

Explaining Motivated Reasoning The roots of motivated reasoning are best traced back to psychologist Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance theory argues that holding inconsistent or incompatible cognitions (attitudes and beliefs) results in an uncomfortable psychological state within people. To avoid or alleviate such discomfort, people strive for consistency between their attitudes and behaviors. This desire for consistency, in turn, impacts how people seek information as well as how information is integrated into existing knowledge structures. Cognitive dissonance occurs when individuals are confronted with information that runs counter to their preexisting attitudes or behaviors. Those experiencing cognitive dissonance can respond in one or more ways. First, one might change one’s original attitude to better fit with the incoming information. Second, one might discount or disparage the dissonant information, thereby reducing its relevancy or power. Third, one can search out consonant information that reduces the weight or impact of the dissonant information. The latter two strategies are more common than the first, and those responding with one of the latter two approaches are engaging in the motivated processing of information.

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The Mechanisms Underlying Motivated Reasoning Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the underlying process of motivated reasoning, including the prior attitude effect, disconfirmation bias, confirmation bias, selective perception, and selective memory. The prior attitude effect refers to the tendency for people to evaluate supportive arguments as stronger and more compelling than arguments that run counter to their point of view on an issue. In short, people grant greater weight to arguments that fit with their preexisting attitudes toward an issue. The disconfirmation bias, in the context of biased information processing, refers to a tendency for individuals to spend more time and greater cognitive resources disparaging and counterarguing opinions that are attitudinally incongruent, resulting in an increased tendency to discount such ­ information. Confirmation bias is concerned with how individuals seek out information for various topics. Individuals are said to engage in confirmation bias when they seek out attitudinally consistent information over attitudinally inconsistent information. Confirmation bias is one of the mechanisms by which selective exposure occurs. Selective exposure takes place when an individual seeks information that generally conforms to his or her view—that is, engaging in confirmation bias while avoiding attitudinally discrepant information. The avoidance of attitudinally inconsistent information is another form of disconfirmation bias. The third mechanism of motivated reasoning, selective perception, posits that people are more likely to understand the take-home message of a communication when it is consistent with their prior beliefs on the topic. Conversely, people are more likely to miss the point of a communication when the communication represents a departure from their previously held beliefs. Finally, selective memory refers to the tendency for people to better recall arguments that fit with their current attitudes on a topic compared to those that are inconsistent with their beliefs.

Implications of Motivated Reasoning The most commonly cited consequence of motivated reasoning is attitude polarization. The pathway from motivated reasoning to attitude polarization is relatively straightforward. The avoidance and scrutiny of counterattitudinal information coupled with our tendency to seek out and integrate information that fits with our opinions creates for each of us a congenial information environment. This information environment can be ­likened to an “echo chamber” in which attitudes and opinions become reinforced. Given the absence of

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competing ideas, prevalent attitudes and opinions are continually reinforced and can become more extreme. Attitude polarization has been demonstrated for a number of highly partisan political issues, including gun control and affirmative action. Motivated information processing has also been proposed as a mechanism by which groups of people form attitudes about scientific and technological issues, especially those that are relatively politicized. On issues such as nuclear power or climate change, polarization has been shown to occur as attitudes of people who differ in political ideology and partisanship diverge. Michael A. Cacciatore and Sara K. Yeo See also Attitudes; Cognitive Dissonance; Confirmation Bias; Decision Making; Partisanship; Political Ideology; Public Opinion

Further Readings Cacciatore, M. A., Binder, A. R., Scheufele, D. A., & Shaw, B. R. (2012). Public attitudes toward biofuels: Effects of knowledge, political partisanship, and media use. Politics and the Life Sciences, 31(1–2), 36–51. doi:10.2990/31_1–2_36 Lodge, M., & Taber, C. S. (2013). The rationalizing voter. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Yeo, S. K., Cacciatore, M. A., & Scheufele, D. A. (2015). News selectivity and beyond: Motivated reasoning in a changing media environment. In O. Jandura, C. Mothes, T. Petersen, & A. Schielicke (Eds.), Publizistik und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung: Festschrift für Wolfgang Donsbach [Journalism and social responsibility: Festschrift for Wolfgang Donsbach] (pp. 83–104). Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag.

Multiculturalism Multiculturalism refers to a policy with its attending practices regarding the coexistence of many ethnocultural groups in a plural society, as well as the normative beliefs that characterize how the relationships should be among the groups. Because the term has been used in many different ways, a single, all-embracing definition is difficult to formulate. The preceding definition tries to capture four ways in which the term has been used, namely (1) as a demographic reality involving the living together of different ethnocultural groups; (2) as beliefs and attitudes toward how the relationships among people of different cultural backgrounds should be lived and conducted within the society; (3) as a policy on how to accommodate and manage the

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different ethnocultural groups within the society, and (4) how the policy on multiculturalism is enacted or practiced in reality. However, there is a fifth way the term has been used, multiculturalism as counterhegemony, to refer to efforts made to counter the Eurocentrism that characterizes many social democratic societies. Listing these different ways in which the term is used is an attempt not to compartmentalize them but to bring to light the nuances in the use of the term. Failure to understand these different ways the term has been used may contribute to misunderstanding and hinder theory development and advances in research. Naturally the various ways the term is used are closely related: in the absence of different ethnocultural groups living together (i.e., multiculturalism as a demographic fact), there will not be the need to formulate a policy on how they should live together (i.e., multiculturalism as a policy), and neither will there be the need to understand and describe the dynamics that underline the relationships among the groups (i.e., multiculturalism as an ideology). Moreover, because policies are simply statements of intent, policies may have to be put into action in order to achieve the intended goals (giving rise to multiculturalism as governance). Similarly, there may be the unspoken underlying motive to undo social injustices committed in time past (through multiculturalism as counterhegemony). The following section presents the different ways the term is currently used. Next, multiculturalism as a policy and as governance is explored, together with the psychological underpinnings and their implications for cultural diversity. The entry concludes with a discussion of the future of multiculturalism.

The Different Meanings of Multiculturalism Multiculturalism as Demographic Fact or as Cultural Pluralism Multiculturalism as a term denoting government policy was first introduced in 1971 when the then-Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau ­ (1919–2000) declared that Canada was abandoning the policy of assimilation and in its place adopting a policy of multiculturalism. Subsequently, the massive growth in international migration and globalization especially from the 1980s and the fight over international terrorism in the 2000s has expanded the meaning of the term to refer to the presence of different ethnocultural groups in a society. Most contemporary societies are diverse on the basis of ethnicity, language, religion, culture, and the like. Based on the notion of ethnic or linguistic

fractionalization (i.e., the probability that two randomly drawn individuals from a country belong to the same ethnic, linguistic, or religious grouping), Korea and Japan are among the most ethnically homogenous groups in the world. Nevertheless, even these two countries have large and vibrant ethnic groups residing there. There are, for instance, large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Thais, and Indians living in Korea. The United States and Canada are among the most culturally diverse countries in the world, with large numbers of different ethnic groups residing throughout the country. Whether these different ethnic groups keep to themselves with minimum interaction with each other or they have daily close interaction such as working together, going to school together, use the same public transport or not, the mere presence of these different ethnocultural groups makes the society multicultural.

Multiculturalism as Ideology Multiculturalism as an ideology is the normative response to the demographic fact of multiculturalism and carries with it the moral obligation members of societies have to respect other people and their cultures, as well as the social requisites of respecting ­cultural differences. The underlying motive for these ideologies is to promote social equality within the s­ ociety, where the ultimate goal is to have a harmonious society. Multiculturalism as ideology refers to how different ethnocultural groups, particularly the nondominant group, should lead their lives within the society and the degree of latitude this nondominant group is given to do so. In acculturation and intercultural psychological literature, four or five kinds of ideologies are normally identified, and these are referred to as acculturation expectations from the larger society, or the host society’s acculturation orientations. Although variously named, the acculturation expectations are commonly referred to as assimilation/melting-pot; ­ ­multiculturalism/integration/biculturalism; segregation; and exclusion and individualism. Multiculturalism, within the context of acculturation expectations and as an ideology, exists when the larger plural society expects its members to maintain their cultural distinctiveness, as well as providing its members with the opportunity to acquire and attain the cultural values of the larger society. Multiculturalism (as ideology or as an acculturation expectation) aims at mutual accommodation by all the members of the society. From the Canadian perspective, a true multicultural ideology has two objectives: an appreciation for ­(cultural) diversity and support for its maintenance on the one hand, and mutual or reciprocal accommodation among the different groups together with the promotion of equitable participation for all members of the

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society. Ideologically, most social democratic countries regard equitable participation as the most politically correct way for people to live together, and this is understood as a moral obligation.

Multiculturalism as Policy A policy is a statement of intent that guides decisions aimed at achieving rational outcomes. Thus, multiculturalism as a policy is a national government’s legislated intentions on how to manage and accommodate cultural and ethnic differences or diversity within a plural society. Different countries may have their own multicultural ideology, and this may be reflected differently in the policy that the country legislates. For years, and even to this present day, most countries sought to manage and accommodate the different ethnic groups within the society through a policy of assimilation, where the goal is to create a society with a single national language, one identity, and one shared set of values. During a 1956 conference on integration, held in Havana, Cuba, the Canadian government expressed some misgivings regarding the policy of assimilation as impractical and unrealistic and suggested that Canada would be pursuing a new policy that reflected the ethnic composition of the country. This new policy was to avoid a single dominant group within the country seeking to absorb all other groups (culturally). In 1971, therefore, a policy of multiculturalism was announced by the government when it declared A policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework . . . (is) the most suitable means of assuring the cultural freedom of all Canadians. . . . The Government will support and encourage the various cultural and ethnic groups that give structure and vitality to our society. They will be encouraged to share their cultural expression and values with other Canadians and so contribute to a richer life for all. (Government of Canada, 1971, pp. 8545–8546).

Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau went on to suggest that national unity could be achieved when individuals were confident in their own individual identity. Confidence in one’s identity, he alleged, made it possible to respect others and for individuals to be able to share ideas with others with positive attitude. Following Canada’s multiculturalism policy, several other countries including Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Sweden have proposed similar policies. The various policies that different countries have formulated have placed emphasis on different issues. The Canadian multiculturalism policy, for instance, placed emphasis on issues such as (1) the maintenance and development of heritage cultures; (2) the reduction

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of barriers to full and equitable participation of all Canadians; (3) the learning of official languages as a basis for such participation, and (4) the need to be confident in one’s identity. Both the Swedish and the European Union policies have placed emphasis on three things. The Swedish multiculturalism policy emphasized equality, freedom of choice, and partnership among all members within the society. The goal of equality sought to give immigrants the same living standard as the rest of the Swedish population. Freedom of choice referred to public initiatives that were to be taken to assure that members of ethnic and linguistic minorities in Sweden genuinely could choose between retaining and developing their own cultural heritage and/or adopting Swedish cultural identity. The goal of partnership was that immigrants and the native population could both benefit from working together. The first of the 11 Principles the EU adopted identified issues such as (1) the right of all peoples to maintain their cultures; (2) the right to participate fully in the life of the larger society; and (3) the obligation for all groups (both the dominant and nondominant) to engage in a process of mutual change. Most multicultural policies, including the examples given here, seek to achieve cultural integrity, coupled with opportunities for full participation in the activities of the society. Participation in the activities of the society and the maintenance of cultural integrity are for all members of the society. What may be missing in many of these policies is equity when it comes to participation in different sectors of society. Since its introduction as policy, multiculturalism has become an alternative approach to how societies should manage cultural and ethnic differences in a society. The two policies—assimilation and multiculturalism—have been pitted against each other and have succinctly and been described respectively as the “melting away” or “leveling out” of differences among ethnocultural groups toward a society in which intergroup similarity is maximized and differences minimized (in the case of assimilation) and the strengthening and highlighting of intergroup differences together with the sharing of in-group culture with out-groups (in the case of multiculturalism).

Multiculturalism as Governance Multicultural societies often have to deal with four issues: first, the recognition of the diverse ethnic composition of their society; second, the formation of ideologies of how ethnic coexistence should proceed. Third, there is the transformation of the ideologies into policy. The fourth issue, and perhaps the most challenging, is how to turn the policies into practical and attainable

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goals. The governance aspect of multiculturalism is also often fraught with ambiguities. The good intentions laid out in policies may turn out to be unworkable. From a practical point of view, multiculturalism can be characterized along three models of governance: conservative, liberal, and plural, and these models may differ in terms of how society sees the challenges posed by the coexistence of the different ethnocultural groups, the underlying assumptions regarding the relationships among the ethnocultural groups within the society, and the kind of actions deemed necessary in order to achieve the expected outcomes. Conservative multiculturalism is a “color-blind” or “one-size-fits-all” approach, where all members of the society, regardless of ethnicity (or gender) receive equal treatment before the law. In other words, differences should not be a basis to deny one full democratic rights and access to all privileges conferred on citizens. Difference does not matter and should be deemphasized. Multiculturalism as practiced in France may be described as such. Liberal multiculturalism is based on the principle of unity and equality albeit with full recognition of differences. Diversity is to be promoted and celebrated. This model of multiculturalism expects people to be treated as equals despite obvious cultural and ethnic differences. Some concessions have to be made to make this possible, and privileges may have to be granted, albeit temporarily, to some sectors of society in order to achieve equality. In addition, differences within society should not threaten the unity of the society. The practice of multiculturalism in Canada may be described as the liberal type. Plural multiculturalism advocates for the coexistence of cultural differences and the creation and the support for autonomous institutions and separate communities for the different groups. This interpretation of multiculturalism reflects the Dutch approach. Whereas plural multiculturalism recognizes differences and encourages members to live out their difference without the need on their part to be united, liberal multiculturalism, while recognizing differences and encouraging members to live out their difference, encourages members to be united. These three models of multiculturalism governance translate into “living together differently” (the plural way) versus “living together with difference” (the liberal way) versus “living together with no difference” (the conservative way). How long a country’s multicultural governance needs to run in order to see the expected outcomes is unclear. It is perhaps safe to suggest that multicultural governance is, to a large extent, a “work in progress” in most societies, and the desired result may take years to attain. Canada, which has the longest history of multiculturalism policy and governance, can still be ­

considered one such “work in progress.” The Canadian multiculturalism policy and its governance started as ethnicity multiculturalism (in which the emphasis was to celebrate ethnicity; a “mosaic”) in the 1970s. This was followed by equality multiculturalism (with emphasis on equality through structural accommodation; “leveling the field”) in the 1980s and early 1990s. This period was followed by civic multiculturalism in the late 1990s and early 2000s (with the goal of citizenship and full engagement; “belonging”). Currently the policy is integrative multiculturalism and the goal is to live together in cohesion.

Multiculturalism as Counterhegemony Hegemony is a political or cultural dominance of one nation or group over others. Hegemony within the context of the United States, for instance, has been the power exercised by Whites over ethnic minorities such as African Americans. Part of this hegemony has been the goal of assimilating ethnic minorities. Hegemony has often been associated with discrimination, prejudice, oppression, and a number of social injustices. Multiculturalism as counterhegemony has been the unspoken motive to remedy these social injustices. This form of multiculturalism can be interpreted as a form of counterhegemony. Ethnic revival (e.g., “Black is beautiful”) and the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s are regarded as some of the activities behind the rise of multiculturalism.

Comparing Best Practices As multicultural policies and governance gain popularity, social scientists have also tried to operationalize multicultural practices and made them amenable for comparative research purposes. Two such efforts are the Multiculturalism Policy Index (MPI) and the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX). Both indices attempt to quantify a country’s efforts in meeting eight specific criteria deemed to reflect multiculturalism. The eight indicators that the MPI, hosted by Queen’s University, Canada, assesses are legislative affirmation, media representation, dress codes, naturalization, funding of ethnic organizations, school curriculum, minority-language education, and affirmative action. Using the MPI, it has been possible to track changes in multiculturalism from 1980 to 2010 in some 21 Western countries. In the 1980s, Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United States were four countries that were identified as making some progress in multiculturalism. All other countries were seen as weak on multiculturalism. In the 2010 scores, Australia, Canada, Sweden, and Finland were rated as strong on multiculturalism.

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MIPEX also focuses on eight indicators when c­ alculating a country’s MIPEX. The indicators used to determine a country’s level of multiculturalism include integration of migrants in the labor and education sectors, access to health, political participation, and antidiscrimination laws. There are presently MIPEX scores for 38 different countries, including Australia, Canada, Norway, and Sweden. For years, Sweden has had the highest MIPEX score and was ranked first in 2014, followed by Portugal and New Zealand. Surprisingly, Canada is ranked sixth and the United States ninth. The relatively poor ranking of the United States has been attributed to lack of comprehensive immigration reform and the treatment of illegal immigrants.

Psychological Aspects of Multiculturalism At the center of multiculturalism are individuals and groups of people who are affected by the ideologies, policies, and governance at play within the society. Because Canada was the first country to have introduced multiculturalism, it is also not surprising that pioneering social-psychological research on multiculturalism has been undertaken there as well. A number of hypotheses have been derived from the Canadian multiculturalism policy, three of which are mentioned here. First is the multiculturalism hypothesis: confidence in one’s identity will lead to sharing, respect for others, and to the reduction of discriminatory attitudes. Second is the integration hypothesis: when individuals and groups seek integration, by being “doubly engaged” (in both their heritage cultures and in the larger society), they will be more successful in achieving a higher level of well-being. Third is the contact hypothesis, which asserts that contact and sharing between ethnocultural groups under certain conditions, such as equality, will promote mutual acceptance and reduce prejudice. Studies have found varying degrees of support for these hypotheses, with less support found for the multiculturalism hypothesis. These hypotheses are currently being further examined to verify their generalizability across countries in the MIRIPS project (i.e., Mutual Intercultural Relations In Plural Societies).

Beyond Multiculturalism A number of European leaders, including a former British prime minister (David Cameron), a former French president (Nicolas Sarkozy), and the German chancellor (Angela Merkel) have individually and separately made statements to suggest that “multiculturalism has failed.” These statements have arisen in part because of the huge influx of refugees and the insurgence of home-bred terrorists in European Union countries. These statements

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are normally directed at multiculturalism as policy and as governance and could be interpreted to indicate that the policy of multiculturalism is flawed and/or that multiculturalism as governance is wrongly practiced. Flawed multiculturalism policies may mean that policies have a number of ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes. Such ambiguities imply that multiculturalism is not practicable and should be replaced. It also means that the various hypotheses (e.g., the integration hypothesis) may not be tenable. Research on integration hypotheses has received much support; that on multiculturalism hypothesis is mixed. Considering that there are different forms of multiculturalism governance (e.g., conservative multiculturalism), it is reasonable to assume that not all countries purported to be practicing multiculturalism are doing it well, as reflected by differences in scores in MPI or MIPEX. It may be that some of the practices are not yielding the expected outcome or that they may be lacking in some important aspects. A third question is whether there are ways other than multiculturalism and assimilation for managing cultural diversity. One such alternative approach is omniculturalism, which arguably goes beyond the efforts of a single country, and has implications for the global world. Omniculturalism seeks not only to emphasize human commonalities and celebrate shared features of human beings but also to create a society that recognizes and shares group differences. David L. Sam See also Assimilation; Globalization; Hegemony; Immigration; Omniculturalism

Further Readings Berry, J. W. (2013). Research on multiculturalism in Canada. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37(6), 663–675. Berry, J. W., & Sam, D. L. (2014). Multicultural societies. In V. Benet-Martínez & Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.), Oxford handbook of multicultural identity. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Berry, J. W., & Ward, C. (2016). Multiculturalism. In D. L. Sam & J. W. Berry (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of acculturation psychology (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Fleras, A. (2009). The politics of multiculturalism. Multicultural governance in comparative perspective. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Government of Canada. (1971). Policy of multiculturalism. Statement to the House of Commons. Ottawa. Moghaddam, F. (2008). Multiculturalism and intergroup relations: Psychological implications for democracy in global context. Washington, DC: APA Books.

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Moghaddam, F M. (2012). The omnicultural imperative. Culture and Psychology, 18, 304–330.

Multilateralism Multilateralism has been defined as the practice of coordinating national policies in groups of three or more states. States engage in multilateral cooperation according to a wide range of rationales. Multilateralism can be a useful strategy to spread out the costs of international engagement, such as those associated with the prevention of human security crises (genocide, mass atrocities, gross government abuse, refugee crises), providing aid or provision in the occurrence of disasters (of human origin or otherwise), or armed military interventions to mitigate, halt, or prevent civil war or dyadic conflict. States engage in multilateralism because there is a sense that states can effect greater change or produce more meaningful policy results by working multilaterally rather than bilaterally or unilaterally. In the post-World War II international order, multilateralism typically took one of two main forms. First, economic and military alliances formed the foundation for regional and international governance. States provided for their own material and security interests through cooperation and collusion with other states. Second, the postwar order saw the creation of numerous international organizations. These new institutions provided for shared rules and norms in regard to international trade, international or bilateral conflict resolution, and the representation of both small and large states in international fora built to address genuinely global economic, security, or environmental issues. These patterns of multilateral engagement—alliances and international organizations—remain in place today, despite the significant changes in international affairs after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of the War Against Terror. The bulk of multilateral international cooperation takes shape within military alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or within international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the European Union, or the ­African Union. Scholars and policy analysts suggest that processes of globalization and regional economic integration have created greater incentives for multilateral engagement in the 21st century. Given the onset of more complex forms of social, political, and economic interdependence, states are forced to engage policy problems multilaterally, as they are increasingly unable to shape desired policy outcomes alone.

Multilateralism in Contemporary Global Governance Multilateral engagement is a fundamental reality of contemporary international affairs and an essential component for the realization of global collective goods. In regard to trade and commerce, for instance, the current functioning of the global economy would be impossible without multilateral agreements, such as those that assure the free and open transoceanic shipment of goods, policies that regulate currency exchange and international banking, and the laws that govern trade practices. Similarly, international security would be ­disadvantaged without the existing multilateral frameworks that guarantee the territorial integrity of sovereign states, those laws that regulate the conduct of warfare and the treatment of civilians in war zones, and the institutionalization of international diplomacy such that states might find peaceful resolutions to conflicts in the context of international organizations. Increasingly, multilateral engagement is forming the backbone of emergent regional subsystems in international politics, especially among the more densely populated areas of the world such as Europe or Southeast Asia. As international territorial borders become increasingly less effective as government tools for the regulation of goods, capital, and services flows in these regions, states rely more and more on multilateral engagement to build regional agreements to promote policy harmonization and foster dialogue on regional affairs. The European Union, for example, is a multilateral organization with its own supranational governmental structures and currency—the euro—that aims to coordinate regional policies for the purposes of regional economic growth, the management of regional labor flows, and the sheltering of European economies from the unpredictable downturns in the international economy such as recessions or collapses in international trade.

Multilateralism: Beyond Materialist Concerns Thus far we have discussed multilateralism primarily as a state strategy to cope with emergent international problems or to more effectively realize shared, collective goods obtained only through cooperation. The emphasis so far has been on how states use multilateral engagement to procure material goods such as economic, financial, or security well-being or to produce regional stability. Yet there is also a wide range of nonmaterialist, ideational reasons states may choose ­ to employ multilateralism as a foreign policy tool. Scholars have noted for some time how multilateral engagement is a means through which governance

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norms and values are transmitted, received, and implemented. For instance, multilateral engagement is a means through which states learn about “best practices” in regard to governance and economic management. Close cooperation allows for a number of socialization opportunities as governments gain a closer view of the functioning of politics in the societies of their multilateral partners. International trade cooperation is often thought to be an important part of the promotion of democracy and representative forms of government. If multilateral cooperation requires policy harmonization, for example, states may choose to abandon restrictive or oppressive economic or political governance practices or curb state favoritism and participation in in-group/out-group conflicts. National elites may choose multilateralism as a strategy to better realize visions or images of a “good society,” fostering international cooperation in order to boost their standing at home or abroad. A history of success in multilateral engagement can accord advantageous reputational credentials to a state as a “good neighbor,” “honest broker,” or “transparent partner.” Building a good reputation may allow for greater influence in a state’s immediate neighborhood and beyond (e.g., the Scandinavian states and international conflict resolution). At the individual and group levels, political ideology can play a major role in predispositions toward cooperation and collusion and thus toward multilateral engagement. Individuals and the social groups they identify with may realize higher levels of personal or group satisfaction through altruistic, cooperative, or reciprocal behaviors. The willingness to cooperate is associated with other cognitive, personality, or group-level attributes such as a lack of nationalism, a decreased tendency to favor one’s own community over others, and a decreased need for group belonging. These attitudes effectively amount to a propensity to value differences across cultures and across nations. Multilateral engagement in the 21st century includes those issues deemed most salient to international and regional security and/or economic growth including concerted counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts, stemming the spread of pandemic viruses and diseases, mitigating the spread and use of nuclear weapons technologies and other weapons of mass destruction, and regional and global initiatives to combat global warming and global climate change. Luke B. Wood See also American Exceptionalism; Contact Theory; Defense Planning; Deterrence and International Relations; Diplomacy; International Humanitarian Law; Nationalism; Parliamentarism; Political Deliberation; Positioning Theory; Reconciliation

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Further Readings Feinstein, L. A., & Lindberg, T. (2009). Means to an end: US interest in the international criminal court. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Keohane, R. O. (1990). Multilateralism: An agenda for research. International Journal, 45(4), 731–764. Keohane, R. O. (2003). Humanitarian intervention: Ethical, legal, and political dilemmas. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Keohane, R. O., & Victor, D. (2010, January). The regime complex for climate change. Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Discussion Paper 10-33. Kreps, S. E. (2008). Multilateral military interventions: Theory and practice. Political Science Quarterly, 123(4), 573–603. Muller, H., & Wunderlich, C. (2015). Norm dynamics in multilateral arms control. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Telo, M. (Ed.). (2014). Globalization, multilateralism, Europe: Toward a better global governance. New York, NY: Ashgate. Zartman, W., & Touval, S. (2010). International cooperation: The extents and limits of multilateralism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Mutual Radicalization Political behavior is sometimes influenced by mutual radicalization, when two groups take increasingly extreme positions against one another, reacting against real or imagined threats, moving further and further apart, with the ultimate goal of thwarting, blocking, or even destroying the other. Associated with this process is pathological hatred, in which each side interprets a loss for the other side as a gain for the self, with the destruction of the other bringing maximum self-satisfaction. Mutual radicalization is a dynamic process that can involve individuals competing against other individuals, as when two people become extreme in hatred and acts of aggression against one another. However, the more common and destructive form of mutual radicalization involves large groups, such as when groups formed on the basis of religion, ethnicity, nationality, and/or ideology mobilize to harm or destroy others. The dynamic nature of the mutual radicalization process means that increases in radicalization in the first group impacts other groups, leading them to further radicalize, with the result that their radicalization increases the radicalization of the first group. The outcome can be a ratcheting process, with each group becoming increasingly radicalized and also influencing other groups to radicalize, with little or no opportunities to deradicalize. The culture and identity of each group becomes transformed and takes shape in opposition to “the enemy.” The three main stages in the mutual

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radicalization process are group mobilization, with each group taking positions and distancing themselves from out-groups around particular issues; extreme in-group cohesion, when conformity and obedience increases within groups and the distance between different groups increases; and antagonistic identity transformation, when the identity of each group changes on the basis of enmity toward the out-group(s). Mutual radicalization impacts family life, the education system, and all other mechanisms for socialization of the next generation. Children grow up seeing and believing “the enemy” to be evil. For example, the relationship between Arabs and Israelis has been characterized by mutual radicalization. Other examples are India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars and countless skirmishes since gaining independence from Britain in 1947. The relationship between extremist Muslims and right-wing nationalists in Europe is also taking on the characteristics of mutual radicalization. Mutual radicalization also takes place in domestic politics, as reflected by “gridlock” on Capitol Hill during the presidency of Barack Obama (2008–2016). The shutdown of the federal government of the United States of America from October 1 until October 16 in 2013 was an outcome of mutual radicalization. This came about when the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate and the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives could not agree on funding for “Obamacare” (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), signed into law in 2010. The government shutdown was an attempt to “inflict political pain” and with a mentality that “whatever hurts the opposition must be good for us.” The shutdown cost the United States economy at least $24 billion, and the employees given a “forced holiday” received back pay. The importance of the mutual radicalization process derives from the powerlessness of individuals to resist conformity to group norms, obedience to authority figures, and collective changes in general. Individuals are often reluctant to go along with group radicalization because they can see the group is making a mistake, but they become entrapped within collective changes. About 80 years of psychological research, including the studies of Turkish-American psychologist Muzafer Sherif in the 1930s, Solomon Asch in the 1950s, Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, and Phil Zimbardo in the 1970s, demonstrates that individuals with normal personality characteristics can be influenced by the group and by authority figures to make decisions they can clearly see are wrong and harmful to others. Furthermore, research by Henri Tajfel and his associates suggests that mutual radicalization can take place

on the basis of what in objective terms are “trivial” criteria, or at least criteria that are psychologically rather than materially important. This helps explain why mutual radicalization and associated conflicts seldom result in material benefits to either side. For example, if Arabs and Israelis acted rationally in a way that maximizes the material interests of both sides, their relationship would be very different. Instead, mutual radicalization leads each side to treat each loss by the other as a gain for the self. This also explains why wars often end in material losses and no gains for both sides. For example, the 8-year war between Iran and Iraq (1980–1988) ended with neither side gaining an inch of territory or other resources but costing millions of lives and enormous material destruction on both sides. The two sides were led by belligerent dictators (Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq; Ayatollah Khomeini ruled Iran) who led their respective nations down a path of mutual radicalization and increasing destruction. The power of the mutual radicalization arises from the automatic and irrational behavior of groups and individuals caught up in this process. Even individuals who can clearly see their group is moving in the wrong direction often are compelled to conform, obey, and move along with the rest of the group. If these “wise” individuals attempt to resist the collective movement, they are often victimized and branded traitors. However, it is often the courage of individual rebels that redirects the mutual radicalization process and prevents further destruction. The removal of the kinds of leaders who benefit from intergroup conflict and the improvement of communications between groups are other extremely important paths to preventing mutual radicalization. Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Calculus of Dissent; Deviance and Control; Dictatorship; Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs; Groupthink; Irrationality; Powerlessness

Further Readings Konaev, M., & Moghaddam, F. M. (2010). Mutual radicalization. In F. M. Moghaddam & R. Harré (Eds.), Words of conflict, words of war: How the language we use in political processes sparks fighting (pp. 155–171). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International. McCauley, C., & Moskalenko, S. (2011). Friction: How radicalization happens to them and us. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.

N The study of name order effects is useful in assessing whether or not the position of a candidate’s name has any effect on his or her electoral loss or success. This is particularly relevant when studying elections that involve too much or not enough public information, either of which would hinder the voter’s ability to make a substantive decision. If voting is mandatory, or voters feel a democratic duty to vote, voters are sometimes making decisions on the basis of little or no information. As a result, voters have been found to choose candidates based on their ballot position. The order of candidates’ names on the ballot has been correlated with the following effects: primacy effects, which are biases toward selecting the first object considered in a set (such as when a voter chooses the first candidate listed because he or she has no information about the political race); and recency effects, which are biases toward selecting candidates listed last. Voters who are knowledgeable about candidates and have made substancebased decisions in the past are the least likely to rely on superficial decision influencers like name order. Tests that resulted in a statistical significance for order effects have been significant for primacy effects. Candidates listed lower on the ballot were at a disadvantage compared to those listed first. Statistical studies have also shown that name order effects are stronger in nonpartisan races than in partisan ones, in races that received less coverage by news media, and races that had the highest rates of a roll-off (voters not completing a ballot with a selection in each contest), which suggests that voters knew relatively little about the candidates. Differences between the strength of name order effects have also been highly correlated with differences between counties in the amount of formal education voters had. However, races with incumbents have showed lower name order effects because of the public’s familiarity with the incumbents.

Name Order A concern for the order in which candidates’ names appear on a ballot is founded on a presumption that uninformed or ambivalent voters will choose a candidate based on the candidate’s ballot position when other common identifiers are not available. This is one of many theoretical assumptions about the political behavior of voters. It hypothesizes that the number order of a candidate’s name on the ballot may influence a voter’s decision during certain races. Voters most likely to be influenced by name order tend to be more uninformed or ambivalent, but nonetheless compelled to vote either because of compulsory voting or because of personal pressure that it is their democratic duty to vote. Also, such races generally lack information about the candidates or their offices, or consist of ballots that lack identifiable characteristics (e.g., party affiliation), a younger population of voters, voters that lack sufficient cognitive capabilities, voters that have cognitive capabilities but are ambivalent about the election, or voters lacking fluency in the language in which the election is being conducted.

Overview What happens when voters are uninformed about the choices they are being asked to make? What process of elimination do they use to ultimately cast their vote? Although low information rationality, whereby voters will rely on cues such as party affiliation and name recognition, can guide some voters, such rationality is not applicable in situations where party affiliation is not listed on the ballot or the office position being voted on, such as County Representative, is too obscure. 511

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Debates Because name-order studies have been conducted without information on voter characteristics (either one or more of the precincts or districts studied lacked such voter information), and because the name order itself has not been randomized (meaning that voters were not given ballots with random name orders), it has been debated that these studies may have ignored other explanatory variables. For example, it may be that the spatial position of candidate names, that is, horizontal versus vertical, has an effect on voter choices as opposed to temporal/numerical primacy only. Additional issues debated include whether the effect of name order is homogenous across party lines, or if certain parties, age groups, electoral environments, for instance, are more affected by name order than others.

Conclusion Name order identifies an issue whereby voters will place an uninformed or ambivalent vote based on the ballot position of a candidate’s name. Name order is to be distinguished from other preferences such as alphabetic preference—where candidates are listed in alphabetical order as opposed to some arbitrary numerical order. As a result of these studies, policy recommendations have been made to mitigate name order effects in elections. These policy recommendations have generally been focused on randomizing the order of candidates’ names as they appear on the ballot. However, it was found that when the randomization is done prior to the voting, ballot order continues to affect the voters when they arrive at the polls. Some authors have since suggested that multiple versions of ballots be printed so that each candidate will be listed first on a share of the ballots used during the election. In this way, a candidate’s name would be rotated on multiple ballots throughout all polling places to ensure that they appear in the first position for an equal number of voters. Liana Eustacia Reyes-Reardon See also Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting; Political Participation; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Ho, D., & Imai, K. (2008). Estimating causal effects of ballot order from randomized natural experiment: The California alphabet lottery. Public Opinion Quarterly, 72(2), 216–240. Kim, N., Krosnick, J., & Casasanto, D. (2014). Moderators of candidate name-order effects in elections: An experiment. Political Psychology, 36(5), 525–542.

King, A., & Leigh, A. (2009). Are ballot order effects heterogenous? Social Science Quarterly, 90(1), 71–87. Koppell, J., & Steen, J. (2004). The effects of ballot position on election outcomes. Journal of Politics, 66(1), 267–281. Miller, J., & Krosnick, J. (1998). The impact of candidate name order on election outcomes. Public Opinion Quarterly, 62, 291–330.

Narcissism Narcissism is broadly defined as an exaggerated sense of self-importance, highly inflated self-views, and an unrelenting desire for maintaining these self-views. Individuals with higher narcissism are motivated by a desire to attain high status and are also more often chosen as leaders. Given that narcissistic individuals are likely to occupy positions of high power, it is imperative for the study of political behavior to understand narcissists’ interpersonal functioning and interaction with others, including followers, organizations, and society as a whole. This entry provides an overview of narcissism, conceptualized as a personality trait. It discusses the self-perceptions of narcissistic individuals, the perceptions others have of narcissistic individuals, the behavior of narcissistic individuals, and finally, the consequences of narcissistic individuals as leaders.

Definition Narcissism: A Disorder or a Personality Trait? Some of the general characteristics of narcissistic individuals include (a) grandiose sense of self-­importance, (b) arrogance and sense of superiority, (c) perception of being special and unique, (d) sense of entitlement and perception that one deserves special treatment, (e) exhibitionism and attention seeking, (f) lack of empathy, and (g) tendency to exploit others. Narcissism can be assessed as a clinical disorder, namely narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), but it can also be conceived as a stable personality trait found in the nonclinical population. Whereas a clinical diagnosis would classify individuals as either suffering from the disorder or not, the trait conceptualization considers individuals to differ in their degree of narcissism. In the latter case, narcissism is most commonly measured using a self-report questionnaire (the Narcissistic Personality Inventory; NPI), with some individuals scoring higher and some scoring lower on a continuum. Given the emphasis of the current entry on discussing the potential impact of narcissistic individuals on other individuals, groups, and society as a

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whole, it is more relevant to focus on narcissism as a personality trait found to varying degrees within the general population. Subsequent reference to narcissism will thus refer to those individuals who possess many narcissistic characteristics, in other words, who would score high on a narcissism personality scale.

Grandiose Versus Vulnerable Narcissism Two distinct forms of narcissism can be distinguished, each with its own set of characteristics. Grandiose narcissism is characterized by relatively functional intrapersonal self-relevant features such as confidence, dominance, extraversion, high self-esteem, and low emotional distress. In contrast, vulnerable narcissism, or depressive narcissism, is characterized by more dysfunctional intrapersonal features which include introversion, low self-esteem, and high emotional distress. However, both forms of narcissism have in common that highly narcissistic individuals possess a fundamental sense of entitlement and a tendency to behave aggressively toward others, particularly when criticized. Given the overlap between grandiose narcissism characteristics and characteristics that are most commonly associated with leadership, such as confidence, dominance, and extraversion, it is more relevant to focus on grandiose narcissism when examining the impact of narcissism within the context of the political domain. For example, U.S. presidents have been found to have higher grandiose narcissism, but not higher vulnerable narcissism, than the norm in the general population. Furthermore, whereas grandiose narcissism was related to several performance indicators, vulnerable narcissism was not related to the performance of presidents. Moreover, studies showing that narcissistic individuals are more likely to emerge as leaders have predominantly focused on this more grandiose form of narcissism. This will likewise be the subsequent focus of this entry and any reference to narcissism will imply grandiose narcissism.

Origins of Narcissism One potential influence on the development of narcissism which has been debated by different schools of thought is early upbringing. Social learning theory suggests that narcissism develops in children who receive too much positive attention and validation from their parents. This in turn leads children to internalize the belief that they are special, unique, and entitled to special treatment. Psychodynamic theories, on the other hand, suggest that it is the deficiency in parental approval and warmth that leads to the development of narcissism in children. The general idea is that children

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are then compelled to seek approval by showing off a grandiose image. Research which followed the progress of children over several months found that parental overvaluation rather than lack of parental warmth predicted narcissism in children. In addition, there are other potential predictors of narcissism. For example, narcissism has been found to have a moderate-to-large genetic component, which suggests that it is, at least in part, a hereditary trait. Narcissism also differs between genders, with men consistently reporting higher narcissism than women. Finally, cultural factors seem to play a role in shaping narcissism: Narcissism appears to be higher in individualistic cultures in which the emphasis is on individual achievement (e.g., the United States), than in collectivistic cultures where the emphasis is on embeddedness of individuals in larger groups (e.g., China). In terms of trends, there are indications that narcissism levels in the United States are increasing over time, along with other individualistic traits such as extraversion.

Narcissism in the Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Domain Motivation At the core of narcissism lies a pervasive sense of uniqueness, grandiosity, and a continuous desire to align the real self with the overly positive ideal self. Narcissistic individuals believe that they are better than others and that they possess superior skills and abilities across different domains. They continuously strive to show off these superior abilities, for example by means of bragging to others about their accomplishments or name dropping. Because narcissistic individuals are fundamentally driven by a desire to prove their superiority, they seek contexts in which they can show off their abilities. This motivation to maintain or elevate positive aspects of oneself is known as self-enhancement and has been found to stimulate performance. Indeed, narcissists’ performance is better in contexts which give them opportunities to self-enhance rather than when such opportunities are not present. For example, coming up with creative ideas in front of an audience would be seen as a high opportunity to self-enhance, whereas as coming up in solitude with ideas would not be seen as an opportunity to self-enhance as it lacks an evaluative audience. Other contexts which motivate performance in narcissistic individuals are ones which are seen as challenging, have high pressure, are defined as competitive, or involve performing in front of a high-status other. Overall, social contexts in general thus provide narcissistic individuals with opportunities to seek admiration and validation. In pursuit of the fulfillment of

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their goals, highly narcissistic individuals are more driven by a desire to attain positive outcomes (approach motivation) rather than a motivation to avoid negative outcomes or losses (avoidance motivation), which fits with their inclination to be impulsive and take risks. Put differently, a narcissistic individual taking a driving test would not be focused on avoiding mistakes, such as speeding, but instead would be focused on showing off superior driving skills.

Maintaining High Self-View Narcissists’ grandiose self-views make them particularly sensitive and reactive to ego-threats—defined as any events that call into question one’s positive selfimage, such as interpersonal rejection or criticism. Consequently, narcissistic individuals employ several ­ defense strategies—intrapersonal, interpersonal, and even at the intergroup level—in order to defuse any ego-threatening information and maintain a positive ­ self-view. At the intrapersonal level, narcissists predominantly attribute successes to themselves; however, if they fail, they externalize blame to others. For example, a high grade in an exam will most often be attributed to one’s own talent, whereas a low grade might be blamed on poor quality of the teacher or the exam itself. Other defensive strategies include mentally restructuring past events in order to minimize negative feedback, for example remembering past romantic experiences more positively after being rejected, reluctance to process negative information, or a tendency to distort feedback in self-protective ways. All in all, on the intrapersonal level, narcissistic individuals appear to be psychologically healthy by engaging in defensive strategies and maintaining their high self-esteem. At the interpersonal level, the primary behavioral reaction of highly narcissistic individuals is to aggress against the source of threat. For example, following egothreats, narcissistic individuals have been found to blast the other person with sound or evaluate the other person negatively (derogation). The rationale for this behavior is explained by the theory of threatened egotism, which argues that aggression can help narcissistic individuals reestablish superiority or dominance and likewise eliminate the source of the threat. Finally, narcissistic individuals are more likely to perceive an ambiguous action as threatening, for example, if they receive seemingly innocuous feedback that they are average rather than unique. However, although in many instances aggression is the dominant response, in some instances narcissistic individuals counter ego-threats by showing off their superior skills and increasing their performance. For example, after receiving negative feedback narcissistic individuals come up with more creative ideas. At the intergroup level, collective narcissism, defined as grandiose beliefs regarding one’s own in-group such

as a national in-group, is associated with a greater intention to harm the offending outgroup if in-group members perceive a threat to their group’s highly inflated image.

Self–Other Perceptions Narcissistic individuals tend to rate themselves highly, or better than others, on agentic characteristics such as on intelligence, creativity, physical attractiveness, and leadership potential. In contrast, they do not regard themselves as more caring or moral than others, also known as communal characteristics, which suggests that they are more concerned about being admired rather than liked. The overconfidence of narcissistic individuals is, however, not well anchored in reality, and narcissists’ actual capabilities do not seem to coincide with their overly idealized notion of themselves. However, narcissists do appear to be very effective at generating an image of excellence and competence. For example, research found that the enthusiasm and energy with which they pitch ideas led narcissistic individuals to be perceived as more creative, even though their ideas were not objectively more creative. In addition, despite not being found to be more intelligent, narcissistic individuals tend to be perceived as more intelligent and competent by others. This could be explained by the fact that dominance and overconfidence are often seen as cues of competence. Insofar as physical attractiveness of narcissists is concerned, the story is more complicated. While earlier research found that narcissistic individuals were objectively not more attractive than others, later research found a positive association between narcissism and attractiveness. For example, higher narcissism in users of social network websites was related to higher attractiveness ratings because these individuals paid more attention to their visual self-presentation. The question remains whether high narcissists are innately more attractive or whether the perception of greater physical attractiveness by others is the result of narcissists’ greater attention to self-presentation, for example by purchasing more trendy clothes or just taking better care of their appearance. Research shows that narcissists do have a neat, organized appearance, and a preference for flashy, expensive, and stylish clothes. Thus, the key to narcissistic success appears to lie in impression management and this in turn engenders positive perceptions in others, at least initially.

Short- Versus Long-Term Perceptions of Narcissists People are fairly accurate in perceiving narcissism in others, even from merely a photograph, and they tend to initially evaluate narcissistic individuals positively,

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mainly because of stylish clothing, charming facial expression, self-assured body movements, and use of humor. In a group context, both the greater expressiveness, such as increased talking and being active, and the dominant behavior of narcissistic individuals leads other group members to initially perceive them as assertive. However, these positive initial impressions and concomitant popularity ratings tend to diminish relatively quickly, as the more negative aspects of narcissism become apparent, such as arrogance and hostility. This in turn leads group members to perceive them as untrustworthy, thereby negatively influencing their popularity. These findings are also consistent with research which found that narcissists have difficulties forming long-term relationships. Narcissistic individuals do seem to have some awareness of the fact that others may not necessarily see them as positively as they see themselves. They also seem to be aware that their positive impressions tend to deteriorate over time. This could help explain why narcissistic individuals engage in self-promotional behavior such as bragging about their accomplishments, and why they are motivated to show themselves as competent across various domains. In essence, they strive to merge the gap between selfand others’ perceptions.

Narcissists as Leaders Leader Emergence The initial positive impressions others have of narcissistic individuals help explain why they have often been found to emerge as leaders in group contexts. Early research on how people acknowledge others as leaders, known as implicit leadership theory, states that observers match the leader’s behavior against their own schema of what personifies a leader. In other words, in their minds, people have an implicit leader prototype, which they utilize as a point of reference in assessing whether or not a person exemplifies their notion of a leader. The greater the apparent overlap between the leader prototype and a person’s behavior or assumed characteristics, the more likely it is that others will perceive this person as a potential leader, or an effective leader. The characteristics that have been consistently associated with a prototypical leader include confidence, dominance, high self-esteem, intelligence, extraversion, and empathy. With the exception of empathy, there is a great level of overlap between the narcissistic characteristics, especially insofar as perceptions are concerned, and the general leader prototype. Therefore, because narcissistic individuals display many leadership characteristics, this leads others to perceive them as leaders. Furthermore, narcissists’ desire for status and their positive assessment of their own leadership aptitudes would lead them to seek high-profile jobs that

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contain opportunities for self-enhancement. The leadership role in particular provides narcissists with an alluring stage from which they can show off their superiority and demonstrate their leadership qualities.

Consequences of Narcissistic Leaders A more complex picture emerges when considering whether narcissistic leaders have a positive or a negative influence on their followers, groups, organizations, or society at large, particularly because narcissism itself has a mixture of both positive and negative characteristics. For example, research found that especially the exploitative/entitlement dimension of narcissism was ­ associated with several negative outcomes, such as unethical decision making, antisocial tendencies, devaluing of others, entitlement rage, and lack of agreeableness. In contrast, the more positive component of narcissism (Leadership/Authority) was associated with positive outcomes such as being perceived as extraverted by others. On the positive side, narcissistic leaders promote bold visions, are perceived as charismatic, score well on crisis management, and are open to change and new technologies if other people perceive the change as provocative or engaging. On the negative side, the dominance of narcissistic leaders causes them to inhibit information sharing among their followers, which negatively impacts the group’s performance. In addition, their tendency to disregard the viewpoints of others, and their insatiable need for glory, could lead them to pursue unrealistic projects and risky investments. Indeed, narcissistic CEOs were found to make riskier decisions that resulted in greater volatility in organizational results, however, on average organizational performance was neither better nor worse than for low-narcissistic CEOs. Furthermore, their lack of empathy and their self-serving attitude prompts narcissistic leaders to bully their subordinates and ignore moral standards. Finally, narcissistic CEOs have been found to have higher pay in comparison to their senior team members, which could lead to high levels of dissatisfaction and turnover among employees. In the political sphere, research on U.S. presidents similarly found that narcissism was associated with both positive outcomes (e.g., public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting) and positive indicators of presidential performance (e.g., winning popular vote and initiating legislation), as well as negative outcomes (e.g., congressional impeachment resolutions and unethical behavior). It is this combination of dark and bright sides of narcissism that has led research to grapple with the question of whether narcissistic leaders actually constitute an asset or a liability to organizations. It has been proposed that context is important in determining the effectiveness of narcissistic leaders. For example,

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narcissists seem to be particularly valued as leaders during times of uncertainty and crisis even though at the same time people seem to be aware of the negatives of narcissism. The confidence and dominance of narcissistic individuals is wanted in turbulent times and helps reduce followers’ uncertainty. Finally, narcissistic leaders may also be more functional in the short term, when their positive characteristics are apparent. ­However, in the long term, their negative relational characteristics, such as aggressive behaviors and a lack of empathy, tend to be counterproductive for their followers. Barbara Nevicka See also Dictatorship; Egocentrism; Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership; Narcissistic Personality Inventory; Personality Traits; Self-Esteem; Social Dominance Orientation

Further Readings Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Nelemans, S. A., De Castro, B. O., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B. J. (2015). Origins of narcissism in children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 3659–3662. doi:10.1073/pnas .1420870112 Bushman, B. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: Does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 75, 219–229. doi:10 .1037/e552692012-026 Campbell, W. K., & Campbell, S. M. (2009). On the selfregulatory dynamics created by the peculiar benefits and costs of narcissism: A contextual reinforcement model and examination of leadership. Self and Identity, 8, 214–232. doi:10.1080/15298860802505129 Campbell, W. K., Rudich, E. A., & Sedikides, C. (2002). Narcissism, self-esteem, and the positivity of self-views: Two portraits of self-love. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 358–368. doi:10.1177/0146167202286007 Golec de Zavala, A. G., Cichocka, A., Eidelson, R., & Jayawickreme, N. (2009). Collective narcissism and its social consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 1074–1096. doi:10.1037/a0016904 Leckelt, M., Küfner, A. C., Nestler, S., & Back, M. D. (2015). Behavioral processes underlying the decline of narcissists’ popularity over time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109, 856–871. doi:10.1037/pspp0000057 Miller, J. D., Hoffman, B. J., Gaughan, E. T., Gentile, B., Maples, J., & Campbell, W. K. (2011). Grandiose and vulnerable narcissism: A nomological network analysis. Journal of Personality, 79, 1013–1042. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010 .00711.x Morf, C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the paradoxes of narcissism: A dynamic self-regulatory processing model.

Psychological Inquiry, 12, 177–196. doi:10.1207/S1532 7965PLI1204_1 Nevicka, B., Ten Velden, F. S., De Hoogh, A. H., & Van Vianen, A. E. (2011). Reality at odds with perceptions: Narcissistic leaders and group performance. Psychological Science, 22. doi:10.1177/0956797611417259 Rosenthal, S. A., & Pittinsky, T. L. (2006). Narcissistic leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 617–633. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.10.005 Sedikides, C., Rudich, E. A., Gregg, A. P., Kumashiro, M., & Rusbult, C. (2004). Are normal narcissists psychologically healthy? Self-esteem matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 400–416. doi:10.1037/0022-3514 .87.3.400 Wallace, H. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2002). The performance of narcissists rises and falls with perceived opportunity for glory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 819–834. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.82.5.819 Watts, A. L., Lilienfeld, S. O., Smith, S. F., Miller, J. D., Campbell, W. K., Waldman, I. D., . . . Faschingbauer, T. J. (2013). The double-edged sword of grandiose narcissism implications for successful and unsuccessful leadership among U.S. presidents. Psychological Science, 24, 2379–2389. doi:10.1177/095679 7613491970

Narcissistic Personality Inventory The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is the most widely used psychometric test for the construct of narcissism as a personality trait. The NPI measures, on a continuum, the degree to which a person thinks and acts narcissistically across various situations. This measure is often used to study populations at a subclinical level, meaning that a high score on the NPI should not be confused with clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which is a cluster B personality disorder characterized by excessive preoccupation with one’s own adequacy, power, and vanity that disrupts daily functioning. High scores on the NPI, by contrast, could reflect a still healthy level of self-absorption, that is often more inconvenient to those around the individual rather than the individual themselves. Alternatively, those who score very low on the test may have abnormally low levels of self-esteem and are often at a higher risk of developing anxiety or depression. Those in the middle of the spectrum are often thought to have a healthy and appropriate level of narcissism, or positive self-image. This entry briefly covers the history of the NPI, the ways in which individual differences in scores can influence personality and behavior, and the structure and validity of the test.

Narcissistic Personality Inventory

History The NPI was originally developed by Robert Raskin and Calvin Hall in 1979, when the need to measure narcissism on a scale became exceedingly clear. This was largely due to its increasing prevalence in clinical psychology and to the influence of Sigmund Freud. The authors, therefore, developed the NPI with the intention of studying the construct of narcissism in an empirical and quantitative way. This was also important for measuring individual differences in narcissism, which they believed would be expressed in nonclinical populations. They began developing the test by creating a list of 220 dyadic items that they believed reflected narcissistic sentiments, based on the clinical criteria for the NPD as it was presented in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). These factors included a grandiose sense of self-importance or uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love; exhibitionism; an inability to tolerate criticism, the indifference of others, or defeat; entitlement or the expectation of special favors without assuming reciprocal responsibilities; interpersonal exploitativeness, relationships that alternate between extremes of overidealization and devaluation; and a lack of empathy. By testing the internal (the item score to the total score) and construct (to measure narcissism specifically) validity of these items, the authors eventually developed the questionnaire to consist of 54 of the most representative statements. Since the original test was created, many different versions of the NPI have been explored, but a 40-item forced-choice version of the test is the most widely used today. In 1988, Howard Terry along with Robert Raskin developed this 40-item version, and for this reason are sometimes cited as the developers of the NPI. Although the NPI was created based on the NPD, there is still a lot of controversy over whether the NPI is relevant to clinical samples, and so it is often used in social or personality psychology as a way of exploring individual differences in narcissism that are expressed in a nonclinical or subclinical population. By 2008, the NPI was used as the main or only measure of the narcissistic personality trait in over 75% of social and personality research on narcissism.

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studies using the NPI have found that high levels of the narcissism trait can have several types of effects on human behavior: from the amount an individual will imitate another, to how much agency they feel, their likelihood of cheating, and their amount of self-love. It is important to note that scores on the NPI represent both normal and abnormal psychological developments. High scores on the NPI, for example, have been related to psychoticism, increased hostility, and lower levels of empathy; however, those who score higher on the scale benefit more from the perception of available social support in a time of high stress, and in some cases, have been shown to manifest certain leadership skills that are superior (although short lasting). As previously mentioned, very low scores on the NPI are associated with low self-esteem and vulnerability to anxiety or depression. Middle scores are often representative of a healthy self-image and an adaptive amount of selfentitlement. There are no specific cut-off scores that represent high or low, nor, too-high or too-low narcissism levels. Generally, the researcher will look at their sample and calculate the top and bottom percentage of scores in order to make their comparison; or alternatively, compare the measured outcome or behavior to the NPI score directly using a correlational analysis (the relationship of the behavior to the score in a positive or negative direction).

Structure and Validity The most common form of the NPI is a self-report survey composed of 40 forced-choice questions between two strong and opposing statements. Participants are asked to answer as best as they can, and this format is thought to reduce socially desirable responding, which is common in narcissism. The nonnarcissistic statement is scored as a “0” and the narcissistic statement is scored as a “1.” The overall score is the sum of all the answers. Some examples of paired statements include the following: I prefer to blend in with the crowd. (nonnarcissistic answer) I like to be the center of attention. (narcissistic answer) I don’t like it when I find myself manipulating people. (nonnarcissistic answer) I find it easy to manipulate people. (narcissistic answer)

Influence on Behavior The NPI has become of great interest to many researchers because it allows them to measure objective levels of the narcissism trait on a continuum and compare how the differences in individual scores can manifest themselves as differences in behaviors or beliefs. Several

I try not to show off. (nonnarcissistic answer) I will usually show off if I get the chance. (narcissistic answer)

There is much controversy surrounding whether the NPI can be used as a total score, or whether it should

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be divided into subfactors; although this is still up for debate and there is a lack of consensus on the number of subfactors involved in the test. The most commonly used are two subfactors: Leadership/Authority and Exhibitionism/Entitlement; and seven subfactors: Authority, Superiority, Exhibitionism, Entitlement, ­Vanity, Exploitativeness, and Self-Sufficiency; but three and four have also been proposed. Despite this, the total score of the NPI is often used and understood to measure a combination of positive and negative narcissistic traits, such as self-perceived confidence, leadership ­ability, social potency, entitlement, and willingness to exploit others. Ann (Chen) Hascalovitz See also Attitudes; Machiavellianism; Narcissism; Self-Esteem; Significance, Need for

Further Readings Raskin, R. N., & Hall, C. S. (1979). A narcissistic personality inventory. Psychological Reports, 45(2), 590. doi:10.2466/ pr0.1979.45.2.590 Raskin, R. N., & Terry, H. (1988). A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and further evidence of its construct validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 890–902. doi:10.1037/0022–3514.54.5.890 Watson, P. J., & Biderman, M. D. (1993) Narcissistic personality inventory factors, splitting, and self-consciousness. Journal of Personality Assessment, 61, 41–57. Watson, P. J., Grisham, S. O., Trotter, M. V., & Biderman, M. D. (1984). Narcissism and empathy: Validity evidence for the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 301–305.

Narcoterrorism Terrorism is defined as politically motivated and organized acts of violence meant to cause fear and panic in society in order to change people’s behavior. Although terroristic actions may appear random or insane because of the extreme and often random forms of violence they employ, the purpose of terrorism is political: to weaken an opponent such that he or she will capitulate due to fear of victimization. Narcoterrorism occurs when drug-trafficking organizations perpetrate violent actions of this kind. Narcoterrorism happens primarily in Latin America, especially in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Brazil. Terrorism in this form is a relatively new form

of political violence that has had a profound impact on political life in Latin America. This entry provides an overview of the history of narcoterrorism focused mainly on Colombia and Mexico, and discusses important aspects of narcoterrorism and theories about narcoterrorism. Former Peruvian president Fernando Belaúnde Terry first used the term narcoterrorism in the 1980s to refer to the rampant violence perpetrated by Colombian drug cartels led by notorious drug lords such as Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder. The Colombian cartels engaged in a prolonged war with the Colombian government, paramilitary forces, and leftist guerrilla groups. Narcoterroristic tactics in South America included car bombs, explosions of buildings and airplanes, assassination of high government officials and presidential candidates, and mass killings of peasants, ordinary citizens, and other perceived enemies of the drug-trafficking organizations and their allies. Narcoterrorism, thus, was not simply connected to efforts to control and expand the drug trade but was also part of political conflicts with rival criminal groups, revolutionary insurgents, and the state. In the 1990s, the center of Western hemispheric drug trafficking shifted from Colombia to Mexico as the U.S. and Colombian governments cracked down heavily on the Colombian cartels. Although the Mexican cartels began to dominate the cross-border drug trade into the United States and their fortunes swelled during the 1990s, it was not until the 2000s that Mexican cartels engaged in full-blown narcoterrorist acts. In 2006, newly elected president Felipe Calderón unleashed a “war” on drug cartels that led to dramatic confrontations and firefights between the government and cartels in various regions of the country. The ensuing conflagration produced huge numbers of casualties as the Mexican military and federal police forces attempted to recover parts of Michoacán, Nuevo Laredo, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, and Sinaloa states. The government-­ initiated “drug war” coincided with and exacerbated conflicts between drug cartels including the Zetas, Gulf Cartel, Juárez Cartel, Sinaloa Cartel, Beltrán Leyva Cartel and La Familia Michoacana (and its splinter group the Knights Templar, so called). One of the first events that came to be associated with narcoterrorism in Mexico was a 2005 video in which members of one cartel interrogated, tortured, and then murdered four rival cartel members. The video of this and subsequent torture killings were posted widely on YouTube and Internet websites concerned with drug trafficking, such as Blog del Narco, which led to a ­tit-for-tat competition of cruelty and sadism in which rival cartel members brutalized and executed their enemies on camera. Frequently, the cartel torture videos

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used narcocorrido music (which celebrates the drug-­ trafficking lifestyle and the power of cartels) as background accompaniment. Typically such narco-videos portray handcuffed men and women who are nude or disheveled and who are subjected to insults and intense questioning about the drug-trafficking group they are reputedly affiliated with, followed by torture and death involving beheading with a machete or chain saw, el tablazo (being beaten with boards), coup de grace gunshots to the head, rifle fire from automatic weapons, and so on. The most striking acts of narcoterrorism in Mexico have included the mass murders of dozens of people, whose bodies were then strewn in public view. In many cases, orchestrated mass killings have included quasiritualized displays of dehumanization involving decapitation, dismemberment and scattering of body parts, dissolving bodies in barrels of acid, burning people alive, piling up or posing of bodies in macabre positions, sexualized amputation of penises and breasts, flaying, crucifying, and hanging bodies from bridges. In other cases, single individuals or groups of people are forcefully disappeared never to be seen again, or their mutilated bodies may turn up on the outskirts of towns, in vacant lots wrapped in blankets and thrown in the streets, or placed in the trunk of a car. A common element of narco-terroristic attacks is the placing of a sign (known as a narco-mensaje or narco-message) or banner (narco-manta) at the scene of a murder or massacre. The signs and banner typically contain an explanation or justification of the killing, insults of rival cartel ­members or leaders, attacks on government officials or politicians, and the signature of the cartel or faction committing the violent actions. A major obstacle for research on this criminal-political phenomenon is that the authorship of specific acts of violence is not always obvious and may be made even more confusing by the often cryptic, slang-filled narcomessages left at the scene of the narco-related crimes. Moreover, the degree of corrupt interconnections between government officials and the cartels and the murky overlap between police and cartel members (the former sometimes working for the latter), is such that disentangling the forces in conflict in relation to particular narcoterroristic events is labyrinthine. These epistemological problems are aggravated by the rampant conspiracy theories that flourish in a context of hyperviolence, media intimidation or infiltration by cartel interests, and progovernment propaganda. Nonetheless a number of scholars have attempted to make sense of the narcoterrorism phenomenon, even though it is an oblique and emerging phenomenon. George Grayson has suggested that narcoterrorism is both the cause and consequence of Mexico teetering on

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the brink of being a failed state, a country controlled by criminals and in which law and order has disintegrated. Other observers, such as Dawn Paley, consider the drug business to be just another capitalistic industry, albeit an illicit, often clandestine one, sponsored and protected by the state, which in turns benefits from the profits drug trafficking generate in a kind of protection racket. From this perspective, narcoterrorism is part of the cost of doing (the drug) business and is in fact more concerned with social control and the social cleansing of dissidents than with inter-cartel rivalry. Finally, Howard Campbell concludes that narcoterrorism is an element of a nontraditional form of politics that, rather than focusing on the orthodox elements of the political process (parties, ideology, elections), is concerned with establishing de facto regional political control—through violence—in order to dominate licit and illicit businesses in a specific area. Howard Campbell See also al Qaeda; End of Terrorism, Theories of; Lone Wolf Terrorism; Radicalization; Risky Shift; Terrorism, Theories and Models; Terrorist Networks

Further Readings Campbell, H. (2009). Drug war zone: Frontline dispatches from the streets of El Paso and Juárez. Austin: University of Texas Press. Campbell, H. (2014). Narco-propaganda in the Mexican “drug war”: An anthropological perspective. Latin American Perspectives, 41(2), 60–77. Corchado, A. (2013). Midnight in Mexico. New York, NY: Penguin. Grayson, G. W. (2010). Mexico: Narco-violence and a failed state? New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Paley, D. (2014). Drug war capitalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

National Character National character comprises the characteristics considered to be typical of a nation or national group. It may include values, traits of character, and similar contents. It rests on the assumption that nations represent a meaningful subdivision of the world, and that they are different in systematic ways; it is, therefore, only appropriate in an ideological context of nationalism. This entry outlines some empirical investigations of national character and examines how judgments of national character can be influenced by the perceiver’s degree of national identification and the context in which these judgments are made.

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National Traits and Values The psychologist Dean Peabody conducted a direct and systematic empirical analysis of national trait characteristics of the English, Germans, French, Italians, ­Russians, and Americans. His method was designed to circumvent the issues typically found in studies of national stereotypes by separating the evaluative component of his participants’ judgments from the descriptive component. For example, someone who is not afraid to make big decisions and take risks could be described as either bold or rash, depending on how the perceiver evaluates the person and the characteristic being judged. The opposite trait of character might be judged either as timid or as cautious for the same reasons. The key to Peabody’s method is to ask for judgments on all of these traits (bold, rash, timid, cautious) and separate the evaluative from the descriptive component at the analysis stage. This has allowed him to find a large degree of consensus across nations about descriptions (but not evaluations) of national character, along dimensions such as impulse control and self-assertiveness. Studies on the values that can be considered typical of particular nations are not beset by the same difficulties as studies of stereotype traits—values are always positive in evaluation. The bigger problem for studies of values has been that not everyone understands a value statement in the same way. One of the largest and most frequently cited studies of international differences in values is Geert Hofstede’s survey of work-related values among 117,000 IBM employees in 40 countries. His analysis yielded meaningful international differences in power distance (e.g., the power differential between bosses and subordinates), uncertainty avoidance (e.g., the preference for employment stability), individualism (e.g., skepticism about committee work), and masculinity (e.g., the value placed on career advancement). Equally well known is Shalom Schwartz’s list of cultural value orientations, including dimensions of autonomy/embeddedness (the degree to which people are encouraged to seek their own path rather than follow the group), harmony/mastery (the extent to which people should strive for control of social and environmental resources), and egalitarianism/ hierarchy (the expectation of an unequal distribution of roles and power in society). A large body of findings from cross-cultural studies using these or other value dimensions demonstrates that nations differ measurably in their endorsement of values.

Influences on National Stereotype Ratings Although there exists a great deal of agreement about national characteristics, it is tempered by findings that descriptions of national character depend to some

extent on the person who is doing the describing and on the context in which this is done. There is evidence of an association between national identification and the positivity of the national autostereotype (the stereotype held by people about their own nation), with highly identified people tending to describe the nation in more positive terms. The same high national identification has also been shown to be associated with greater ingroup bias (the tendency to evaluate one’s own group more positively than others). The degree to which a person identifies with his or her nation is thus influential to how he or she will describe national character. In addition to these effects of identification, studies of national stereotypes have repeatedly found variations in the perceived applicability of traits to national groups depending on the context in which these judgments are made. Some of these contexts are more stable than ­others. In questionnaire studies on national stereotypes in Europe, Hub Linssen and colleagues found that the attribution of stereotypes depended on the geographical location and population size of the nation being rated: For example, southern Europeans were rated as more emotional than northern Europeans, and those from smaller countries as more moral than those from larger ones. Regarding more transient contexts that can affect descriptions of national character, the national autostereotype has been found to vary according to whether the nation is being described on its own or in comparison with other nations; the perceived homogeneity of the participant’s own nation in terms of stereotype traits has been shown to increase in a context that includes another nation; and heterostereotypes (the stereotypes held by people about other groups) have displayed some sensitivity to social change. Alexander Haslam and associates, for instance, found that Australian participants gave different stereotype ratings to Americans at the beginning and at the end of the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf conflict, and that stereotypes also depended on the frame of reference (the inclusion of additional comparison groups). This is interpreted in line with the principles of self-categorization theory, suggesting that stereotypes inherently depend on context-sensitive categorizations and are therefore stable only insofar as the social context is stable. Dennis Nigbur See also Nationalism; Optimal Distinctiveness Theory; Personality Traits; Self-Categorization Theory; Stereotypes; Values

Further Readings Haslam, S. A., Turner, J. C., Oakes, P. J., McGarty, C., & Hayes, B. K. (1992). Context-dependent variation in social

National Language stereotyping 1: The effects of intergroup relations as mediated by social change and frame of reference. European Journal of Social Psychology, 22(1), 3–20. doi:10.1002/ ejsp.2420220104 Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. London, England: Sage. Nigbur, D., & Cinnirella, M. (2007). National identification, type and specificity of comparison, and their effects on descriptions of national character. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37(4), 672–691. doi:10.1002/ejsp.382 Peabody, D. (1985). National characteristics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Poppe, E., & Linssen, H. (1999). In-group favouritism and the reflection of realistic dimensions of difference between national states in Central and Eastern European nationality stereotypes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 38(1), 85–102. doi:10.1348/014466699164059 Schwartz, S. H. (2011). Values: Cultural and individual. In F. J. R. van de Vijver, A. Chasiotis, & S. M. Breugelmans (Eds.), Fundamental questions in cross-cultural psychology (pp. 463–493). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

National Language Languages are closely connected with politics, societies, and cultures. They express and reconfirm culturalcognitive models and attitudes, they share a common communicative space in multilingual habitats, and choices from among them signal differences in functions, social identities, and political power. Their vocabularies reflect much more than political orientations. Issues having to do with languages are studied from a range of theoretical and methodological angles in linguistic subdisciplines like language and culture, cognitive linguistics, sociology of communication (media), language and politics, multilingualism, and language contact. The term national language (NL), the central concept in this entry, is connected with official language (OL), working language (WL), Amtssprache (German: administrative language), standard language, standardization, and (relevant) foreign languages (FL)—all set in multilingual and multidialectal societies and polities. The terms describe the status and functions of language(s) at the macro level of a language habitat, the political or other support structures a language benefits from, or lacks, vis-à-vis other languages in a polity. As polities interact with others, FLs are a necessary complement to NL in communication with polities, institutions, and people outside some polity or in a context open to the outside. These terms all presuppose a hierarchical structure of the languages habitat of a society within a particular

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political spectrum. They do that in an ever-changing, dynamic environment and at two levels above the ­polity—that is, the macroregional and the global; one should not forget the traditional bilateral and crossborder relationships that continue to exist. They presuppose developed or developing a standard variety, or varieties. Particular language expressions are rarely at stake, though the functions a language (variety) performs has implications on language form. Functions can be ordered on a cline from “local” to foreign languages in this political spectrum.

The Political Context: Polity, Country, Nation A polity is an organized society such as a country or state with a government; an administrative, educational, and legal infrastructure; a territory of its own; and the conduct of foreign relations. Polities may be republics, monarchies, sultanates, or be based on some other constitutional foundation. They may be democratic, religious, totalitarian, or in between. Most polities like Spain, Malaysia, Finland, or Canada are bi- and multicultural, multireligious, and multilingual. A nation is a body of people inhabiting a state or territory united by such characteristics as common descent, history, culture, language, literature, and a shared identity. A national language, however, is the genuine expression of a culture and is, according to German Romanticism, grounded as a Natursprache or “natural language.” The Anglophone countries have had a different, more pragmatic vision of their “national” language. Given the close link between language and culture, it is understandable that this intellectual tradition has reinforced monolingualism or the “monolingual mindset.” Although complete monolingualism is rarely a reality, there is a visible tendency even in new nations to reduce the visibility of multilingualism through status assignment. Ignoring recent migrations, Korea, Japan, or Poland are nearly ideal cases. A distinction is made between a Staatsnation (a state nation, or nation-state) and a Kulturnation (a cultural nation). The former is a polity as described, while the latter may be a cluster of smaller independent polities, as in Germany up to the late 19th century or the Malay sultanates or the Italian dynasties in the 19th century before they formed nations. The six Australian colonies had properties of a cultural nation prior to federation in 1901. Nations may embrace several nationalities, often referred to today as ethnicities or ethnic groups, “peoples,” or dependent “nations” such as Canada (focus on the Anglophone, Francophone, and indigenous communities), Singapore (focus on Malays, Chinese, and Indians) or Australia (focus on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal

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communities). Polities entertain foreign relations and are forced to, or develop by tradition, “relevant” FL competence. European monarchies, by tradition, developed FL competencies in French, English, or Russian. New polities opt for English as major FL, lingua franca (LF); or as second language (SL). The FL competency of citizens is much broader but the FLs concerned are “not relevant” at the top political level. There are two political levels above the polity with repercussions on NL, OL, WL and FL; namely, the macroregional and the global level. Institutions inside a polity and those regional or global ones located there (such as the Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, or the International Labor Office in Geneva) may require language regulations of their own.

Language Policies: Assigning Status and Functions in a Languages Habitat Joshua Fishman, a leader in the sociology of language, made a close link between NL and national identity. An NL may be a source of pride for all citizens and a mobilization or rallying point, he believed. That may be true in many cases, for example Australia, but it can be exploited by segments of the political spectrum such as by Enoch Powell, a controversial conservative British politician in the 1980s. He said in a speech that “Others may speak or read English—more or less—but it is our language not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is learnt or used” (The Independent [Great Britain], August 23, 1988). Claiming ownership of a language at a time when pluricentricity and the existence of countless epicenters of a language—such as British versus American English—was common knowledge, situates claims of ownership on the far right of the political spectrum. The term NL is also used by language nationalists in former colonial environments like Malaysia with regard to Bahasa Malaysia to emphasize the rights and status of the Malays and their language. Nationalists were not right wing at the time. Independence advocates like Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi used the term with regard to Hindustani, a consensual form of Hindi and Urdu, before the split into a Hindu form, Hindi, and the Islamic form, Urdu. In fact, NL goes easily with any political doctrine. An OL, in contrast, is a “functional” alternative that is not connected with any particular political system and can, in fact, be used for supranational bodies. While it is normally a language used in a polity concerned, it can be an FL such as English in the Association of South-East Nations (ASEAN) and Singapore. OLs normally have official political or constitutional backing.

Political ideologies about the functions of languages are as controversial as any other political topic. Controversies arise rarely at the level of national politics but where language issues are structurally allocated; that is, education, human resources, science and technology bureaucracies, foreign affairs, business, trade, media, and culture. There are dependent bureaucracies further down in a polity—the media and the interested public. Controversies often arise as a result of frictions between bureaucracies and the political priorities of experts and the public. A consensual link of an NL with national identity is rare and temporary at best. Raising any one language to the status of NL (or OL, WL and FL) amounts to demoting other candidates and to creating inequalities. To avoid language-based political and social divisions, some polities, therefore, omit NL assignment and debates about the role of language in national identity and nation building. The United States is a case in point. There is no NL in the United States, not even an OL with constitutional or legal backing. The original thirteen colonies were multilingual, while English was dominant. The question of its status came up in the context of Federation in 1776 when the choice of an OL was discussed but no decision was taken. A “German myth” appeared by the middle of the 19th century that it was a single vote (of a German) that had defeated German as OL in 1775–1776. That vote never took place. What did happen was an ill-fated attempt to have laws translated into German for the benefit of older German-speaking immigrants; Germans made up a third of the Pennsylvanian population. The myth was kept alive and is used on occasion, such as in the context of the “Official English” campaign in recent decades. An English Language Amendment (ELA) was debated in Congress in 1981 and shelved. California, among 30 states, passed Official English laws. But there will probably never be a constitutional amendment and the United States will continue to be without OL, let alone NL. The debate generated a secondary effect of disparaging bilingual and FL education programs altogether, although research had shown they were not detrimental to children. Moreover, experts have argued, immigrants will shift naturally to English within two to three generations. In a number of countries, an NL only symbolically underpins national cohesion or identity, since it is barely used. In Malta, Maltese—a former contact language with Arabic as its base—is NL but has only a symbolic status. It has been promoted as a result of EU-induced language nationalism. Scotland had a distinct variety of English, Scots, up to the 17th century. With the loss of independence (Union of Crowns, 1603; Union of Parliaments, 1707), Scots gradually became a mixed variety

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of English while the indigenous Scottish Gaelic was moving toward extinction. Devolution from England in the 1980s would have made it possible to raise Scots to NL, but the debate focused more on reviving Scottish Gaelic. As independence has recently been rejected, it is unlikely for Scots (or Gaelic) to acquire greater status. The case with Irish Gaelic in the Republic of Ireland is similar. Its use is minimal but it was nominated as OL of the European Union (EU). While Irish English has countless features of its own, it is not independent enough to warrant NL or OL status. In Ulster, Gaelic is hardly used at all, but Ulster English counts as a separate dialect of English at best. Similar arguments can be made about the diaspora of Mandarin in Southeast Asia. Singapore and Malaysia, for instance, pursue a Chinese Mandarin policy, strongly supported by C ­ hina’s claim that there is only one China and hence only one Mandarin. The Indian Tamil diaspora in that region is similar. What is more, the countries concerned have already made choices of NL or OL so that support for another language could be seen as an attempt at ­segregation and ethnic strife. Many countries do not nominate one or, as is occasionally the case, two or three languages, as NL to avoid such conflicts in multilingual situations or because they share a language with a neighbor. What is possible in Switzerland with German, French, ­Italian, and Romansch as NLs is not in Belgium where French, Dutch, and German are OLs; none is NL. In Malaysia, a particular ethnic constellation prior to independence made it possible to adopt Malay (under names like Bahasa Melayu, B Malaysia) as NL and to secure the language rights of the Chinese and Indian communities, which were seen as immigrants, in the public domain, the media, economy, and education. Yet, Mandarin and Tamil are not OLs. Singapore, in contrast, accepted Malay as NL to secure a relatively frictionless departure from Malaya in 1967. Malay is used symbolically in, for example, the national anthem or in the opening address of parliament, though there is a continuous stream of calls for its wider use as a sign of a stronger nationalism. English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay are OLs. Canada is multilingual, with English and French being dominant, while indigenous and migrant languages round off the habitat. All languages can be called NLs (metaphorically), but English and French are OLs. Australia has much the same typology of languages. English is de facto NL but has no constitutional backing. Yet, the attachment of the cultural elite like writers, the press, and linguists is very strong. The other languages, referred to as “(Community) Languages-Other-Than-English,” [C]LOTEs, are seen as a national resource and are promoted in a policy of languages and education.

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Aboriginal languages are tied to their communities, often with an aside to the effect that not all Aborigines (or members of a particular tribe or “nation”) use them. Migrant languages are associated with their migrant communities. In education policies and with regard to foreign relations, LOTEs may also be FL and a few are promoted as “relevant” FL to s­ ymbolize, for instance, Australia’s European and Asian geopolitical orientation and double identity. New ­Zealand has not given any particular constitutional or legal status to English, while it has to Maori and Sign Language. Other Anglophone countries like the F ­ alklands are too peripheral to warrant either NL or OL. Israel is a special case. It inherited as OLs Hebrew, Arabic, and English from the 1880s and the British Mandate and a ruling of the League of Nations in 1922. After the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, English was removed by a regulation on the WLs of the country. The OLs are the ethnically and politically divided Hebrew and Arabic. As in most polities today, English is used unofficially (particularly in academia and business) as a result of external political circumstances, the alliance with the United States, and for general international relations. In Spain, Castilian may express a Castilian identity but does not a Basque or Catalan one. The Catalans have felt neglected a long time inside Spain and the EU, where many minute languages like Irish Gaelic or Maltese have become OLs, while the rather “big” Catalan language with over 13 million mother-tongue, bilingual, and diasporic speakers has not. The feeling of inferiority is unfounded as every member state could nominate only one language. Spain’s pronounced regionalism or, to put it more strongly, fragile national status would have made a choice other than Castilian Spanish difficult. Today it is co-OL in Spain and OL in Andorra, a small independent polity across the Eastern Pyrenees. If the nationalist movement that promotes separation were successful, the issue of Catalan might be brought on the agenda unless the EU no longer treated Catalan as a member state. Ukrainian, which had no status in the former Soviet Union, is the official (or as it is called in the ­Constitution, Article 10, the state) language of Ukraine. The free development and use of Russian (and minority languages) is guaranteed in the same article. Belgium has no NL but three OLs, Flemish (or Dutch), French, and German. With exception of the multilingual ­Brussels area, they have regional focal areas. India is another interesting example. It acquired unity during British colonialism and was faced with the problem of choosing one or more languages for official functions at independence in 1947. The separation of East and West Pakistan in 1947 and the formation of Bangladesh (in East Pakistan) in 1971 created similar

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language issues there. After a series of sometimes violent protests, a three-language formula was developed in India, which is still in place with modifications. For the north of India this meant Hindi, English, and some South Indian language. For the South it was a South Indian language, Hindi, and English. The states of the federation can choose from among the so-called scheduled (or constitutionally recognized) languages. India has no NL though Hindi is often wrongly taken for granted as NL. English has been retained one way or another. Today it is considered an asset at the international scene. Its status as an Indian language or a ­postcolonial heritage language is left vague in political contexts. Former colonial languages often remain and pose problems regarding their status. Some turned out to be weak, such as Dutch in Indonesia or French in IndoChina, and were abandoned; English became the default FL, (strong) second, or WL. Russian has weakened in Central Asian republics, as it has in the Baltic States; it is still used and learned as FL and ethnic language. What these examples show is that the question of selecting NLs (OLs, WLs and FLs) typically occurs in the context of crucial moments of polity formation like independence, separation, unification, mass migration or macroregional and global integration. Often some events combine, such as independence and unification (such as of Malaysia) or free nation building in former Indo-China and accession to ASEAN. In such contexts, political, ethnic, economic, or cultural elites, often under political pressure from the outside (such as former colonial powers), frame the macrostructure of the country’s language habitat. There is little chance subsequently to alter decisions taken. Separation and the creation of a new polity also have repercussions on language choices. The separation of Ukraine from the former Soviet Union made Ukrainian a distinct language. The separation of the Baltic States and the creation of Central Asian, and often Islamic, republics raised the issue of selecting NLs and OLs from a number of ethnic and regional languages and how to go about with Russian, now an FL or ethnic language. While a significant proportion of school students— many probably of Russian descent—learn Russian, it was rejected at the macro level of the Baltic States. A similar case was the fall of the communist former Yugoslavia. Decisions were by no means straightforward as there have been countless ethnic (cleansing) wars, and animosities still continue. There is a strong motivation to make languages different from one another though their (Slavic) similarity is occasionally admitted as an asset in international relations and higher education. Ukrainian is a clear example, which was, of course distinct before separation. Similarly, the distinct features of Croatian and other former Yugoslav

languages were accentuated with nationhood but their similarities can be, and are, used as arguments about the communicative “mileage” of former “Serbian” or Croatian. The story of South Sudan cannot be told in detail here, but there had been periods of (semi-) independence from the north during the 19th century based on the religious divide between the Islamic north and the Christian south. Forced unification triggered civil wars until the creation of an independent Republic of South Sudan in 2011. Despite the poor performance of the new state (with civil war in 2013), there emerged a sense of loyalty to the “nation” that explains the rejection of Arabic, which is used in the north. With the impossibility of reaching consensus on a local language and as a “demarcating” symbol of being independent, non-Islamic, non-Arabic, modern English was made OL by default.

Supranational Bodies: Macroregional and Global Organizations Supranational or macroregional organizations like the EU, ASEAN, the African Union (AU), the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), or topic-focused regional or global organizations such as the United Nations with dependent organizations like UNESCO, or bodies like the International Monetary Fund with representations worldwide, International Labour Organization, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) all reflect responses to regional and global embedding of some polity. What they have in common is a supranational communicative space where OLs or WLs are needed. Such bodies do not, and are not supposed to, generate a sense of identity as in a nation, so no NLs are called for. Choices of OL and WL are made from among “world” languages like English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic. The choice of FLs has repercussions at the “national” level, as polities need to ensure a big enough human resource in the education domain to deal with communicative demands when their NL or OL is not used. There are two extreme regional and global policies. One is illustrated by ASEAN, whose member states decided without discussion that English would be its OL and WL. The other extreme is illustrated by the EU, which aims to reflect the language heritage of its members. It has 27 OLs; only Belgium shares one language, namely Dutch/Flemish, with the Netherlands. With further expansion there could be more OLs. There is a semilegalized understanding that only English, French, and German are the EU’s WLs, though sub-bodies like the European Central Bank (ECB) can choose their own WLs. The ECB only uses English; the European Court of Justice uses French and English and any other

National Language

language of the defendant party. Bodies like the UN with five OLs and WLs, namely English, French, ­Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic, pursue a somewhat mixed policy. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) uses 14 eastern and western European WLs. Global and macroregional political institutions, thus, create a flexible hierarchy of “international” languages with repercussions on language choices at the level of polity and investments. Human resource development and education are the most significant domains affected. A nation’s capacity to introduce a wider set of FLs to cater for regional or cross-border communicative needs is severely limited. To add a language to the languages hierarchy, say, Hindi or Malay, could only be done at enormous material costs or under a massive change at the global political level. The rise of Russian as FL to the level that preceded the fall of the Soviet Union is almost unthinkable. A few languages, such as English, are strengthened. The global hierarchy of OLs is by no means static. Recently, Arabic and Mandarin have become stronger in some regions. The international standing of some languages attracts students to learn them as foreign languages, to move to some country where they are used, and to study at prestigious universities there.

The Boundaries of Languages: Language Texture and Pluricentricity NL and the other concepts under review do not affect the linguistic texture of languages beyond requiring standard and independent varieties. If this is not a given at statehood formation, policies of ausbau, accentuating differences, are common. A few countries, like Australia, tie Aboriginal languages to a geopolitical space, but the majority of communities do not. Languages do not “end” at the border of some polity; they can even “travel” and be implanted in some other geopolitical space where they develop independent varieties and cultural associations. German, for instance, is used in the neighboring countries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and in some regions adjacent to Germany in Belgium or Denmark. Malay is used widely in ­Southeast Asia and was a lingua franca across the whole region. So are Russian, Arabic, and many other ­languages. Such languages may be NL or OLs on one side of the border but a minority language or FL on the other. They may be cross-border languages for trade, religion, and other purposes. They have international standing. English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Indian, and other languages have “traveled” to distant habitats where they have developed new varieties. The use of some of them in multiple language habitats makes it more likely for them to be selected as WL, OL or as FL.

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Though a language may be or become “pluricentric” with any number of full or developing “epicenters” as norm-setting varieties, the possibility of epicenters qualifying as NL or OL remains severely limited. The language name, its market value, and its ancestry will be strong enough to inhibit diversification at the formal level required. Though British and American English are different in many ways, both are still considered “English.” But if English were to become America’s OL, the reference would be its American form. The selection of an epicentric variety as NL or OL requires a strong sense of independence and nationhood. Australia has attained that status. Singaporean English and Indian English may follow but the general discourse still speaks of “English.” Hong Kong English is unlikely to reach that status as the political and social pressure of China acts against full naturalization. The acceptance of Austrian German is almost beyond dispute for it to become OL in Austria, but NL is unlikely. Afrikaans, a variety of Dutch, is an OL in South Africa. Some creole languages, like Jamaican Creole, are NLs though the OL is English. The Middle East is mainly Arabic speaking while the Maghreb in North Africa is multilingual. All countries have (Classical) Arabic (and not Egyptian or Moroccan Arabic) as OL as an expression of the association with Islam. The texture of the language(s) chosen as NL(s), OL(s) or FL(s) is rarely an issue beyond a standard variety. The Arabic world insists on Classical Arabic as OL to express the Islamic association. Something similar holds for Malaysia where some conservative Islamic groups call for the wider use of the Arabic Jawi script, which replaced the (Indian) Pallava script in the 15th century and was used across the Malay-speaking polities such as the Sultanate of Malacca and the sultanates of Johor, Brunei, Pattani, Aceh, or Ternate. The motivation to adapt the Arabic script Jawi for the Malay language was purely religious. But the impact of Islam on all matters of a polity such as government and law added a political dimension. Jawi was replaced by the Roman (or Rumi) script under British rule in the 19th century but survives in Brunei and, for some religious purposes, in Malaysia and in some conservative states like Kelantan.

Conclusion: Language Issues and Their Political Locus The concepts discussed are used at the highest organizational level of a polity’s languages habitat. NL may symbolize a polity’s identity, aiming to develop an integrated and independent society with “its own language” though its actual use may be minimal. The political force behind NLs can express quite different ideologies.

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But NL cannot be understood without OL, WL and FLs. OL and WL are also usable above and below the polity level as functional alternatives. There is indeed a cline of choices. FL refers to the major foreign languages of a polity that enable it to play a role in the world at large. NL is very much an “internal” choice to express identity, and so forth. It may have prestige and attraction outside, as German did before World War I. The selection of a particular language as NL depends on the internal political power and the desire to integrate a diverse society. Language attitudes at the level of social psychology have a high impact on the acceptance or rejection of some language. To illustrate this, Dyula in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa was perceived as the language of Muslims (which was not quite true) and was an impossible choice as NL. OL and FL are functional purposeful alternatives in the case where no language qualifies as NL, where a polity needs, or wants, to integrate in regional or global constellations at some given moment in history or where institutions inside a multilingual polity need language regulations. Selection of OLs or WLs is done in consideration of decisions made at some, often external, political, or administrative level. If agreement is impossible, an external language like English may be chosen by default, as in the Republic of South Sudan. All such decisions are political and, as such, controversial. In a democratic system, they can be challenged; in others they cannot or are, as in institutions, predetermined by decisions made higher up. Questions of status assignment of language(s) do not come up often in a polity, let alone in global, macroregional or topicfocused institutions. Language is normally peripheral unless there is a crucial moment. More frequent are questions on usage patterns and the quality of performance, language modernization, the improvement of acquisition and learning, and the need of foreign language(s) in a globalizing world. In many polities, standardization and the rejection of foreign influences and concern for the language’s “purity” are frequent. Also quite frequent are sociopolitical issues relevant to social and ethnic cohesion such as gender, disadvantage, and ideologies expressed in and through language. NLs and OLs may be endangered by the spread of English into domains like higher education that governments tend to ignore. These by no means “lower level” issues are often brought to the language policy agenda from “below,” by interested segments of the public and their political lobby groups. They may, or may not, reach higher level political levels. The media, cultural or other institutions, and citizens may initiate or promote issues and help direct decision-making paths.

Politically, language issues including choice of NL, OL, and FL are allocated to relevant political bureaucracies. They are mainly dealt with at government levels such as education and human resource development, trade, tourism, foreign affairs, and occasionally, religion, depending on the texture of government and its constitutional base. Language and communication in the public domain is generally seen as peripheral and lacks fine-tuning between “competing” ministries and their objectives. The EU’s creation of a multilingualism commissariat of some years ago was quickly terminated. There is scope for research in political theory and the sociology of language along the lines Joshua Fishman has pursued. Gerhard Leitner See also Collective Action; Development, Theories of; EnglishOnly Movement; Language Death; Modernization Theory; Nationalism; State Development

Further Readings Fishman, J., & Garcia, O. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of language and ethnic identity. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Leitner, G. (2015). The transformation of language situations: The habitat model. In R. Muhr, D. Marley, & H. L. Kretzenbacher (Eds.), Pluricentric languages worldwide and pluricentric theory (pp. 55–72). Vienna, Austria: Peter Lang Verlag. Leitner, G., Hashim, A., & Wolf, H.-G. (Eds.). (2016). Communicating with Asia. The future of global English. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Mazrui, A., & Alamin, A. (1998). The power of Babel. Language & governance in the African experience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rappa, A. L., & Wee Hock An, L. (2006). Language policy and modernity in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. New York, NY: Springer Verlag.

Nationalism Nationalism may refer to either of two different but related concepts: an ideology concerned with the creation, maintenance, and/or defense of a nation-state; or an extreme version of this ideology, which results in the rejection of others who do not belong to the same nation. Both definitions have currency in political debates on topics such as democracy, independence, self-determination, migration, and xenophobia. This entry will explain both of these senses of nationalism,

Nationalism

by defining nations and nation-states, illustrating nationalism as a psychologically influential ideology with specific reference to the importance of national identity content, and outlining individual differences in relating to national identity.

Interdisciplinary Views on Nationalism Nationalism is an interdisciplinary concept with most relevance to political science, philosophy, history, psychology, and sociology. The interdisciplinary literature on nationalism has usually adopted the former of the two definitions introduced above, treating nationalism as a philosophy and collective agenda that assumes the subdivision of the world into distinct nations and ascribes to each nation the project to have a nationstate. Nationalism, in this interpretation, is neither positive nor negative in and of itself. By contrast, the second definition appeared more recently and has negative connotations. In the mass media and public discourse, nationalists are often characterized by a blind and absolute allegiance to their nation, and by an instinctive rejection of others—an image that some writers have likened to fascism. In psychology, nationalism is sometimes operationalized as an attitude that an individual can hold toward their nation, often implying a sense of superiority over others. This definition locates nationalism in the individual rather than the nation as a whole, or the world of nations.

Defining Nations Both definitions of nationalism offered above require a sense of what the nation is. There is no single accepted definition, but most involve the idea of a collectivity of people sharing a subjective notion of belonging together as a nation with common history, common culture, common identity, and common fate. The American political scientist Walker Connor differentiates between ethnic groups, nations, and states. Whereas an ethnic group can be defined—and different ethnic groups can be distinguished from one another by outside observers according to shared characteristics such as skin tone or other anthropological data—a nation is necessarily a self-defining entity in a context that favors ­nationalism— it is not a nation if it does not regard itself as such, and it cannot be a nation without the ideology of nationalism that allows it to do so. A state, finally, is a political entity with a geographically delimited territory. Not all states are nation-states, and several nations or ethnic groups can exist in one state. What is remarkable is the idea that the nation essentially defines itself—Connor speaks about a psychological bond as the intangible essence of the nation. This

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appears to contrast with the rhetoric and folklore cultivated in and by nations, replete with concrete manifestations of shared culture and references to primordial ties and deep-rooted traditions that make the togetherness of the nation seem natural and inevitable. But without the psychological bond and subjective sense of being a nation, these artifacts and commonalities are meaningless. An important characteristic of nations is the concern with an existing or aspired nation-state. The aim of the nation is the convergence of the people, its culture, its territory, and its own government. This distinguishes a nation-state from other political entities such as empires. It also means that a group can be a nation without having an existing state; what matters is that a nation-state represents an agenda of the group. An independence movement, for example, may be initiated by a national group without an existing nation-state. A nation with its own state, conversely, will be concerned with the maintenance of the nation-state in order to preserve the match between the people, the land, and the rulers. This definition of the nation is not necessarily restricted to ethnonationalism (in which nations are also ethnic groups). The criteria of self-definition as a nation in a world of nations and the concern with an extant or aspired nation-state can apply, in principle, regardless of whether the nation defines itself along ethnic, cultural, or civic lines. Arguably, the cohesiveness of the nation predates the existence of the state in ethnically homogeneous states, whereas it has to be cultivated within an existing state in multiethnic societies.

Nationalism as the Ideology and Psychology of the Nation-State This cultivation of kinship and uniqueness is at the core of the ideology and psychology of nationalism. Nationalism is at work wherever a national group campaigns for political self-determination and independence; whenever politicians debate about defending borders, economies, or ways of life; every time an ordinary person presents his or her passport at border control; or waves the national flag at a sporting event. The assumption that the world is meaningfully divided into nations, that every individual belongs to a nation, and that the best way to govern the nation is a nation-state with laws and customs that suit the unique characteristics of the nation can be simultaneously unifying (within the nation) and dividing (between nations), and will be adopted by progressives or conservatives depending on whether a nation-state already exists. As explained by writers such as Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, and Kenneth Minogue, the ideology of nationalism emerged from 18th-century European philosophy,

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prominently including the thoughts of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Its ideas played a part in the French ­Revolution and the American War of Independence— essentially, the subjects of kings became citizens of nation-states, and the loyalty of the individual was transferred from the ruler to the nation itself. This principle was revolutionary at the time, and contemporary democracy would be unthinkable without it. It contrasts with the later mobilization of nationalist ideas for fascist politics, which may be responsible for the nowcommon conflation, in public discourse, of nationalism with the extreme right wing and hostility toward ­others—the second definition of nationalism offered at the start of this entry. Nationalism is also a psychological phenomenon because membership of, identification with, and comparisons between nations are psychologically influential. The psychoanalytic approach of Carl Gustav Jung, with its notion of a collective unconscious involving homeland and national customs, may be the earliest example of a psychological approach to nationalism, whereas modern cross-cultural psychology focuses on the study of psychological and social differences between nations as well as universals that unite them. The sociopsychological concepts of social identity, social representations, and acculturation orientations, meanwhile, have been used to explain individual identification with the nation, the reproduction of the content of national identity, and the way in which people maintain, adopt, or reject elements of their own nation and others. The ideology of nationalism thus works in psychological ways by predisposing people to self-categorize and identify as a member of a particular nation and to make descriptions and comparisons in which the uniqueness of national character is portrayed.

Imagined Communities This identification with the nation is possible because nations cultivate identity contents that render them tangible, imaginable, and meaningful. The Irish historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson refers to nations as “imagined communities,” which must be imagined because the whole nation cannot be experienced as a community in the same way as a family, a friendship group, or a village community. To facilitate this imagining, nations use shared symbols, language, and practices, which involve the national in a system that creates ties between compatriots and with the nation as a superordinate entity. The existence and psychological influence of the nation are thus dependent on the cultivation of its uniqueness in those contents of national identity. Without that uniqueness, the drive toward unity and self-determination in a nation-state

makes no sense. The content of national identity is thus crucial to nationalism.

Banal Nationalism The British social psychologist Michael Billig has coined the term banal nationalism to summarize the many ways in which nations, and nationalism itself, promote and perpetuate themselves through everyday contents that remind national citizens of them. These contents are not arbitrary but work along internationally consensual lines: Every nation-state must have a flag, and most have national anthems, traditional dress, distinctive cuisines, and so on. Symbols, conventions, and similar unobtrusive reminders of nationhood keep the individual permanently in touch with their nationality and the underlying idea of a world of nations. Unlike other group or category memberships, nationality thereby becomes permanently accessible, legitimate, and meaningful to the individual.

Content and Culture Both Anderson and Billig talk about the importance of national identity content. This raises the question about the origin of these contents. Although it is common for cultural practices and artifacts to invoke the distant past, their use is often promoted in the world of nations for the very contemporary purpose of justifying the separate and unique character of the nation. For example, the national flag of Scotland bears a diagonal cross (saltire) symbolizing the early Christian martyr Andrew the Apostle. It came into use in Scotland during the medieval period and was widely displayed as a symbol of Scottish nationalism around the time of the referendum for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom in 2014—about 2,000 years after the crucifixion of St Andrew. It is not necessary for national citizens to know the history of the image in order to recognize it as a symbol of Scottishness and Scottish nationalism. This cultivation of identity content to focus popular sentiment on a tangible representation of the nation, to promote cohesiveness within the nation, to demonstrate the uniqueness of particular nations, and to position nations in the diversity of the world of nations, is similar to the “invention of tradition” by the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. But whereas those authors show that not all traditions are as old and established as they claim to be, the significance of national identity content to the psychology of nationalism is not dependent on the age or provenance of the content. Winston Churchill, for example, is widely accepted as a national symbol of Britishness, although he lived as recently as the 20th century. And the

Nationalism

invented figure of Marianne became adopted as a representation and personification of the French Republic almost as soon as her image and the Republic came to exist. As history moves on, more identity content and more banal reminders of nationality and nationalism continue to emerge in street names, public monuments, the designs on national currencies, works of art and music.

National Identity Content and the Individual While national systems produce contents to represent the nation and act as foci of national identification, individuals of course do not all accept or understand this offer to the same extent and in the same manner. Every nation has its textbook patriots and its internal critics, and national citizens respond in different ways to the expectations of the nation. There are individual differences in the attachment to national symbols, the correspondence between a person’s own values and the value prototype of their nation, and the extent to which stereotypes about the nation’s traits of character are accepted. National citizens are usually born and socialized into an existing nation, but they are also active participants rather than passive recipients. The British social psychologist Susan Condor has written extensively about how individuals relate to national identity. The participants in her interview studies (mostly conducted in England and Scotland) typically appreciate the complex nature of identity and the oversimplification involved in the image of nations as essentially homogeneous and different from other nations in systematic and meaningful ways. At the same time, precisely this order of largely separate, distinctive, and self-governing nations appears regularly as a tacit assumption about the normal state of affairs, from which some nations and some individuals deviate. The effectiveness of nationalism on psychology is thus not dependent on uniform acceptance of the artifacts and understandings that the nation provides. Whereas symbols of nationality fulfill the purpose of demonstrating the distinctiveness of the nation and offer to national citizens a focus to imagine and identify with the nation as a whole, they do not usually specify how nations differ from one another. The cross-cultural psychologist Pawel Boski writes about values as cultural dimensions along which nations can meaningfully be compared. Symbols, in his interpretation, are criterial attributes of identity because they delineate the boundaries between groups. By implication, someone who belongs to the group will accept the symbols of the group as relevant to the self, whereas someone who does not belong to the group will not. Values, on the other hand, are described as correlated attributes of

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identity because they are attached to group membership in different magnitudes, which enable comparisons between different groups. Boski uses the example of hospitality, which is recognized as a value by both ­Polish and Canadian people but plays a greater part in Polish than in Canadian culture. He also demonstrates that symbols and values can be examined separately in acculturation processes: The degree to which Polish immigrants to Canada in his study knew, and considered as personally relevant, the symbols of Polish nationality decreased from new immigrants, via less recent immigrants, to second-generation immigrants. The opposite pattern was found for ­Canadian symbols. The correspondence between participants’ own values and the values considered typical of Polish people, on the other hand, was similar across the three groups of migrants. This suggests that national symbols and values serve different purposes. It also shows how the content of national identity is functional not only in making nations imaginable but also in the individual’s adaptation to a new cultural setting.

Nationalism, Patriotism, and Intergroup Relations Social psychologists and political scientists have often shown an interest in whether identification with a particular national group is necessarily accompanied by the rejection of others. In other words, they search for a benign form of national identification, which is not encumbered by jingoism and xenophobia. This is different from interdisciplinary analyses of nationalism and has contributed to a somewhat different usage of the term, as outlined in the second definition at the outset of this entry. Researchers following this line of inquiry have often differentiated between patriotism (defined as a love of, and identification with, a particular nation) and nationalism (characterized as a belief in the superiority of one’s own nation and the devaluing of outsiders).

Thinking About the Nation and Thinking About Others There is evidence from social psychology that different ways of thinking about the nation can indeed have different consequences for attitudes toward other groups. For example, surveys conducted by Maykel Verkuyten and Borja Martinovic in the Netherlands found that a preference to define Dutch citizenship in ethnic (as opposed to civic) terms was associated with a less inclusive view of national belonging, a greater sense of autochthony (the belief that one’s own group owned the national territory first), and more negative

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attitudes toward immigrants. Meanwhile, Samuel ­Pehrson and his colleagues used questionnaire studies and large-scale international survey data to show that the relationship between national identification and negative attitudes toward immigrants depends on how nationality is defined: Ethnocultural criteria of citizenship (birth and language) were associated with a stronger relationship between identification and prejudice than civic criteria. Finally, Amélie Mummendey, Andreas Klink, and Rupert Brown demonstrated in a series of experimental studies in Britain and Germany that the link between national identification and the rejection of other groups was stronger when participants were primed to make comparisons with (unspecified) other nations rather than comparisons over time or with some abstract standard. In sum, there is ample evidence that individuals can relate to their nationality in different ways, which are associated with different kinds of attitudes toward others. What has been subject to more debate is whether nationalism and patriotism are the most appropriate and helpful labels for these orientations.

that suggest a sense of the nation being easily and obviously superior (e.g., “I would never settle in another country”). The results of this study suggest that it is possible to measure different kinds of attitudes toward nationality and distinguish, among others, a positive attitude toward one’s own nation from a belief in its superiority over others—a finding confirmed across 34 countries by Eldad Davidov 20 years later. However, the analysis demonstrates the multidimensionality of attitudes toward the nation, not the independence or dichotomy of “patriotic” and “nationalistic” ways of relating to it. In fact, these two factors were positively correlated in Kosterman and Feshbach’s study as well as Davidov’s. From a social identity perspective, it could be argued that “patriotism” represents the individual’s identification with the nation while “nationalism” concerns ingroup bias in favor of their own nation. Dennis Nigbur See also Citizenship; Democracy; Ethnicity; National Character; Patriotism; Prejudice; Social Identity Theory

Measurement of Nationalism and Attitudes Toward Nationality

Further Readings

Psychologists Rick Kosterman and Seymour Feshbach have designed a questionnaire to measure attitudes toward one’s own nation. Derived from a factor analysis of 120 questionnaire items, six components are proposed. One, patriotism, comprises items relating to positive affect for the nation—the United States of America in this case. For example, the item “I love my country” has a high factor loading on this component. The second factor, nationalism, is measured by items that concern a perception of the nation’s goodness and the promotion of the national interest. For example, there is the item “In view of America’s moral and material superiority, it is only right that we should have the biggest say in deciding United Nations policy.” A third factor, internationalism, includes items to do with global cooperation and welfare such as “If necessary, we ought to be willing to lower our standard of living to cooperate with other countries in getting an equal standard for every person in the world.” The fourth factor, civil liberties, contains items about the rights of the individual, including the right to criticize or resist the expectations of one’s own government (e.g., “A person who preferred jail to serving in the U.S. Army could still be a good American”). The fifth factor, world government, is about support of a supranational authority and includes items such as “All national governments ought to be abolished and replaced by one central world government.” Finally, the factor smugness involves items

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (2nd ed.). London, England: Verso. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London, England: Sage. Boski, P. (1991). Remaining a Pole or becoming a Canadian: National self-identity among Polish immigrants to Canada. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21(1), 41–77. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1991.tb00441.x Condor, S. (2006). Temporality and collectivity: Diversity, history and the rhetorical construction of national entitativity. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45(4), 657–682. doi:10.1348/014466605X82341 Connor, W. (1978). A nation is a nation, is a state, is an ethnic group is a . . . . Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1(4), 377–400. doi:10.1080/01419870.1978.9993240 Davidov, E. (2009). Measurement equivalence of nationalism and constructive patriotism in the ISSP: 34 countries in a comparative perspective. Political Analysis, 17(1), 64–82. Kosterman, R., & Feshbach, S. (1989). Toward a measure of patriotic and nationalistic attitudes. Political Psychology, 10(2), 257–274. doi:10.2307/3791647 Mummendey, A., Klink, A., & Brown, R. (2001). Nationalism and patriotism: National identification and out-group rejection. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40(2), 159–172. doi:10.1348/014466601164740 Pehrson, S., & Green, E. G. T. (2010). Who we are and who can join us: National identity content and entry criteria for new immigrants. Journal of Social Issues, 66(4), 695–716. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2010.01671.x

Negative Peace Verkuyten, M., & Martinovic, B. (2015). Behind the ethnic–civic distinction: Public attitudes towards immigrants’ political rights in the Netherlands. Social Science Research, 53(1), 34–44. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.05.002

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conflict studies, which includes theories on violence, conflict, and peace; as noted earlier, he also introduced the concept of negative peace, defined as absence of war or direct violence.

Negative Peace and Positive Peace

NATO See North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Negative Peace Peace is often associated with the inner state of a person, which arises when the person is experiencing a sense of well-being and tranquility. In contrast to personal peace, negative peace is a term that applies to relationships that can take place at various levels of analysis: interpersonal, intragroup, intergroup, and international. According Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist who coined the term negative peace, negative peace occurs when there is the absence of direct violence in a relationship. At the international level, negative peace refers to the absence of war. This entry presents a historical overview of the concept of peace, followed by an elaboration on the meaning of negative and positive peace. The entry concludes with a section on the relationship between peace and violence.

A Historical Overview of the Concept of Peace From a philosophical approach, the concept of peace goes from an initial  definition  of absence of war between states,  to an understanding of peace as the absence of direct violence at multiple levels of analysis, and finally, to a view where peace is seen as a social construction that is not sustainable in the absence of social justice. In the 18th century, the concept of peace evolved from a philosophy of war, where humankind was seen as naturally bad and was predisposed to violence and animosity, to a concept within a philosophy of peace, where war among nations was not assumed to be a natural state. Following World War I, the  first research on  peace emerged, largely motivated by the devastation caused by international war. In the 1960s, several authors extended the concept of peace to social justice, equality, and dialogue, in a vision of social enrichment and well-being. Galtung is considered the founder of the transdisciplinary field of peace and

In Galtung’s  view, the concept of negative peace relates, fundamentally, to  absence: absence of war or direct violence, absence of  mass deaths, absence of armed conflict. Negative peace is associated with situations of direct violence causing harm and suffering. The understanding of the adjective negative relates to the fact that, in this peace model, the roots of violence or war are not eliminated and therefore episodes may recur. During the cold war following the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States were responsible for political, economic, and military tensions that had repercussions worldwide. Even though war was never declared, the world was witnessing a reality of armed peace. There was the absence of war, but no presence of peace in its true sense. Contrary to this view of “false” peace—negative peace—­Galtung understands true peace,  positive peace, as being obtained through cooperation and mutual aid, in which there is not only prevention of war but also— fundamentally—the construction of equitable relationships (i.e., social justice). The goal is to build a social structure based on reciprocity, cooperation, culture of peace, dialogue, equal rights, benefits and dignity, with active participation of its members.  Positive peace engages the root causes of violence by addressing the underlying drivers, structures, and dynamics responsible for injustice, inequality, and nonproductive conflict.

Peace and Violence The concepts of negative and positive peace are related to direct, structural, and cultural violence—again, concepts introduced by  Galtung. Direct or episodic violence (which when absent implies negative peace) refers to physical violence that injures or kills people in a fast, instrumental, and intentional way, producing a physical trauma or full incapacity. Structural violence  (which when absent refers to positive peace) results from social, political, and economic oppressive structures that hinder the development of a society in all its potential— such as poverty, hunger or lack of access to education or health—and can trigger episodes of direct violence such as crime and domestic or youth violence. Cultural violence arises from the imposition of values or cultural norms or narratives that legitimize the use of force as a

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Neoliberalism

Table 1  Violence and Peace Violence

Peace

Direct

Physical harm between individuals or groups

Prevention and mitigation of direct violence (i.e., negative peace)

Structural

Social inequalities due to societal structures

Prevention and mitigation of structural violence (i.e., positive peace)

Cultural

Norms, cultural narratives, and symbols that support direct or structural violence

Norms, cultural narratives, and symbols that support negative or positive peace

means of solving conflicts. Table 1 summarizes the way to define negative and positive peace with respect to the three types of violence that, together, provide a fairly comprehensive view of peace. Sustainable peace requires both: negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace implies solving situations of direct violence, namely to prevent or mitigate direct forms of violence. Positive peace, on other side, requires the mitigation of structural violence by adopting attitudes such as cooperation and working toward equality, equity, and dialogue in relationships. Negative peace is related to the cessation of direct violence and positive peace to a structural building of social justice based on reciprocity, equality, and economic rights. Boia Efraime and Alexandra Mello See also Asymmetric Warfare; Civil Wars; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Cyberwar; Deterrence and International Relations; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Images and Theory in International Relations; Positive Peace; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution; Stag Hunt; Women and Leadership

Further Readings Christie, D. J., & Louis, W. R. (2012). Peace interventions tailored to phases within a cycle of intergroup violence. In L. Tropp (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of intergroup conflict (pp. 252–272). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Christie, D. J., Wagner, R. V., & Winter, D. D. (2001). Peace, conflict and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 176–191. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. Galtung, J. (1998). Peace by peaceful means: Peace and conflict, development and civilization. London, England: Sage.

Galtung, J. (2012). Peace, positive and negative. In D. J. Christie (Ed.), Encyclopedia of peace psychology (pp. 1011–1015). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Neoliberalism Neoliberalism is a set of ideas and government policies that favor reducing market regulations, decentralizing states, and lessening state intervention into the economy in general. More specifically this means cutting taxes, especially for business and the wealthy, reducing social expenditures, particularly for the poor, and scaling back if not eliminating regulations on business and finance. Neoliberalism is not a coherent totality but rather a loose conglomeration of ideas and policy prescriptions from which actors pick and choose ­ depending on their prevailing political, economic, social, historical, and institutional situations. Neoliberalism is important because since the late 1970s it has become a road map for many national governments around the world. This entry provides an overview of the origins of neoliberalism, its diffusion across ­countries, and the effects it has had.

Origins Scholars often mark the late 1940s as the time when neoliberalism began to come into its own. This was when an international group of economists and other intellectuals formed the Mont Pélerin Society, a partisan thought collective that included Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Karl Popper, and George Stigler, all internationally renowned scholars. Their purpose in these early postwar years was to formulate an intellectual alternative to both communism and Keynesianism, which they feared posed serious threats to democracy and capitalism. In their view, neoliberalism was a

Neoliberalism

conservative counterweight to these dangerous leftwing ideologies. Eventually, the Pélerin Society played an influential role in the formation of various national and international think tanks and policy research organizations that helped spread neoliberal ideas around the world. However, neoliberalism had little effect on politics until the 1970s, when stagflation hit the advanced capitalist countries in North America and Western Europe. This was a time of simultaneously rising unemployment and inflation that baffled Keynesian economists and policy-makers who had long believed that there was an inverse relationship between these two economic phenomena. But now that they were rising in tandem, Keynesianism was discredited and people searched for an alternative approach that would explain this new economic situation. Neoliberalism won out. It maintained that excessive welfare spending reduced the fear of unemployment and, as a result, workers did not work as hard as they used to but demanded ever higher wages. Furthermore, as the regulatory burden on business had grown over the years, the cost of complying with these regulations also grew. Taxes on business and the wealthy had grown too. The result of all this, according to neoliberals, was that the cost of doing business had increased for firms. To cope, they raised prices and laid off workers. Stagflation was the result. Given this analysis, the solution was to cut taxes, social spending, and regulations.

Diffusion Neoliberalism was adopted initially as a guide to policy making by the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Both were elected on neoliberal platforms and promised to cut taxes, social expenditures, and regulations on business. The results were mixed and neither Reagan nor Thatcher achieved everything they wanted. For instance, Reagan’s large tax cut in 1981 was followed soon by a tax increase due to a ballooning government budget deficit. Other advanced capitalist countries tended to follow a similar course, but this trend was most pronounced in countries that already had relatively low taxes, social spending, and regulation. Others, such as the Scandinavian countries, who also had stronger labor unions and left-wing political parties, were much less eager to jump on the neoliberal bandwagon. Neoliberalism also had effects beyond these Western countries. When countries in the developing world, such as South America and East Asia, ran into serious debt or other economic development problems and needed assistance, they often turned to the Interna­ tional Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. These

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organizations were willing to provide advice and financial aid, but only if the country seeking help adopted a set of neoliberal policies commonly referred to as the Washington Consensus—so-called because it was advocated by the IMF, U.S. Treasury, and the financial interests on Wall Street. Among other things, the Washington Consensus pushed countries to reduce their regulations inhibiting the flow of capital across their borders. In some cases, this sowed the seeds for trouble later, notably the 1997 Asian financial crisis in which the first signs of economic trouble led to a rapid exodus of investment capital that crippled the local economies. The Washington Consensus was also at work in Eastern Europe and Russia during the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When these countries began to move away from communist rule and state-run economies, advisors favoring neoliberalism moved in, urging what became known as shock therapy—rapid privatization of state assets, slashing state spending, and a variety of other institutional changes designed to quickly usher in market-based economic development. Again the results were mixed and some countries, notably Poland, changed course, moving away from strict neoliberalism to something a bit more like a West European brand of social democracy.

The Financial Crisis The real challenge to neoliberalism came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which saw capital markets freeze around the world and plunged many countries into deep economic recessions. Many blamed the crisis on the neoliberal deregulation of financial markets, so when the crisis hit, several countries moved to beef up their regulations in order to prevent another crisis in the future. Some countries, including the United States, embarked on big economic stimulus programs that looked much more like Keynesianism than neoliberalism. However, in Western Europe’s Eurozone area, which was dominated by the European Central Bank and Germany, countries that ran into serious trouble, such as Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, were told that financial assistance for failing banks and economies would only be provided if these governments pursued severe austerity programs rooted in neoliberalism. To date it appears that austerity did not have the beneficial effects as intended. Nevertheless, neoliberalism remains resilient and has survived so far as an important guide for policy-makers worldwide. John L. Campbell See also Capitalism; Conservatism; Economics and Political Behavior; Free Market; Political Ideology

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Further Readings Blyth, M. (2013). Austerity: The history of a dangerous idea. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Crouch, C. (2011). The strange non-death of neoliberalism. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mirowski, P., & Plehwe, D. (Eds.). (2009). The road from Mont Pélerin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmidt, V., & Thatcher, M. (Eds.). (2013). Resilient liberalism in Europe’s political economy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Thelen, K. (2014). Varieties of liberalization and the new politics of social solidarity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power Neustadt’s theory of presidential power refers to a supposition about the foundations of executive authority in the United States as articulated by presidential scholar Richard Neustadt in his book Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. The theory suggests that the core of presidential power is not found in inherent constitutional or statutory authority, but rather in the president’s adeptness at persuading other relevant government actors to adopt his or her policies. Neustadt first proposed this theory in 1960 and it has played a central role in motivating presidential scholarship ever since, having been subjected to numerous challenges, adaptations, and caveats. The theory has received increased attention since the early 2000s as scholars work toward developing an understanding of how presidents accomplish their goals using a variety of methods. This entry defines what persuasion is, as well as what it is not, and summarizes relevant scholarly debate on the subject.

Persuasion Notions of persuasion as fundamental to the exercise of presidential power were common, if largely implicit, before Neustadt. At its most basic, the theory of persuasion states that the president’s formal powers, under the U.S. Constitution, are seriously limited and that accomplishing long-term change necessarily requires the giveand-take inherent in all realms of politics. Presidents, in other words, only very rarely command; usually, they must work within a system of checks and balances that cannot be overcome without persuading others to join their cause.

Persuasion is a multifaceted term. It does not merely refer to a president’s ability to convince others, through oratory and rhetoric, to adopt a different position; it refers as well to bargaining or compromise. Any means of furthering an agenda short of using command authority could reasonably fit the definition of persuasion.

Persuasion in Practice Because the term persuasion can conceivably refer to a number of activities, it is important to consider both what does and what does not fit within this definition. Persuasion in the context of the presidency is often interpreted as exercising the “bully pulpit,” a phrase popularized by Theodore Roosevelt in reference to the office’s utility for broadcasting one’s ­message to the public at large. While this can be a component of persuasion, however, it is not exhaustive, and presidential scholars have noted repeatedly that presidents often attribute their own failures to a seeming inability to adequately persuade the public of the w ­ isdom of what the president wants to do. This, however, is a fundamental misunderstanding of Neustadt’s theory. A more precise reading of Neustadt’s theory is that persuasion refers to strategic behavior on the part of the president, requiring a recognition that tactics which might work in one situation do not necessarily translate to another, even if the situations are seemingly related. Persuasion thus can involve public appeals, but it can also involve things like veto threats, executive orders, informal conversation, vote trading, and so forth. These tactics all share a common thread: As exercises in command, they are very limited, but as a way of securing political support for a given policy, each has its situational advantages. A president opposed to congressional legislation to increase entitlement spending, for example, has a number of options at his or her disposal. He or she could merely veto the bill, but theoretically this could be overridden. Instead, the president might merely threaten a veto unless specific concessions are made within the bill; Congress, perhaps unwilling to call the bluff or recognizing that they do not have enough votes to override a veto, may subsequently yield. In such a scenario, no one’s actual underlying policy preferences have changed, and yet Congress has been persuaded to adapt to what the president wants of them.

Presidential Power Since Neustadt The publication of Neustadt’s theory in 1960 unleashed a veritable torrent of research into the presidency that

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commonly had as its bedrock the notion of power as persuasion. Much of this work was devoted to studying the individual personalities, experiences, and skills that presidents have possessed. However, largely starting in the mid-1990s and coming to fruition in the early 2000s, scholars began raising serious concerns with Neustadt’s theory. Various studies purported to show how ineffective presidential rhetoric actually is at changing minds, while others detailed the applicability of tools like unilateral powers (i.e., powers that theoretically can be employed by the president alone, such as executive orders and proclamations) to advance a president’s policy agenda. All seemed at least marginally skeptical of Neustadt’s claims with some rejecting the theory outright. However, research since the mid-2000s has led to something of a renaissance for Neustadt. Other studies showed that public appeals could be useful when advanced properly under certain circumstances and that unilateral powers are far from universally effective; they in fact routinely involve bargaining both in their formulation and in their implementation. Research into an array of presidential powers, including appointments, vetoes, administrative directives (e.g., executive orders, presidential memoranda), and the like have revealed in recent years a great deal of insight into the central role persuasion plays in determining whether a president will be successful. Debates on the applicability of Neustadt’s theory are far from settled, however. The presidency as a field of research has advanced tremendously, especially in the last 15 to 20 years, but there is still considerable disagreement about what comprises the foundations of presidential power. As the United States continues to face new and complex challenges in the 21st century, understanding the presidency’s role, both formally and informally, remains a paramount objective of political scholarship. Joshua B. Kennedy See also Bully Pulpit; Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership; Hearts and Minds Approach; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Presidentialism; Strong President Model

Further Readings Dickinson, M. J. (2009). We all want a revolution: Neustadt, new institutionalism, and the future of presidency research. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39, 736–770. Howell, W. G. (2003). Power without persuasion: The politics of direct presidential action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Neustadt, R. E. (1990). Presidential power and the modern presidents: The politics of leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York, NY: The Free Press. (Original work published 1960) Rudalevige, A. (2012). The contemporary presidency: Executive orders and presidential unilateralism. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 42, 138–160.

New Left New Left is an umbrella term for intellectual currents and social movements emerging in the 1950s and 1960s as an alternative to both reformist social democracy and the authoritarian socialism promoted by communist parties. While these strands, forming the “Old Left,” adhered to an economic view of social conflicts and addressed male workers as the subject of change, the New Left emphasized an international perspective on injustice, highlighted individual rights and liberties, and sought for a new historical subject. The concept of the New Left is commonly associated with students’ movements in Western Europe and North America during the late 1960s. Among scholars, however, it is undisputed that the rise of the New Left dates back to the 1950s. A broad definition includes not only the U.S. civil rights movement and the 1950s peace movements but also the new social movements ensuing from the students’ movements. This entry provides an overview of the historical background of the New Left, its emergence and trajectory, main ideas and tactics, and finally, the New Left’s social basis and organization.

Historical Context In the late 1950s, Western Europe and North America saw the emergence of new currents in the political left that heralded a new generation of social movements. These currents evolved in reaction to precipitating events both in the Western and in the Eastern bloc. In the East, it was the actions of the Soviet regime that repelled Western leftists with a critical and undogmatic stance. Two events in 1956 fostered their alienation: First, during the Twentieth Communist Party Congress, the open-hearted critique of Stalin and the prevalent cult of personality revealed the corruption and the terror of state socialism. Second, the swift military crackdown of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops wrecked hopes for “socialism with a human face”—a term coined during the Prague Spring of 1968 that was also acclaimed by leftist activists and shredded by Soviet tanks.

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In the West, communist parties followed the authoritarian bearing of their Eastern sister parties, provoking a split across their members and adherents. Many members canceled their membership or developed a more critical stance when they saw party leaders sticking to the Soviet dogma and defending the intervention in Hungary. Social Democratic parties, on the other end of the Old Left spectrum, embraced an indiscriminate anticommunist stance and sided with NATO integration. Moreover, social democracy had made its peace with welfare capitalism. This became most obvious in the program of Godesberg, in which the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) openly dismissed its socialist legacy. In terms of political organization and ideology, the positioning of communist and social-democratic parties thus created a gap that the New Left was about to fill. Indignation among the independent left was furthered by the series of brutal colonial wars and proxy wars, particularly the Suez crisis in 1956 and the Algerian War of Independence at the turn of the decade. Ten years later, the war in Vietnam became the focus of a general critique of U.S. intervention that united the New Left as an antiwar movement across national boundaries. Apart from these political developments, Western Europe and North America saw significant changes in the fabric of society after World War II. A phase of economic growth allowed for the consolidation of middle classes. At the same time, university education expanded considerably. Both developments, economic affluence and more leisure for critical reflection, provided the social background for an emerging movement generation that was dominated by the middle classes and fueled by postmaterialist values.

Emergence and Trajectory Although each country provides a specific context and specific challenges, the New Left is a transnational ­phenomenon united by a radical critique and an ostentatious rejection of what has been called cold war liberalism. Against the historical background described above, the New Left came into being as both an intellectual current and as a new generation of political movements. Leftists at unease with the political program and the organizational sclerosis of the Old Left ventured to think and organize alternatives to parties, trade unions, and the broader labor movement. As a label for an intellectual current, the term New Left (nouvelle gauche) was first used to describe the faction of the French left represented by the news magazine France Observateur. The term was picked up by the editors of the British journal New Left Review, first

published in 1960. Journals became an important reference point for alternative thinking, also in France (e.g., Arguments) and Germany (e.g., Das Argument). The intellectual grounding of the new movement generation is underlined by the role of universities and debate clubs as hothouses for the emerging New Left. The birth of the New Left as a new generation of political movements is closely connected to postwar peace movements in Western Europe. In the late 1950s, groups opposing the nuclear arms race organized independently from trade unions and political parties. In the United Kingdom and Germany, the Easter Marches of the antinuclear movement became a key experience for an independent, radical critique of the status quo. In the United States, the nuclear threat was also part of the motivation to get active. Later, with the Vietnam War, the movement for peace entered the center stage. In the initial phase, however, the civil rights movement that was unfolding in the second half of the 1950s proved to be a major catalyst for the development of the New Left. In the late 1960s, the New Left’s critique condensed in students’ movements that emerged on university campuses across the globe. Students rejected the capitalist organization of Western societies, they criticized the authoritarian culture and the elitist bias of liberal democracies, and they denounced the politics of war. This criticism was shared beyond campuses. Some of the critics chose to “drop out” and to live a life apart from the routines and expectations structuring mainstream culture. The emerging counterculture aimed at alternative ways of living and producing, for example, in communes. At the turn of the decade, the mindset of the New Left also resonated in the new social movements that emerged in the wake of the students’ movement. Activists turned to issues such as women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights, environmental protection, human rights, and solidarity with the Global South. Moreover, antiracism, housing rights, and the “right to the city” (a slogan that embodies demands for agency in reshaping the processes of urbanization) experienced a new wave of activism; youths fought the authoritarian systems of education and care. Such new social movements are clearly an outgrowth of the New Left, although it is disputed whether they should be considered as part of it.

Main Ideas and Tactics Some of the main ideas of the New Left in the United States can be found in the Port Huron Statement that was issued by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962. The authors refused to take sides in the block confrontation and denounced the racist structure

New Left

of the United States as the most blatant obstacle to the equality granted by the Constitution. The Port Huron Statement emphasized the potential of each individual for creativity, compassion, and self-reflection. In order to realize this potential, SDS activists proposed a participatory democracy as an alternative to the conformist and elitist liberal democracy. In a nutshell, the mindset of the New Left emphasized libertarian values and selfdetermination. It combines the rejection of capitalism and authoritarianism. Large parts of the New Left were revitalizing Marxist thought. Activists dug out the humanist and antiauthoritarian heritage of the European left and blended it with existentialist and anticolonial thought. Journals and intellectual circles provided a forum for leftist discussion beyond Marxist orthodoxy. Overcoming the latter’s economic reductionism, thinkers of the New Left such as Herbert Marcuse, E. P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall conceived of culture as an arena of social change and as a site of political struggle. Intellectual discussions of the New Left also challenged the focus of the Old Left on the male worker as the subject of historical change. Instead, they emphasized the agency of marginalized groups and, on the international level, of national liberation movements. The Algerian War of Independence and the Vietnam War marked the New Left’s conception of injustice as an international experience. For many activists, these and other conflicts provided room for an—all too often uncritical—identification with the national liberation movements that struggled for socialism and autonomy. In accordance with this political orientation, the New Left constituted as a protest movement. Rather than appealing to authorities or seeking institutional change, the new generation of movements sought to mark their fundamental opposition to the status quo. Marches and congresses, the main activities of the antinuclear peace movements, were soon complemented by nonviolent innovations that were introduced by the civil rights movement (e.g., sit-ins). The actions that students’ movements took were more confrontational compared with earlier movements of the New Left advocating peace and civil rights. The harsh reaction of the authorities fueled a process of radicalization. As a consequence, occupations of universities and the mockery of the establishment were followed by violent confrontations with the police and, eventually, bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations carried out by militant factions of the New Left. Despite these confrontations, marches, congresses, and everyday-life alternatives remained the dominant activities within the New Left. Finally, electoral politics reemerged as an option: As an outgrowth of the New Left, a new generation of green and Eurocommunist parties was formed.

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Social Formation and Organization The public image of the New Left is dominated by White, male students. It is important to note, however, that intellectuals, organizers, and activists on the ground were more diverse in terms of gender, race, age, and class. Moreover, on empirical grounds, there is no neat distinction between the Old Left and the New Left. Activists of both generations joined forces in campaigns against war, discrimination, and injustice. Yet the New Left marked a major change in the social constituency of social movements. While the actions of the Old Left were sustained by working-class activists, educated, middle-class youths became the main carriers of the new social movements that emerged from the New Left. The two movement generations were also connected to different collective experiences: World wars and economic depression were formative for the Old Left; the next generation experienced the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s and the consolidation of the welfare state. With regard to organization, the New Left challenged the Old Left models of representation and ­leadership. The common denominator of the different formations within the New Left is the ideal of horizontality, spontaneity, and self-organization. A meeting culture that cherished individual participation and ­consensual decision making developed in many of the informal groups that constituted the new generation of movements. The women’s liberation movement in particular raised awareness of power-ridden organizational structures and created alternatives in theory and practice. Bottom-up groups were bound together in a scene located in alternative meeting places such as congregational facilities and discussion clubs as well as youth centers and squatter-occupied houses. Movement activity was sustained in networks that linked smaller groups and organizations, thus functioning as mesolevel organization hubs. The social movement landscape that was inspired by the New Left continues to thrive in Western Europe and North America. The organizational innovations as well as ideas of individual liberty, horizontality, and solidarity have left their mark on subsequent activist generations. Simon Teune See also Marxism; Pacifism; Social Movements; Women’s Liberation Movement

Further Readings Breines, W. (1989). Community and organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The great refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Gitlin, T. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the left. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gosse, V. (2005). Rethinking the New Left: An interpretative history. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Klimke, M., & Scharloth, J. (Eds.). (2008). 1968 in Europe: A history of protest and activism, 1956–1977. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Oglesby, C. (1969). The New Left reader. New York, NY: Grove Press. Sassoon, D. (1997). One hundred years of socialism: The West European Left in the twentieth century. New York, NY: New Press.

News, Television Disaggregation is a best practice when explicating a concept consisting of multiple terms. News refers to the practice of gathering information and the presentation of journalistic storytelling on the major issues of the day. Television is a mass communication technology through which news content can be provided. Television news competes with other media forms (e.g., newspapers, World Wide Web, radio) for the time and attention of citizens. Television’s unique channel characteristics are defined by the moving image with an accompanying audio stream. There are several different types of television news based on varied methods of distribution (e.g., broadcast, cable), financial incentives (e.g., public, forprofit), and geographic coverage (e.g., local, national, international). Various types of mass communication can be defined as being reach media, rather than specificity media. Reach media are those forms of mass communication that can attract a large, geographically and psychographically diverse population very quickly. Specificity media tend to pull together a smaller, but more homogenous audience. Certain types of television news are best described as reach media, while others are known for their specificity. For example, national broadcast television news (e.g., CBS Evening News) exemplifies reach, while many national cable television news outlets (e.g., Fox News) are best known for their relatively small (compared to broadcast television), politically narrow, but devoted audiences. This entry offers an overview of four major types of television news that have attracted the most academic attention and are deemed to be of unique value in terms of affecting political processes and outcomes.

National Broadcast Television News A primary distinction for national broadcast television news between countries is the relative proportion of,

and audience share for, public, nonprofit versus private, for-profit organizations. The rise of mass communication technologies at the beginning of the 20th century produced very different approaches in the degree to which governmental agencies versus the private sector would oversee these resources. Some countries (e.g., United Kingdom) allowed government to maintain strong control of the broadcast airwaves and out of this structure came public organizations like the British Broadcasting Service (BBC). The United States was a relative anomaly in placing an overwhelming control of media in the hands of the private sector, with only minimal governmental oversight from regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These decisions made at the dawn of mass media continue to have influence in the 21st century over what are the dominant broadcast television news sources within countries. The content of national broadcast television news speaks to a diverse audience that varies in political orientation, background, and interest. It is typical for an evening’s national broadcast television news program to last for roughly 30 minutes and cover anywhere from 12 to 15 topics. As a result, it is rare for news of this kind to offer in-depth analysis of any one issue. It is meant to offer an audience a broad overview of the major issues of the day. This is especially true for programs produced by private, for-profit media organizations. In the United States, public national television news broadcasts tend to be granted longer programming slots, cover fewer topics, and offer greater depth than private, for-profit newscasts. However, it is important to note that the audience size for U.S.-based public television broadcasting is relatively small. The best predictor of national broadcast television news consumption is age, with those who are older consuming more of this content. Overall audience share for this type of programming has decreased in the 21st century’s highchoice media environment where broadcasting is competing with cable television and the Internet. The strongest outcomes generated by national broadcast television news viewing can be found in the lower levels of the hierarchy of effects. In particular, national broadcast television news has been shown to produce strong agenda setting effects (i.e., salience transfer from the media to the audience). The basic agenda-setting process speaks to how the media agenda becomes the public agenda. National broadcast television’s effects further along the hierarchy, from knowledge to attitudes to behaviors, are relatively weaker. A medium like the daily newspaper or political media events like a political debate have been shown to have stronger effects on knowledge and several studies reveal campaign-centered messaging like political advertisements being more likely than national broadcast television news to affect political attitudes and behaviors.

News, Television

Local Broadcast Television News

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The United States is divided into media markets, and nested within these markets are television stations affiliated with national broadcasting companies. Although the local affiliates present content offered by their national corporate partners, it is also typical for them to create their own local material. The most important local content they produce is news. The creation of this material allows the owners of the local affiliates to show the federal government they are serving the public well, which is a condition of their license renewal process. As with national broadcast television news, the best predictor of local broadcast news consumption is age. The viewing of local television news is often strongly correlated with national broadcast television news exposure and this is due in large part to the national and local stations coordinating their programming so one type of news directly follows the other each evening. In addition to a traditional evening broadcast newscast, many local affiliates also offer morning and late evening newscasts. While several scholars have pointed out the normative value of local broadcast television news, much academic work is critical of this content. In particular, several scholars have offered empirical evidence that local broadcast television news tends to overreport violence-centered stories like crime (aiding the development of the “mean world” syndrome) and there is much work showing that local television news will often import crime stories from other locales (both near and far) if there is a slow news day. The negative outcomes created by crime-driven coverage are compounded by the detrimental effects of local television news on perceptions of racial and ethnic minorities. It has been shown that local newscasts often present material that serves to reinforce negative stereotypes of disadvantaged subpopulations.

emphasizing opinion and editorial programming alongside hard news coverage. The network, helmed from its inception until 2016 by former Republican Party media consultant Roger Ailes, is often criticized for its heavy bias toward political conservatism. The formula proved successful, however, and Fox News supplanted CNN as the most-watched cable news channel. MSNBC later replicated elements of Fox News’s approach from a liberal perspective. Cable news channels outside the United States (e.g., Sky News in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and Al Jazeera in much of the Middle East) have achieved some commercial success, though their audience shares typically lag behind those of the major American networks. Cable news channels are national in reach, but their audiences are characteristically smaller and older than those of national news broadcast programs. In 2015, for example, Fox News led cable news networks with an average of 1.8 million prime-time viewers per day, more than double the audience for CNN and MSNBC combined. The median age of all three networks’ viewers was over 60. Cable news channels are distinct from broadcast news in that they provide current events coverage all day, every day. The proliferation of this programming format provided geographically distant viewers with the opportunity to learn about even relatively minor breaking news events within minutes for the first time in history. CNN was the first network to report on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The need to fill 24 hours of programming time each day also led networks to devote exhaustive attention to dramatic events like the rescue of “Baby Jessica” from a well in Texas and the apprehension of celebrity murder suspect O. J. Simpson. Cable networks’ focus on melodramatic and salacious stories has been criticized for intermingling entertainment and news, a deviation from traditional journalistic norms. The availability of ideologically slanted news has also been identified as a source of political polarization.

National Cable Television News

International Cable Television News

Cable television is a subscription service offering customers a package of channels in exchange for a periodic fee. The Cable News Network (CNN), launched in 1980, became the first television channel in the United States to offer news exclusively. In contrast to broadcast news programs, CNN provided live news coverage 24 hours per day. This distinction helped the network gain prominence by offering exclusive coverage of breaking news events like the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. The network also captured audiences’ attention with its reporting on the first Persian Gulf War in real time from inside Iraq and Kuwait. CNN’s success inspired the launch of competitor channels, MSNBC and Fox News, in the mid-1990s. Fox News departed significantly from CNN’s model by

International cable television news outlets are a relatively recent media development and have grown more pervasive in the current century. The creation of international cable television news stations reflects increased globalization and the growing interconnectedness of different parts of the world politically, socially, and economically. In the United States, audience members will often see channels like Al Jazeera America or BBC World News as part of a basic cable television package. Also, channels like CNN International can be found on cable packages in many European, Asian, and Oceanic countries. These channels often provide unique, international perspectives on the various issues of the day that are distinct from what citizens receive through their domestic news services.

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Research has shown that outlets like Al Jazeera America versus domestic U.S.-based cable news channels like Fox News, MSNBC, or CNBC will offer very different viewpoints on topics like terrorism, war, and financial crises. International cable television news outlets will also vary in the types of stories they choose to cover, compared with domestic television news programming. The audience for international cable television news remains limited, and pales in comparison to the number of people within any given country consuming domestically produced news content. Little research has been done on those who are drawn to this type of news content; however, individuals who have spent time abroad, have specific international ties, and also knowledge of a region are more likely to consume this type of television news. R. Lance Holbert and Nicholas W. Robinson See also Capitalism; Clientelism; Democracy; False Consciousness; Globalization; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Public Opinion; Sleeper Effect; Talking Heads and Political Campaigns

Further Readings deVreese, C. H. (2002). Framing Europe: Television news and European integration. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Aksant Academic. Dixon, T. L. (2015). Good guys are still always in white? Positive change and continued misrepresentation of race and crime on local television news. Communication Research, 27, 547–573. doi:10.1177/0093650215579223 Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. Image bite politics: News and the visual framing of elections. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Graber, D. A., & Holyk, G. G. (2012). Civic knowledge and audiovisual learning. In H. A. Semetko & M. Scammell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of political communication (pp. 153–163). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hamilton, J. T. (2004). All the news that’s fit to sell: How the market transforms information into news. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McCombs, M. E. (2014). Setting the agenda: Mass media and public opinion (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity. Prior, M. (2007). Post-broadcast democracy: How media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, N. W., Zeng, C., & Holbert, R. L. (in press). The stubborn pervasiveness of television news in the digital age and the field’s attention to the medium, 2010–2014. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. Stromback, J., & Esser, F. (2015). Making sense of mediatized politics: Theoretical and empirical perspectives. London, England: Routledge.

Stroud, N. J. (2011). Niche news: The politics of news choice. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Non-Aligned Nations Non-aligned nations are members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM); a collection of states that was formed in opposition to the polarizing influence of the cold war, and whose members have stated positions of anticolonialism and peaceful coexistence. Many nonaligned nations define their politics as “neutral” or not in alliance with, or in opposition to, any bloc of powerful states, and all members follow a policy of neutralism. By maintaining an impartial position in world politics, non-aligned nations have traditionally sought to resist imperialist forces, while strengthening relations between members of their own group. To a large extent, non-aligned nations are located in the Global South. There are currently 120 non-aligned nations spread over four continents and including around half of the world’s population. They cooperate on a range of issues in international politics, including economic and social development strategies. Collectively the non-aligned nations focus their policies on resisting ­ pressures from major powers on these issues while ­fortifying their political and economic independence in order to thwart the spread of neocolonialism. The nonaligned nations form an international group, which gives its members substantial clout in larger organizations such as the United Nations (UN).

Origins and History The idea of non-alignment can be traced back to the first Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghanaian premier Kwame Nkrumah, and Josep Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s president. These leaders advocated a position of resistance toward the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the major world powers during the cold war. In encouraging newly independent states to adopt a neutral position, or middle course, in world politics, they believed that this would prevent the spread of cold war ideology around the globe, especially in the Global South. It was also a means by which these former colonies could protect their sovereignty, prevent the intrusion of the cold war powers into their affairs, and halt the spread of imperialism and neocolonialism. These were precisely the major concerns of newly independent nations as they emerged on the world stage during the process of

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decolonization after World War II ended in 1945. Nonaligned nations sought to avoid becoming entangled in the cold war, but members are not always neutral states. The non-aligned nations have a variety of different political systems and cultures as well as a range of ideologies and different worldviews, but they also have many common challenges. First, many non-aligned nations have a shared ­colonial past and were formerly colonies of Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Others, including many South American members, achieved independence earlier, but almost all members have been under colonial rule in some form and have been suppressed by outside powers that often imposed tyrannical social and political regimes. Central to their collective experience of colonialism was the exploitation of their natural resources and the creation of cashcrop economies that did not provide a sustainable basis for the later social and economic development of these nations. Second, many non-aligned nations also experienced turmoil, the breakdown of law and order, civil unrest, and in some cases wars of liberation against their former colonial rulers as they tried to achieve independence. For many, the struggle to regain control of their own territories resulted in widespread violence against colonial administrations, a collapse of state institutions, and subsequent civil war. The path to independence was often long and complicated, involving large-scale loss of life and often resulting in a poor relationship with former colonial powers. However, this common experience has been useful in leading non-aligned nations to look to each other for support in the face of any infringement upon their sovereignty and in the articulation of common aspirations of liberty and freedom. Third, given their shared histories of colonial rule in a variety of contexts, from Latin America to Africa to South and Southeast Asia, the non-aligned nations have faced similar challenges in nation- and state-building processes undertaken since their independence. Because colonial boundaries were often drawn without consideration of the different races, ethnicities, cultures, tribal affiliations, and languages within a given territory, the arbitrary binding of these disparate groups into a nation upon acquisition of territorial and political sovereignty often provided a difficult basis for the construction of a nation-state. Tensions between rivaling ethnic groups, conflict that emerged over prejudices and bias built into existing colonial systems of governance, border disputes, and class wars have been a feature of many nonaligned nations as they have tried to construct peaceful and prosperous societies. Finally, since many members are located in the Global South, they share the same struggle to close the North-South imbalance in terms of

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social and economic development. Among the nonaligned nations, low incomes, the heritage of years of colonial exploitation of their natural resources, a lack of key infrastructure, a poorly educated workforce, and the challenges inherent in the conversion of agrarian economies to industrial systems mean that many members share similar problems of poverty and underdevelopment. However, in tackling these myriad challenges together, through international and transnational cooperation, the non-aligned nations have shown that there is strength in unity.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) African and Asian nations who declared their intention to be non-aligned met for the first time in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955. This was a meeting of representatives of states that were either independent or engaged in a struggle for their independence. The ­Bandung Conference brought them together to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to emphasize their unified opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism. This was followed by a meeting in Belgrade in 1961, when the non-aligned movement ­ was officially launched. The original five leaders— Nehru from India, Sukarno from Indonesia, Nasser from Egypt, Nkrumah from Ghana, and Tito from ­Yugoslavia—agreed with others, such as Ho Chi Minh from Vietnam and Zhou Enlai from the People’s ­Republic of China, on a set of principles which would underpin the NAM: •• mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty •• mutual nonaggression •• mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs •• equality and mutual benefit •• peaceful coexistence

These principles provided the basis for the criteria by which nations could become members of the NAM:

1. An independent policy based on the coexistence of states with different political and social systems and non-alignment or a trend in favor of such as policy.



2. Consistent support of movements for national independence.



3. Nonmembership of a multilateral military alliance concluded in the context of Great Power conflicts.



4. In case of bilateral military agreement with a Great Power, or membership of a regional defense pact, the agreement or pact should not be one deliberately concluded in the context of Great Power conflicts.

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5. In case of lease of military bases to a foreign power, the concession should not have been made in the context of Great Power conflicts.

The agreement between members on these rules was further institutionalized as a feature of the NAM and came to be recognized as a key characteristic of nonaligned nations as the group expanded from the original five members to the current 120. The first official summit of the NAM was held in Belgrade in 1961 and since then, non-aligned nations have held a series of conferences and meetings in an array of locations from Cairo to Havana, Lima to Lusaka, and the most recent meeting in 2012, which was held in Tehran.

Functions and Utility Non-aligned nations have always sought to strengthen the United Nations and endorse various General Assembly resolutions, especially those relating to peace and security issues and colonial questions. During the cold war, the UN was polarized by two rival blocs: the West, comprising the United States, United Kingdom, France, and other European countries; and the East, comprising the USSR, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and Romania. The non-aligned nations created the third bloc in the General Assembly during the cold war, which brought together members of the NAM and other countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. During the cold war, the non-aligned nations voted consistently together on an array of questions before the UN General Assembly and, in the process, achieved a high degree of cohesion between its members and became a distinct voting bloc. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war in 1989, it was presumed that the era of bloc politics was also over, as the vacuum that had been created by the bipolar world order disappeared and the utility of non-alignment was called into question. By that point, however, non-alignment had become an ideology that shaped the foreign policies and internationalisms of a diverse array of states. Nonaligned nations tend to interpret this ideology in different ways, which means that, for instance, Cuba’s foreign policy is quite different from that of Saudi Arabia, which is also a member. However, non-aligned nations remain connected through their commitment to the core principles of the movement and through the united struggle for disarmament, their anticolonial stance, and their respect for peaceful coexistence. These broad strategies are not contingent on the shape of the global order or on the particular constellation of the global balance of power. In particular, the Non-Aligned Movement has been very important in safeguarding the sovereignty of

its members from outside interference and in providing a platform and a mechanism with which smaller states can have their voices heard, and pursue their interests on the world stage. The gradual process of institutionalizing the NAM through the regular meetings of its members and at the General Assembly and the Security Council of the UN has led to the infusion of neutralist internationalism into the policies of non-aligned nations. The unity among the members has proven useful in guarding their autonomy and directing international discourse on questions relating to their interests, especially in this international, institutional environment. In binding together this diverse array of states, the Global South has emerged as a cohesive and powerful force in world politics. Non-aligned nations in the Global South continue to engage with international political questions related to their core principles while also pursuing a vigorous development agenda which addresses their common challenges in promoting social and economic development in their countries. The non-aligned nations, therefore, play a fundamentally important role in the ongoing evolution of the global order. Alanna O’Malley See also Diplomacy; International Security; Peacemaking; Political Ideology; United Nations; United Nations Security Council

Further Readings Jackson, R. L. (1986). The non-aligned, the UN and the superpowers. New York, NY: Praeger. Jankowitsch, O., Sauvant, K. P., & Weber, J. (Eds.). (1978). The Third World without superpowers. Dobbs Ferry, NJ: Oceana. Miskovic, N., Fischer-Tine, H., & Boskovska, N. (Eds.). (2014). The non-aligned movement and the cold war, Delhi—Bandung—Belgrade. London, England: Routledge. Mulay, R. (1987). Mass media, international relations and nonalignment. New Delhi, India: South Asia Books. Schaufelbuehl, J. M., Bott, S., Hanhimaki, J., & Wyss, M. (2015, December). Beyond and between the cold war blocs [Special issue]. The International History Review, 37(5), 901–1013. Singham, A.W., & Hune, S. (1986). Non-alignment in an age of alignments. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill. Tassin, K. S. (2006). “Lift up your head my brother”: Nationalism and the genesis of the non-aligned movement. Journal of Third World Studies, 23(1), 147–168. Willets, P. (1978). The non-aligned movement, the origins of a Third World alliance. New York, NY: Nichols. Willets, P. (1981). The non-aligned in Havana: Documents of the Sixth Summit Conference and an analysis of their significance for the global political system. London, England: Frances Pinter.

Nonviolence

Nonviolence Nonviolence exists on a spectrum. On one end of that spectrum are people like Gandhi who believe that nonviolence is a way of life, the only way that one can live a life of truth. This end of the spectrum can be called comprehensive nonviolence. On the other end of that spectrum are people like Machiavelli, who counsel nonviolence as a tactic worth using when it is to a sovereign’s advantage but who feel no special obligation to counsel refraining from the use of violence. This end of the spectrum can be called tactical or selective nonviolence. In the middle of that spectrum are most of the rest of the world’s people, who shun violence and prefer to behave nonviolently most of the time but believe that, regrettably, violence is sometimes, perhaps even often, necessary. Since the middle of the 19th century, nonviolence has played a major role in political movements such as the antislavery movement, the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, and various movements for independence, such as the movement led by Gandhi that culminated in the end of ­British rule in India in 1947.

Comprehensive Nonviolence At the beginning of the 20th century, on September 11, 1906, Mohandas K. Gandhi undertook with other Indians in South Africa the first of his nonviolent campaigns. In the years that followed, until his assassination on January 30, 1948, Gandhi conducted many nonviolent campaigns. With the help of one of his relatives, Gandhi coined a term for nonviolence as he understood it. The term is satyagraha, which means, literally, holding onto truth. An instance from Gandhi’s life might illustrate this concept best. Shortly after his arrival in South Africa, in 1893, Gandhi, a lawyer, was forced to leave a train for refusing to move from his first-class compartment to third-class. He described the experience as life-changing insofar as he had never before been made to feel so insulted. But a day or two later, Gandhi boarded a stagecoach and had to endure another insult when the company refused to seat him with the other passengers. And when the man in charge of the coach urged Gandhi to sit on the foot rail, Gandhi protested and held onto the rail of the coachbox as he was pummeled and as the man in charge attempted drag him to the foot rail. This image of Gandhi, refusing to lash back but clinging with all his might at the same time to what he thought was right, is a good example of Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha. For Gandhi, each person is finite, and thus no one individual is capable of grasping the entire truth,

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especially if one refuses to hear what another has to say or offer. One must live one’s life according to what is right and true, and since every person should also do that, no one is entitled to harm another or take another’s life in pursuit of truth. Doing so would limit one’s ability to perceive the whole truth. For such people as Gandhi, an understanding of what constitutes violence is crucial to an understanding of what constitutes nonviolence. And for such people, violence is all around. Gandhi, in fact, argued that it was impossible for a person to live a fully nonviolent life. The very act of living requires that one kill vegetable life, if not animal life. And while many would not regard the killing of a plant as violent, in the mind of Gandhi and others like him, if one deliberately or negligently harms another living being, one is engaged in violence. Harm is different from hurt. One can hurt someone in protecting them from harm. The example Gandhi gives is that of pushing a young child forcefully to keep him from putting his hand in a fire. That, for Gandhi, is not violent insofar as, first, there is no intent to harm, and second, the hurt that is delivered is not itself harmful. It promotes or secures another’s potential rather than restricting or inhibiting it. But harm for Gandhi and others is not restricted to physical injury. Gandhi and others point out that psychological harm is often far more debilitating and longer lasting than some forms of physical harm. Parents who continually demean their children, a partner who is cold or indifferent to his or her partner, or bosses who constantly harass employees can often do damage of a sort more injurious or harmful than a broken arm or even a missing limb. People who believe in nonviolence as a way of life generally take all of these concerns into account, and as a result, they are often pacifistic, opposing all warfare; vegetarian, opposing the intentional breeding of animals for consumption of their meat; and anarchistic, opposing governments and their coercive measures. They are committed to nonviolence as a means to all ends, sometimes regardless of the ends, because they believe that nothing good can come from violence.

Tactical or Selective Nonviolence At the opposite end of the nonviolence spectrum are those who will use nonviolent tactics when it suits them. And when will it suit them? When it is more expedient than violent methods, for example when a company executive chooses to negotiate with a union official and get an agreement than to remain intransigent, force a strike, and then engage a private security force, hire strikebreakers, and fire union employees. Such actions

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might suit those who engage in tactical nonviolence. But if an agreement isn’t possible, or if working toward such an agreement is less than convenient, a Machiavellian figure would have little concern about resorting to the use of a security force and strikebreakers to maintain production and keep a factory open, firing or even firing upon those who are striking. The “commitment” to nonviolence, for such people, is not a commitment to nonviolence itself. It is a commitment to whatever means will bring about a desired end most easily. Sometimes those means are nonviolent. Sometimes they are not. Tactical nonviolence focuses on ends more than on means.

The Middle of the Nonviolence Spectrum Most people fall between these two extremes on the spectrum of nonviolence. Most people will eschew ­violence even if it involves some sacrifice on their own part. They will engage in violence only when they believe that a failure to engage in preventing harm through violence will result in greater harm befalling them or some third party. For many people that belief comes readily. For many others that belief is rare. But all people who believe that violence is sometimes but regrettably necessary fall in the middle of the nonviolence spectrum. Prominent among those who fall between these extremes are a large group of activists and scholars who follow the work of Gene Sharp. Sharp in 1973 published a work titled The Politics of Nonviolent Action. In this three-volume work he set forth a number of principles, strategies, and tactics for engaging successfully in political change through the use of nonviolence. Sharp’s works suggest that he is thinking primarily of nonviolence as anything that doesn’t involve physical violence. One can’t be sure, however, for Sharp never defines violence. And so among the tactics that he lists as nonviolent are the taunting of government officials, the haunting of public officials, and other actions that someone like Gandhi would describe as psychological violence. Sharp’s focus— and the focus of the many who follow him—is on prevailing in conflicts without the use of physical violence. Although Sharp published his work in 1973, he didn’t garner much popular attention until a documentary aired on U.S. television in the year 2000. The television documentary, called A Force More Powerful, was based on a book by that same name, written Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman, a protégé of Sharp. Since that time especially, Sharp’s work has received much more attention. His books have been translated into many ­ languages, and many of the Arab Spring movements of 2010–2012 arose from the actions of people educated in Sharp’s methods. The International Center on

Nonviolent Conflict, based in Washington, D.C., is one prominent organization devoted to distributing information about nonviolent conflict. Following Peter ­Ackerman, ICNC has eschewed use of the term nonviolence, and since 2008 or so, it has even preferred to speak of nonviolent political action as civil resistance, embracing the usage of Sir Adam Roberts of Oxford University.

Theory of Nonviolent Political Action Many of Sharp’s ideas come from Gandhi, whom Sharp regards as a master political organizer. In his efforts to understand Gandhi’s political acumen, Sharp presented two models of political power. Both can be understood by considering a pyramid, with rulers or leaders at the top of the pyramid, enforcers of order just below that, and the mass of people comprising the largest, bottom part of the pyramid. While many conceive of power as residing at the top of the pyramid (what Sharp calls the monolithic model of power), people engaged in nonviolent political action conceive of power as residing in the cooperation or indifference of people who comprise the more massive bottom of the pyramid (what Sharp called the pluralist-dependency model). If the masses withdraw their cooperation with power or their indifference to it, the top of the pyramid falls. Sharp and others maintain that power can be found in resources possessed by those at the bottom of the pyramid: tangible resources such as money, material goods, natural resources, and large numbers of people, and intangible resources such as the education levels of a population and the devotion of people to their leaders. To the extent that a population can overcome fear of its leaders and their enforcers and can control the various resources that power comprises, that population has power. This theory of nonviolence gained many adherents in the first decade of the 21st century. A follow-up documentary to A Force More Powerful, called Bringing Down a Dictator, documented the rise of Otpor!, a Serbian group that helped coordinate efforts to end Slobodan Miloševic´’s rule in Serbia. Otpor! had already discovered many nonviolent techniques before being introduced to the work of Gene Sharp, but their introduction to his work helped catapult Otpor! and an offshoot of that group, CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) into greater prominence. During the first decade of the 21st century, ­CANVAS and other adherents of Gene Sharp’s teachings helped to educate leaders of the Arab Spring and resistance movements in places such as Georgia, Ukraine, and the Maldives, to name a few. These uprising were often successful in “bringing down d ­ ictators” or unpopular leaders.

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The Heart of Nonviolence But the consequences of many such civil resistance campaigns have been undesirable and unexpected: civil war in Syria, mass migrations of disaffected youth in Tunisia to join ISIS, a more dictatorial regime in Egypt, massive unrest in Libya, and more. Some of this can be attributed to premature euphoria over the prospect of deposing dictators without the use of weapons. Probably more of this can be attributed to a lack of advance planning about what would happen after a dictator was brought down. Civil resistance for most people was simply a means of engaging in a struggle with the purpose of winning. To those on the far end of the ­ ­spectrum, who attempt to practice comprehensive nonviolence, this is anathema: Seeking to overcome an opponent is by its very nature violent, whatever the means. To those committed to comprehensive nonviolence, nonviolence necessitates engaging others constructively or not engaging them at all by refusing to cooperate with them, by rendering oneself independent of them. It does not entail, as civil resistance did in the first dozen years of the 21st century, overpowering and dominating another group. Gandhi was keenly aware of this danger. He worked hard, although unsuccessfully, to keep India united and not divided along religious lines into two separate nations, Pakistan and India. He believed that any attempt by one group to dominate another would lead to trouble. And he has largely been proven correct by historical events. And so on the one hand, while nonviolence can be viewed as a spectrum, on the other hand comprehensive nonviolence sees no place for selective nonviolence as a political tactic where the goal is to overpower another. This is not to say that those who attempt to practice comprehensive nonviolence are never violent; they would probably be the first to acknowledge that living entails violence. But they would argue that the introduction of any form of violence into a political campaign, whether it be ­ physical violence, psychological violence, or simply a desire to overpower an o ­ pponent, is ultimately selfdefeating. So although nonviolence may occupy a spectrum of behaviors, it is comprehensive nonviolence that ultimately defines nonviolence. Barry L. Gan See also Aggressive Capitulation; Art in Political Campaigns; Calculus of Dissent; Civilian Intervention; Deviance and Control; Equality of Opportunity; Equity Theory; Insurgency; Legitimacy, Forms of; Lobbying; Pacifism; Powerlessness; Saber Rattling; Social Contract; Social Revolts; Term Limits; Women’s Liberation Movement

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Further Readings Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gan, B. L. (2013). Violence and nonviolence: An introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Gandhi, M. K. (1999). The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi. Retrieved from http://www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/ cwmg.htm Holmes, R. L. (1971). Violence and nonviolence. In J. A. Shaffer (Ed.), Violence: Award-winning essays in the Council for Philosophical Studies competition. New York, NY: David McKay, 1971. Holmes, R. L., & Gan, B. L. (2012). Nonviolence in theory and practice (3rd ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Sharp, G. (1973). The politics of nonviolent action. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an international organization including states in North America and Europe. Its overall purpose is to protect the freedom and security of its member states through political and military collaboration. NATO provides member states with a forum for discussions, and all members have equal say with decision making taken by consensus. Since its foundation in 1949, NATO has transformed to adapt to a changing world order. This has led the organization not only to survive, but also to prevail with broadened numbers of member states and deepened collaboration in new policies and geographical areas around the world. This entry provides an overview of NATO as a political and military alliance, and a description of its founding structures, member states, and missions around the world.

A Political and Military Alliance NATO was based on the propositions declared during World War II by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the U.S president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the Atlantic Charter. The charter was issued on August 14, 1941, and set out propositions for U.K. and U.S. national goals for how to shape a postwar order. The charter stressed that there should be no aggrandizement, territorial or otherwise, and affirmed the right of all people to freely choose their own government, to restore self-government to those that had been deprived of it, to trade and economic prosperity, to social security, and to international peace and collective security.

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In the period immediately following the war’s end in 1945, Western European countries were concerned about Soviet and communist expansion in Europe. A war-torn Europe, with political and economic challenges, could become a target of the Soviet Union. In January 1948, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, spoke of the need for a treaty between allies pledging mutual assistance, arguing for a transatlantic defense alliance between Western European states and the United States. The United States government was supportive of such an alliance, but only if Western European governments were unified on the issue. In ­ March 1948, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom agreed on the ­ Brussels Treaty, forming the Western Union as a symbol of political c­ ollaboration and integration and the military and s­ trategic ambition to initiate a shared defense system. The Western Union became the starting point for what would become NATO. The signing partners of the ­Brussels Treaty (except for Luxembourg, which was represented by Belgium) began discussions together with Canada and the United States on what would become the Washington Paper, which was agreed upon on September 9, 1948, and would eventually be the founding ideas for the future articles of the North Atlantic Treaty.

The North Atlantic Treaty The North Atlantic Treaty (often referred to as the Washington Treaty) was officially signed in the Departmental Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on April, 1949, by twelve states: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the ­ ­Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO had three triggering factors: first, as a response to the growing threat of the Soviet Union and expanding communism in Europe; second, as a response to the danger of a war-torn Europe, such as the development of aggressive nationalism and militarism; and third, to promote European integration and political reconstruction. To accomplish these three objectives, NATO member states agreed that an attack on one member state would be seen as an attack against all member states (Article 5); to set up military preparedness between allies (Article 3); and to collaborate nonmilitarily to promote friendly, prosperous, and stable relations that enhance the principles espoused in the founding of the organization (Article 2). Article 2 has been the basis for nonmilitary cooperation and is supported by Article 4 with reference to the right to consult together if there are concerns for territorial integrity, political independence, and security. Articles 2 and 4 support member

states’ sharing information and views to coordinate national policies and ensure a common stand when it is felt to be necessary. The treaty comprises thirteen articles; Article 5 has become the most important article of the treaty as it points out NATO as an arrangement among member states for collective defense. NATO and Article 5 derive their authority from the UN Charter and Article 51. This article sets out the inherent right of all states in the world to individual or collective defense. Article 5 focuses on collective defense among member states, as it embeds a commitment to protect any member state that is under attack. Since the declaration of the treaty, NATO member states have had somewhat different opinions on the nature of Article 5. While the United States, from the start, expressed concerns over obligations to foreign military engagements if a member state was under attack, member states on the European side of the Atlantic sought American assurance of support in the event of a Soviet attack. At the end of negotiations, Article 5 came to contain a mutual assurance that a military attack against one or more member states would be considered an attack against all NATO members and an obligation from each one to take necessary actions, including, but not necessarily leading to, military support. NATO member states invoked Article 5 for the first time ever after September 11, 2001, when terrorist attackers struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., with about 3,000 civilian deaths. NATO has declared itself to be a political and military organization. The political dimension of the organization embeds the role of promoting and protecting democratic values and free discussions and cooperation on defense and security matters. The political dimension of the organization embeds the commitment among member states to solve political disputes peacefully. NATO member states have also agreed to pursue the military capacity to deal with external security challenges diplomatically, and, if diplomacy fails, with military means. These military operations are implemented under the Washington Treaty, Article 5, and/or under a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) mandate. However, NATO has also launched military missions without referring to Article 5 or without a UNSC mandate. This has occurred when NATO member states perceived security threats in genocide, war crimes, and mass atrocities to safeguard against, based on the UN Charter.

Founding Structures NATO is an intergovernmental organization in which each member state has equal say. Each member state has

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a delegation under the supervision of a governmentappointed ambassador or permanent representative. The main role of the delegation is to represent the member state in the daily work of NATO, to interact and discuss policy positions with allies, and to gather and send back information from NATO to domestic institutions. It is the duty of the delegation to exchange ideas and positions within NATO to facilitate discussions and collective decision making. Each member state is represented in the North Atlantic Council (NAC), which is the decision-making body of the organization. There are weekly meetings, but meetings may be called at any time by one or more of the representatives. In addition, the NAC holds meetings on a ministerial level between ministers of defense and foreign affairs twice a year and NATO summits (top-level meetings) are held between the heads of the member states when deemed important. NATO decisions require consensus, with each member state holding a veto right. In practice, however, NATO only functions if member states are willing to compromise and seek common positions. Therefore, the decisionmaking process is based on consultations, negotiations, and transparency, where member states try to harmonize national stands with the positions taken by other member states and the secretary-general to promote a collective will and to be able to speak with one voice. The political culture within NAC is to seek and find common ground on political and security challenges. The secretary-general is the chairman of NAC with the responsibility to present issues for discussions with member states, offer assistance to find common positions among member states, and acting executive in the name of NATO with responsibility for ensuring the implementation of decisions that are made. The secretary-general is also the chairman of all major committees, such as the Defense Planning Committee and the Nuclear Planning group and, in addition, is the spokesperson for NATO in international relations as the voice of the collective will of the member states. The s­ecretary-general is also the head of the International Staff. Besides the civilian structures, NATO has a military component. The military component encompasses the Military Committee of appointees of the military chiefs of staff, its executive body, the International Military Staff and two strategic commands, first the Allied Command Operations (ACO) headed by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium, and second, the Allied Command Transformation (ACT) in Virginia in the United States, headed by the supreme allied commander, transformation (SACT). The Military Committee assists the North Atlantic Council and the Nuclear Planning Group with information and guiding with the help from NATO’s two

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strategic commanders—the supreme allied commander Europe (SACEUR) and the supreme allied commander, transformation (SACT).

Member States Since the twelve founding states of NATO signed an agreement, NATO has, based on Article 10 of the Treaty, widened its number of member states to 28 as of 2009. The founding member states in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the ­Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States were accompanied by Greece and Turkey (1952); Germany (1955); Spain (1982); the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and ­Slovenia (2004); and Albania and Croatia (2009). In 2016, four states are aspirants for membership: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Montenegro, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). All invitations to become an ally are decided unanimously by all member states based on Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty and through the North Atlantic Council. The guiding principles for membership are to be defined as a European state able to promote and protect the fundamental principles of the treaty and to provide security to the transatlantic region. The different enlargements of NATO over time have reflected upon new security challenges. The end of the cold war challenged NATO in its foundations. NATO had for decades primarily been a political and military organization with the objective of protecting its member states from the communist threat in the east. The new post–cold war era called for a new role for NATO or for its dissolution. At the beginning of the 1990s, NATO was called upon by former eastern European states to open up for membership. Many former communist states called for a Western security umbrella against potential Russian expansionism. In 1995, NATO allies presented a report, The Study on NATO Enlargement, presenting how new member states were to be accepted. NATO officials argued that the end of the cold war provided a window of opportunity for NATO allies to build a more secure and peaceful transatlantic region and to promote NATO norms and values in neighboring states. The first post–cold war enlargement of 1999 included the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland and, based on the experiences of such enlargement and on the 1999 initiated Membership Action Plan (MAP), NATO opened up for a second and major post–cold war enlargement in 2004, including Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. ­ Owing to the civil wars in the Balkans of the 1990s,

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NATO enlargements occurred eastward. However, in 2009, NATO enlarged to the southeast, including ­Albania and Croatia after years of domestic political and military reforms. In December 2015, Montenegro took an important step toward membership by being accepted to start accession talks to become the 29th member of the organization.

Accession Talks The accession talks begin after an official invitation by NATO and are the first step in the process toward membership. They include meetings at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, between NATO representatives and representatives of the state of interest to discuss the capability of meeting the obligations set out by NATO to become a member state; these obligations are discussed in two sessions—first on political, security-related and military aspects of membership and second, on technical issues regarding resources, legal aspects, and financial support of the NATO budget. Altogether, the discussions result in a timetable for reforms to be taken by the potential member state. The second step of accession talks embed the written confirmation to the NATO secretary-general of the invitee of timetables and reforms to be taken. The third step consists of the signature and ratification of all NATO Allies of the accession protocols and is an amendment of the Washington Treaty to first allow the invitee to be acknowledged by the treaty and, second, ratified by all NATO member states based on their domestic, political, and legal procedures. The ratification by all NATO allies opens up the fourth step in the invitation and acceptance of the new NATO member state. The formal invitation, by the secretary-general, to become a member state confirms the new member state as a potential body of the Washington Treaty and is followed by step five, which is the acceptance from the invitee to be part of NATO under the obligations and responsibilities of the Washington Treaty. Besides accession talks to become a formal member, NATO has developed institutionalized partnerships around the world, including dialogue and collaboration with 41 partner states. These structured relationships are the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), but, also with partners across the globe, comprising individual states not part of the aforementioned structured partnerships. In addition, NATO cooperates on an institutional level with other global and regional organizations, such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), as well as other relevant organizations to promote NATO political and security objectives when required.

NATO Activities in the 21st Century Since the end of the cold war, NATO missions have increased in number. NATO engaged in the civil war in Kosovo in 1998–1999. In August 2001, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia asked NATO for assistance in halting ethnic tension and in disarming violent factions, supervising the implementation of a peace plan, and assisting and advising the government in upholding peace and security. In early October 2001, NATO began pursuing counterterrorism missions, as a result of the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes against the United States, to support the United States as a NATO ally. In February 2003, NATO established radar aircraft and air defense batteries to protect the security of Turkey as a NATO ally as part of the second Gulf conflict. In the summer of 2004, NATO, on request from the Greeks, assisted in securing the Olympic and Paralympic Games through intelligence support, radar aircraft surveillance, and by providing capacities to protect from biological, chemical, and nuclear attacks. In November 2006, NATO provided assistance to the Latvian government-held NATO Summit in Riga. In late August 2005, the United States was hit by Hurricane Katrina, leaving civilians in despair and in need of humanitarian support and protection. In September of 2005, NATO agreed to assist in humanitarian assistance. NATO also provided humanitarian assistance to Pakistan after a major earthquake on October 2005 that killed over 50,000 people and left more than four million without homes or shelters. From 2004 to 2011, NATO was engaged in assisting the Iraqi government with protection and security. This included a training mission of Iraqi security forces and the setting up of a long-term collaboration between NATO and the Iraqi government. In June 2005, NATO assisted the African Union (AU) in its mission to halt the ongoing violence in Sudan by providing air transport and training. In the fall of 2008, NATO began counterpiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and around the Horn of Africa to protect humanitarian missions in the region and to counter piracy activities to protect different economic objectives, which was continued by NATO in 2009. From March of 2011 to late October, NATO launched a major military mission in Libya, supervising all military operations, to halt the ongoing civil war by implementing a no-fly zone and an arms embargo and stopping all military strikes by hostile Libyan forces against civilians. NATO has continued to be active around the world to deal with a broad range of security challenges. A major NATO operation is the training and advising of regime security forces in Afghanistan and the supporting of development of democratic institutions and good governance based on UNSC Resolution 2189. This is an operation based on previous NATO engagement in

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Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014 in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Another NATO mission of larger size is the presence of NATO´s Kosovo Force (KFOR) in Kosovo with the objective of protection peace, security, and stability in the aftermath of the civil war in 1998–1999 and the following UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). Based on UNSC Resolution 1244, NATO operates to promote a safe and secure multiethnic Kosovo. A third NATO operation is the long-term presence in monitoring the Mediterranean Sea and off the Horn of Africa to identify and destroy piracy and terrorist activities. A fourth mission includes the support of the AU in peacemaking throughout the continent. The Russian intervention in Ukraine of 2014 marked a fifth NATO concern, with intensified air police missions, surveillance and patrolling by fighter jets, deployment of increased numbers of aircraft in NATO territory, and deployment of ballistic missile defense systems to protect NATO territorial integrity. Daniel Silander See also Capitalism; Cyberwar; Dependency Theory; Deterrence and International Relations; Diplomacy; Ecopolitics; European Union; International Security; Malthusian Cycle; Nuclear Taboo; Peacemaking; Resource Mobilization; Tragedy of the Commons; United Nations; United Nations Security Council

Further Readings Asmus, R. D. (2002). Opening NATO’s door: How the alliance remade itself for a new era. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Graeme P. H., & Kriendler, J. (Eds.). (2013). Understanding NATO in the 21st century: Alliance strategies, security and global governance. Abingdon, England: Routledge. Kaplan, L. S. (1999). The long entanglement: NATO’s first fifty years. Westport, CT: Praeger. Michta, A. A., & Hilde, P. S. (2014). The future of NATO: Regional defense and global security. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Webber, M., & Hyde-Price, A. (Eds.). (2016). Theorising NATO: New perspectives on the Atlantic Alliance. New York, NY: Routledge.

Nuclear Taboo The concept of nuclear taboo emerged as possibly the most surprising outcome of the nuclear age: Outside of the United States’ use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no other instances of use of nuclear weapons have been recorded since. Despite incentives to the contrary, cold war conflicts including

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the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Middle East wars, and the Soviet Union’s campaign in Afghanistan did not result in the use of nuclear weapons. The nuclear taboo, therefore, refers to the restraint shown by nuclear states when it comes to the use of their nuclear arsenal in conflict. This behavior is the result of a restrictive norm; that is, a standard of behavior expected of actors in social interactions, which constrains the available choice of actions for nuclear states. Stronger than typical norms, taboos are prohibitions on types of social behavior that are abhorrent in nature and carry strong punishments by the community if flouted. Following a detailed discussion of the nuclear taboo, the entry introduces the tradition of non-use, which has been an analytical eclectic answer to the nuclear taboo. A discussion of potential future transgression of the nuclear taboo concludes this entry. The non-use of nuclear weapons has been a significant topic since the initial development of the first nuclear device. Many early nuclear theorists, including Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter, argued that nuclear weapons could only serve to prevent states from using such weapons due to the unacceptable level of destruction they could cause. This idea became the widely accepted doctrine of mutually assured destruction. A more normative understanding of the non-use of nuclear weapons, first articulated by Thomas Schelling, put emphasis on the uniqueness of nuclear weapons to explain why nuclear states had reached a consensus on non-use outside of deterrence purposes. Important U.S. decision makers, including Robert McNamara and John Foster Dulles, began referring to the non-use of nuclear weapon as a taboo. Most recent work on the nuclear taboo has been done by Nina Tannenwald. She defined it as “the de facto prohibition against the first use of nuclear weapons.” According to ICJ ruling, this does not mean nuclear weapons use is fully illegal although it contravenes international humanitarian law. The taboo has the following effects in and of itself. First, it makes certain behavior unacceptable—in this case, the offensive use of nuclear weapons. Secondly, by constraining what is considered unacceptable behavior, it creates a separation between conventional weapons, which are seen as appropriate weapons of war, and nuclear weapons, which are not to be used. The delegitimization of the use of nuclear weapons can also be used to delegitimize states that are perceived as potentially deviant enough to use nuclear weapons. Over time, as states refrain from using nuclear weapons, the taboo’s strength increases. For the taboo argument to work, it needs to be demonstrated that statesmen had considered using nuclear weapons but ultimately chose otherwise for reasons that are not strictly cost related. During the Korean War,

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plans were drawn up by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to use nuclear ­ weapons in the theater of war, with a thought to the possibility that not using them might, in the long term, undermine future possibilities for use. Despite internal pressure from nuclear advocates, Eisenhower decided against the use of nuclear weapons for fear of the reaction by allied and nonallied states alike. Nuclear weapon use was also ruled out during the first Taiwan Strait crisis for similar reasons.

The Tradition of Non-Use The concept was first mentioned by Thomas Schelling. Subsequently, political scientist T. V. Paul and others believe that the unwritten prohibition is not a strict taboo, but a socially accepted tradition and can be broken under certain circumstances. The nuclear taboo, they argue, is different from social taboos such as those on cannibalism and incest, because the use of nuclear weapons is not illegal and no mechanisms, either social or formal, are in place to punish potential use. Moreover, the lack of absoluteness in national planning of nuclear use makes this prohibition less strong than an unequivocal, literal taboo. The most salient example remains that of NATO, which still characterizes itself as a nuclear alliance—an alliance that refuses to adopt a no-first-use policy. Moreover, nuclear states—and most notably the United States and Russia—continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals while seeking to make them more useable. The immediate difference between the nuclear taboo and the tradition of non-use is to re-emphasize the role of material factors, in this case the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons, to explain the norm of non-use. Moreover, it adds concerns over reputation as a deterrent against potential use. Reputational cost includes potential desertion by allies to being shunned by the international community. Therefore, states will in effect self-deter: While they may see benefits to the use of nuclear weapons, they will refrain from doing so because the cost is too high. It is self-deterrence because the state in question refrains from nuclear use, not because of a threat made by an outside power but due to its own internal calculations.

The Future of the Nuclear Taboo While the taboo and the non-use of nuclear weapons has held strong for over 70 years, many analysts believe we are now more likely to see nuclear use than during the cold war. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the primary concern remains the use

by terrorist groups of a dirty bomb, a nuclear device made from radioactive material in conjunction with regular explosives. Although many theorists discount the possibility of a state giving nuclear weapons to such groups, because of the difficulty of controlling them, a number of authors have expressed concern about the safety of nuclear materials in countries such as Pakistan and North Korea; inadequate safeguards might make it possible for such groups to obtain the necessary material. Another possibility, tested through experimental means by Daryl G. Press, Scott D. Sagan, and Benjamin A. Valentino, suggests that the American public would react favorably to nuclear use against terrorist organizations headquarters and facilities. Perhaps the chief deterrent factor, however, remains the reputational costs of such endeavor: the fact that the use by one country could make way for more use in the future. Concerns have also been raised about the possibility of seeing small nuclear states use their weapons if they strongly believed the regime might be about to be overthrown, or if they felt sufficiently threatened by a rival state. This line of thinking has often been put forward with the North Korean regime in mind, and has also been used as justification as to why regimes such as Iran and Iraq should not be allowed to develop nuclear arsenals. Periodic conflicts between India and Pakistan are often cited, as a possible basis for unwanted escalation could occur due to the volatile nature of the relationship. Jean-François Bélanger and T. V. Paul See also Asymmetric Warfare; Command of the Commons; Crisis Decision Making and Management; Defense Planning; Deterrence and International Relations; Drones; Emotions and Political Decision Making; International Humanitarian Law; Just War Theory; Moral Hazard; Negative Peace; NonAligned Nations; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Peacemaking; Realism

Further Readings Paul, T. V. (2009). The tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Press, D. G, Sagan, S. D., & Valentino, B. A. (2013). Atomic aversion: Experimental evidence on taboos, traditions, and the non-use of nuclear weapons. American Political Science Review, 107(1), 188–206. Quester, G. H. (2014). The end of the nuclear taboo? In J. A. Larsen & K. M. Kartchner (Eds.), On limited nuclear war in the 21st century (pp. 172–189). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Tannenwald, N. (2008). The nuclear taboo: The United States and the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

O figure’s commands (e.g., benign vs. harmful), and situational factors (e.g., the presence of obedient others).

Obedience Obedience is the practice of following the commands of an authority figure. Although one’s desires or default responses may be in accordance with the will of authority, obedience generally involves people or groups overriding their desires or default responses so as to carry out (obey) the commands of an authority figure. Obedience occurs in the context of interactions between parties of unequal authority. The party with higher authority issues a command; the party with lower power typically obeys. The balance of authority between two parties can vary depending on the circumstances. For example, employees generally must obey their bosses at work. However, employees might not be obliged to obey their bosses outside the workplace or regarding non–work-related issues. Acting in accordance with the will of others is not always obedience. For example, cooperation involves people agreeing on a course of action and acting jointly. Cooperation does not involve a person of high authority commanding a subordinate. Similarly, conformity can involve acting in accordance with the will of others or mimicking others’ actions but does not require explicit commands from authority figures. Obeying authority figures can aid society by limiting violence and selfish behavior and by facilitating the efficiency of collective activities, such as large-scale group projects. However, if people follow authority figures whose goals are detrimental to the well-being of specific individuals or the group as a whole, obedience can lead people to harm others. People’s willingness to obey authority depends on their personal characteristics (e.g., their moral values), characteristics of the authority figure (e.g., legitimacy), the nature of the authority

Commands Obedience involves following commands. Commands can be verbal (e.g., a coach commanding a player to leave the playing field) or written (e.g., a judge issuing a summons). They can be one-time requests, such as when a parent commands a child to get out of the street. They can also be codified into laws. In all cases, commands that require obedience are issued by individuals or organizations that have authority over others. Commands can be either prescriptive (i.e., describing what one ought to do) or proscriptive (i.e., describing what one ought to avoid doing). Ordering soldiers to open fire, telling a child to brush his teeth, and assigning homework for students would all be examples of prescriptive commands. Ordering people to refrain from harming others, telling a child to avoid leaving the house alone, and outlawing the sale of certain drugs would all be examples of proscriptive commands. Commands sometimes deal with regulating people’s thoughts and emotions. For example, some religious authorities urge their followers to avoid lustful thoughts or excessive pride. More commonly, commands deal with regulating behavior. For example, the vast majority of laws deal with forbidding actions (rather than thoughts or emotions). Nevertheless, thoughts and emotions are often taken into consideration regarding the culpability of a person for his or her disobedience.

Authority Authority refers to one’s power to control others and evoke obedience. Individuals and groups can acquire

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and maintain authority by many different means. According to influential work by French and Raven, there are five primary means of acquiring and maintaining power over people: (1) controlling people’s access to rewards, (2) administering or being capable of administering punishments, (3) demanding that people fulfill their obligations, (4) being able to endow people with respect or approval, and (5) providing people with valuable information. Authority may be derived from any or all of these means. Authority may or may not be officially designated. For example, political authority can result from elections or appointments and is most often officially designated. On the other hand, demonstrating expertise in a given area even without official credentials may give people authority and cause them to gain the deference of others. Officially designated authority can give the impression of legitimacy and may make people especially likely to obey. The legitimacy of one’s authority over a group generally depends on the extent to which he or she acts in accordance with the group’s rules and values. Stanley Milgram found that people were more likely to obey an experimenter who seemed legitimate (conducting research at a prestigious university) than one who lacked the appearance of legitimacy (conducting research in a rented space in a shopping center). Often, the appearance of authority can lead people to obey. People can appear to be authority figures by the way they dress or speak or by inducing others to follow them.

The Functions of Obedience People generally say they want autonomy, so one may wonder why obedience seems to be a ubiquitous feature of social life. Living in society has many benefits. Society offers access to food, shelter, medicine, and ­ entertainment that a solitary individual would be unable to attain alone in the wilderness. However, ­living in society comes with a cost; one must obey society’s rules. If people fail to obey rules forbidding theft or violence, for example, then they miss out on the benefits of society (e.g., by facing incarceration). For society to run smoothly, people must give up a modicum of their freedom. Stealing, cheating, and murdering are bad for society, so people are generally willing to outlaw such acts. Authority figures generate and enforce these rules, and members of society are compelled to obey. Throughout history and prehistory, group survival has often depended on successful warfare, which often requires many of the young men to risk their lives in group combat. Obedience has long been recognized as essential to military success, and military authority is

often explicitly codified by rankings of authority. An autonomous, self-interested individual might well elect not to fight, and it is hard to imagine an egalitarian, democratic army (i.e., with no authority figures) ever winning a battle or even fighting one. Soldiers are often trained to obey commands immediately and without thinking. Military obedience has thus long contributed to the survival and well-being of society. Obedience to legitimate authority serves society by encouraging people to set aside their selfish impulses for the good of their group. An individual might benefit by consuming the group’s resources while avoiding any personal contribution to the group despite having the ability to contribute, but the group as a whole would suffer as a result of such selfish action. Therefore, human social groups form rules to dissuade selfish behavior that could undermine the group and appoint authority figures to enforce them. In addition to restraining behaviors that would be deleterious to one’s group, authority figures may encourage obedience to work toward group projects. Division of labor increases productivity and efficiency but requires direction and coordination among many individuals. Authority figures can provide such direction and focus on macro-level aspects of a project that would be unknown to individual workers. Provided that the authority figure organizing a project is competent, subordinates can maximize their contribution to the group by obeying authority. The necessity of obedience for coordinated work depends partially on the degree to which decisions and actions need to be quick. For example, when soldiers face an ambush, they would not have the opportunity to discuss various strategies and come to a consensus—they would need to obey quick, decisive instructions from a commander. Similarly, in the emergency room of a hospital, urgency requires clear delineation of authority and obedience among subordinates. In contrast, in a low-stakes, l­ow-time-constraint situation like deciding where workers in an office should order lunch, obedience is less essential. Obedience can also aid the education and socialization of children. Contrary to a popular misconception, children start off relatively violent and selfish; through the process of socialization—involving obedience to authority—they learn to thwart violent and selfish impulses. Researchers have found that children obey their caregivers very early in infancy. This suggests that infants are born with a predisposition toward obedience that is independent of overt attempts to induce obedience. When learning new skills, children and adults benefit from obeying the instructions of an authority figure with expertise. Obedience may become less necessary as a student progresses but can be important for beginners.

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The Dark Side of Obedience Some of the most influential work on obedience was done by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. His research was inspired by the Holocaust and focused on the German people’s willingness to obey the sinister commands of Nazi leaders. In one study with a sample of participants from the United States, Milgram found that 65% of the participants obeyed an experimenter’s request to deliver what participants thought were potentially lethal shocks to another person. Many of Milgram’s obedient participants were visibly distressed while administering the shocks; many were sweating and trembling. Milgram’s studies provided evidence that people have a strong motivation to obey authority. Even when authority figures issue seemingly nefarious commands, people are often obedient. Society can suffer from authority figures demanding excessively rigid obedience. Authority figures are often motivated to maintain their power over others. If authority figures are more motivated to maintain power than to work for the benefit of the group, then groups can become excessively rigid. If authority figures resist innovation and discourage subordinates from entertaining ideas that might challenge the status quo, then ­societies may be unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Similarly, authority figures can be incompetent. Obeying incompetent, selfish, excessively rigid, or sinister authority figures can cause inefficiency or even disaster and societal collapse. Incompetent generals and other poor leaders have caused countless deaths among their soldiers, but soldiers are still mostly obliged (often on pain of death) to obey these leaders’ commands. In recent years, however, recognition of immoral commands has caused some revision in military thinking, so that soldiers are released from the obligation for unthinking obedience to immoral commands—though that places the burden of moral responsibility on the soldier. The goal is presumably to render useless the excuse “I was only following orders” sometimes used by perpetrators of war crimes. Because authority figures’ commands can sometimes be harmful to society, disobedience can benefit society. In the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau outlined how “civil disobedience” could overcome injustice. His work inspired Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others to disobey authority for the benefit of society. Ultimately, obedience can either aid or harm society depending on the merits of the authority figures’ commands.

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Factors That Affect People’s Willingness to Obey Although people are generally motivated to obey authority, they sometimes disobey. The likelihood that an individual will obey a command depends on characteristics of the individual, the authority figure, the nature of the command, and the situation. An individual’s personality and values can affect his or her propensity to obey authority. Some people regard obedience to authority as a moral virtue to a greater extent than others. For example, researchers have found that people who identify as politically conservative value obedience to authority to a greater extent than those who identify as politically liberal. Similarly, people display individual differences in a trait called rightwing authoritarianism (RWA); people high in RWA are especially likely to regard obedience as important and virtuous. Authority figures who are regarded as legitimate (i.e., acting in accordance with the group’s rules and values) are especially likely to elicit obedience. The degree to which an authority figure possesses power can also affect whether others will be compelled to obey. In other words, the degree of the power asymmetry between the authority figure and the subordinate can affect the likelihood of obedience. For example, a worker may feel somewhat compelled to obey a coworker who slightly outranks him or her, but that worker may be more likely to obey a command directly from their chief executive officer. Commands to violate one’s beliefs or values are less likely to be obeyed than commands consistent with one’s beliefs and values. In some circumstances, people may be unmotivated to act in accordance with their own values and are spurred on by the commands of authority figures. For example, athletes may desire to train hard for an upcoming game but lack sufficient motivation to overcome fatigue and boredom with their drills. In such cases, a coach might command the athletes to continue to train. Such commands merely encourage people to overcome obstacles and act in accordance with their own values. In contrast, a boss might command a subordinate to cover up evidence of their organization’s transgressions. The subordinate might regard such dishonesty as morally reprehensible and be unmotivated to obey. Situations that require quick decision making and immediate, coordinated effort are conducive to obedience. Some organizations require immediate, ­ coordinated effort more than others; accordingly, some ­organizations require more strict obedience than others. For example, military units generally demand stricter obedience than academic institutions. In

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addition, situations in which an authority figure gives direct commands are likely to elicit obedience. For example, Milgram found that participants were less likely to obey an experimenter who issued commands via telephone than an experimenter who was in the same room as the participants. Milgram also found that participants were especially likely to obey an experimenter when they were led to believe that other participants were obedient; they were especially likely to disobey when they were led to believe that other participants were disobedient. Michael Ent and Roy Baumeister See also Conformity

Further Readings Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. New York, NY: Crown/Random House. Ent, M. R., & Baumeister, R. F. (2014). Obedience, self-control, and the voice of culture. Journal of Social Issues, 70, 574–586. French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright & A. Zander, Group dynamics (pp. 150–167). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. Hobbes, T. (1958). Leviathan Parts I and II. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378. Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human Relations, 18(1), 57–76. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Son Hing, L. S., Bobocel, D. R., Zanna, M. P., & McBride, M. V. (2007). Authoritarian dynamics and unethical decision making: High social dominance orientation leaders and high right-wing authoritarianism followers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 67–81. Stayton, D. J., Hogan, R., & Salter Ainsworth, M. D. (1971). Infant obedience and maternal behavior: The origins of socialization reconsidered. Child Development, 42, 1057–1069. Thoreau, H. D. (1849/1960). Walden and civil disobedience. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Oligarchy Oligarchy is a type of political system or arrangement in which a small minority of people with great material wealth sustain their holdings through various strategies.

An oligarchy is made up of individuals with massive financial assets, disproportionate to the rest of their society, who can be referred to as oligarchs. Oligarchs use systems of wealth defense, ways to protect and extend their assets, either through property defense or income defense, or both. A political economic system that supports an oligarch’s claims to massive and unequal wealth can be considered an oligarchy.

Overview The term oligarchy comes from the ancient Greek words oligos (few), and arkho (to govern). Oligarchies have existed from antiquity, historically recorded from the time of the Greek city-states of the pre-Hellenic era, through the Roman era, the Italian city-states of medieval Europe, the Renaissance, and down to the modern era. Oligarchy occurs when governmental rule is carried out by the richest members of a society, or where those wealthiest are able to influence politics to defend and maintain their wealth. In contemporary times, oligarchy differs from elitism, as oligarchy is based on great wealth disproportionate to the rest of society. While a president of a country would be considered an elite member of that society and wield considerable influence, he/she would still not be considered an oligarch if he/she did not have the requisite amount of wealth. Oligarchs are able to use strategies for maintaining wealth through political influence. There are a number of types of oligarchies today, for example, warring, ruling, sultanistic, and civil oligarchies. These exist in a wide variety of political contexts, including democratic political systems. In addition, contemporary oligarchy is interconnected with processes of capitalist globalization.

Oligarchy in Antiquity In his political theorizing, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the first philosopher to explicitly articulate what oligarchy was. In his view oligarchy was a “deviant” political form whereby a minority of wealthy people ruled over a political community. Aristotle’s political theories were closely connected to his theories on ethics; he believed that a political community should foster right action and virtue, or “noble actions.” Two variants on his theory of justice were central. First, universal justice should support the common good of a political community. Second, distributive justice should allocate benefits to people based on their merit. Aristotle’s description of oligarchy needs to be placed in the context of his system of political classification. He believed the political systems that foster the

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common good of the people in that system to be correct forms. Likewise, he saw political systems that favor a minority’s interests as deviant. Deviant political forms included tyranny (rule by one despot), oligarchy (rule by a wealthy elite), and democracy (rule by an ignorant majority). Correct political forms included monarchy (rule by a king), aristocracy (rule by a few noble leaders), and polity (rule by wise citizens). For him, monarchy, aristocracy, and polity foster the common good of the political community, whereas tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy only foster the good of some of the political community. Aristotle observed that oligarchs believed that their superior wealth should equate to greater political rights. But because he saw a political community’s purpose to be the promotion of the common good, however, he saw oligarchy as deviant. In contrast, he saw the opposite of oligarchy as aristocracy, whereby those that make the greatest contribution to the political community should be assigned political right. Today we might consider this a type of political meritocracy. It is important to note that, unlike contemporary political thought, Aristotle and many other thinkers of his time did not idealize political equality but rather other ideals such as virtuous action and the common good. Implicitly, oligarchy concerns the concentration and misuse of power by the few and is a universal concern. Therefore, many other philosophers and scholars, both ancient and modern, have explored such political dynamics. Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE) explored the dynamics of political change. In his view, oligarchic forms of rule were indicative of declining political dynasties. In his cyclical theory of political change, new dynasties, born of Bedouin culture, were tough, pious, and virtuous. Once in power, after several generations, political dynasties become corrupt and exploitative. The first generation is hardworking and honest; the second generation follows the example of the first but with less success; the third generation can merely imitate the virtues of the first and second; the fourth generation has lost creativity and is self-deluded in thinking that its privilege is derived from inherent superiority rather than virtue and work; finally, a last generation that has become weak through an overly luxurious life can only cling to power and wealth through cunning and exploitation.

Elite Theory and Oligarchy Elite theory proposes that it is a small number of elites (exceptional people) who govern societies, including advanced democracies. Oligarchy is related to views on

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elites and elitism; however, they are distinctly different. Analysis of oligarchs and oligarchy rests on an understanding of material power; that is, power derived from the maintenance and exercise of great wealth. Theories of elitism, on the other hand, rest on an understanding of power based on rank and official positions, coercion (force), and mobilization (charisma and leadership). The economist and social theorist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) believed that society consisted of people who are naturally more talented (elites) and those that are less talented (masses). Elites can have one of two important qualities. The first quality is an exceptional capacity for innovation and enterprise. The second is an exceptional capacity to govern and maintain order. He believed that the governance of political systems fluctuated between these two types of elites, the first of which governs through democracy and the second of which governs through bureaucratic autocracy (rule by a few or one). He believed the best system to be a democratic system that was open to new elites. However, because people are driven by instinctual needs that lead to irrational actions, he had little faith that democracies could last and believed that over time they tend toward bureaucratic autocracy and plutocracy (rule by the wealthy). German sociologist Robert Michels developed the theory of the “iron law of oligarchy.” The theory put forth the proposition that all political systems and organizations, even when they start out as democratic, ultimately become oligarchic and ruled by a handful of people. He reasoned that, because systems that grow become large and complex, they cannot function as direct democracies and power must be delegated; thus, power eventually accrues within a small group of people, a “leadership class” that specializes in modes of administration. Even when democratic systems exist, this leadership class will over time dominate since they can control the flow of information, use the system to reward personal loyalty among members, and control the procedures used to make decisions. Michels’s theory is related to bureaucracy. Because any large system needs a bureaucracy to function effectively, this centralization through bureaucracy leads to an oligarchy whose primary motivation is to maintain its own power. Numerous theories of elitism proliferated in the 19th and 20th centuries, some attacking the privilege of elites and others justifying such privilege. Elite theory is distinctly different from the study of oligarchy, as oligarchy is concerned with the exercise and maintenance of material wealth. Oligarchy in practice, however, combines elements of elite power with material power in order to exercise its rule.

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Elements of Oligarchy Power Resources and the State Power is exercised in society in a number of ways, such as through political rights (a person’s right to vote), rank and position (e.g., a chief executive or president), coercion (force and violence) and mobilization (leadership and charisma via social movements). Elite forms of power may rest on rank and position, c­ oercion, and mobilization. Contemporary oligarchy, however, largely rests on the use of material power, the power of one or more oligarchs in the exercise of their massive wealth, combined with these other forms of power. Oligarchy in the premodern state needed to use a variety of types of power to support the oligarchs’ claims to wealth. In particular, in the premodern state, oligarchs and oligarchy exercised forms of coercion and violence to practice wealth defense and enforce property claims. Through systematic bureaucratization, over time, the modern state developed a monopoly on violence and coercion through the exercise of law. In the modern state, therefore, an oligarch or oligarchy does not use coercive power for wealth defense but rather material power (their wealth) to buy wealth defense services from professionals. The development of the modern state explains why, in premodern contexts, violence is often combined with material power to defend wealth and to influence social outcomes. Extreme inequalities in wealth among people (between the rich and poor) can create tension and conflict and counter claims for the redistribution of wealth. In the absence of formal and bureaucratic systems that effectively ensure the right to property, especially when claims to property are extremely unbalanced, violence and coercion together with material wealth are used to enforce property claims. In the modern state, enforcing claims to vastly unequal wealth cannot be done by ­oligarchs or their payees themselves but is done by a formal bureaucracy. Power resources used for wealth defense in a modern state context are thus focused on the use of material power.

of premodern states, the biggest threat was to an oligarch’s property. This required greater investment in physical defense and coercion (armed support). In the case of the modern state, with well-developed bureaucratic and civil law systems, the biggest threat to an oligarch’s wealth is to his income (as his property is legally protected). This requires the use of an income defense industry, specialized professionals who help oligarchs avoid taxation by the state (whether democratic or not). Ideology also plays an important role in the oligarchic defense of wealth. Justifications for wealth disparity help to support oligarchic claims and positions. Such ideologies, through narratives, theories, and other writings, have differed through history depending on the circumstances.

Four Types of Oligarchy Jeffrey Winters uses four major characteristics to classify oligarchies. First is whether an oligarchy is directly engaged in coercion (violence) in enforcing its claims. Second is whether the oligarchy is engaged in governance. Third is whether oligarchic rule is fragmented or collective. Finally, whether oligarchs are wild or tamed (unstable vs. stable oligarchy). He then classifies oligarchies into four main types: warring, ruling, sultanistic, and civil.

Warring Oligarchies Warring oligarchies are typified by direct use of violence between a number of individual competing oligarchs. They combine coercive force (violence) and material resources over territorial claims. It is an unstable system with many competing oligarchs. Material accumulation is through conquest and extracting surpluses from subordinate populations. Contemporary examples of this include Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. Historical examples include medieval Europe and perhaps the Mongols before Genghis Khan.

Wealth Defense

Ruling Oligarchies

One of the key problems faced by oligarchs is how to maintain their extreme wealth (property or income) when it is being challenged. Wealth defense is the process by which oligarchs defend, maintain, and extend their wealth. There are two main types: property defense is the process of defending claims to real property; income defense is the process of avoiding taxation and other threats to an oligarch’s income. The more extreme the disparity in wealth between an oligarch and ordinary people, the more effort and resources are needed to defend such wealth. In the case

Ruling oligarchies are typified by direct involvement in ruling (using a range of hard to soft violence strategies that are supported by different types of security forces) in a system with established codes, institutions, and norms. These will bring together a number of oligarchs into an alliance, which is not always stable but nonetheless able to govern collectively. Contemporary examples include the U.S. Mafia Commission, Haiti, and Afghanistan. Historical examples include Rome, the Italian magnati of the medieval city-states, and some of the Greek city-states of the pre-Hellenic period.

Oligarchy

Sultanistic Oligarchies Sultanistic oligarchies are typified by the supremacy of one oligarch who has a monopoly on violence and coercion (has disarmed rival oligarchs). The rule of law is very weak or personalistic (by supreme decree), with the ruler holding maximum authority in the absence of a formal bureaucratic system of codes and law. The sultanistic ruler prevents the other oligarchs from warring and provides property and income defense to the other oligarchs, who in turn support him. Contemporary examples may include Indonesia under Suharto; the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos; Russia; and Saudi Arabia.

Civil Oligarchies Civil oligarchies are typified by strong bureaucratic and institutional rule of law with strongly established norms and codes of collective governance and where oligarchs need play no personal role in governance. Property defense is well established by the state, even when huge disparities in property wealth exist. Oligarchs’ primary means of maintaining power is through income defense strategies deployed to sidestep democratic efforts to redistribute income. An army of professional income defense specialists (lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and offshore tax specialists) exist to support oligarchs’ income defense activities. Contemporary examples include the United States, India, Singapore and Malaysia, the Organization for Economic Cooperation, South Africa, Brazil, Samoa, and Romania.

Oligarchy-Associated Perspectives Civil Oligarchy and Democracy John Keene demonstrates through his extensive history of democracy that popular (democratic) rule as an ideal type was sporadic at best during the Greco-Roman era and was considered an aberrant type of political system, equated with mob rule, until only recently. Keene points out how the U.S. political founders considered that the governance of society should be reserved for those few people who had requisite attributes and were civilized. In this context, the ideas of democracy and universal suffrage were seen negatively (as mob rule), and it was not until the mid- to late 19th century when democracy became popular. He argues that the United States was established along elitist principles for the governance of a republic, not necessarily popular rule. Jeffrey Winters argues that, while there may be tensions between democracy and oligarchy, they can and do coexist. He shows how oligarchs in the United States have extensive guarantees to the property that they own, and can expend considerable material resources in

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wealth defense industries to maintain their wealth. Such considerable extremes in wealth disparity have accompanied the United States from its inception and have waxed and waned (for example through the “robber baron” period) even while expectations and the ideals for popular democracy and suffrage have increased over time.

Marxism and Oligarchy As a form of socioeconomic analysis, Marxism studies how a bourgeois (owner and investor) class uses their means of production (businesses) to extract surplus value (the difference between their profits and their costs) at the expense of a working class, who may be underpaid or suffer poor working conditions. Jeffrey Winters argues that, in contrast to Marxist analysis, an analysis of oligarchy puts an emphasis on how oligarchs defend “extreme material inequalities” through wealth defense and is in fact compatible with a Marxist analysis. Neo-Marxist political theorists William Robinson and Leslie Sklair believe that nationally based capitalist structures of influence have been fundamentally superseded by the process of capitalist globalization. They believe the international system no longer produces the conditions for capitalism. Rather, the international system is conditioned by the interests of capitalist globalization. Capitalist globalization is maintained and extended through trans-national practices that operate in three spheres: the economic (through transnational corporations), the political (through an emerging transnational capitalist class), and the cultural (the cultural ideology of consumerism). From this perspective, modern oligarchs are propositionally transnational actors who practice wealth defense across and between political jurisdictions, in fact conditioning nation-states for their own wealth-accumulating interests. As well, in an era of capitalist globalization, the defense of extreme wealth is enabled by the opportunities inherent in a global tax avoidance and money laundering system, for example as revealed by the Mossack Fonseca scandal.

Capital Investment Dynamics Thomas Piketty’s recent study Capital in the 21st Century looks at the dynamics of capital accumulation across demographic groups. He shows how, historically, dividends of large-scale investors are disproportionately higher than those of small-scale domestic investors. In addition, the rate of return on capital investments is increasingly greater than overall economic growth, leading to a concentration of wealth and greater inequality. Under neoliberal policy conditions, this will continue to support the stratification of wealth between the rich, the superrich, and ordinary people.

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Two Contemporary Examples Russia’s Oligarchs Oligarchs emerged in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, during a period of market liberalization. Many of these oligarchs were associated with government officials and crime bosses who were able to acquire state assets cheaply. Russian president Vladimir Putin is considered to have brought order to the oligarchic system through an agreement, making Putin the supreme oligarch. The Putin regime, through the apparatus of the state, has both attacked some oligarchs that have fallen out of favor as well as created new oligarchs.

Oligarchy in the United States The United States experienced oligarchic power s­ystems following the Civil War and the rise of the socalled robber barons, who monopolized railway transport. Extreme inequalities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to social movements for greater economic equality. Today the United States features extreme income and wealth inequality. The 400 most wealthy individuals have more wealth than the bottom 60% of the population. Jeffrey Winters estimates the wealth of the top 400 oligarchs to be more than 20,000 times the income of the bottom 90% of the population. Combined, they have a worth of more than 2 trillion U.S. dollars. The 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, has described the United States as an oligarchy, primarily because of the Citizens United ruling that allows for unrestrained political donations that lack transparency. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page conducted a study to find out which groups exert influence over public policy: citizens, economic elites, and interest groups (whether mass-based or business-oriented). Their findings suggested that economic elites and business interests have substantial influence on policy, while citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no influence. José Ramos See also Charisma; Death of Leaders; Dictatorship; Dogmatism; Egocentrism; Rentier State; Rent-Seeking Behavior; Sultanism

Further Readings Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2016). Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Association, 12(3), 564–581.

Inayatullah, S. (1997). Ibn Khaldun: The strengthening and weakening of Asabiya. In J. Galtung & S. Inayatullah (Eds.), Macrohistory and macrohistorians (pp. 25–31). Westport, CT: Praeger. Keane, J. (2009). The life and death of democracy. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Kreps, D. (2015, July 31). Jimmy Carter: U.S. is an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” Rolling Stone. Accessed online July 31, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ videos/jimmy-carter-u-s-is-an-oligarchy-with-unlimitedpolitical-bribery-20150731 Miller, F. (2012). Aristotle’s political theory. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato .stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-politics Minerbi, D. C. (1997). Vilfredo Pareto: The unbreakable cycle. In J. Galtung & S. Inayatullah (Eds.), Macrohistory and macrohistorians (pp. 76–84). Westport, CT: Praeger. Moghaddam, F. M. (2016). The psychology of democracy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Robinson, W. (2004). A theory of global capitalism. London, England: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sklair, L. (2002). Globalisation: Capitalism and its alternatives (3rd ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Westcott, C. G. (2011). Oligarchy—by Jeffrey A. Winters. Governance, 24(4), 742–745. doi:10.1111/j.1468–0491.2011 .01547_3.x Winters, J. A. (2011). Oligarchy. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University. Winters, J. A., & Page, B. I. (2009). Oligarchy in the United States? Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Association, 7(4), 731–751.

Omniculturalism Twenty-first-century globalization has caused an increase in contact between humans. Modern globalization results from vast movements of people around the world, which is further characterized through an evolutionary context. The influx of groups with diverse cultural attributes can create intergroup tensions. These tensions can manifest as conflict, sometimes leading to violence. These challenges have inspired a framework for thought regarding the organization and interaction of societies. Rapid intergroup contact often lacks a basis for preadaptation that can threaten the natural process of group evolution. Threats to group identity often ­trigger dysfunctional defense mechanisms. The consequences of this phenomenon can be detrimental, producing radicalization, terrorism, and war. The concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism are ­

Omniculturalism

generally attributed to managing group relations. Omniculturalism is offered as a third approach. This entry briefly introduces omniculturalism research and discusses theoretical approaches to the concept. The entry concludes with a discussion of the critiques of omniculturalism.

Addressing Population Diversity Migration is a fundamental component of human evolution. Interaction between human groups forms the basis for valuable biological and cultural benefits such as crossbreeding and genetic diversity. However, the sudden, rapid contact that has occurred between groups in recent decades due to the emergence of modern transportation has led to fractured globalization. Sociologists describe fractured globalization as the consequence of new pressures, conflicts, and identity threats that extend past national boundaries. Large-scale security challenges have emerged from managing diversity and inequality. Traditionally, assimilation and multiculturalism have exemplified philosophies related to managing group relations. Assimilation is a sort of melting-pot approach seeking to minimize differences in language, religion, ethnicity, and tradition. The result of assimilation is that groups become increasingly homogenous but tend to lose distinctive cultural attributes. U.S. immigration is often characterized by assimilation. Multiculturalism, in contrast, seeks to emphasize and celebrate differences in culture where communities of ethnicities exist concurrently, resulting in heterogeneous societies. Multiculturalism is often considered a politically superior policy and is depicted in immigration within Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Despite the wide adoption of assimilation and ­multiculturalism within nations worldwide, the psychological assumptions made by these policies are often challenged. Assimilation relies upon the notion that group differences can be eradicated through contact. Social identity theory suggests that groups are likely to remain dissimilar because the faction to which people belong is an important source of pride and self-esteem. Therefore, a person’s sense of self is challenged when they are required to assimilate, even when changes seem trivial in nature. Similarly, the multiculturalism hypothesis posits that one’s heritage is the basis upon which one draws his or her esteem when existing within groups. While there is no empirical support for such criticisms, Muzafer Sherif’s notion of superordinate goals—objectives that supersede any specific race or class—and Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio’s common group identity model convey the significance of commonalities rather than differences.

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Emergence of Omniculturalism Psychologists, biologists, and other cultural researchers are exploring new frameworks for human reorganization. Fathali Moghaddam suggests that traditional policies of assimilation and multiculturalism are lacking, indicating that shared attributes and superordinate goals should be identified followed by appreciation of groups’ dissimilarities. This approach is known as omniculturalism and offers numerous implications, including ­reduction of intergroup tension and reduced fear of terrorism. Omniculturalism addresses fundamentalism and intergroup conflict through a two-stage socialization process. During stage one, the aim is to specify commonalities among people that supersede ethnicity, religion, and culture. In stage two, intergroup differences and distinctiveness are introduced. Omniculturalism is grounded in the notion of superordinate goals. Implementing omniculturalism is achieved through identifying commonalities and then recognizing distinctiveness. The first stage can occur through approaches that offer a voice to all groups. This could be accomplished through open forums and advisory councils whereby trust is fostered through communication and understanding. This would be followed by formal recognition of ethnic and cultural groups in communities and exposition of superordinate goals, perhaps by way of youth programming, social justice initiatives, and broader access to employment. The second stage of omniculturalism is predicated on accepting and celebrating group distinctiveness, a concept that is considered politically expedient to many within governance. Social identity theory explains ­ individual behavior as people self-identify into groups, recognizing a wider movement. Their behavior is essentially a product of perceived group status differences. Social identity theory has important implications for terrorism, particularly with dissatisfied or ostracized individuals and groups who may opt toward self-­radicalization. Recognizing and celebrating group distinctiveness can avert disenfranchisement that social identity theory characterizes as a basis for terrorist ideology. Omniculturalism is primarily aimed at ensuring that a rigorous commitment is made toward socializing one’s primary and secondary identities such that individuals are devoted foremost to their primary identity— human. The significance of people as human above all else contributes to the notion that individuals share human characteristics with all people, beyond affiliation with secondary groups based on ethnicity, religion, or nationality. This method places a great burden on the superordinate human category as well as the belief that all people share undeniable foundational psychological features.

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Critiques and Implications Empirical research indicates practical support for omniculturalism over assimilation and multiculturalism. Advocates suggest that if communities endorse and implement an approach based on the tenets of omniculturalism, intergroup tensions will likely decrease. If communities take steps to minimize intergroup tensions, they may be able to reduce ethnically motivated violence, perceived disparity, and the roots of radicalization. Researchers recently found that positive contacts between Arab Muslims and Israeli Jews produced a desire among Jewish residents for concessions as well as an overall decrease in fear of a Palestinian threat. Survey results indicate a relationship between support of omniculturalism and lower levels of fear of terrorism. Some criticism exists regarding omniculturalism. Anthropologists are generally critical of research reliant upon the notion of psychological universals, such as those posited within the primary category of humanity within omniculturalism. Michal and Aleksandra ­Bilewicz question the ability of outsiders to demarcate humanity and its context, specifically within certain cultural groups. Researchers suggest that the goal of identifying superordinate goals may fall to communities, prompted by community leaders, including ­government agencies, which may not accurately represent those of the group. Recognizing that this misinterpretation of goals could create a disconnect with constituents could prevent misuse. Engagement by governmental authorities and omniculturalism are thematically linked, as they both seek to leverage community values, norms, and cultural imperatives to reduce violence, conflict, and discord. Shana M. Mell and William V. Pelfrey Jr. See also Assimilation; Ethnocentrism; Globalization; Identity Politics; Multiculturalism

Further Readings Bilewicz, M., & Bilewicz, A. (2012). Who defines humanity? Psychological and cultural obstacles to omniculturalism. Culture Psychology, 18(3), 331–344. Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing intergroup bias: The common identity group model. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Moghaddam, F. (2009). Omniculturalism: Policy solutions to fundamentalism in the era of fractured globalization. Culture and Psychology, 15(3), 337–347. Moghaddam, F. (2010). The new global insecurity: How terrorism, environmental collapse, economic inequalities, and resource shortages are changing our world. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Moghaddam, F., & Breckenridge, J. (2010). Homeland security and support for multiculturalism, assimilation, and omniculturalism policies among Americans. Homeland Security Affairs, 6(3), 1–15. Pickett, J. T., Baker, T., Falco Metcalfe, C., Bellandi, R., & Gertz, M. (2014). Contact and compromise: Explaining support for conciliatory measures in the context of violent intergroup conflict. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 51, 585–619.

Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Optimal distinctiveness theory is a social psychological theory proposing that individuals identify with groups or identities that allow them to satisfy two needs at the same time: the need for assimilation and the need for differentiation. The need for assimilation involves the need to belong or to feel similar to others, while the need for differentiation comprises the need to feel different from others. These two needs are thought to operate as opposing forces such that the more one need is satisfied, the more there is a desire to satisfy the other need. Optimal distinctiveness theory posits that individuals define themselves in terms of groups or identities that allow them to achieve an optimal balance of the need for assimilation and the need for differentiation. Although optimal distinctiveness theory can be used to explain an individual’s identification with groups and identities in a variety of settings, it has become particularly relevant with the increased prevalence of multicultural societies, diverse workplaces, and job and career changes. This entry briefly introduces optimal distinctiveness theory and discusses how the two opposing needs that are included in this theory have been explored. The entry concludes with a discussion of how optimal distinctiveness theory has been put to the test in research studies in different fields and contexts.

Opposing Needs Optimal distinctiveness theory was developed as an extension of social identity theory and self-­categorization in order to understand which of many possible groups, roles, or identities an individual identifies with (e.g., identities as a daughter, team member, physician, Asian American, employee, member of a religious organization). In addition, optimal distinctiveness theory helps explain reasons individuals identify with groups or identities based on achieving a balance between two opposing needs.

Optimal Distinctiveness Theory

There have been two different ways that researchers have interpreted how the two opposing needs of assimilation and differentiation operate within optimal distinctiveness theory. The first approach believes that individuals look for assimilation within a group while they simultaneously look to be differentiated from other groups. The second approach interprets this tenet to involve satisfying assimilation and differentiation needs within the same group. Regardless of the approach adopted by researchers, it is commonly understood that individuals will seek to restore a balance between assimilation and differentiation needs when either need is unmet. For example, when individuals feel too similar to others in a group (too much assimilation), they will strive to more fully satisfy their need for differentiation by, for example, pointing out how they are different from other group members. Likewise, if individuals feel too different from others in a group (too much differentiation), they will seek out ways of feeling a sense of belonging or similarity relative to others in the group. When an individual’s needs for assimilation and differentiation are both met, an equilibrium point of optimal distinctiveness is attained at which identification with the group is strong. According to optimal distinctiveness theory founder Marilyn Brewer, the equilibrium point of optimal distinctiveness depends on the individual’s socialization and recent experience as well as on cultural norms. The varying nature of these factors has posed a challenge for researchers to quantify what the level of optimal distinctiveness might be in one individual relative to another individual. Numerous studies have found support for optimal distinctiveness theory, as described in the next section.

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also have been included in studies involving optimal distinctiveness theory. A common way that optimal distinctiveness has been quantified in research studies to date has been to show how people prefer groups of intermediate size, since these groups are small enough to allow people to feel that they belong (assimilation) while simultaneously allowing opportunities to feel differentiated from others. Another way that optimal distinctiveness has been examined in studies is to ask individuals about their experiences in groups they belong to in order to capture how well individuals’ assimilation and differentiation needs are satisfied by membership in groups of different sizes. Studies focusing on group size have found that individuals strongly identify with intermediate-sized groups, which has been interpreted as showing support for optimal distinctiveness theory. One of several possible new directions for optimal distinctiveness theory has been proposed by Brewer and two of her colleagues. They have suggested that, in different contexts, individuals may think of themselves in terms of being an individual (the individual level of identification), a relationship partner (the relational level of identification), or as a group member (the collective level of identification), based on which of these levels provides the best balance of satisfying assimilation and differentiation needs. Amy E. Randel See also Self-Categorization Theory; Similarity-Attraction; Social Categories; Social Identity Theory

Further Readings

Putting Optimal Distinctiveness Theory to the Test Optimal distinctiveness theory has been studied in a variety of situations and settings. Many studies have included university students and their experiences with particular majors, colleges, or campus groups. Optimal distinctiveness theory has been studied as it relates to preferences for different music styles, which included music styles that were unique as well as those that are more common (to show a range in how differentiation needs are satisfied). Political parties, romantic relationships, and work groups in health care organizations

Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same and different. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(5), 475–481. Brewer, M. B. (2012). Optimal distinctiveness theory: Its history and development. In P. A. M. VanLange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 81–98). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Leonardelli, G. J., Pickett, C. L., & Brewer, M. B. (2010). Optimal distinctiveness theory: A framework for social identity, social cognition, and intergroup relations. In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol. 43, pp. 63–113). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

P others, pacifism is merely a contingent commitment to peace or peaceful means, which is dependent upon particular circumstances. Pacifism has deep roots in religious, moral, and political ideology. It also has important political ramifications. Pacifists often abstain from military service or refuse to pay taxes that support militarism. Some nations have established mechanisms whereby pacifists are permitted, as conscientious objectors, to be exempt from military service to the state. Peace parties and pacifist organizations make important contributions to public discourse. Pacifists have worked to abolish war and establish the conditions for world peace, including building organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Pacifists have developed and employed strategies of nonviolent social activism, including civil disobedience.

Pacifism Pacifism is the rejection of violence and war on moral, religious, or philosophical grounds. Pacifism may be understood as a merely negative critique of violence. But pacifists are also often positively committed to peace and nonviolence. Pacifism can be grounded and expressed in a variety of ways. Pacifism has important political implications including both at the level of international relations and at the level of individual choices regarding military service and support for war. This entry explains several ways of conceiving, grounding, and acting upon pacifism.

Overview Pacifists develop and apply their critique of war in various ways. Some pacifists are merely antiwar: They oppose international warfare and violence in its largest and most destructive manifestation. Some pacifists also reject violence at the level of the individual, perhaps even questioning the right to violent personal self-defense. Some pacifists extend their critique to include violence against the nonhuman world, adopting vegetarian choices of diet, for example. Pacifist commitments influence the content of political ­ideology and the methods by which people engage in political life. Pacifists vary in their understanding of the commitment required by pacifism. For some, pacifism is merely the choice of an individual. In vocational pacifism, for example, clerics may adopt a vow of peaceful behavior that is different from what is expected of laypeople. For others, pacifism is part of the larger, universal claim that all people should reject war and avoid violence. For

Religious, Moral, and Political Pacifism There are a variety of reasons that one may be committed to pacifism. This section explores three approaches to pacifism: religious, moral, and political.

Religious Pacifism Religious pacifists ground their commitment to nonviolence and peace in religious belief. Religious pacifists may be pragmatic about how they act upon their ­pacifist ideals but religious pacifism tends toward an absolute commitment to peace. If God’s commands require us to renounce violence and war, then this permits no exception. In other religious traditions, where morality does not rest upon the commandments of a monotheistic God, commitment to nonviolence may be less absolutist.

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In the West, religious pacifism can be traced to the beginning of the Christian era. Jesus commanded his followers to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. Early Christians refused to serve in the military and in some cases allowed themselves to be martyred. Although Augustine and other Christian authors sought to find a way to accommodate Christian idealism with the realities of military and political power (and thus inspired the “just war” tradition), varieties of Christian pacifism have existed throughout the millennia. In more recent times, pacifism has developed along with a focus on biblical literalism, with some scholars tracing ­pacifism back to the original teachings of Jesus while arguing that Augustinian Christianity and the just war tradition have too cozy a relationship with political and military power. Notable among pacifist Christian denominations of the modern period are the Quakers, Mennonites, and Seventh Day Adventists. Members of these historically pacifist churches are often recognized as conscientious objectors, who may opt out of military service. Christian pacifism has been defended by a ­number of authors, including in the writings of some 19th-century American abolitionists and in Count Leo Tolstoy’s thought in Russia. Tolstoy was a particular important author, since his writings about Christianity and peace influenced a number of subsequent pacifist authors and activists including Jane Addams and Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi. Gandhi provides an often-cited success story about the power of nonviolence, or ahimsa. Gandhi’s thinking about ahimsa is grounded in the philosophical and religious idealism of South Asian traditions such as ­ ­Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Gandhi developed a unique theory about the power of organized nonviolent activism. His idea of satyagraha (translated as truth force or love force) involved political organization and spiritual development. Gandhi’s ideas were put into action in India’s campaign against British colonialism. His strategies included marches, boycotts, and hunger strikes. Gandhi’s fasts were informed by his larger spiritual idea of love and interconnected humanity that guided his practice of satyagraha. Gandhi fasted in order to unite people, to atone for injustice, to purge the spirit, and to demonstrate commitment to justice and love. Gandhi’s success was emulated and studied by others. The spiritual foundation and political strategies of his approach were further developed by Martin Luther King Jr., who advocated nonviolent civil disobedience in the civil rights movement in the United States. King wove Gandhian principles together with Christian ideals. This approach had further impact on the labor and Latino rights ­movement led by Cesar Chavez and in antiwar protests and other social movements, such as those inspired by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

Religious pacifism has important implications in terms of political behavior. Religious pacifists have stood up against political and military power in various ways—in marches, rallies, protests, and hunger strikes. In some cases, this takes on an extreme character. For example, in Vietnam, Buddhist monks burned themselves alive in acts of nonviolent protest. Thich Quang Duc famously immolated himself in Saigon in 1963. In the United States, Norman Morrison, a Quaker pacifist, immolated himself outside of the Pentagon in 1965 to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War. Selfimmolation has also been used by Buddhist monks in Tibet in protest against the Chinese government, and in a quite different context in the so-called Arab Spring. Self-immolation is considered as an act of self-sacrifice that is in line with a basic commitment to ­nonviolence— and which connects to larger religious ideas about the spirituality of sacrifice. Some may argue that suicide remains a type of violence. But for a pacifist, self-harm is preferred over harming others. Rather than attacking one's enemies or oppressors, the nonviolent protester puts his or her own life on the line, hoping to send a message and create social change. While self-­immolation is an extreme and contested form of nonviolent protest, hunger strikes are related: They can lead to suffering and, occasionally, death. For a religious pacifist, this may be related to a commitment to other ascetic practices.

Moral Pacifism While religious pacifists ground their commitment to peace and nonviolence in religious teachings, nonreligious moralities can also lead to pacifist commitment. Secular and humanistic ethical ideas develop out of a critique of divine command ethics and out of a commitment to establishing a nonsectarian basis for morality. Nonreligious morality includes a number of different approaches. Here we will discuss three of the predominant varieties of moral theory: virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontological ethics. In recent decades, some nations have recognized moral (and not explicitly religious) objections to war as valid grounds for conscientious objection. This includes a moral objection to specific wars (often called contingent pacifism) that is not absolutely or dogmatically opposed to all wars (called selective conscientious objection). Moral pacifism tends to be less dogmatic and absolutist than religious pacifism, since nonreligious moral theorizing is more responsive to the contingencies of the empirical world and more inclined to admit that there are complexities and exceptional circumstances that must be taken into account.

Pacifism

Virtue Ethics Virtue ethics is concerned with the character traits, habits, and dispositions of virtuous people—as well as in the traditions and practices that produce virtuous people. The habit of peacefulness or peaceableness can be viewed as a virtue that is connected to other pacific virtues such as modesty, hospitality, generosity, tolerance, and patience. Warrior cultures will not agree that peacefulness is a central virtue. But the peaceful virtues are celebrated in Christian and South Asian traditions. Virtue ethics relies upon an account of human flourishing and happiness. From this perspective, peacefulness is a trait of highly developed and happy human beings. At the same time, hate, anger, and violence are viewed as vicious traits which should be avoided. The virtue tradition—especially as explained by Aristotle and those influenced by him—maintains that virtues tend to be located in the middle between vices. On this view, peacefulness would be a virtue between the vices of hate or anger (on the one hand) and meek submissiveness (on the other). An Aristotelian account of peacefulness as a virtue would thus not be committed to an absolute rejection of violence or war. Instead, on the Aristotelian account, there may be times that a peaceful person ought to fight (say, in order to defend the innocent or to establish self-respect). A different pacifist tradition would hold that peacefulness, lovingness, and the other pacific virtues do not necessarily admit of the kind of middle-path analysis that Aristotle provided. For a Christian or a Jain who is committed to nonviolence, peacefulness and the pacific virtues represent the high point of human development. In some absolute formulations of the idea, there may be no such as thing as too much peacefulness or too much love. Thus a self-sacrificial commitment to nonviolence may be praised as a high point of virtue. Virtue ethics is concerned with how virtues such as peacefulness can be cultivated. In this regard, a critique of war and violence can be developed, which holds that war undermines virtue, bringing out the worst in human beings. On this view, war is not only bad because people are killed in war; war is also bad because war results in vicious behavior. A virtue-­ oriented pacifist might claim, for example, that war tends to make people selfish, cruel, and callous. That same critic might also say that cultivation of virtuous humanity requires peaceful conditions in which the pacific virtues can be nurtured. A rival interpretation might claim, however, that war brings out the best in human beings, by helping us develop virtues such as strength, endurance, and loyalty. That view might be associated with what Theodore Roosevelt called the strenuous life. Roosevelt was a

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critic of pacifism, who thought that pacifism was enervating and feminizing. Contemporaries of Roosevelt such as Jane Addams and William James imagined a moral alternative to war, where the virtues of loyalty and strength could be encouraged without the cruelty of war. This dispute points toward an obvious gender dichotomy. While Roosevelt rejected pacifism as feminine, some feminist authors have argued that care ethics and “maternal thinking” provide a basis for creating a culture of peace. As this debate makes clear, our thinking about peace and the virtues can have important implications for our attitudes toward leadership, citizenship, patriotism, military service, and family life. Utilitarianism Utilitarians seek to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Utilitarian versions of pacifism develop from a general claim about the negative consequences of war, violence, and militarism. This approach depends upon a cost-benefit analysis of empirical facts, which may vary in light of differing circumstances. Thus, utilitarian pacifism will tend to be contingent and not absolute. Utilitarian pacifists will argue that war tends to produce bad consequences. While some may argue that war may be needed in order to respond to aggression or in order to defend the rights of the innocent, a utilitarian pacifist will reply by arguing (1) that nonviolent methods can be effective and (2) that violence usually ends up causing more harm than good. Utilitarian pacifists may argue that war tends to be politically destabilizing. They may draw upon examples of successful nonviolent campaigns. They may note that the harms of war are broad and pervasive: War creates widows, orphans, and disabled veterans; it causes posttraumatic stress; it creates lingering environmental harms; and it adds to the national debt. Utilitarian pacifists are interested in research that considers and explains the costs of war. Utilitarian pacifism depends upon an analysis of changing empirical conditions, which includes a consideration of changing technologies of war. Atomic weapons, chemical warfare, and drone warfare create new circumstances, which must be taken into account. This has implications for the political commitment and agenda of utilitarian pacifists. They may advocate for nonlethal weaponry, targeted killing, cyberwarfare, and other techniques that minimize the harm of war. They will also advocate for creative application of nonviolent strategies for conflict resolution. Utilitarian arguments against war have significant impact on considerations of international relations and the developing international order. Although utilitarian concern occasionally stops at the border, utilitarianism

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tends to focus on global concerns. Utilitarians concerned with global justice will often point out that the existing international order resulted from the militarism of prior colonial interventions and that remaining injustices within the global system continue to be defended by military force. This argument may also claim that a utilitarian concern for global justice provides a path to world peace. Deontology Deontological ethical systems emphasize duty. The most famous modern form of deontology is that of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant maintained that morality required strict observance of duty and that happiness was irrelevant to moral obligation. Kant also claimed that one of our fundamental duties is to respect persons as ends in themselves. We cannot use persons as a mere means to our ends, since an autonomous person has a special sort of moral dignity. To use somewhat different moral language, we might say that using persons in this way violates their rights (for our purposes here, human rights theories will be incorporated within deontological ethics). Kant maintained that moral principles must be universalizable. We know that an act is right or wrong by asking whether we can will, without contradiction, that everyone should behave in this way. Kant was not, strictly speaking, a pacifist; but he did argue for restrictions on warfare and imagined the development of a federation of nations that would help to resolve conflict and bring about world peace. The Kantian ideal of universality can be used to ground pacifism. To will that everyone should go to war seems contradictory. Defenders of the just war tradition will argue that war is only justified for those who have justice on their side and who also fight justly. But pacifists may respond that things are rarely so one sided. It turns out that in many cases, each side believes that it is justified in resorting to war. Once war is underway, each side often believes that it is responding to the aggressions of the other side. For a deontological pacifist, this exposes the problem: If war is permitted, we may end up with constant and universal warfare. A Kantian may also argue that war is disrespectful of persons—that it violates their rights. This claim obviously applies to the case of noncombatants who are killed in war. Noncombatants—especially children—are innocent bystanders who do not deserve to be killed. It might be the case that soldiers do somehow open themselves to being killed. But in many cases, soldiers are conscripted or otherwise coerced into military service. In those cases, the question of their innocence and responsibility for war—and whether killing them is morally

permissible—becomes morally vexing. Deontological pacifists may also point out that military service tends to use individuals as means toward some larger social project and is thus disrespectful of persons. Deontological ethics also provides support for nonviolent social protest and civil disobedience. Although Kant was not in favor of civil disobedience, moral duty can create conflicts with immoral laws and unjust political systems. In some cases, we may have a duty to violate unjust laws—as Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. each argued. But this duty is limited by the demands of nonviolence: Civil disobedience that is committed to nonviolence is quite different from outright rebellion or the violent methodologies of terrorists.

Political Pacifism Let’s conclude by noting that individuals and parties may be committed to peace and nonviolence for political reasons, which are less deeply rooted than what we find in moral or religious pacifisms. The commitment to peace may connect to larger political questions. On the one hand, we might view peace as the goal of political development. Some versions of liberal internationalism and cosmopolitanism point in this direction, holding that war is not necessary for international affairs, and that institutions of peace should be developed. On the other hand, pacifists may note that war seems to conflict with basic liberal or democratic values. In other words, political pacifists may focus either on peace as the imagined end of political development or on nonviolence as the appropriate means for political action. In either case, the political pacifist’s commitment to these ideas falls short of the more robust commitment of moral or religious pacifism. Andrew Fiala See also Civil Disobedience; Ethics of Political Behavior; Human Rights; Just War Theory; Peacemaking

Further Readings Brock, P. (1998). Varieties of pacifism: A survey from antiquity to the outset of the twentieth century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Brock, P., & Young, N. (1999). Pacifism in the 20th century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Cady, D. L. (2010). From warism to pacifism (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Cortright, D. (2008). Peace: A history of movements and ideas. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Dombrowski, D. (1991). Christian pacifism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Parental Worldview and Children Fiala, A. (Ed.). (in press). The Routledge handbook of pacifism and nonviolence. New York, NY: Routledge. Fox, M. A. (2014). Understanding peace: A comprehensive introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. Gan, B. L. (2013). Violence and nonviolence: An introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gan, B. L., & Holmes, R. (Eds.). (2012). Nonviolence in theory and practice (3rd ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Holmes, R. (1989). On war and morality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kurlansky, M. (2006). Nonviolence: 25 lessons from the history of a dangerous idea. New York, NY: Modern Library. Ruddick, S. (1995). Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Sharp, G. (1973). The politics of nonviolent action. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. Sharp, G. (2005). Waging nonviolent struggle. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. Zinn, H. (2002). The power of nonviolence: Writings by advocates of peace. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Parental Worldview Children

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Everything depends on upbringing. —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace The first duty of a man is to think for himself. —José Martí Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old. —Victarion Greyjoy, in A Feast for Crows, by George R. R. Martin Political worldview is influenced by an assortment of factors, including peers, family, religious affiliation, culture and ethnicity, local environment, community, and one’s underlying sense of purpose and meaning in the world. In addition to individual issues, such as attitudes toward gender identity, minimum wage, capital punishment, abortion, the right to bear arms, and environmental protections, it is reasonable to see primary family interactions as being central in shaping individuals’ political and cultural worldview. This entry explores the relationship between the worldview of parents and how this can impact the development of the perspectives and ideologies of their children.

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Worldview and Cultural Outlook The concept of worldview can be understood as the way in which individuals perceive their environment through their unique set of senses, observations, and perspectives. This framework then allows individuals to process and interpret new information and incorporate this first-hand material into their view of the world. It is a process primarily informed by experiences that individuals acquire throughout their development. In early childhood, as children begin to experience the world, they form a perspective unique to their upbringing. As their circle of influence expands, so does their perspective and worldview. The environments through which they are exposed to new experiences includes their peer group, primary family, and educators in a school setting; religious or spiritual groups such churches or synagogues; popular media; and their surrounding neighborhood, town, city, county, country, and continent. These interactions and experiences combine to shape individuals’ thoughts on philosophy and what it means to live a good life. The first and most pervasive influence on children is their parents. As such, parents often strive to instill in their children a compliance with their own worldview. Young children tend to parrot their parents’ views and, as long as they are living with their parents, will most often share their parents’ political stances. However, as they leave the nest and come into contact with people and ideas outside of their parents’ influence, young adults develop their own opinions and beliefs based on new experiences and interactions. Parents may continue to attempt to influence their children to maintain a viewpoint that is in agreement with their own, but given the myriad influences in the lives of young adults, there is as much chance that they will reject those teachings as accept them. Parents of millennials in 2016 may have strong feelings related to the fall of the Soviet Union, struggles by world economies such as Japan in the early 1990s, and the supremacy of the United States in the Gulf War as evidence of U.S. capitalism’s success. Calls to make the United States “great again” and for country to return to its past success are often a clarion appeal in the political landscape of 2016. Millennials, in turn, may remember all too well the near collapse of the banking system in the United States in 2007–2008 surrounding subprime lending and deceptive mortgage practices. These young adults may feel the need for the country to move forward, rejecting what they see as previous failed policies. In both cases, the worldview of the parents as well as the worldview of the millennial children are informed by their experiences and subscribe to certain premises that make finding a common ground difficult to discover.

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Parents in this scenario might chide, “You don’t know enough history to know about what this country once had the potential to become.” Meanwhile, the millennial might retort, “I’ve been making critically informed decisions for years about which smart phone company to use. You know what I learned? That the desire of companies to sell you on their products is more important to them than telling the truth. The whole banking structure almost collapsed when I was in my sophomore year of high school. I don’t have a lot of faith in the system.” To this end, worldview is influenced by firsthand experience as well as the environment within which both parents and children exist. Once a premise or belief becomes hardened and fixed, it is difficult to shift to a new perspective. The flexibility of talking, exploring concepts, discussing politics, and finding a common ground often gives way to talking points, sound bites, and in the United States, the continued development of an intensely bifurcated two-party political system. Many cultures have a deep sense of tradition that requires younger generations to follow suit. However, in each of these cases, as outside influences come to bear and the world is opened up to young adults, parents’ roles are diminished and other forces exert greater influence, leading to the formation of opinions and ideologies based on those influences.

Parental Pressure for Compliance to an Existing Worldview When individuals hold a strong ideology such as a ­religious or political view, there is a reasonable human desire to enlist others into viewing the world from this same perspective. This process reinforces their belief. As more followers join, there is a reinforcement of believers’ existing way of seeing the world from a particular religious or political viewpoint, which becomes shaped and encouraged. Parents may wish to count their children among these followers. In addition, there is a safety in the known. As parents begin to help their children interact with the world outside the safety of the primary support group, they search for ways to create stability, predictability, and safety. By encouraging children to buy into their own worldview and perspectives, parents gain reassurance that their children will then act in a way that is in line with their expectations, behave in a known way, and live a happy—or at least similarly moral—life. There is also awareness by many parents that the behavior of their children is learned. This is supported by scientific studies such as Albert Bandura’s work at Stanford University in 1961, dubbed the Bobo Doll Experiment. The study demonstrated that social

behaviors such as aggression can be acquired by observation and imitation. This idea is also taught in many religious texts, including the Bible, as in Proverbs 22:6, which states, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Even Aristotle shared his thoughts on the influence that parents and educators have on the young in his text, Nicomachean Ethics, stating, “In educating the young, we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain.” Parents use this knowledge to instruct their children in the way they wish them to behave and the worldview they wish them to maintain. For those familiar with child and young adult ­development theory as explored by Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Carol Gilligan, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Arthur ­Chickering, we understand that over time and as the brain of the child develops, there is an increased desire for ­differentiation from the primary support group—for self-exploration. Once children begin on the path to adulthood in their teenage years, it is expected that their increasing desire for independence and differentiation will come crashing head-on with the parents’ desire for control. To further complicate matters, there is the looming pressure of the offspring leaving the house. After spending a considerable amount of time and energy raising, educating, and protecting their children, parents have a vested interested in ensuring their safe launch into the world. This can become a less stressful transition when the offspring share their parents’ worldview, thereby creating a sense of safety and consistency in their ­behavior. In this scenario, parents are also challenged to redefine the meaning of their own lives as their parenting responsibilities develop, shift, and mature ­ throughout their children’s late teens and early 20s. Whether informed by liberal or conservative ideologies, parents influence and exert pressure on their children’s development of worldview. Imagine the following messages and dinner table conversations and how these messages might influence the political ideology of developing children: •• “We won’t go to vacation in North Carolina this year because of the state’s transphobic bathroom policy.” •• “Those on welfare need to stop leaning so much on the government and start to work for a living to solve their own problems.” •• “Just because Daddy makes more money than other people doesn’t mean he works harder than other ­people who make less money.” •• “We won’t shop at that chain store, because as a ­company, it creates unsafe spaces in its bathrooms, where predators can assault our daughters.” •• “By providing affordable health care to everyone, we create a stronger society. If we can afford to spend

Parental Worldview and Children trillions on nuclear weapons and new jet fighters, we should spend the same on health care and to end poverty.” •• “The reason our economy is so weak is because liberals refuse to instill solid conservative beliefs in their children. Children need to be told ‘no,’ to have limits, and go to church. Everyone can’t win. Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes. Everyone doesn’t get prizes.”

Willingness to Encourage Exploration and Diversity While cultural influences and larger religious beliefs certainly influence individuals’ sense of politics and worldview, there is an inherent good in fostering the dual concepts of critical thinking and autonomy when it comes to the personalization and adoption of a particular worldview, whether political or otherwise. Philosophy itself can be defined as a love of knowledge and wisdom. As there is no ideal political worldview, many would argue that the teaching of children to explore, assess, and critically review religion, philosophy, and politics would be the highest aspiration. However, others may suggest that by raising children consistently under a religious or political system throughout their formative years, they are providing the children with a foundation on which to make sound choices and life decisions, providing them with a better opportunity to buy into and live their parents’ version of a “good life.” So then, must parents struggle with the question of whether there is some intrinsic good in pursuing knowledge and wisdom as the goals to have a good life? Philosophers and politicians have long argued the merits of a good life. Is the ascetic sacrifice of free will and worldly pleasures for a reward in the life to come after death the pursuit of a good life? Is happiness and satiating desires found in the concepts of capitalism or hedonistic pursuits a good life? Is fostering a more altruistic approach, such as those found in the tenets of socialism or religious traditions that focus on serving others rather than self a better goal (given that capitalism can be altruistic and socialism can enrich those in power while limiting resources to the multitudes)? Both have their virtues and vices. Each of these perspectives has some arguable merit. Parents may have very specific viewpoints on these questions and will often attempt to pass those on to their children. However, many find that instilling the love of knowledge, philosophy, and politics is a nobler goal than indoctrinating children into a fixed way of looking at the world. While some choose to attempt to indoctrinate their children with their own philosophies, many attempt to raise individuals who can make their own choices based on their experiences rather than by

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following expectations set forth by parents, society, church, school, or the dominant beliefs common to a certain geographic location. It may appear reasonable for parents to say something such as, “I don’t send or take my child to church; I want them to decide about religion on their own when they are older.” Yet the problem here is they are sending the message that church and religion are not important to them. It may be that parents can’t help but “indoctrinate” their children just by the fact that they live together and children observe their parents’ behavior and attitudes for good or ill. Some question whether independent thought should be seen as the pinnacle of self-actualization. Do we aim for the ability to draw from past experience and tradition all the while forging a more personal outlook that draws from independent choice regarding how to live a good and meaningful life? Culture and religious ideologies and beliefs need to be considered here as well. Eastern Hindu cultures that are steeped in the caste system of India may have a drastically different understanding of political good than, say, a blue-collar worker from Indiana. Following in the established path of elders and religious leaders in the Mormon church may be seen as more essential than the desire for autonomy and independence when forming political opinions. The Amish rite of passage Rumspringa splits the difference between forced capitulation to an existing system and encouraging independence and exploration. When Amish teens are 14 or 15 years old, they are given an opportunity to experience the world before committing to the community’s values, politics, and philosophies. While many parents wish to indoctrinate their children with a specific ideology, this is rarely possible in our open society. Teaching an awareness of tradition and history, but ultimately allowing children the freedom to make their own choices is perhaps an important goal. Parents can and should encourage their children to understand their cultural, political, and religious identities. Many cultures value these traditions very deeply and take a vested interest in the younger generations’ learning and following them and can help shape the direction that children take when determining their own viewpoints. This process begins to be accomplished with open communication.

Open Communication and Political Discourse Perhaps the greatest influence that parents can have on the development of their children’s worldview is in the type of communication fostered in the family setting. There are two main categories of family ­

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communication. Families can be authoritarian and require obedience and deference to the parents, or they can allow free and open discussion and questioning of rules and practices. Families with open communication that welcomes differing viewpoints and ideas tend to produce children that grow up to be more politically engaged. This effect can go both ways. Children who take part in political discourse at school and talk about it at home can influence their parents to become more politically aware and active. In homes where politics is not discussed, children are more likely to be apathetic and even unaware of their parents’ viewpoints. The more that politics is discussed in the home, the more likely that children will continue to discuss it as teens and adults in other settings. This exposes them to new ideas and can lead them to either reaffirm their parents’ beliefs or change their stance on political issues. This can, however, be a source of anxiety in children and young adults. When there is no clear direction from parents for which viewpoint is preferred, the number of options can become paralyzing for some. Parents need to watch for this and guide children, who will ultimately come to their own conclusions. For some parents, this kind of open communication can be difficult in that the mere act of sharing and teaching their own worldview can open their children to embracing the opposite. Many children feel a need to step away from their parents’ ideologies and strike out on their own. However, since parents have no guarantee of compliance, the goal of political awareness and participation is best accomplished through this ­ communication.

Practical Examples In the final calculation, the relationship between the worldview of parents and their children is a varietal and complicated thought experiment. Imagine the following scenarios: •• A parent demands strict compliance with a conservative Christian fundamentalist religious and political worldview in order for the child to obtain salvation. This compliance overrides all other developmental concerns that the child, teenager, or young adult may express. Obedience and tradition are valued more than independence or critical thought. In this scenario, it would be easy to paint a picture of a child following the politics, traditions, and worldview of the parent without question. And yet, it would be equally reasonable to imagine rebellion on the part of the child. •• It could be argued that most people raised in the United States have been exposed to—some may say

brainwashed by—a consumer capitalistic culture that primarily values financial achievement and success over living an easy life, having a low-paying but ­personally rewarding career, or material asceticism. Parents may pressure their children to attend certain schools or study certain subjects with the goal of ­finding a good job rather than following a dream career path. •• For many, religion and politics become interchangeable. Particularly on the religious right in America, there is a distinct pressure not only to practice religion in a certain way, but to vote for certain political candidates as well. Parents then exert similar pressure on their children. Parents may pressure children to vote a certain way or support a candidate based not only on their political beliefs, but also on religious ideology. In these cases, pressures increase and include religious communities, neighborhoods, and towns as well as extended circles.

Where the Path Leads In the end, the political worldview between children and their parents is a multifaceted concept that is affected by peers, religious beliefs, societal pressure, and the media. Open communication, active political discourse, and openness to a variety of ideas influence children most. Parents’ specific political beliefs may not be held by their children, but their general communication style and level of political discourse have a great influence on their lives. Parents are faced with the task of determining their priorities in shaping their children’s worldview. They can chose to foster openness and exploration, supporting the choices of their children, even if they are not in line with their own viewpoints. Conversely, they can choose to attempt to maintain a firm line and teach their children only their own worldview and expect that their children will develop the same beliefs. However, with either approach, the children will have other influences and will likely choose their own path. Bethany Van Brunt and Brian Van Brunt See also Framing Effects; Political Discourse; Political Plasticity; Values and Politics

Further Readings Chickering, A. W. (1993). Education and identity. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A current formulation and a response to critics. Contributions to Human Development, 10, 174. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396.

Parliamentarism

Parliamentarism Parliamentarism denotes a form of government in which the legislative and executive powers are fused instead of originating from a separate popular mandate. The core feature of a parliamentary government is that the executive somehow emerges from and can be removed by the legislature. A second crucial characteristic is the dependence of the executive on legislative confidence for its survival, and the governmental accountability to parliament that results from that: ­Parliament can make or break the government. A third fundamental characteristic of parliamentarism is the collective (collegial) executive of parliamentarism versus the single-person executive in presidentialism. Parliamentary systems are characterized by the direct election of a legislative assembly from which the executive emerges. As a consequence of this strong mutual dependency for survival of legislative and executive powers in parliamentary systems, political parties play an important role in coordinating the recruitment of candidates, the formulation of policies, the formation of government, and the mobilization of voters during election campaigns. In general, political parties in parliamentary systems exert a high level of control over the career and voting behavior of their candidates to an extent that government is “partified.” This entry focuses on this fusion of legislative and executive powers in parliamentarism, the nature and role of the executive and the legislature, and the importance of political parties in parliamentary democracies.

Parliamentary Democracy as a Fused Power System The basic principle of all types of democracy is that citizens, in one way or the other, choose their own government, and can openly criticize power holders and hold them accountable. In addition, democracies are characterized by a separation of legislative, executive, and judiciary powers. The legislature represents the people, controls the government, and suggests and approves legislation. The executive implements those policies and is responsible for the day-to-day functioning of all government agencies and institutions, as well as for the well-being and safety of its citizens. An independent judiciary checks the constitutionality and consistency of laws and solves disputes where conflicts of interests or interpretation occur. Needless to say, the precise manner in which these different powers are separated and interact varies substantially across different democratic regimes. Classically, the extent to which these powers are separated in distinct bodies or fused can be

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summarized as two distinctive regime types, parliamentarism and presidentialism. Parliamentarism is characterized by a fusion of executive and legislative powers through a singular mandate, which differs from presidentialism, where the executive and legislative are divided by a separate mandate of the people. Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach (1993) define pure parliamentarism as systems of mutual dependence whereby (1) the executive power must be supported by a majority in the legislature and can fall if it receives a vote of no confidence and (2) the executive power (normally in conjunction with the head of state) has the capacity to dissolve the legislature and call for elections. A government formation process most crucially exemplifies this fusion of powers in parliamentary democracies; the government originates from this single mandate for the legislative assembly. As a result of this mutual dependency for survival, the executive is responsible to the legislature and the legislature can at any time end the term of the incumbent government through a vote of no confidence (Müller, Bergman, & Strom, 2003). This means that ­ there are no fixed terms for the executive and legislature, as is the case in presidential systems. Another sharp contrast with presidential systems is that governments within parliamentary democracies are not elected directly by the people and do not have their own mandate. Instead, voters in parliamentary democracies only directly elect their parliamentary representatives, who then—in turn—start a complex and often lengthy process of government formation. Governments in ­ parliamentary democracies, therefore, do not derive ­ their authority directly from the electorate, but are dependent on the support of the majority of people’s representatives in the legislative assembly. Additionally, governments in parliamentary systems require the confidence of the majority of members of the legislative assembly since the executive is responsible to the legislature and dependent on its support for survival. Across parliamentary systems, however, there is substantial variation in how this confidence is demonstrated. In some parliamentary systems, the explicit expression of this confidence is constitutionally arranged through an investiture vote. This means that before any new government assumes its role, it has to face an ­official vote of investiture in parliament. In other parliamentary democracies, there is no explicit vote of ­investiture and the government is believed to have the support of the majority of members of parliament (MPs) until an explicit vote of no confidence is held. Both mechanisms, nevertheless, show that a crucial ­feature of parliamentarism is that governments originate from and can find their demise in the legislature. Consequently, most governments in parliamentary

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democracies are majority governments, although multiple forms of minority rule are also quite common. As long as no majority explicitly supports a motion of no confidence, such minority governments can survive. This means that—in parliamentary systems—any day, and any parliamentary vote can mean the end of the incumbent government. A government can be dismissed simply by a legislative vote of no confidence, making tenure in office determined only by a maximum number of years. In turn, the cabinet can dissolve parliament and call for new elections. Since in most democratic systems governments can call new elections when they are defeated in parliament, MPs will not send away a government unless they think it is utterly necessary, or politically advantageous, to do so. It also means that sometimes—for extended periods of time—no new ­government is formed as parties cannot agree upon its composition or policy program. Another important consequence of this mutual dependence of legislature and executive is that MPs do not only express support for an incumbent government or call for its demise, but MPs can actually hold each and every minister accountable. Both the collective ­government and individual ministers are responsible to parliament. This fusion and mutual dependence for survival of the executive and legislature creates a unique dynamic in parliamentary systems that have several consequences for the functioning of parliament and of government. We will focus in particular on the role of political parties in parliamentary democracies.

The Executive Next to the fusion and mutual dependence of legislative and executive powers, parliamentary democracies also strictly separate the role of the head of state, either a president or monarch, from the head of government. Often, the head of state in parliamentary democracies is reduced to a primarily ceremonial function. Both the party composition of government and the allocation of ministerial portfolios are beyond the control of the head of state. While the head of state might formally appoint the prime minister and other members of cabinet and sign laws, he or she has no responsibility for policy making or policy implementation. In parliamentary democracies, it is the executive that commonly initiates policies and sets the political agenda. In parliamentary systems, there is a bonus on disciplined political parties that can control their ­ MPs, which increases their chances of entering into coalition or single-party government. Often, the largest party can also command the position of the head of g­overnment—the prime minister or chancellor. The chief executive in parliamentary systems is thus

nominated through an inner-party process or a negotiation between several political parties, instead of being popularly elected. Often, the formation of a government can take weeks, months, or even more than a year (as happened in Belgium after the 2010 elections). ­During such periods of government formation, the outgoing government acts as a “caretaker” executive. Party rule in parliamentary systems comes in single-party ­government—either as a majority or minority party— and multiparty coalitions. Clearly, much of the relative power balance and seat distribution between parties depends on electoral systems, with majoritarian systems like first-past-the-post more often creating single-party majorities, while a more proportional system often ­creates coalition cabinets. In parliamentary systems where elections do not immediately return a majority government, the formation process of a government is often formalized through the appointment of a broker between parties— often either a neutral figure or senior politician—who is tasked with exploring what government can count on majority support in the legislature. This formateur negotiates with potential coalition partners—often in multiple rounds—to explore what combination of parties would be able to command the most stable majority and implement the policies that can be written down in a formal coalition agreement. Most of the time, the largest party in the coalition nominates its leader as the prime minster. This chief executive, together with all other ministers, forms the collective executive, which is characteristic of parliamentary democracy. Cabinet ministers have two important roles. First, and most important, ministers are the political head of a ministry or department. Second, ministers are ­members of the cabinet, a body that makes collective political decisions. This has two important consequences: Ministers have individual ministerial responsibility and they can be held individually accountable in parliament for the manner in which they run their departments. ­Ultimately, this means that in the case of a bad performance, problems, or scandals, the responsible minister may be obliged to resign. Second, the cabinet has a collective responsibility to parliament, meaning that the malfunctioning or failing of one or more ministers in the eyes of parliament may have consequences for the cabinet as a whole. The cabinet must swim or sink together, as policy decisions are the collective responsibility of all cabinet members, with the prime minister being responsible for overall coordination. From this collective responsibility, and often complex negotiations among cabinet members, flows cabinet confidentiality. In many cases, what is discussed within the cabinet is treated as confidential, and cabinet members are prohibited from revealing the details of discussions.

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The Legislature Generally, in parliamentary democracies, legislatures fulfill three roles. The first role is a representative role of linking ordinary citizens with political decision making. This representative role is taken on by individual MPs and by political parties that represent different segments of society and different social interests. This representative role of parties is often combined with a distinct worldview, ideology, or minimally a program for government action. Second, legislatures in parliamentary systems fulfill a major role in the oversight of the government. For this purpose the legislature has numerous formal and informal control mechanisms and investigative powers, the most important being the vote of no confidence. Finally, and most crucially, the legislature plays a role in the development of legislation, either as initiators of laws or scrutinizing legislation proposed by members of the government. Legislatures in parliamentary democracies act as the link between the population and political decision making by representing various constituencies, voicing the concerns and interests of various societal groups in the public debate, which makes politics more inclusive and representative. The ability of the legislature to act as a link and represent various constituencies legitimizes the democratic policy-making process. In parliamentary democracies, political ­parties fulfill these functions of linkage and representation in large part. However, this role of representing segments and interests of the population is eroding. Across established and new democracies, trust and confidence in national politics, politicians, and political parties, has fallen considerably and support for “antisystem” populist parties and candidates is on the rise. There is increasing doubt in the integrity and capacities of traditional political elites at the national levels to manage the affairs of the state. Low turnout, together with declining partisan affiliation and party membership, all pose a challenge to political parties and party leaderships. Control and oversight of government action is the second important task of legislatures. This seems somewhat contradictory as many of the cabinet members will actually come from parliament and in some democracies are actually members of both parliament and government. This fusion of legislature and executive and their mutual dependence becomes most evident in this ability of parliament to hold the government accountable. While parliament has the prerogative to end the life of the incumbent government at any time, the executive, in turn, has the power to dissolve the legislature. This mutual dependence of survival functions is a guarantee that MPs and cabinet members will

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behave responsibly. Needless to say, the ways in which the legislature can control the executive and hold cabinet members and the government as a whole responsible differs substantially from country to country. There are different control mechanisms formalized through committee structures, special investigative powers, and types of hearings. As noted earlier, the most powerful mechanism available to parliaments for controlling the executive is the vote of no confidence (Huber, 1996). Through enactment of this procedure, the legislature can suspend its support of the executive and thereby vote the incumbent government out of office. Bringing down a government requires the support of the majority of the legislature, and in most parliamentary systems, an incumbent government can find itself facing a vote of no confidence at any time during its tenure. This means there is no minimum term for a government, only a maximum term. Many argue that this creates a high level of uncertainty and instability in democratic parliamentary systems, as any event or vote can lead to the demise of a government. Since deep political conflicts often occur in times of crisis, a parliamentary democracy may lose a functioning government just when it needs it most. On the other hand, such flexibility also allows for swift and immediate adaptation to new situations, where fixed terms—as many presidential systems have adopted—can lead to deadlock and political inertia. Most importantly, the executive in parliamentary democracies is a complex collective, often consisting of members from several political parties of varying political orientations. Many parliamentary systems that adopt some form of majoritarian electoral rule will generally generate single-party majority governments, in which case dissolution of government (and parliament) primarily results from intraparty conflict. In cases where multiparty coalitions are formed or a single-party minority government is dependent for its survival on other parties in parliament, the government is only as strong as its weakest link. Some parliamentary democracies have opted for an ex-ante mechanism of establishing majority support for a government by holding a formal vote of investiture. This means that the legislature needs to explicitly confirm the appointment of a new executive by a plenary vote. The third role of a legislature in parliamentary democracies relates to lawmaking and scrutinizing policy making and implementation. Here the legislativeexecutive fusion reappears as laws can originate either from within the legislature—by means of an initiative law by one or more members of parliament—or from the executive. In parliamentary democracies, most legislation is developed under the auspices of cabinet

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ministers at their departments, and parliament simply rubber-stamps, amends, or rejects what ministers propose. Lawmaking in parliamentary democracies is often a complex and interactive process whereby civil servants prepare legislation, often in consultation with many societal interest groups, while members of multiple political parties might also be involved to secure majority support before a minister presents a proposed law on the floor of parliament. Through committee meetings and plenary debates on legislation—in many parliaments in both chambers of the legislature—MPs and senators propose amendments or otherwise ask ministers to adapt their proposal. Again, there are many institutional variations in how and when laws can be amended or have to be voted on, but the crux of parliamentary democracy is that legislature and executive “mix and mingle,” rather than having totally separated responsibilities. While proposals initiated by the opposition are less likely to succeed than proposals coming from parties that constitute the government (and their ministers), there are many examples where opposition parties have initiated or substantially influenced legislation. It is this interaction between representatives of the different parties in parliamentary democracy that is delved into somewhat deeper in the final section of this entry.

Political Parties and Party Modes In parliamentary democracies, political parties play an important role in both the making and the functioning of the executive and the legislature. Anthony King (1976) argued that to understand parliamentarism, we should not look at the legislature and the executive as two different actors that are juxtaposed. In parliamentary democracies, it makes little sense to see parliament and government as two distinct bodies that vie for power, as is often the case in presidentialism. The fusion of the legislature and the executive becomes most apparent if one looks at party politics, party organization, and the party system—how parties interact—in parliamentary democracies. There are basically two types of party interaction in parliamentary democracies: One such interaction is between government and opposition parties, while the other is within government parties between their “party in parliament” and their “party in office” or between their MPs and their ministers. In this vein, King suggested that the relation between parliaments and ­ government should be analyzed by the different modes in which key players operate. Rudy Andeweg and Laurens Nijzink (1995) redefined these modes and identified three different party modes: (1) an interparty mode, in which the relations between different actors across

the legislature and executive are determined by party affiliations; (2) a cross-party mode, in which the executive and legislature combine and cooperate on the basis of cross-party interest; and (3) a nonparty mode, in which the different key actors in government and parliament interact without any regard to party affiliation. In the nonparty mode, government and parliament or executive and legislature act as two separate monolithic bodies. In reality, most of the time, key actors in parliamentary democracy will act in either the interparty mode or the cross-party mode. The nonparty mode, in which parliament and government are clearly demarcated and juxtaposed, is rare in parliamentary democracies.

Parliamentarism: A Dynamic Relation Between Executive and Legislature The fusion of powers in parliamentary democracies creates a distinct dynamic interaction between the ­ executive and legislature. This relation can be characterized as a relation of mutual dependence, which means that neither the legislature nor the executive can be seen as monolithic bodies standing in juxtaposition with one another. Instead, parliament and government become fused, which is most visible in political parties that form the government. Parliamentarism cannot be understood without profound analysis and knowledge of party politics, both within and between parties. The logic of parliamentary democracy forces political actors to behave differently than in presidential systems, where a direct mandate for the executive exists next to a direct mandate for legislators. The fact that in parliamentary democracy one single popular mandate is the origin of both executive and legislative powers makes it impossible to totally separate the two. While this may ­theoretically look highly problematic, the reality is that the most democratic, prosperous, and successful ­countries on this planet have adopted some form of parliamentary democracy. Andre Krouwel and Thijmen Jeroense See also Authoritarianism; Direct Versus Indirect Democracy; Duverger’s Law on Elections; Electoral Systems; Political Deliberation; Presidentialism; Representative Democracy

Further Readings Andeweg, R. B., & Nijzink, L. (1995). Beyond the two body image: Relations between ministers and MPs. In H. Döring (Ed.), Parliaments and majority rule in Western Europe (pp. 152–177). Mannheim, Germany: Mannheim Centre for European Social Research.

Partisanship Cheibub, J. M., Martin, S., & Rasch, B. E. (2015). Government selection and executive powers: Constitutional design in parliamentary democracies. West European Politics, 38(5), 969–996. Huber, J. D. (1996). The vote of confidence in parliamentary democracies. The American Political Science Review, 90(2), 269–282. Katz, R. (1986). Party government: A rationalistic conception. Visions and Realities of Party Government, 1, 31–71. Katz, R., & Mair, P. (1995). Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the Cartel Party. Party Politics, 1(5), 5–28. King, A. (1976). Modes of executive-legislative relations: Great Britain, France and Germany. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 1, 11–36. Kreppel, A. (2008). Legislatures. In D. Caramani, Comparative Politics (pp. 114–130). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Krouwel, A. P. M. (2003). Measuring presidentialism and parliamentarism: An application to Central and East European Countries. Acta Politica, 38(4), 333–364. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500041 Krouwel, A. P. M. & Koedam, J. (2015). The Netherlands: Investiture behind closed doors. In B. E. Rasch, S. Martin, & J. A. Cheibub (Eds.), Parliaments and government formation: Unpacking investiture rules. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Laver, M., & Shepsle, K. A. (1990). Coalitions and cabinet government. American Political Science Review, 84(3), 873–890. Laver, M., & Shepsle, K. A. (1996). Making and breaking governments: Cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary democracy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lijphart, A. (1992). Parliamentary versus presidential government. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of democracy: Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Müller, W. C. (2000). Political parties in parliamentary democracies: Making delegation and accountability work. European Journal of Political Research, 37, 309–333. Müller, W. C., Bergman, T., & Strom, K. (2003). Parliamentary democracy: Promise and problems. In K. Strom, W. C. Müller, & T. Bergman (Eds.), Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies (pp. 3–33). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Pitkin, H. F. (1967). The concept of representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rasch, B. E., Martin, S., & Cheibub, J. A. (Eds.). (2015). Parliaments and government formation: Unpacking investiture rules. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Stepan, A., & Skach, C. (1993). Constitutional frameworks and democratic consolidation: Parliamentarism versus presidentialism. World Politics, 46(1), 1–22. Verney, D. V. (1959). The analysis of political systems. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

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Partisanship In 1796, George Washington passed the mantle of American democracy on to the American people with a warning. In his farewell address, he warned Americans to be cautious about “the expedients of party.” He likened the loyalty to party (rather than nation) as ­ “a frightful despotism.” Washington’s warning drew from his observation of human nature as naturally prone to factionalism that, once set in motion, can cause citizens to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other factions and to compel fellow citizens to view each other as enemies. Washington’s warnings, however, did not prevent political parties from rapidly establishing themselves as a central element of American democracy. One main reason for this is that it is simply easier for citizens to make electoral choices when their options are limited. In 1950, the American Political Science Association assembled a Committee on Political Parties that made exactly this point. This committee produced a report arguing for the “responsible two-party system.” As they argued, “popular government in a nation of more than 150 million people requires political parties which ­provide the electorate with a proper range of choice between alternatives of action.” Parties, therefore, simplify politics for people who simply do not have the time or resources to be political experts. In fact, Elmer Eric Schattschneider famously argued in 1942 that “political parties created democracy and that modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties” (p. 1). Political parties are an important element of democracy. However, they do more than simply structure the choices available to voters. Parties can also act as a part of each voter’s identity. This feeling of linkage, or closeness to one party over another, is often called partisanship. It is, in fact, this partisanship that George Washington was truly worried about. The parties themselves, in the absence of partisanship, would simply be structural heuristics for simplifying vote choice. It is the sense of partisanship among voters that can potentially lead to the type of division between citizens that Washington warned against. It can also, however, be a powerful force for political engagement.

Historical Background In American politics, the names of the parties have changed and the partisanship of the electorate has waxed and waned, but partisanship as an attachment to a political party has never disappeared. As soon as Washington left the office of the presidency, a divide

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between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans emerged. For a brief period, under president James Monroe, the majority of the electorate considered themselves to be Democratic-Republicans, and without an opposing team, partisanship declined. This was known as the “Era of Good Feelings.” Soon thereafter, however, President Andrew Jackson was elected as a Democrat, defeating the National Republicans in a new party system. The Democratic Party has maintained its name to this day, with the opposing party changing from National Republicans, to Whigs, and finally, during and after the Civil War, simply to Republicans. The Democratic and Republican parties remain the two major parties in American politics, though their platforms and voters have undergone numerous changes. Most recently, many conservative Southern Democrats fled the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This led to a period of “dealignment,” in which the strength of partisanship in the electorate as a whole declined considerably. Over time, however, these Southern Democrats moved into the Republican Party, reducing the cross-pressures they had earlier felt as Democrats. Currently, most voters are in a party that is ideologically, racially, and religiously consistent with their own identities. In this modern party system, partisanship is strong and consistent in most of the electorate. Even those who profess to be independent are often, in fact, identified with one of the two parties in their thoughts and choices.

Theories of Partisanship In the study of political behavior, scholars have ­struggled over the appropriate characterization of partisanship. Is it a logical choice, made by informed and interested ­voters who are open to change? Is it a social identity, like religion or race, that one is born and socialized into? Is it an acquired bias, coloring our views of politics and fellow citizens? Here, these three major theories are examined and described.

Running Tally One theory of partisanship, advanced by Morris Fiorina and others, considers it to be a type of “running tally,” in which voters keep track of things that they like and dislike about each party. These voters keep a score in their minds that they update when new information is presented. In this way, the old information has a relatively larger sway in their choice of party, but with enough new information, partisan preference can be changed. In this view, partisanship is relatively responsive to new information, and it incorporates new information in an unbiased manner.

When understood in this way, partisanship is essentially a choice with a memory. Every time they are asked to vote, voters make a reasoned choice between parties, taking into account what they have previously learned, and any new information that is relevant to the choice. Because of the responsiveness of partisanship, parties are incentivized to be sensitive to voters’ wishes, protecting the carefully constructed tally that they have built in their voters’ minds. This view also suggests that parties have the potential, in each election, to draw voters from the opposing party, if they present enough compelling evidence for their own superiority.

Social Identity An alternate view, dating back to the seminal 1960 book The American Voter, by Angus Campbell and colleagues, is that partisanship is essentially a sense of belonging and identification that a voter feels toward one party or another. In this view, often referred to as the “Michigan School,” partisanship is a psychological attachment that endures for reasons beyond pure information and objective facts. One’s party is a group that a person is socialized into, from a very young age, much like religion. As a voter begins voting in her first election, her attachment to the party grows stronger. Repeatedly voting for the same party can reinforce party attachments and increase the strength of partisanship over time. Due to this psychological attachment, partisans are motivated to participate in politics not only to accomplish policy goals, but also to achieve the satisfaction of winning. As the partisan’s identity is tied to the group’s successes and failures, a vote for the party is akin to cheering for a sports team. Much like sports fans, partisans in this theory are motivated by team spirit. They participate in politics for the joy of victory and the sense of belonging. Parties, therefore, have little chance of drawing opposing-party voters to their side, as these voters are motivated largely by loyalty and team victory. Partisanship, in this view, is the “unmoved mover” of political behavior. It affects behavior, but is not affected by virtually anything.

Motivated Reasoning A third view, not mutually exclusive from the previous two theories, is that partisanship is a biasing agent, skewing the partisan’s perception of the world around her. The authors of The American Voter referred to partisanship as a “perceptual screen,” altering the way individuals experience political events and objects. Although most compatible with the social identity theory of partisanship, the running tally theory could be affected by this type of bias as well.

Partisanship

The classic understanding of motivated reasoning is essentially that individuals prefer to see information with which they already agree, and they are made uncomfortable by information that disturbs their understanding of the world. Because of this, partisans will accept positive information about their own party more quickly than positive information about the opposing party. Furthermore, it will take more effort for them to understand or receive information that presents their party in a negative light. This edits the flow of information to an individual voter in such a way that allows them to continue to feel good about their own party. If this theory were combined with the running tally view of partisanship, it would cause voters to add information to their running tally selectively. This effectively maintains the partisan affiliation of the voter via selective retention of information. In combination with the social identity view of partisanship, motivated reasoning fits very neatly. Partisans are driven largely by victory and therefore they mainly seek out information that will underscore the benefits and likelihood of that victory. A voter’s partisan ­affiliation continues to be secured. Furthermore, social identities (of all kinds) have been demonstrated to generate in-group bias, which causes group members to privilege the status of their own group in comparison to other groups. A motivated reasoning approach would simply facilitate this biased evaluation.

The Benefits of Partisanship Despite Washington’s warnings, partisanship is not entirely “a frightful despotism.” Loyalty to one party over another has many beneficial effects in a democracy. First, partisanship simplifies the voting decision. The vast majority of a nation’s citizens are not, and cannot be expected to be, political experts. They do not read legislation; many do not even know which party is currently in the majority. But whether through a running tally or social identity approach, most voters have a sense of party loyalty. When they stand in the voting booth, partisanship helps voters to make choices. They know, either through a lifetime of learning, from parental socialization, from biased information searches, or some combination thereof, that one party is better suited to their interests. This acts as a heuristic, a cognitive shortcut that allows voters to make choices that are informed by some helpful truth. According to Schattschneider, this is a crucial element of representative democracy. Second, the act of voting itself has long been a mystery to political scientists. Why would anyone vote when their single vote will almost certainly make no difference? No one believes that the election will come

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down to one individual vote, and they are almost universally correct. A variety of reasons have been suggested to explain the act of voting, one of the most prominent being a sense of civic duty. But where does this duty come from? Partisanship is one powerful source. The sense of team spirit elaborated by the social identity model of partisanship provides one potential source of motivation for voting or any other kind of political activism. When a person feels linked to a party, they participate in politics, just as they attend and cheer at a sports game. Partisanship, then, is one important link between individuals and political action. It encourages citizens to participate and feel involved in their own democracy. A third, related effect is that partisanship can generate emotional responses to political events. The most strongly affiliated partisans tend to respond to political messages and events with the highest levels of enthusiasm and anger. Because these emotions tend to drive individuals toward action, they are further resources available to partisans that push them into the political fray.

The Drawbacks of Partisanship The first drawback of partisanship in any democracy is its aforementioned effect on reasoning. Once individuals have come to believe that their own party is better than an opposing party, they can begin to view the world in biased ways. They more easily see what they want to see, and they have trouble seeing what conflicts with their own party’s superiority. This does not make for an accurate or reliable running tally, and therefore keeps citizens from being responsive to real changes in objective conditions. This can affect the responsiveness of government itself, by locking voters into decisions that are difficult to change. Second, at the extremes, partisanship can reduce citizens’ desire to see compromise on the part of their political leaders. The strongest partisans are generally the least supportive of compromise. They judge the opposing party more harshly than they judge their own party, and their voices push their elected representatives away from moderation. Furthermore, the anger discussed above can also lead toward a resistance to compromise. This is the result only of very strong ­ ­partisanship and is not a result of moderate partisan affiliation. However, there is a danger in very strong partisanship of damaging the room for compromise that allows democratic governments to function. Third, these effects of strong partisanship can be exacerbated when combined with other social identities. Typically, the effects of partisanship are mitigated by what are called “cross-cutting cleavages.” These are

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attitudes or identities that are not commonly found in the partisan’s party. If a person is a member of a party and a religion that do not tend to co-occur, the effect of partisanship on bias and action can be dampened. However, if a person is a member of a party and also a member of another social group that is mostly made up of fellow partisans, the biasing and polarizing effect of partisanship only grows stronger. The negative social effects of this can be seen in partisans disliking each other on a personal level, as their political opponents grow increasingly unfamiliar to them. This can generate political conflict in the electorate that can motivate highly rancorous electoral politics, a phenomenon often called affective or social polarization.

Partisanship With More Than Two Parties If we consider partisanship to be a social identity, it theoretically follows that a two-party system, and a winner-take-all electoral system, would lead to the strongest levels of partisanship. This is because when two social groups are competing in a zero-sum game (such as control over government), the group identities grow more salient. In a two-party system, then, partisanship is a highly salient and useful identity. Furthermore, with only two parties, the opponent is a clear target. One is either in the in-party or in the opposing party. The target of criticism and disagreement is static for most elections. Once politics ceases to be a zero-sum game, however, as in the case of a multiparty system of government or a proportional representation system of government, the intensity of the competition is reduced. Furthermore, in multiparty systems in which alliances are often made, the opponent of yesterday could become the ally of today. The certainty over which parties are friends and which are foes is therefore blurred. Partisanship still exists under these systems, as individuals are socialized by families and by their own voting history to see themselves as members of a particular party. But the social identity element of partisanship may be less salient when the opponent is less clearly and repeatedly defined. Furthermore, even in new democracies with multiple parties, scholars have found repeated evidence that partisanship increases soon after parties are formed, and that this partisanship acts as a stabilizing force on a new democracy. Partisanship tends to increase under democratic governments, and decrease during dictatorships.

External Forces on Partisanship In addition to socialization and experience, other forces are capable of strengthening individual identification

with a party. These include, but are not limited to, media sources, campaigns, and polarization.

Media In an increasingly fractionalized media environment, one-sided partisan news is easy to locate and consume. Partisan media does have the ability to push partisans further toward their party, although only relatively strong partisans choose to spend time consuming partisan media in the first place. However, because highly partisan individuals tend to be the most powerfully involved in politics, this can have an outsized effect on the partisanship of politics in general. Furthermore, as the content of partisan media grows increasingly uncivil, the effect on partisans is only to polarize them further.

Campaigns In the course of an election, party organizations work very hard to convince voters to vote for and donate money to their side. During any election, the events of the campaign serve to repeatedly remind voters which side is theirs. Advertisements are run either against opponents or for party candidates, rallies are held, speeches are made, and some voters are even contacted personally by party members. Furthermore, the campaign acts as a reminder that there is a battle underway. The victor could be a voter’s own party, or it could be the opposing team. As the conflict grows more salient, voters grow increasingly attached to their own side. They think of themselves in partisan terms more often. They understand their relationship with their society in a partisan way. All of these things are social forces pushing voters toward their partisan groups and making clear who belongs, and who does not.

Polarization Polarization itself can be both a cause and an effect of strong partisanship. Some scholars have found that as citizens become increasingly partisan, they also perceive more polarization in the electorate as a whole. This perception is a function of their partisanship. Partisans also tend to believe that the opposing party holds more extreme views than it, in fact, does. This creates a sense of polarization among partisans that is not grounded in truth, but is nonetheless sustained by partisan bias. At the same time, stronger partisanship can cause citizens to psychologically distance themselves from opposing partisans, generating an affective or social type of polarization that enhances the divide between partisans of different sides.

Party Identification

In general, partisanship is an unavoidable element of any democracy. It can exacerbate rifts between citizens, but it can also create useful choices for voters. Lilliana Hall Mason See also Identity Politics; Mutual Radicalization; Party Systems; Propaganda; Similarity-Attraction; Stereotypes

Further Readings American Political Science Association. (1950, September). A report of the Committee on Political Parties: Toward a more responsible two-party system. American Political Science Review, 44(3), Part 2, 303–306. Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1980). The American voter (Abr. ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1960) Fiorina, M. P. (1981). Retrospective voting in American national elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Klar, S., & Krupnikov, Y. (2016). Independent politics: How American disdain for parties leads to political inaction. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Levendusky, M. (2013). How partisan media polarize America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lupu, N., & Stokes, S. (2010). Democracy, interrupted: Regime change and partisanship in twentieth-century Argentina. Electoral Studies, 29(1), 91–104. doi:10.1016/j.electstud .2009.07.005 Schattschneider, E. E. (1942). Party government. New York, NY: Rinehart. Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755–769. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006 .00214.x

Party Identification Party identification is the attachment of a citizen to a political party. The concept forms the core of a dominant approach to the study of electoral behavior and political participation. American electoral research has inspired researchers worldwide, and party identification is an influential but rather contested concept in a nonAmerican context.

Overview Party identification as a concept was developed only after the Second World War, but in reference to conflicts between groups, attachment to a specific group is arguably as old as politics itself. The concept became the

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pivotal element of the so-called party identification model. Party identification is considered to be the result of socialization processes and is able to explain political behavior and party choice. Outside the United States, party identification fares less well, since many nonAmerican democracies are multiparty systems wherein the American concept and operationalization are not applicable. Still, because of its potential to explain party choice and long-term trends of alignment, party identification remains an important concept in the field of electoral studies, both inside and outside the United States.

The Concept and Operationalization of Party Identification Group conflict and individual attachment to groups is as old as Homo sapiens itself. Conflict could arise from regional, religious, or political conflicts. At the end of the 18th century, individuals began to identify with political movements, such as the Jacobins versus Girondins in France and the Federalists versus anti-Federalists in the United States. From such movements eventually emerged modern political parties; individuals attached themselves to these parties. Failure to account for this attachment resulted in a failure of the research design in a seminal study of voting behavior, when Paul Lazarsfeld and associates studied media effects in the 1940 American presidential election. They conducted a panel study over the period May to November. The results failed to discover substantial media effects: Voters apparently knew long in advance for which candidate they would vote. Subsequently, a second classic of voting behavior research, published in 1960, made party attachment a core element in the explanatory model of voting behavior. The authors of The American Voter drew upon sociopsychological reference group theory and introduced the concept of party identification. This concept has become so important that their model is often referred to as the party identification model or, referring to the location of their institute, Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Michigan School of electoral research. The concept has been defined as an attachment or a tie to a party that is a psychological identification, which can persist without legal recognition, or evidence of formal membership and even without a consistent record of party support. This definition fundamentally differs from definitions based on party membership or vote consistency. Instead, it is a psychological selfidentification; in other words, it is an indication of the individual’s feelings toward a political party. The operationalization of party identification by Angus Campbell and his colleagues in the 1950s and

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1960s has become a staple in the American national election studies. The standard question wording in these studies has been this: Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what? The phrase think of yourself emphasizes self-identification, while generally and usually indicate the identification with the party should be an enduring one. This standard question primarily taps the direction of party identification and a follow-up question is assumed to tap its intensity. For Republican and Democratic identifiers, the follow-up question is, Would you call yourself a strong (Republican/­Democrat) or a not very strong (Republican/Democrat)? For Independents, direction and intensity are combined in one question: Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican Party or to the Democratic Party? The results of these questions can be combined to form a 7-point unidimensional scale: Strong Republican, Weak Republican, Leaning Republican, Independent, Leaning Democrat, Weak Democrat, and Strong Democrat.

Sources and Consequences of Party Identification In The American Voter, party identification was placed in a central position in a so-called funnel of causality to represent a chain of events resulting in the vote choice. At the mouth of the funnel were those factors that led to or produced the identification. Party identification then impacted those factors that were temporarily more closely related to the vote choice. The focus on the origins of party identification was primarily on early politicization and socialization within the family. In addition, the social and economic context in which individuals grow up impacts how they view themselves and with which groups they identify. Particularly important is social class; race is also an important factor related to party identification. Also, the times in which one grows up is relevant for party identification. The Republican Party emerged in reaction to differences over slavery and state’s rights in the 19th century and resulted in a century-long division of identities along regional lines. Other major events, for example the Great Depression in the 1930s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s, resulted in shifts of identification for many voters. Dramatic incidents, such as the Watergate scandal and the Clinton sex scandal, can result in strengthening or shifting of identification. There is a considerable literature on explanatory factors, but there has been even greater interest in how party identification influences the attitudes and behavior of voters. In The New American Voter, Warren Miller and J. Merrill Shanks modified and extended the traditional funnel-of-causality model by introducing six

causal stages to explain vote choice. At the second stage are party identification and policy-related predispositions. These long-term factors impact the short-term factors of a specific election: current policy preferences, perceptions of current conditions, retrospective evaluations of the president concerning governmental results, impressions of the candidates’ personal qualities, and prospective evaluations of the candidates and the parties. Thus, virtually everything that the voter thinks or believes is colored by party identification. Although in the funnel-of-causality model, party identification is viewed as having major indirect influence, it also has a strong direct relationship with vote choice. In fact, it is probably the single best predictor of vote choice. Note that this relationship cannot and should not be perfect, since if it were it would be indistinguishable from vote choice. However, at least in the American context, party identification and party choice in fact do not fully overlap. Strong Republicans and strong Democrats almost unanimously vote for the candidate of their party, but with so many offices to choose and American voters voting more often for the candidate than the party, weak Republicans and weak Democrats defect from their identification in greater numbers. Aside from the influence on various attitudes and the vote, party identification has an influence on other attitudes and behavior. Party identifiers have more interest in politics; they pay more attention to politics and elections; they are better informed; they care more about the outcome of an election; and they are more likely to turn out to vote.

Exporting Party Identification Party identification was developed in the 1950s to study the American voter, the subject of the seminal book published under that title. In the late 1960s and 1970s, political science began to expand in other countries, especially Europe, and researchers in these countries began to organize survey election studies. The Michigan researchers collaborated with various European scholars; European researchers traveled to Ann Arbor, and Warren Miller, in particular, made numerous visits to European countries to consult with local researchers. However, only three main problems arose in attempting to adapt the American concept to non-American systems: the operationalization, in particular the question wording; the dimensionality; and the causal model underlying the concept.

Operationalization In Britain, the names—Conservative, Liberal, and Labour—of the traditional main parties could easily be

Party Identification

grafted onto the American question wording. In Sweden, for instance, the traditional operationalization employs a slightly different introduction, but also mentions the names of most relevant parties. When attempting to gauge party identification in Norway, different questions were used. Norwegians were first asked if they were a member of a political party; if not a member, they were asked if they “wholeheartedly support one special party.” A third question was employed to assess how strong this support was. In other countries, even more problems with the operationalization of party identification arose. The names of many European parties were not as short and simple as Democrat and Republican. In the Netherlands, for example, there were parties with such names as Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy, Catholic People’s Party, and Anti-Revolutionary Party. It ­ was ­difficult to incorporate them into a question beginning with “Generally speaking do you consider yourself . . . .” Moreover, many European countries had multiparty systems, which would have meant a very unwieldy question if all parties were to be included. The Dutch solution is one that served as a model for the formulation that was introduced into the party attachment module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems in the 1996–1997 round of interviews. These questions were used: (1) Do you usually think of yourself as close to any particular party? (2) Which party is that? (3) Do you feel very close to this party, somewhat close, or not very close? (4) Do you feel yourself a little closer to one of the political parties than the others? and (5) Which party is that?

Dimensionality The American operationalization of party identification yields a unidimensional 7-point scale running from Strong Republican to Strong Democrat, with Independents in the middle. This unidimensionality has been challenged, outside and within the United States. When moving to systems with more than two relevant parties, it became impossible to conceptualize a unidimensional scale. Even if there were polar opposite parties, how could other parties be placed along this scale and how could the position of a voter along such a scale be determined? Thus, identification becomes a series of vectors, originating at some zero point to the attachment to a party, as in the portrayal of the British situation by Richard Katz. The number of vectors can be equal to the number of political parties. The introduction of vectors does not solve the problem, however. The question arises whether the voter is to be located on one vector, as would be implied by the assumption of an attachment to a single party, or

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whether a voter could be placed at a non-zero point on more than one vector. Herbert Weisberg argued that even in the American case, party identification can be conceptualized as multidimensional. American voters are able to express a level of attachment to both main parties, and the correlation between these feelings is not strongly negative, as the unidimensional model would predict. Moreover, attachment to independence constitutes an additional dimension. Cees van Der Eijk and Kees Niemöller demonstrated that Dutch voters could even have party identifications with between two and four political parties. And Eric Uslaner showed that Canadian voters may identify with a different party at the national level than at the provincial level. A second aspect of dimensionality concerns the zero point of the vectors. In the American conceptualization, pure Independents are considered the zero point, but the jargon of many or even most other, non-American countries does not include the concept of “Independent” in the way the American political vocabulary does. More often reference would be simply to nonpartisans.

Theoretical Implications In order to justify its position in the funnel of causality, party identification must satisfy at least three conditions. It must be relatively stable across elections; it must be distinct from vote choice; and it must precede vote choice in the stages of causation. All of these conditions have been called into question. That the American conception of party identification might essentially be unique was demonstrated in one of the first attempts to export it to a different system. In Great Britain, it was found that it was more difficult to distinguish between party identification and the vote than in the United States. Soeren ­Holmberg reports correlations between party identification and vote choice of over .90 in Sweden, whereas those in the United States were as low as .52 and never exceeded .75. Finally, in an analysis of a Dutch voting panel study, it was argued that all three of the conditions were ­violated: party identification was less stable than vote choice, the distinction between identification and vote could be explained as measurement error, and party identification was not causally prior to vote preference.

Stability and Instability of Party Identification and Its Implications The distribution of party identification in the United States has been remarkably stable. For 60 years, the American National Election Study has posed the

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standard question every 2 years, and a comparison of the results in 1952 and 2012 reveals substantial stability. There is a not insubstantial decrease in the percentage of Democratic identifiers and a rise in Independents, and although the percentage of Republicans has increased slightly, the Democrats in 2012 still held an edge in the percentage of party identifiers. The stability of patterns of party identification is at the basis of the concept of the “normal vote”—in other words, the outcome of a presidential election if there have been no short-term factors that lead to defections from party identifications. The normal-vote approach has continued to be viable in American election studies and has been applied not only to presidential elections but also to congressional elections.

Dealignment and Realignment Not everyone has examined the figures on the distribution of party identification in the United States and stressed their stability. The ink on The American Voter was hardly dry when the United States entered the turbulent era of the 1960s. Observers began to notice changes in the alignment of voters with parties. Moreover, in contrast to the normal vote, dealignment seemed to be a concept that could be applied outside the United States, and for 40 years political scientists have been studying dealignment in advanced democracies. Russell Dalton examined partisanship in 19 countries and concluded that the trend was negative in 17 of the countries studied. Although there is probably more literature on dealignment than on realignment, again in the United States, various studies can be found. The seminal study is that of V. O. Key Jr., who introduced a theory of critical elections and identified the period 1892–1896 and 1928–1932 as critical periods leading to Republican and Democratic dominance respectively. It remains an open question whether the dealignment of recent decades has produced a new alignment, based on a new cleavage structure in many advanced European democracies due to more general processes of modernization and globalization. The most obvious American example of recent realignment is in the southern portion of the United States. The area that was called the Solid South at the time of The American Voter has now become solidly Republican instead of Democratic. In the United States, contemporary voters may shift their allegiance from one of the dominant parties to the other, creating a realignment in the sociodemographic characteristics of the identifiers. In the European ­context, the parties do not have such a stranglehold on the electoral system, so realignment does not so much occur as a shift between existing parties, but as the

emergence of new parties, such as radical right and populist parties that after the turn of the millennium have been electorally and politically successful in various European democracies.

An Alternative Definition Party identification as described above is an established concept. However, the discussion of this important concept should not close without referring to an alternative definition. The Michigan definition may have dominated electoral research since the early 1960s, but it is not the only conceptualization. The Michigan definition stressed the early development of party identification, passed on by parents within the family context, which was relatively stable throughout one’s lifetime. Morris Fiorina has provided an alternative perspective on party identification that takes adult experiences into account. He attempted to integrate rational choice theory into the sociopsychological concept of party identification. Voters are primarily viewed as utility maximizers who examine their past experience with the parties and keep a “running tally” of the performance of these parties. Subsequently, they adjust their party attachment accordingly. Indeed, Aaron Weinschenk, using American National Election Study data, empirically tested this idea and concluded that the distribution of opinions in the American electorate and elite may be important signals to changes in party identification. So the concept of party identification may be over half a century old now, but it remains a vital and inspiring sociopsychological concept in the field of political science and electoral studies. Joop J. M. Van Holsteyn and Galen A. Irwin See also Attitudes; Economics and Political Behavior; Identity Politics; Mass Political Behavior; Partisanship; Party Systems; Political Participation; Political Socialization; Social Categories; Social Identity Theory; Voter Identification; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Blais, A., Gidengil, E., Nadeau, R., & Neville, N. (2001). Measuring party identification: Britain, Canada, and the United States. Political Behavior, 23, 5–22. doi:10.1023/ A:1017665513905 Butler, D., & Stokes, D. (1969). Political change in Britain. London, England: Macmillan. Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. (1960). The American voter. New York, NY: Wiley. Campbell, A., Gurin, G., & Miller, W. E. (1954). The voter decides. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

Party List Converse, P. E. (1966). The concept of the normal vote. In A. Campbell, P. E. Converse, W. E. Miller, & D. Stokes (Eds.), Elections and the political order (pp. 9–39). New York, NY: Wiley. Dalton, R., Flanagan, S. C., & Beck, P. A. (Eds.). (1984). Electoral change in advanced industrial democracies: Realignment or dealignment? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dalton, R., & Wattenberg, M. P. (Eds.). (2000). Parties without partisans. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Fiorina, M. P. (1981). Retrospective voting in American presidential elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Holmberg, S. (1994). Party identification compared across the Atlantic. In M. K. Jennings & T. E. Mann (Eds.), Elections at home and abroad (pp. 93–121). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Katz, R. S. (1979). The dimensionality of party identification: Cross-national perspectives. Comparative Politics, 11, 147–163. doi:10.2307/421753 Key, V. O., Jr. (1955). A theory of critical elections. The Journal of Politics, 17, 3–18. doi:10.2307/2126401 Lazarsfeld, P., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1968). The people’s choice (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lewis-Beck, M., Jacoby, W., Norpoth, H., & Weisberg, H. (2008). The American voter revisited. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Miller, A. H. (1979). Normal vote analysis: Sensitivity to change over time. American Journal of Political Science, 23, 406–425. doi:10.2307/2111009 Miller, W. E., & Shanks, J. M. (1996). The new American voter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nie, N. H., Verba, S., & Petroick, J. R. (1976). The changing American voter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomassen, J. (1976). Party identification as a cross-national concept: Its meaning in the Netherlands. In I. Budge, I. Crewe, & D. Farlie (Eds.), Party identification and beyond (pp. 63–79). London, England: Wiley. Uslaner, E. M. (1989). Multiple party identifiers in Canada: Participation and affect. The Journal of Politics, 51, 993–1003. doi:10.2307/2131545 Van der Eijk, C., & Niemöller, B. (1983). Electoral change in the Netherlands. Amsterdam, Netherlands: CT Press. Weinschenk, A. C. (2010). Revisiting the political theory of party identification. Political Behavior, 32, 473–494. doi:10.1007/ s11109-009-9105-1 Weisberg, H. F. (1980). A multidimensional conceptualization of party identification. Political Behavior, 1, 33–60. doi:10.1007/BF00989755

Party List A party list is one of the fundamental elements of an electoral system. Whenever elections take place in a multiseat district system (each electoral district elects

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more than one candidate), parties present a list of candidates for each district. Lists could be open or closed and this difference may crucially influence the outcome of the election. This entry offers a definition and a description of the working of different typologies of party lists and discusses some of their possible effects.

Open Versus Closed Party Lists, and Beyond A party list can be open or closed. Closed lists are more easily defined. In each district, parties present a takeit-or-leave-it offer on ranked ballots. Voters have no possibility to influence the ranking of individual candidates, hence their choice is limited to choosing the parties themselves. Nonetheless, even with closed lists there is still a little space for expressing a choice by focusing on candidates at the top of the lists (similarly to a plurality system). On the other hand, under a strategic ­voting approach, voters might be concerned with only marginal candidates, namely candidates whose position in the list makes them neither sure to be elected (top of the list) nor sure to fail (bottom of the list). Open lists, often referred to as preferential lists, allow voters more possibilities to influence the list of elected candidates. Sometimes, voters can determine the entire set of elected candidates (open list); sometimes, they can determine only a share of them (with the other share determined by the party ranking over the list: flexible list). Variations of these two possibilities can occur. First, voters may choose candidates from more than one party list (panachage). Second, there may be a single party list divided according to single-member districts. Thus, voters cannot express a choice over the entire list but only over a single name in their particular district. Nonetheless, votes are then pooled to determine the number of seats obtained by a party, and voters’ choices within each district determine the order of candidates at the national level. Finally, a preference vote may be mandatory or not. When the preference vote is not mandatory, choosing only the party means delegating the ranking either to the party (flexible list) or to the other voters (open list).

Effects What drives the choice between preferential and closed lists? And what are the main consequences? Despite the relevance of these questions, empirical research has not yet provided satisfactory answers. Nonetheless, some theoretical conjectures are worth discussing. The first concerns the goals of a closed list. On the one hand, a closed list should make candidates more willing to please the party leaders, who are responsible for

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choosing the candidates’ order within the list. So a closed list is clearly a device to establish or keep power. The power of party leaders may even be higher if ­multiple candidatures are allowed. For instance, if the same candidate is running in different districts, he may win different seats and must obviously choose only one. This choice may be imposed by the party leader so as to leave the vacant seats to the most loyal among the first of unsuccessful candidates. On the other hand, closed lists are the only effective way to promote candidates with lower electoral support (i.e., good or competent candidates without an electoral basis or consensus). This can be done to foster any sociodemographic category (minorities, local interests, religious groups) and, in particular, it has been widely used to support minority candidates. In addition, even in the context of a closed list, parties may be forced to organize primaries to partially or fully influence the order of candidates. Halfway between these two extremes, parties may let subdistricts within the voting district decide on the set of candidates and then bargain on their position within the list. A second conjecture regards the quality of elected politicians. With a closed list, the quality of a candidate, however defined, is decided by the party leader. So it is the party leader who decides whether to promote a candidate on the basis of loyalty or on the basis of abilities. With a preferential list, however, voters decide the order of elections and thus have greater freedom to choose according to their preferences. It is important to stress that competition does not always result in better quality candidates. Especially when districts are big, electoral campaigns become very costly; so the allocation of votes may be more influenced by the amount of spending rather than by the abilities of the candidates. A third conjecture explores the efforts of candidates. With a closed list, only marginal candidates are willing to put effort into the electoral campaign: They will be elected only if the party obtains more votes than expected. Intuitively, this effect is stronger the smaller the magnitude of the district (a smaller number of votes is necessary to obtain seats). On the contrary, with a preferential list, competition among candidates on the same list should increase in proportion to the size of the district, since the number of competitors increases. Finally, party lists may affect the size of parties; for instance, with closed list members of the party who are not loyal to the party leader can only obtain representation by splitting from the party and running independently. Paolo Balduzzi See also Democracy; Districting; Electoral Systems; Party Systems

Further Readings Cox, G. W. (1997). Making votes count: Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, M., & Mitchell, P. (Eds.). (2005). The politics of electoral systems. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lijphart, A. (1994). Electoral systems and party systems. A study of twenty-seven democracies, 1945–1990. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Mueller, D. C. (2003). Public choice III. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Taagepera, R. (2007). Predicting party size. The logic of simple electoral systems. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Party Systems A party system is a widespread organizational modality for allocating and distributing power and for providing government coalitions in modern democracies. A party system may even define the level or the presence of a democracy. Parties collect votes—representing citizens’ preferences—and turn them into political power; by the interaction of parties within the system, a governing entity (possibly a coalition) emerges. So parties are basic and almost necessary concepts in representative democracies, where voters delegate power to candidates, but are also effective tools to inform voters and to convey opinions in direct democracies. This entry offers a description and classification of party systems and ­discussion on their determinants and effects.

Classifying Party Systems The most straightforward way to classify a party system is to refer to the number of parties acting in a country. Hence, it is possible to define at least three types of party systems, namely single-party, two-party, and multiparty systems. Of course, counting parties is not such an easy task. A system can be defined either by all parties running for elections or only by parties obtaining seats, hence obtaining effective allocation of power. And it is necessary to have a criterion about the possible presence of two or more independent parties, constantly running or governing together in coalitions (sometimes referred to as “sister parties”). Most importantly, some additional questions make it clear how unsatisfactory the numerical criterion can be. The first question is about the classification of a country where one single party constantly keeps the power even if a multitude of little parties participate in elections; the second question is about the consistency in the same category (i.e.,

Patriarchy

two-party system) of countries with two alternating ruling parties, and of countries where one of the several parties is never part of the governing coalition. Hence, relevance, or effectiveness, has to be defined in order to have a more precise picture of a party system. Relevance relates to at least two additional dimensions: size, usually measured as vote share in elections or as a party’s share of seats in parliament; and relative position, in other words, the ability of a party to participate in a government coalition, independent of its size. For instance, according to some coalition theories, central parties take part in most governing coalitions not necessarily because of their electoral strength but mainly due to their strategic political position, which serves as a connection between leftist and rightist parties, or as a device to isolate extreme positions. Clearly, other factors may be considered: first of all, polarization, or the ideological distance between parties, which in turn affects their relative position or distance; second, interaction, or the ability or willingness of parties to cooperate with or support each other. All these elements together define the party system and influence each other; it is thus very difficult to disentangle the specific effect of each one of them from that of the others. On this basis, a more widely accepted classification of party systems is single party, hegemonic party, dominant party (previously nested in the single-party system), two party, multiparty with limited pluralism, and multiparty with extreme pluralism (previously nested in multiparty).

Explaining Party Systems Party systems are usually explained by two different determinants, sometimes proposed as alternative explanations. On the one hand, a party system may be seen as the result of a particular electoral system. Two wellknown statements in political science are Duverger’s law and Duverger’s hypothesis. The former states that majoritarian systems (with single-member districts) tend to favor two-party systems, in particular when the support of smaller parties is evenly distributed across a country; the latter establishes that elections characterized by multimember districts (i.e., where more than one candidate can obtain a seat in a specific district) lead to multiparty systems. The logic is intuitive and hinges on the strategic behavior of voters, who tend to support only parties or candidates who can actually compete for a seat. Hence, these statements mean that plurality rule creates party systems characterized by a lower number of parties (that is, two) with respect to proportional rule. Nonetheless, the causal relation may be inverted. Any law, thus also any electoral law, is determined by and within a preexisting party system aiming at settling

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its power. Under this view, electoral systems are thus consequences rather than causes. But apart from the presence of exceptions due to country-specific elements, empirical research has fundamentally confirmed ­Duverger’s intuitions. Hence, it is possible to state that electoral systems are both cause and consequence of party s­ ystems. On the other hand, party systems are also influenced by the social structure of a country. The heterogeneity of a population may tend to give birth to heterogeneous, and therefore numerous, political ­positions and parties. In contrast, a very homogeneous society will tend to be represented by a more limited number of parties. Despite being often presented as alternative views, the role of the heterogeneity of social structure (often referred as “cleavages”) and the role of electoral systems are surely correlated. For instance, plurality favors two-party systems as long as minor parties’ support is evenly distributed across a country. But whenever this is not true and there is concentration of a minority in a specific territory (a very clear example of heterogeneous social structure), the effect of the electoral rule on the party system is not so straightforward. Paolo Balduzzi See also Democracy; Electoral Systems; Party List

Further Readings Cox, G. W. (1997). Making votes count: Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Goodin, R. E., & Petit, P. (Eds.). (1993). A companion to contemporary political philosophy. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Lijphart, A. (1994). Electoral systems and party systems. A study of twenty-seven democracies, 1945–1990. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Mueller, D. C. (2003). Public choice III. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Sartori, G. (1976). Parties and party systems. A framework for analysis, vol. 1. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Taagepera, R. (2007). Predicting party size. The logic of simple electoral systems. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Patriarchy Patriarchy is the institutionalized domination of women and children by men. Patriarchy is important because it is one of the historically most enduring inequalities in political life; it has also had a most profound effect on

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political behavior. Patriarchy—varying in both form and content—has been conceptualized as both ahistorical and universal. Patriarchy has several institutionalizations. In the privatized form, men (typically the fathers) exercise their dominion within the family, in both extended and nuclear families. In its public form, patriarchy is found in the political arena, in religious organizations, in ­corporations, and elsewhere. This entry looks at advocates and critiques of patriarchy.

Advocates of Patriarchy Patriarchy has been advocated from time immemorial by religions around the globe. Among examples, the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, the Analects of Confucius, the epistle to the Ephesians in the New ­Testament, and the Surah An-Nisa in the Qur’an all promoted patriarchy. The Protestant Jean Calvin continued the patriarchal argument in his Commentary on Timothy. Patriarchy was thus understood to be divinely ordained—conflating the relation between god(s) and humans with both public patriarchy and familial patriarchy. More recently, the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–1791) advised his wife in 1744 to be content with being a private, insignificant person. The Mormon apostle Heber Kimball equated taking another wife—in polygamy—to buying another cow. The Southern Baptist media figure Pat Robertson stated in a fundraising letter in 1992 that the Equal Rights Amendment was part of a socialist, antifamily political movement that encouraged women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. Philosophers have also promoted patriarchy, striving to give more rational argumentation. Aristotle, for instance, argued in his Politics that men were by nature superior to women, and his student, Alexander, helped disseminate this notion throughout the ancient Middle East. Thomas Aquinas later echoed Aristotle on this point in his enormously influential Summa Theologica. As women’s suffrage slowly advanced and the modern professions emerged, the professionals tended to use their prestige to advocate on behalf of patriarchy. Consider the adage of Sigmund Freud, arguably the most influential psychologist in the 20th century: “Anatomy is destiny.” From this premise, Freud argued that human groups developed the libidinal ties of members to the (male) leader. The eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons argued in 1940 that the separation of sex (read: “gender”) roles— a separation that advantaged men—related to the necessity of maintaining family solidarity in modern society.

His patriarchal conceptions, conflating familial patriarchy and public patriarchy, were extremely influential in family studies through the 1960s.

Critiques of Patriarchy Patriarchy has been criticized on a number of grounds, including democratic rights, biologism, and class struggle. It has been criticized by both modernist and postmodernist thought. These critiques present a wideranging and rich analysis of patriarchy. With the emergence of the 18th-century bourgeois republics, the possibility of extending the democratic struggle to women and oppressed minorities was increasingly recognized. The abolition of chattel slavery and domestic slavery moved apace. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an example of the 18th-century liberal critique of patriarchy. Harriet Taylor Mill wrote The Enfranchisement of Women in 1851. The liberal critique sought reform, limiting itself to working within the bourgeois social order to secure women’s franchise and other democratic rights. After the emancipation of slaves in the United States and the slow recognition of women’s rights, the liberal position was transcended by more radical critiques and forms of political participation. The radical critiques included biologistic as well as social and cultural arguments. Biologistic speculations about women’s “penis envy” were countered by psychiatrist Karen Horney’s allegations of men’s “womb envy.” One notable distinction among social and cultural critiques was between Marxist and non-Marxist analyses. Marxist analyses provided critiques of both capitalist exploitation and patriarchy. Capitalist exploitation was critiqued in Karl Marx’s Capital, addressing the sphere of production of surplus value. Patriarchy was critiqued in Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, addressing the sphere of reproduction at the familial and the societal levels. Engels’ work drew upon Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society. Some subsequent Marxists have focused their attention on the critique of capitalist exploitation alone; however, others have theorized to address both sides of this exploitative totality of modern society. Wally Seccombe’s writings on Marxism and demography gave further specification to the patriarchal forms sketched by Engels. Another example addressing both sides can be found in the work of feminist economist Heidi Hartmann. An instance of the non-Marxist critique of patriarchy is Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, which sought in 1970 to uncover the biologistic relations of reproduction that drive history.

Patrimonialism

An important factor in the critique of patriarchy was the emergence of the feminine voice in anthropology. Margaret Mead, for instance, carefully framed her early ethnographic critiques so as not to be dismissed as a feminist. Hortense Powdermaker, another early anthropologist, was able to be more explicit. By the 1970s, the feminine voice in anthropology could speak quite boldly, openly, and compellingly, criticizing the apologetics of patriarchy on theoretical as well as—perhaps most importantly—on evidentiary grounds. Finally, the development of new methods of a­ nalyzing and amalgamating large numbers of research studies, called meta-analysis and meta-synthesis, has facilitated the systematic and comprehensive review of hundreds of studies of gender differences. As a result of metaanalysis of a large number of research studies, Janet Shibley Hyde has proposed the gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. Extending her findings, Ethan Zell and colleagues have found, through meta-synthesis of an even larger number of studies, compelling support for the gender similarities hypothesis. These findings suggest that patriarchy—the non-equality of various capacities of men and women in the familial and public spheres—cannot be sustained on evidentiary grounds. Gordon Welty See also Essentialism; Feminism; Gender Bias; Genetic Essentialism; Liberalism; Marxism; Women’s Liberation Movement

Further Readings Beechey, V. (1979). On patriarchy. Feminist Review, 3, 66–82. Hyde, J. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60, 581–592. Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mann, S. A. (2012). Doing feminist theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. World Economic Forum. Gender gap report. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. Zell, E., Krizan, Z., & Teeter, S. R. (2015). Evaluating gender similarities and differences using metasynthesis. American Psychologist, 70, 10–20.

Patrimonialism At the most general level, patrimonialism refers to a social logic arising in diverse settings shaped through

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monopolization of desirable resources (“patrimony”) by one party, who negotiates mutual obligations through the controlled distribution of those resources and thereby exerts power over others in ways that may be culturally and institutionally legitimated. Patrimonialism can be the central ordering feature or shape or undermine social relationships primarily organized on some other basis. Myriad other factors affect the character of patrimonial relationships. Scholarship has explored the significance of both historical and modern forms of patrimonialism. The foundational analysis by Max Weber, in Economy and Society, offers a sweeping comparative political sociology focused largely on premodern ­societies—from China and India to the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and (in passing) precolonization Latin America. In Weber’s analysis, patrimonialism ­originated in prehistoric traditional relationships of patriarchy, by which the family head controls resources and alliances are formed through marriages. Even within patriarchal families, authority was and is never absolute. Widespread and complex diffusions of patriarchal authority beyond households introduced new possibilities and problems in patrimonial domination. The first developments involved families with resources that no longer could be managed by family members within a single household: They could either incorporate trusted outsiders through “fictive kinship” or establish patrimonial relationships with relatives and others beyond the household. Patrimonial domination could encompass social relationships involving land and its exploitation, grain mills, irrigation control, transportation and trade routes, military forces, trade, crafts, and other orbits of social life. Weber treated feudalism as a theoretically marginal but historically important variant of patrimonialism in which vassals serve a lord who, compared to other patrimonial arrangements, is more dependent on them for economic, political, and military support. The result, in feudal societies, could be cascading “subinfeudation,” in which vassals to a lord themselves become lords of other vassals. Given potential rivalry for control of overlapping resources, the consequences in parts of medieval Europe were political instability and what British historian Perry Anderson has called “parcellized sovereignty,” resolved only with the rise of “absolutist” patrimonial states. Both in Europe and elsewhere, Weber showed, patrimonial rulers claim authority not only in their personal domains but across entire territories. A patrimonial ruler treats all resources and individuals as part of a single jurisdictional realm, ultimately subject to use of force, based on the ruler’s capacity for directly

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organizing and supplying a military apparatus via the patrimonial state. The patrimonial ruler typically extends power by reconstituting household functions (supplies, security, performance of rituals, management of wealth) through grants of offices and other benefices (land, mill fees, tolls, tax-farming opportunities, etc.) coupled with grantee obligations to provide specified resources in return. Personal trust and deference trump expertise, and the ruler therefore typically draws functionaries from family, slaves, or other dependent status groups. Patrimonial state formation has diverse consequences. The ruler is precariously dependent on the solidarity of office functionaries, who typically have substantial de facto discretionary “private” power, so long as they satisfy their patrimonial obligations. Their decisions are thus often capricious, arbitrary, and based on favoritism, gifts, bribes, and deference by supplicants. In effect, functionaries may engage in “sub-patrimonialization” that parallels subinfeudation but with more limited autonomy (especially when an office or benefice typically is subject to patrimonial revocation). Given that office- and benefice-holders often pursue personal interests, patrimonial power may be difficult to harness for state purposes. Furthermore, patrimonial power tends to weaken with distance from the ruler. Also, personal interests push toward circumstances in which offices and benefices may be bought and sold, or inherited. The effectiveness of patrimonial rule depends on the state’s capacity to maintain monopolization of resources and solidarity, or at least obedience. On the one hand, historically, patrimonial monopolization tended to curtail developments exogenous to the state and thus inhibited social change. On the other hand, in early modern Europe, as John R. Hall, Julia Adams, and others have shown, where patrimonial regimes (and semiautonomous cities) competed with one another, interests in monopolization drove familial and state “patrimonial capitalism,” yielding exploration, trade, and colonization through grants of land and other rights. Yet because patrimonial states competed with one another, geographic monopolies became undermined by market competition in the increasingly global capitalist world economy. Increasingly, state interests in efficiency and effectiveness of rule and capitalist interests in marketized fungibility of land and commodities led to the subordination and transformation of patrimonial dynamics. Already in patrimonial capitalism, Weber recognized that patrimonialism might become fused with other social forms. True, social scientists in the 20th century characterized patrimonial arrangements as particularistic and personalistic, and therefore antithetical to ­modern universalistic and legal-rational principles that foster predictability in social relationships. Nevertheless, modern societies are complex. Family patriarchy

continues to be significant. And social research since the 1960s has identified other, more public modern patrimonial relationships. Mostly, research has treated these as remnants of “traditional” society lacking a sharp division between public and private, and thus, especially as a developmental impediment of less developed societies; antimodern corruption in relatively more developed societies such as Russia; a basis of personalistic and “machine” politics in developed societies; or the province of relatively autonomous gangs, mafias, and warlords operating at the margins of social formations. More recent research, however, shows that patrimonial logics are embedded in important modern legal structures such as the corporation charter, patents, and royalties. Further, what may be called modern patrimonialism occurs in a variety of venues where monopolization of resources structures relationships of obligation. The modern state typically claims the capacity to control, regulate, and distribute use rights for key resources, beginning with land, water, and minerals, and extending to electrical and telephone systems, radio and television bandwidth, the Internet, and other resources as they emerge. Additionally, both business corporations and professions (e.g., law, medicine) that are established within state legal frameworks may operate as de facto states within the domains of their control, monopolizing rights to make, sell, and practice, distributing those rights through franchises, royalties, and licensing. Patrimonialism has been significant from prehistoric times to the present, and it will persist in the future. Today, researchers are increasingly concerned with moving beyond modern social theories that anticipated the triumph of legal-rational institutions and a sharp division between the economic logic of the market and the social logic of personal networks and obligation. The task is to understand the hybridic relations among different social logics and institutional patterns, including patrimonial ones. John R. Hall See also Absolutism; Clientelism; Patriarchy

Further Readings Adams, J. (2005). The familial state. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hall, J. R. (2015). Patrimonialism in America. In M. M. Charrad & J. Adams (Eds.), Patrimonial capitalism and empire (Vol. 28, pp. 7–41). Bingley, England: Emerald. Roth, G. (1971). Personal rulership, patrimonialism, and empirebuilding. In R. Bendix & G. Roth, Scholarship and partisanship (pp. 156–169). Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, M. (2013). Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1922)

Patriotism

Patriotism Patriotism is an elusive concept: It refers to the love of—and attachment to—one’s own country, and to positive attitudes and beliefs related to it. Patriotism is an important motivational force in the political behavior of individuals and groups. On the one hand, it helps to foster solidarity and unity among group members; on the other hand, it helps to mobilize them when necessary. Patriotism is studied in many disciplines, including political science, history, and philosophy. This entry discusses different definitions and categorizations of patriotism from the perspectives of social psychology, with a particular focus on whether patriotism leads to outgroup hostility.

Different Definitions of Patriotism Patriotism is defined in scientific literature in various ways. First, patriotism is referred to as a positive emotion, as in-group love, or a feeling of attachment and pride. Second, it is used as a synonym for national identity or identification. Third, it is defined as a positive attitude toward one’s own nation or country. Finally, it is understood as a moral belief system, an ideology that obligates individuals to serve and protect their country and its members. At its extreme, this loyalty should override all other of forms of group loyalties, such as those toward one’s family or friends. The patria is the object of patriotism, the entity individuals should love and protect. There is variation on how this term is defined in the literature. The dictionary definition of the term is “country” or “homeland.” This means that it refers not only to people but also to a political entity and a territory or soil. Nevertheless, in sociopsychological literature, the object of patriotism is often understood solely in terms of a group of people. This group can, in turn, be defined in various ways based on common religion, language, habits, norms, or values, for example. It is important to be aware of how the patria is defined in each context; depending on how it is understood, the meaning of patriotism changes. Furthermore, the definitions of patria influence how outgroups are perceived, for example.

Patriotism as a Form of In-Group Love or Out-Group Hate There are different views on whether patriotism is a relatively stable set of characteristics possessed by individuals or as a discourse that is maintained by different agents in society. The former is a more individualistic explanation emphasizing stability, whereas the latter is more of a societal explanation emphasizing the

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possibility of change dependent on the impact of society and institutions. One common method of explaining the meaning of patriotism is to differentiate it from a sense of nationalism. The term sense of nationalism is usually defined as a positive attitude toward one’s own nation, combined with a belief in its dominance and superiority, whereas patriotism is related only to positive attitudes and attachment toward one’s own nation. In other words, whereas the sense of nationalism combines both ingroup love and out-group hate, patriotism consists solely of in-group love. Nevertheless, this notion is easy to impugn. In history, individuals have derogated outgroups not only because they perceived their nation to be superior or ought to dominate others, but because they wanted to protect their nation and express their loyalties. It is therefore possible that there is not only one type of patriotism, but many. There are various traditions to categorize different forms of patriotism. This entry discusses the one proposed by Erwin Staub, a researcher from the United States. Staub makes a distinction between blind and critical patriotism. These two types reflect different characteristics. The concept of blind patriotism signifies uncritical loyalty—my country right or wrong. The moral imperative is that group members should support any action engaged in by one’s in-group, regardless of its consequences. This in-group, however, is not necessarily the whole nation. It may be a certain political, religious, or ethnic group. The moral imperative is that care and welfare should be reserved only for this group. It follows that the unambiguously defined boundaries between groups become important, and outgroups are perceived of as threatening. By contrast, constructive patriotism requires that national attachment should be in balance with respect for human rights, and individuals should resist political agents if they are undermining basic human values. Although the distinction between blind and constructive patriotism has received empirical support, the view that patriotism reflects individual characteristics or other intrapsychic factors has also been criticized, particularly by researchers who understand patriotism to be a belief system or a discourse. One such researcher is Michael Billig. Billig, from the United Kingdom, criticizes attempts to categorize individuals or nations on the basis of whether their in-group love leads to outgroup derogation. He argues that the more important issue is to understand the roots of “hot” nationalism’s power (i.e., patriotic passions and out-group hostility). He highlights the importance of banal nationalism, the way of life that is daily lived in nation-states. Although this way of life is not necessarily understood to be nationalistic or patriotic by those who live it, it contains many elements that produce and maintain national

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identity and remind individuals of their obligations and duties toward their nation. This is why, under threat, for example, individuals are ready to express their patriotic emotions through aggression toward an outgroup. Billig’s ideas are a reminder that patriotism involves a paradox. Patriotism emphasizes altruistic behavior and loyalty, but in times of crisis, this altruistic behavior can turn into out-group hostility. To conclude, patriotism is a complex concept that is understood in social scientific literature in many ways. The epistemological perspective adopted by the researcher is one factor that affects how this concept is defined. Eerika Finell See also Discrimination; Group Ideologies; Identity Politics; Nationalism; Political Discourse; Political Ideology; Prejudice

Further Readings Bar-Tal, D., & Staub, E. (1997). Patriotism in the lives of individuals and nations. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London, England: Sage. Sapountzis, A. (2008). Towards a critical social psychological account of national sentiments: Patriotism and nationalism revisited. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 34–50. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00050.x

Peacemaking The concept of peacemaking is one of the triumvirate of tasks involved in resolving international and civil wars and violence. It concerns stopping the physical fighting so that efforts toward establishing the bases of a lasting peace can take place. The next two steps are generally considered to be peacekeeping, that is, dispatching neutral forces or observers to preserve the cease-fire by separating and mediating between the previous combatants; and peace building, where steps are taken to rebuild the war-torn society and lay the foundation for reconstruction, repatriation of refugees, resumption of effective governance, reconciliation of the warring factions, and enduring peace. For the last step to be effective, peace theorists argue that the parties must get beyond their clashing positions on specific issues to resolve their basic underlying “interests,” which drive the conflict and cause it to recur; interests which, as theorist John Burton has noted, often involve “needs” such as security, territory, power, resources, status, and honor. To get to the last step, however, a peaceful turn from violence must be established and then maintained

through peacekeeping machinery, or as some would say, peacekeeping is only possible if there is a peace to keep. It would appear that the initial peacemaking might be the least complicated of these three phases, but as the catastrophic multiyear fighting in Syria and other places has shown, silencing the guns can be extremely complicated and difficult, especially when external support to the warring sides continues. Most conflicts in today’s world are indeed internal to countries, that is, involving or verging on civil wars. According to the Uppsala University Conflict Data Program, prior to the end of the cold war in 1989, some 58% of internal wars since World War II have ended with military victory by one side over the other, on the pattern of the 19th-century U.S. Civil War. Between 1990 and 2005, however, 38% of such wars ended, at least temporarily, in cease-fires or agreements, with only 14% concluded by victories (though victories seemed more decisively to preclude conflicts resuming). Stopping the shooting by establishing cease-fires is the initial hurdle in peace negotiations, though many times cease-fires themselves break down as the parties accuse each other of cheating or as one side uses the respite to rearm. Peacemaking can involve pressure to stop the fighting, whether by anguished civilians or by outside parties, such as international organizations (the United Nations or regional organizations), powerful foreign states, or regional neighbors. Such external involvements can range from actual military intervention (e.g., establishment of no-fly zones or backing one side or the other in the fighting) to economic or arms embargoes and sanctions—that is, penalties targeted at the leadership on one or both sides—or to diplomatic initiatives designed to bring the parties together for constructive and comprehensive talks.

Peacemaking Phases Parties to a dispute can signal their readiness for serious peace talks by sending out “peace feelers,” through intermediaries or by signals to (e.g., voluntary or unilateral cease-fire) or direct contacts with the enemy. These feelers can stem from exhaustion after long and arduous fighting, from civilian pressure (such as the Liberian Women’s Peace Movement of the early 2000s), from high costs and casualties, or, as William Zartman has postulated, from “mutually hurting stalemates,” that is, situations where neither party sees a way toward imminent victory and each party is suffering significantly from the situation either because of casualties, financial costs, battlefield setbacks, notable disadvantages in power relations, or failure to impose their own preferences. Unfortunately, though, peacemaking signals can be misread, misinterpreted, ignored, or disbelieved by

Peacemaking

the opposite side, rationalizing such gestures as signs of weakness or trickery requiring a rededication to fight on. Usually some sort of initial talks, whether secret, face-to-face, indirect, or mediated (e.g., “shuttle diplomacy” where the third-party mediator goes between the parties) is needed to set the stage for cease-fire terms to be hammered out. Issues at this stage generally include procedural questions such as the length of time for commitment to nonviolence, prisoner exchanges, no-go areas where the parties agree to leave each other alone, and understandings about what has to take place for full peace talks to ensue. Nevertheless, this initial cease-fire stage can be a crucial first step in trust building, allowing the parties to believe they can realistically deal with one other since they can hold each other accountable about whether the peacemaking terms are being observed. In the early stages of a civil conflict, peacemaking may be ignored by parties still confident of victory, but the longer a conflict drags on—extending into what are sometimes called intractable disputes defying settlement over periods of years and even decades—the more pressure there might be for at least beginning talks. Unfortunately, though, the bitterness and distrust built up over time with attacks on each other’s families, towns, and villages, as between Israel and the Palestinians, can retard the willingness to buy into serious and respectful negotiations. The term asymmetric warfare has come to dominate the discourse on civil conflict, entailing the frequent fighting now seen between official governmental armies and smaller, seemingly less powerful insurgent militias utilizing hit-and-run and ambush tactics. Yet even here, grudging respect can be generated if each party realizes the other is not going away, if each has demonstrated staying power and battlefield capabilities. It is at these times when third-party and constituent pressure for a settlement can open the way for dialogue and the silencing of guns. If third parties intervene to nudge or assist the combatants toward settlement, in other words to mediate a conflict, they might be considered either neutral or partial, if not toward one side of the dispute then to the idea of a settlement itself. It is not entirely necessary for mediators to be neutral to be effective, although in some circumstances that may be expected. Partial or biased mediators can succeed if they are considered acceptable to the parties and put aside some of their partisanship to promote understandings or collaborate with other interveners to create a rough balance of commitments that stress peace above victory. Mediators’ and interveners’ own interests might be furthered if fighting can be halted and peace promoted, as the threat of war’s spread across borders and of regional destabilization— conditions getting more and more out of control—are reduced.

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Mediation itself can be a delicate matter in peacemaking. Studies have shown that culture and traditions of local dispute settlement matter considerably in gaining the disputants’ trust. In some circumstances, local notables from the conflict region might be the most effective go-betweens since they are familiar to and trusted by the parties and understand the parties’ customs, needs, and expectations, as for example on the question of not losing face or being humiliated by the terms of settlement. In other instances, prestigious global figures, such as United Nations (UN) representatives, or envoys from major states or organizations such as the European Union, can offer the kind of clout that demonstrates international concern and the prospect of significant outside support and guarantees for a settlement. Here diplomatic tracks can be seen taking hold, as sometimes talks are held (1) among designated highranking governmental, military, and organizational officials (track 1); (2) among lower level officials and civic leaders from religious or nongovernmental groups in facilitated or private discussions to “get to know each other” better and set the stage for leaders to agree (track 2); or (3) among ordinary citizens in people-to-people diplomacy, that is, discussions or joint activities (e.g., sporting matches) that break the ice and bring the grass roots into the peace process (track 3). Indeed for peace ultimately to take hold it is important that citizens accept the arrangements and change their views of their adversaries. The term multitrack diplomacy entails the use of more than one of these tracks at a time to break down walls of suspicion and reinforce the peacemaking initiative. The Syrian war experience from 2011 through 2016, as well as the Ukraine fighting in 2014–2015, have shown that outside major power and regional intervention might or might not make peacemaking prospects better. Military intervention, often meant to force parties to back down or stop fighting, can actually harden local fighters’ determination, especially when the fighters can find sanctuaries in which to hide and regroup and outside patrons willing to back them to fight off their opponents. On the other hand, extended fighting and outside pressure can also produce willingness to hold peace talks and establish cease-fires (whether shaky or not), as they did in Ukraine. This can at least diminish the civilian casualties, destruction, and victimization that so often go along with today’s political violence.

Peacemaking Prerequisites For peacemaking to be successful, factors that drive conflict must be reconciled at three levels: local, regional,

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and global. In a situation such as Syria, for example, local ethnopolitical divisions, as between Sunni and Shi’ite Islamic groups as well as Christians, Druze, Kurds, and others, helped spur the conflict as the Syrian government used harsh measures in 2011 to crack down on political protesters, driving the parties toward armed confrontation. The impact of the regionwide Arab Spring revolutions to topple dictators in 2011 impacted the Syrian protests, along with the regional cold war for political control between Saudi Arabia and Iran (and their respective allies), also involving nearby Turkey, which opposed both the Syrian regime and Kurdish militias in Syria and Iraq. These Middle Eastern disputes produced competing Islamic and political undercurrents, setting the stage for aid to warring Syrian factions and a prolonged civil war which soon spread across borders and produced millions of refugees. Finally, at the global level, American, European, and Russian governments became engaged either to oppose or defend the Syrian regime, and then to react to the growing extremism among the regime’s local and regional opponents. These world powers, along with regional states engaged in military air campaigns against various rebel factions while the Syrian government, backed by Russia and Iran, continued their own anti-rebel bombardments with the help of the Lebanese political militia, Hezbollah. International organizations such as the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Gulf Cooperation Council weighed in with largely failed peace initiatives. Reportedly even global environmental factors such as an extended drought exacerbated the conflict by driving diverse populations into urban areas. Steps were finally taken tentatively in 2015 and 2016 toward a cease-fire, brokered by the major powers, between the Assad regime and at least some of the rebels, but with uncertain prospects. Thus, to establish even an initial cease-fire in such complex conflict situations involves multiple local, regional, and global actors. Similarly, regional talks in the Ukraine conflict in 2014–2015 involved key European Union members, the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and other local actors and militia, resulting in a fragile cease-fire agreement and commitments to allow expanded local autonomy for antigovernment groups in eastern Ukraine along with future elections. It is important to have buy-in from major players at all three levels for negotiations to begin and move forward; delicate and persistent multitrack diplomacy may also be helpful in extending and preserving the understandings and terms of agreement. One of the great impediments to peacemaking within countries, which may not apply so much to peacemaking between countries, can be the parties’ unwillingness to recognize each other’s legitimacy in the first place. Holding talks can be seen as conferring

recognition, whether by rebels who despise the government, or by the government that inevitably these days refers to rebels as terrorists. If real terror tactics, such as indiscriminate attacks and bombing in civilian neighborhoods, are employed by either side, the slogan “no negotiations with terrorists” can be invoked. Yet negotiated agreements even with extremist groups have occasionally resulted in grudging exchanges of prisoners and terms of extended cease-fires, as in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Agreements or the process of achieving them can cause splintering and disagreement among the parties, or between the parties and their political rivals. Those who see themselves disadvantaged by the talks and the evolving terms of settlement may become rejectionists, those extremists who seek to scuttle the talks and subvert the agreements even by violent means. The parties, the mediators, and those supporting the negotiations must resolve and be willing to persevere courageously through such acts of defiance and provocation, which in the case of assassinations for example, such as that of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin amid ongoing peace talks in 1995, can prove very difficult.

Methods of Peacemaking Some of the methods for unfreezing and making progress in seemingly intractable standoffs include the following: Conflict assessment, to create understanding of the positions, demands, and even basic underlying interests (needs) of each side; Conflict transformation, to begin to reframe the dispute into something more manageable, whether that entails agreeing only on minimum steps, such as prisoner exchanges, or seeing aspects of the problem that can be redefined and resolved jointly by gradual mutual accommodation or third-party reassurance or guarantees; Conflict deescalation of both fighting and the language used by the parties toward each other, to promote reassurance, as when the term enemy is no longer used; one form of deescalation is to begin listing acceptable options for a mutual accord and to find some representatives on each side willing to discuss these options seriously and respectfully.

Such moves reflect a semblance of willingness between the parties to co-exist, at least for a transitional or temporary period, and hopefully to commit to a process whereby political differences are settled through peaceful processes. Given outrageous past behavior on the part of one or both sides, a level of minimal tolerance may be difficult to achieve, but the realities of ­no-win situations can make acceptance necessary.

Peacemaking

Among the issues and topics on a peacemaking ­ egotiation table, then, are (1) technicalities of disenn gagement and deescalation, such as mutual force pullbacks, recognition of boundaries (often referred to as green or red lines and demilitarized zones), prisoner releases and exchanges, and allowance of humanitarian relief; (2) protocols for bargaining about political positions and demands, such as return of territory or property, a share of resources or decision-making power, factional disarmament, new elections or governmental transition; and (3) protocols for coming to grips with deeper interest-based political differences, including security guarantees, territorial autonomy, partition or independence, procedural justice and equity, and terms of ethnic and political reconciliation. Conflict analysts have speculated on whether disputes over shares of government influence are easier to resolve in civil wars than in disputes over territorial control, with many claiming that power sharing is more challenging (as in countries like Lebanon) than territorial separation (as between India and Pakistan), though depending on circumstance, both are problematic for stable peace, especially in situations of high interethnic tension. Moving from the phases of peacemaking that entail cease-fires and initial understandings to serious comprehensive peace talks requires a perceived positive momentum as the process progresses. Parties must be satisfied that they remain better off not fighting than they were in the midst of combat. Conflict theorists sometimes refer to this perception in terms of BATNA, or the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. If one or more of the parties perceives that they are being systematically disadvantaged and that resuming the fight offers a better prospect, they will be likely to renege on the agreements and resume violence. Something akin to this happened over a period of years under Iraq’s postwar government, formed under American occupation, after the 2003 Iraq war. Disillusioned Sunni groups and former Ba’ath Party soldiers from the deposed Saddam Hussein regime deduced that they were being systematically deprived by the Shi’a dominated Iraqi government and its U.S. and Iranian patrons. They linked with global extremist organizations to form a cross-border insurgent movement known as the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS, or ISIL), and the most extreme forms of violence were adopted to take advantage of Iraqi and Syrian governmental weakness and establish a territorial foothold across the border as a step toward a new caliphate. Thus for agreements and peaceful government arrangements to work and survive, care must be taken that all relevant actors remain satisfied with the deal and that timely and equitable improvements in living conditions and political representation take place, all aspects of peace building. BATNA has always been a

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concern for successful peacemaking, but it has become even more complicated and challenging in an era where globalized networking through social media and clandestine travel and contacts have made it more difficult to contain the spread, appeal, and destructive capabilities of extreme rejectionists. To move beyond cease-fires and prenegotiation term-setting agreements, negotiators begin to consider interim, transitional, and finally, comprehensive settlements. Interim agreements can be terms under which expected changes in leadership or policy will begin, or agreements meant as a bridge to further negotiated settlements, elections, and plebiscites (where the public decides important questions about future relationships between parties, such as partition of land, regional autonomy, or independence). Transitional agreements can set up institutions to administer areas and allocate benefits for a set or indefinite period of time until permanent arrangements can be agreed. The intent of these measures is to set the stage for viable comprehensive agreements. Comprehensive peace arrangements get to the crux of the substantive political, and even existential (“Can my people reliably survive with your people?”) issues dividing the parties. They may set a framework for ­settlement, such as the famous Egyptian-Israeli formula of “land for peace” at the 1976 Camp David Accords, facilitated by U.S. president Jimmy Carter. The ­American commitment to underwrite the accords, with both ­substantial continuing military and economic aid and military monitoring (a form of peacekeeping) as a security guarantee to both sides, paved the way for Israel to return occupied territory in the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for the first Arab state’s formal diplomatic recognition and legally binding renunciation of the “state of war.” Although the peace was not cordial, it stood the test of time and the pressures of many nearby crises, fulfilling basic needs on both sides. Thus, peace may require organizational or institutional commitments that allow the parties to restructure formerly hostile relations and gain reassurance against renewed warfare. Peacemakers would do well to recall Nelson ­Mandela’s approach demonstrating the critical importance of timely leadership in peace processes, well portrayed in the 2009 documentary Invictus, as he opened fruitful discussion and came to terms with his long-time adversaries, the brutal South African apartheid regime. Without sacrificing his basic principles and commitment to majority rule, he utilized his deep cultural awareness and understanding of his foes, even to the point of learning their language, to promote “peace through dialogue,” and to reassure both his adversaries and his own constituents of his reliability and ability to lead. The peaceful power transition that followed,

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something few expected, was one of history’s most monumental peacemaking achievements. Frederic S. Pearson See also Civil Wars; Deterrence and International Relations; Just War Theory; Non-Aligned Nations; Nonviolence; Positive Peace; Propaganda; Tolerance for Ambiguity

Further Readings Alger, C. F. (2000, Spring). Challenges for peace researchers and peace builders in the twenty-first century: Education and coordination of a diversity of actors in applying what we are learning. International Journal of Peace Studies, 5(1), 1–13. Burton, J. (Ed.). (1993). Conflict: Human needs theory. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Carlin, J. (2009). Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the game that made a nation. New York, NY: Penguin. Griffiths, M., & Whitfield, T. (2010). Mediation ten years on: Challenges and opportunities for peacemaking. Geneva, Switzerland: Henry Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. Olson-Lounsbery, M., & Pearson, F. S. (2008). Civil wars: Internal struggles, global consequences. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Smith, A. L., & Smock, D. R. (2015). Managing a mediation process. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Stedman, S. J. (2001, May). Implementing peace agreements in civil wars: Lessons and recommendations for policy makers. New York, NY: International Peace Academy. Wallensteen, P. (2015). Understanding conflict resolution: War, peace and the global system (4th ed.). London, England: Sage. Yawanarajah, N., & Oueliet, J. (2003). Peace agreements. In G. Burgess & H. Burgess (Eds.), Beyond intractability. Boulder: University of Colorado. Retrieved from http://www .beyondintractability.org/essay/structuring-peace-agree Zartman, I. W. (2000). Ripeness: The hurting stalemate and beyond. In P. C. Stern & D. Druckman (Eds.), International conflict resolution after the cold war. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Personality Traits Personality traits refer to deep-seated differences in what individuals are like. In day-to-day life, many of us describe other people using adjectives like outgoing, open, or adventurous. When we use descriptions like that, we are generally talking about a person’s personality. Psychologists have long been interested in the ­measurement, causes, and consequences of personality traits. In fact, one branch of psychology is called ­personality psychology. Scholars who study personality are often interested in identifying, measuring, and describing individual psychological differences, ­ determining the causes of those differences, and ­ ­understanding the effects of personality. In general, psychologists have found evidence that personality is

remarkably stable over time, genetically heritable to at least some extent, and distinct from concepts like values and ideology. In addition, there is solid evidence that personality traits influence a wide range of individual attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions. Importantly, personality traits impact a range of political behaviors and attitudes of interest to psychologists and political scientists. After discussing how psychologists measure personality, this entry provides an overview of the intersection between personality psychology and political science.

Describing and Measuring Personality Many psychologists who study personality describe personality in terms of traits. One of the most well-known frameworks for describing and measuring personality is called the Big Five. The Big Five framework holds that most differences in personality can be grouped into five general domains. The Big Five traits are as follows: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability (or ­ Neuroticism). The acronym for these traits is OCEAN. In general, extraverts tend to be sociable, active, assertive, and energetic; agreeable people tend to be prosocial, altruistic, and trusting; conscientiousness people tend to be organized, dutiful, and to abide by norms; emotionally stable individuals tend to be calm, self-assured, and not anxious; and open individuals tend to be creative, curious, and open to new ideas. Although these personality traits have helped to understand individual differences, it is important to note that psychologists have identified a variety of other personality attributes, including authoritarianism, need for power, need to evaluate, need for cognition, need to belong, honesty/humility, altruism, need for influence, social dominance orientation, and conflict avoidance. Psychologists have also identified a higher order personality factor called the general factor of personality. People with high scores on the General Factor of Personality tend to be open minded, hardworking, outgoing, and emotionally stable. Personality traits are often measured using surveys. In many personality surveys, respondents are asked how well a variety of different words or phrases describe them (e.g., I am shy, I am talkative, I like to attend parties, etc.). Some personality batteries are quite short, containing as few as five or 10 items, and some are much longer, containing hundreds of items. Studies have documented that personality measures can be performed with reliability and validity. Selfreported measures of personality often correlate quite well with measures collected from one’s peers.

Personality and Politics There has been increasing interest in the effects of ­personality on political attitudes and behaviors. Both

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psychologists and political scientists have studied the relationship between personality and politics. Some studies have focused on the personalities of political elites, such as U.S. presidents, and others have focused on ordinary citizens. Many studies on mass political behavior have focused on the relationship between personality traits and political ideology. There have also been studies on the impact of personality traits on political orientations like efficacy, the sense of civic duty, and trust. A number of studies have focused on the effects of personality on measures of political engagement, such as voting in elections, volunteering for campaigns, and donating money to political causes and candidates.

Personality and Ideology There is a rich line of research on the link between individual personality traits and political ideology. Many such studies have focused on the impact of the Big Five traits on ideological identification. Scholars have identified a number of consistent findings. For instance, studies have repeatedly shown that those with high scores on Openness tend to be more liberal than those with low scores on Openness. In addition, those with high scores on Conscientiousness tend to be more conservative than those with low scores on this personality trait. Since personality traits have a genetic basis, the implication of such studies is thought provoking: perhaps some people are predisposed to respond to politics in certain ways.

Personality and Other Political Attitudes Although ideology is an important political orientation, it is certainly not the only one worth considering or the only one that has effects on political behavior. Political scientists have shown that people vary in the levels of political efficacy they feel, levels of civic duty, and levels of trust in government. Although studies have documented the link between demographics, political socialization, and political context and these attitudes, researchers have also considered whether personality traits shape how people feel about politics. Although this line of research is not as well developed as research on personality and ideology, scholars are beginning to uncover the relationship between personality and political attitudes like the sense of civic duty and political efficacy. Many of the Big Five traits and some lower level personality traits like altruism have statistically significant effects on feelings of political efficacy and civic duty.

Personality and Political Participation A number of different studies have been conducted on the effects of personality traits on political participation. Scholars are beginning to accumulate

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cross-national evidence on the relevance of personality to political engagement. Again, research has tended to focus on the Big Five, but some other traits like conflict avoidance, need to evaluate, and altruism have been integrated into studies on personality and participation. A number of consistent findings have emerged from this research. For instance, those with high scores on the extraversion trait tend to be much more politically active than those with low scores. In addition, those with high scores on conflict avoidance tend to be less participatory than those with low scores on this trait. While research on personality and political engagement is still developing, the insights so far have helped to provide a better understanding of why some people are more engaged in political life than others. Perhaps there is a set of traits that contribute to a “participatory personality.”

Mediation One line of research that has developed over the past several years entails examining the extent to which the effects of personality on political behavior are mediated by political attitudes. As was mentioned above, there have been studies showing that personality traits ­influence political attitudes and studies showing that personality traits influence political participation. Given political science research indicating that political attitudes influence political participation, it makes sense to think that perhaps some of the effects of personality on participation work through political attitudes. A number of studies have found evidence of direct and indirect (mediation) effects of personality traits. Research on this topic is still in its infancy but may provide a more nuanced understanding of how personality shapes political behavior.

Genes, Personality, and Political Behavior Another recent advance in the study of personality and political behavior entails the investigation of how genetic factors and personality traits come together to shape political behavior. Studies in political science have indicated that there is a genetic component to political behavior, and studies in psychology and behavior genetics have shown that there is a genetic component to personality traits. Thus, causality may move from genes to personality traits to political behavior or from genes to personality traits to political attitudes to political behavior. There have only been a few studies on the idea that personality traits mediate the relationship between genetic factors and political behavior; however, this line of study is likely to receive additional attention from scholars in the coming years. It is important to note that studies on the relationship between genetics,

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personality, and political behavior are not suggesting that genes or personality traits determine how participatory people are or what attitudes they hold. Instead, genes or personality traits shape the probability of ­participation or holding certain attitudes over others. Importantly, the context in which one is situated may shape the impact of personality or genetic factors on political behavior. Aaron C. Weinschenk See also Authoritarian Personality; Charisma; Locus of Control; Narcissism; Political Plasticity; Trust

Overview

Further Readings Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2004). Genetic influence on human psychology traits: A survey. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 148–151. Gerber, A. S., Huber, G. A., Doherty, D., Dowling, C. M., Raso, C., & Ha, S. E. (2011). Personality and participation in political processes. Journal of Politics, 73, 692–706. John, O., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The big five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. Pervin & J. Oliver (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 102–138). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Mondak, J. (2010). Personality and the foundations of political behavior. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Mondak, J., Hibbing, M., Canache, D., Seligson, M., & Anderson, M. (2010). Personality and civic engagement: An integrative framework for the study of trait effects on political behavior. American Political Science Review, 104, 85–110.

Persuasion See Hearts and Minds Approach

Physical Appearance Political Candidates

religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, culture, socioeconomic status, or another foundation of identity coexist, are recognized, respected, accepted, and engaged with on the basis of their diversity. In pluralistic societies, there is also a specific effort to include and protect minorities’ civil and human rights as well as their access to resources such as education and health care as well as the fair and equal ability to participate in all levels of public institutions, including those of political authority. Pluralism involves attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This entry discusses various definitions of pluralism in different contexts as well as related concepts and theories, measures, and challenges.

and

See Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of

Pluralism Pluralism is a theory, system, or form of society in which two or more groups defined by race, creed,

Pluralism, as the word implies, describes the condition or state of being plural. In a pluralistic society, a variety of groups of people are represented. Any situation can be considered plural if there are more than two groups of people who identify differently. But a plural or diverse setting is only potentially pluralistic. Pluralism, as opposed to simply being plural or diverse, means that people who identify or group themselves differently are accepted by the members of the other groups. Pluralism involves recognizing, accepting, and engaging with difference as well as protecting it out of a sense of respect for the value that that diversity brings. It includes the idea that people of distinctive backgrounds, traditions, ways of life, or perspectives coming together to coexist in and contribute to a society is inherently a good thing and is worth pursuing and protecting. Pluralism is not, however, a blank check for wholesale or uncritical acceptance of all identity claims. Claims must be ­ evaluated—for ­example, thieves do not form a viable group that ought to be protected alongside racial or religious minorities. Pluralism precludes the acceptance of positions that prevent or prohibit pluralism or harm others. Political groups that advocate segregation; discriminatory treatment; ­deportation; profiling of, or violence toward, individuals because they are female, gay, trans­ gender, ­Christian, Sikh, Muslim, atheist, Black, brown, disabled, socialist, tall, or conservative, and so on are not afforded a protected status under the concept of pluralism. Pluralism is also discussed in terms of social and legal justice, religious diversity, democracy, and economic justice. Political pluralism is largely concerned with representation, participation, multiparty elections, civil rights, and equality before the law.

Political Pluralism Pluralism, in political theory, refers to the recognition of multiple political parties or to a system of power sharing with various sources of authority including

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individuals or groups that hold office; pluralism may also signify the devolution of governmental authority to states within a union. Political pluralism also involves a commitment to civil rights and free and fair democratic elections where multiple parties compete and share power. Within these basic contours, five types of political pluralism are described in the following sections.

Elite Pluralism Elite pluralists recognize multiple groups, including minorities, but believe that certain groups should have more power than others. Wealth disparities, for example may justify different levels of power. In the United States, the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision found that money acts as free speech and thereby removed the limits on how much corporations could donate to political campaigns. This enabled people and organizations with more money to contribute more to candidates and therefore potentially grants them greater access to political power and influence.

Neopluralism Neopluralism also recognizes multiple groups but sees them as competing for political influence within government institutions. Its focus is less on groups of citizens and more on groups of policy-makers. Neopluralists envision the state as consisting of many different and competing interest groups, offices, and departments that are each seeking to advance their own objectives. Charles Lindblom, a neopluralist theorist, ­acknowledges that businesses, or corporations who lobby policymakers have a disproportionate amount of influence on the government.

Corporatism Corporatists argue that while multiple interest groups lobby policy-makers for influence, some of them are more equal than others. That is, certain interests play a more direct role in policy-making decisions than others. Before deciding on amending Internet regulations, the European Union would likely consult with the heads of the largest groups in the sector, such as Google and Facebook. These entities would likely wield greater influence on the final shape of the policy than would smaller groups in the sector or think tanks that attempt to persuade policy-makers with facts and analysis.

Agonism or Agonistic Pluralism Agonism is more welcoming of political conflict because it sees disagreement as potentially useful.

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Through deliberative processes and negotiation, a better resolution can emerge. Agonists are often deeply involved in debates on a more philosophical level about different models of democracy.

Generative Pluralism Kyoung-Hee Yu is a thinker who offers an approach to resolving the conflicting paradigms of political ­theories of pluralism. Politics are not a reflection of pluralism, but rather, are the starting point for the production of pluralistic attitudes and institutions. Pluralistic societies have a greater responsibility than those that merely acknowledge diversity—they must go beyond recognition and coexistence to negotiate conflict and engage with multiple groups in integrative and ­ adaptive projects. While much of the literature describes politics as a highly competitive, zero-sum game, this approach argues that politics can be a ­generative process that can result in more pluralistic decisions, decision-making processes, and political institutions or organizations that are more responsive to difference and diversity.

Diversity and Pluralism Diversity is often used interchangeably with pluralism but the two words describe different ideas. Diversity, like “plural” or “variety,” describes the state of more than two principles, groups, or entities. In an undergraduate theology class with ten Muslim students, ten Christians, and ten Hindus, there is diversity but not necessarily pluralism. If those students’ diversity is not acknowledged or engaged with and they do not have the opportunity to meaningfully interact or dialogue, then that class is incidentally diverse, but it is not ­pluralistic. Pluralism is more than a simple diversity of individuals or groups. Harvard University’s Pluralism Project argues that pluralism requires “active engagement with . . . diversity.”

Respect and Pluralism Thomas Hill examines pluralism from the standpoint of respect through the lens of contemporary Kantian theory. Respect is often associated with diversity; respect is often discussed as the appropriate attitude toward diversity. Underlying that idea is a basic tension around the question of what respecting diversity looks like in practice. In many ways, the above discussion of pluralism may answer this question—respect in a diverse world looks like pluralism, or active engagement with many groups of people on the basis of their differences, not despite them or regardless of them.

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Theories of Pluralism Pluralism is a process. It requires an intentional, consistent, and concerted effort and must be taught and ­therefore learned. A generally positive attitude toward diversity is only the beginning of the long journey toward establishing a pluralistic society. Other important components are

1. Recognizing difference



2. Active engagement with difference (not engagement despite or regardless of difference)



3. Respect for diversity (no group or individual has the right to exclude or discriminate against others on prejudicial bases)



4. An in-depth, detailed understanding of the specific contexts different people, groups, or principles operate within before making a judgment or choosing how best to respond



5. Working to create psychologically and physically safe environments where pluralism is protected



6. Ensuring that all people, with special attention to minorities, are equal before the law and have equal access to services and opportunities

Tolerance is a far cry from pluralism. A society that merely endures or abides diversity is not the same as recognizing the value of difference and ensuring that all individuals and groups are equally empowered. Four definitions of pluralism are described below. The first two, legal and religious theories, are somewhat psychological and philosophical, addressing broad conceptions of pluralism in two distinct contexts but with some overlap into politics. The last two theories, liberaldemocratic and socioeconomic, are more concrete and directly concern politics, material conditions, and sociology.

Legal Pluralism Sandra Bunn-Livingstone discusses legal cultures in international institutions in terms of a new word, ­juriculture, which she uses to describe how individual, state, and regional cultures play different roles in the international legal system, especially with respect to treaty interpretation and reservations. In short, there is not an “international law” per se, but rather, cultures of law—person-, country-, and region-specific ways of contributing to discussions about international law as well as its codification and application. There can be weak and strong juricultural pluralism. The current international system adheres to a weak version. States

can form coalitions, choose which treaties to sign, suggest changes, and largely negotiate on any agreement from the standpoint of their legal cultures or juricultures. In a strong system, there cannot be more than one legal system taken into account—in pluralism theory, this strong approach is also known as monism. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns write about inclusion and the relationship between cultural pluralism, identity politics, and the law. Whereas integration was once the goal for many minorities in the United States who faced segregation and discriminatory treatment, inclusion has emerged today as a more robust practice that is closely affiliated with pluralism. Sarat and Kearns also examine how cultural struggle is addressed in relation to “material transformation” and how the law is involved in that process.

Religious Pluralism Gastón Espinosa argues that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was based on a political theology that aimed to unite the political right and left in the United States. His platform was progressive but did not shy away from discussing religion or racial and ethnic minorities. Obama spoke to the country about the art of compromise, proportion, and how to find shared values. Obama’s religious pluralism can be described as Kantian or collectivist because it prioritizes unity and the group over the individual. Lyda Favali, Roy Pateman, and colleagues conducted research in Eritrea, where state, traditional, and religious laws equally prevail. That means that for any given case, the applicable legal systems will depend on the individual(s) involved. Laws often contradict one another, particularly when the individuals in the dispute are of different religious traditions. Work is being done to unify the legal system because where there is ambiguity in the law, women and minorities tend to suffer. This approach to religious pluralism is the opposite of Obama’s collectivism. Eritrea’s religious pluralism is Hillian or individualist because it places a premium on the rights of individuals or subgroups and communities rather than on the whole country.

Liberalism and Democratic Pluralism Liberal theory or liberalism emphasizes civil rights and freedoms. Richard Bellamy argues that liberal theory alone, however, does not resolve the inherent tensions of a diverse society. Liberal theory, according to Bellamy, attempts to defuse the conflicts that result from multiple, competing loyalties by trading, t­ rimming, or segregation. Trading, promoted by the libertarian Friedrich Hayek, involves finding “mutually advantageous bargains.” Trimming, advocated by John Rawls,

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who was a liberal, is the approach of “avoiding contentious issues.” Lastly, the communitarian liberal Michael Walzer espoused segregation, which promotes the notion that different groups should “live as separately as possible.” Bellamy argues that each of these approaches is essentially a way to sidestep pluralism and the conflicts that arise from it. In fact, trading, trimming, and segregation, if applied, would result in unjust societal organizing principles and settlements. Bellamy proposes a “fourth solution”: negotiated compromise. Electing representatives who participate in a power-sharing system ensures that those individuals in government must dialogue with one another to arrive at an agreement. Negotiating reduces the possibility of any one system of values dominating the offices and institutions of political authority. Negotiated compromise underpins the concept of democratic liberalism, which is founded on the idea that the purpose of politics is to arrive at “mutually acceptable and fair solutions” for the dilemmas of pluralism.

Socioeconomic Pluralism David Miller and Walzer comport with the notion of separation as a means of achieving “the social good” in diverse societies. Their critiques of “spheres of justice” expose the variability of conceptions of pluralism. Can separate systems of justice for different groups of people in a society ever be equal? Ultimately, pluralistic ­societies cannot support the separation of people on the basis of race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation. Enforcing and maintaining separation means dividing the society into multiple societies and the competition for resources makes it impossible to ensure fair and equal distribution. The civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s protested against the Jim Crow laws that attempted to create a Black America within White America. Eventually, segregation was outlawed and integration was celebrated as a victory for the movement. The Black Lives Matter movement to end police brutality toward Blacks and the scandal over the lack of access to clean water in Flint, Michigan—a majority Black American city—are a couple of the most important examples of how Black Americans are still part of a struggle for equality and socioeconomic justice.

Measuring Pluralism Economic Justice and Democracy Researchers Marten Gilens and Benjamin Page reviewed 20 years of data on the question of whether the U.S. government “represents the people.” A graph

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depicts a horizontal axis tracking public support for an idea and a vertical axis that tracks the likelihood of the idea becoming law. The ideal democratic scenario would be a line extending out from the zero-intercept at a 90-degree angle. The results of the study, however, determined that, regardless of the level of public ­support, there is an average of a 30% chance of it “becoming a federal law.” This means “the number of American voters for or against any idea has no effect on the likelihood that Congress will make into law.” As noted by Gilens and Page (2014), it follows that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy” (p. 851). These facts are true for the bottom 90% of income earners. For the top 10%, however, the results are much closer to the democratic ideal. Increasing the 30% probability of public opinion issues where there is broad consensus can improve the pluralism measure with respect to economic justice and democracy.

Environmental Justice The realities of climate change present serious challenges to even the most pluralistic societies. Agreement about living “the good life” is fraught enough without having to account for the impacts of modern lifestyles on the planet. David Schlosberg argues for a critical pluralism with theoretical and practical dimensions. Engaging with different groups of people, political entities and legal systems’ perceptions and values of the environment presents a set of challenges for theories of pluralism. Bruce Hull also proposes that environmental pluralism has two dimensions—in his framework, they are moral and procedural. The theoretical or moral approaches of Schlosberg and Hull call for taking different conceptions of the environment and human beings’ relationship with it seriously. China and India, both of which have very large populations, are industrializing quickly and must negotiate with other world powers to settle on a ­ ­development path that least impacts the environment. Developed nations must acknowledge that their industrialization was unfettered and is responsible for most of the detrimental effects on the environment.

Religious Diversity Robert Wuthnow poses many questions about how modern societies adapt to the “new diversity” of multireligious nation states, such as “Are we willing to do the hard work required to achieve genuine religious pluralism?” Most Americans recognize the right of different religious groups to practice their faiths freely but have done little to educate themselves about other religions

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or to actively engage in dialogue with people of other faiths. Wuthnow argues that religious pluralism is a core value of America’s “personal and national theologies.” To achieve true pluralism means working to understand and develop relationships with others to move toward a more reflective co-existence with people of other faiths and work together to build a pluralistic society.

Islamophobia John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin describe how antiMuslim sentiment in the West has increased over the last 2 decades. Prejudicial attitudes and discrimination, as well as threats and actual violence, toward Muslim minorities violates the basic principles of religious pluralism. Since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Islamophobia has ebbed and flowed, but in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, negative attitudes toward, and the number of attacks on, American Muslims have significantly risen. A 2016 poll indicated that 66% of Republicans support a proposed “temporary ban” on all Muslim immigration to the United States.

Democracy and Pluralism In pluralistic societies, there have always been c­ hallenges with how to maintain the rights of minorities. Over the years, multiple forms of pluralism have developed and been incorporated into democratic ­models of government. Despite these efforts, the 20th century witnessed the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, the Armenian genocide, Japanese internment in the United States and Canada, the Rwandan genocide, and the proliferation of over 128 million refugees and displaced peoples from Germany, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Palestine, Algeria, the Congo, Nigeria, and Angola. From the standpoint of pluralism, the 21st century is not off to a great start. The total number of refugees and displaced peoples has already reached an all-time high of over 60 million, largely from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war. The International State Crime Initiative reported that the 1 million Rohingyan Muslims of Myanmar are facing the “final stages of genocide” and there is evidence of state complicity. In Europe, the far-right, nationalist Pegida party campaigns in France and Germany on an anti-immigrant agenda that is openly xenophobic and anti-Islamist. The U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) forced a referendum that led to the country’s exit from the European Union (E.U.) in part because antimulticulturalist politicians promised to regulate immigration from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Fear was also drummed up about

Turkey, a majority Muslim country, imminently joining the E.U. Pluralism is not automatic. Teaching and protecting pluralism as a fundamental part of democracy is key to creating more accepting, safe, and peaceful societies. Nazir N. Harb Michel See also Affirmative Action; Assimilation; Ethnic Revival; Ethnocentrism; Globalization; Immigration; Minority Voters; Race and Ethnicity

Further Readings Dahl, R. A. (1915/1988). Power, inequality, and democratic politics: Essays in honor of Robert A. Dahl (I. Shapiro & G. Reeher, Eds.). Boulder, CO: Westview. De Bres, H. (2012). The many, not the few: Pluralism about global distributive justice. Journal of Political Philosophy 20(3), 314–340. Espinosa, G. E. (2012). Barack Obama’s political theology: Pluralism, deliberative democracy, and the Christian faith. Political Theology, 13(5), 610–633. Esposito, J. L., & Kalın, I. (2011). Islamophobia: The challenge of pluralism in the 21st century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Favali, L., & Pateman, R. (2003). Blood, land, and sex: Legal and political pluralism in Eritrea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilens, M., & Page, B. I. (2014). Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564–581. doi:10.1017/ S1537592714001595 Grillo, R. D. (1998). Pluralism and the politics of difference: State, culture, and ethnicity in comparative perspective. Oxford, England: Clarendon. Hill, T. E. (2000). Respect, pluralism, and justice: Kantian perspectives. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hull, R. B. (2007). Environmental pluralism. In J. B. Callicott (Ed.), Encyclopedia of environmental ethics and philosophy. Detroit, MI: Macmillan. Johnson, K. D. (2007). Theology, political theory, and pluralism: Beyond tolerance and difference (Vol. 15). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Miller, D., & Walzer, M. (1995). Pluralism, justice, and equality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Sarat, A., & Kearns, T. R. (2014). Cultural pluralism, identity politics, and the law. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Schlosberg, D. (1999). Environmental justice and the new pluralism: The challenge of difference for environmentalism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Shah, P. (2005). Legal pluralism in conflict: Coping with cultural diversity in law. London, England: Glass House. Wesson, R. G. (1978). State systems: International pluralisms, politics, and culture. New York, NY: Free Press.

Political Apologies Wuthnow, R. (2011). America and the challenges of religious diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yu, K.-H. (2013). Institutionalization in the context of institutional pluralism: Politics as a generative process. Organization Studies, 34(1), 105–131.

Political Apologies Political apologies are actions in which a public figure seeks to remedy (political) damage done by an event, behavior, or policy viewed by the electorate as being negative to the point of offensiveness. Political apologies can be divided into two main groups: personal apologies and historical apologies. Personal apologies relate to events which are relatively current and for which the apologizer is either directly or indirectly responsible (e.g., a decision made in the ministry or department of which she or he is in charge). Historical apologies are ones made for events which are outside of the responsibility of the politician—they often relate to offenses that happened before the politician even entered politics, or in some cases before the politician was born. Personal apologies have important implications for the impression management work done by politicians, and historical apologies are an important component of international relations and reconciliation.

Personal Apologies There are a range of offenses that can trigger an apology of this type—recent apologies made by British politicians were for offenses including physically assaulting a member of House of Commons staff, failing to properly declare conflicts of interest, incorrectly claiming financial expenses, giving misleading information to the press about a government policy. One thing to notice about these personal apologies is that some are truly personal—in the usual sense of the term—and are for matters found in the politician’s private life. They become worthy of an apology (or “apologizable”) because as holders of public office, politicians are generally expected to live up to a strict set of moral standards. Other apologies categorized as personal, relate to decisions taken or actions performed by the politician in his or her role as a politician, rather than in his or her private life. What these personal apologies have in common, though, is the idea that they are not risk free. In apologizing, the politician accepts responsibility for the act in question and this has the potential to damage one’s “face”—that is, it makes one seem less than competent

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and may result in the apologizer’s popularity being adversely affected. This is particularly problematic if, for instance, it was not certain that the apologizer was at fault for the offense or if she or he has previously denied responsibility for the apologizable. These facts offer something in the way of an ­explanation for the existence of so-called nonapologies. Nonapologies are statements which, for instance, apologize for the negative consequence of a policy, but not for the policy itself or statements which are conditional in nature (e.g., I’m sorry if X . . .). These nonapologies avoid the assignment of blame or responsibility for the apologizable, but may be sufficient to defuse (media) attention caused by the offense. The existence of these less-than-sincere apologies may in turn account for the fact that public, personal apologies tend to use explicit tokens like I apologize, which cannot be thought of as ambiguous.

Historical Apologies Historical apologies are different from personal apologies because they do not presuppose that the apologizer is responsible for the offense in question. Because of this, they may be viewed as being inherently less risky for the politician involved than the statements discussed previously. The range of offenses involved in this type of statement are, however, equally varied with recent historical apologies made in the U.K. Parliament for the treatment of prisoners by colonial powers during the Kenyan uprising in the 1960s, the shooting dead of civilians by the British Army on Bloody Sunday during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the government’s retaining the organs of deceased nuclear power station workers without the permission of their families. The legitimacy of historical apologies has received much treatment, with critics being particularly concerned with the notion of inherited guilt which seems to be an implicit part of such statements. However, it is the situational identity of the politician producing the apology which is of importance—that is to say, the politician is not taking on personal guilt for the acts in question but is apologizing in his or her role as head of state or head of the government or minister. In other words, the apologizer represents the person or persons responsible for the action who are no longer available to apologize. In this respect, the historical apology should be viewed as a ritual performance. Given the fact that historical apologies come at some time after the event, the question of what triggers their production needs to be considered. Often the apologies come as a result of political campaigns by groups representing those affected by the offense or by descendants of those so affected. These campaigns may gather

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popular support to the extent that the government of the day feels that they can no longer be ignored. It may also be the case that the conclusion of a public inquiry in which the “truth” about offenses emerges result in a formal, public apology—in such cases, it may be that the facts surrounding government involvement have been denied or suppressed. A further, more pragmatic, trigger for an apology may be that such a statement is made a condition of an international treaty or future cooperation between two states. While historical apologies are not personally risky for the apologizer, they are not given lightly because they still involve the government’s taking responsibility for previous wrongdoing. This may leave the government legally liable for financial restitution—a situation which the apologizer may not wish to find him/herself in. However, historical apologies do have an important role to play in peace and reconciliation and so the benefit of the potential restoration of normal relations with the wronged party may outweigh any financial cost. James Murphy See also Emotions and Political Decision Making; Mediation Skills; Peacemaking; Political Discourse; Reconciliation

Further Readings Kampf, Z. (2009). Public (non-)apologies: The discourse of minimizing responsibility. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(11), 2257–2270. Lind, J. (2008). Sorry states: Apologies in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Murphy, J. (2015). Revisiting the apology as a speech act: The case of parliamentary apologies. Journal of Language and Politics, 14(2), 175–204.

Political Campaigns Political campaigns are orchestrated attempts by political organizations to garner public support through persuasive communication in order to influence public policy in their favor. This broad definition encapsulates all forms of campaigns from those of neighborhood organizations seeking to influence local politicians to the campaigns of political parties and candidates who seek election to office in order to shape policy themselves. In pluralist democracies, campaigns are crucial for representation. Campaigns are a means by which groups of individuals with a common cause can communicate their stance and enable others with similar concerns to join their campaign; thus, campaigns give

voice to those individuals and the supporters of their cause. The majority of academic research has focused on the campaigns orchestrated by those seeking election, in particular political parties or candidates seeking to be elected as national president. Due to the levels of resources, the campaigns run by candidates for the U.S. presidency are the most sophisticated and gain most attention. The campaign environment is more complex, however. This entry explores that complex environment, discusses the evolution of political campaigns to their current professionalized form, and concludes with research around campaign effects.

The Diverse Campaign Environment In all democracies, and even some single-party states, campaigns take place where parties, their leaders, and a range of candidates for all levels of public office compete to govern, or be part of a governing group of, their nation. These campaigns are of considerable importance as they ultimately determine the political program of a nation and the way that government acts toward its own citizens as well as how it behaves toward other nations. Despite the importance of these contests, data from surveys across the European Union member states by Eurobarometer, national election surveys, as well as turnout data from elections demonstrate turnout at elections and engagement with campaigns can be low, involving as few as 50% of a nation’s citizens. Evidence suggests that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are diverting support away from electoral organizations. NGOs have the ability to engage citizens with a single cause, whereas election campaigns encompass a range of issues. NGOs can be more populist, stridently arguing in favor of radical policies that appeal to their supporters; electoral organizations have to be more circumspect and work within the constraints of a broad national interest as well as limitations imposed by international cooperation. NGOs also seldom come under scrutiny in the same way as electoral organizations and so do not lose trust due to being mired in scandal or having their credibility questioned by media. Hence the most crucial campaigns face severe challenges. The challenges relate to the competitive environment and the clashes between campaigns. Outside of the cycle of elections, governing and oppositional parties engage in a permanent campaign in an attempt to retain relevance and support within society as well as—crucially for parties outside of government—providing continuing representation to their supporters. But, in the periods between elections, parties compete with a range of other organizations. The United Nations and its many subsidiary bodies highlight international causes and

Political Campaigns

attempt to put pressure on governments, sometimes leveraging public support. Other organizations that operate at a global level, Greenpeace or Amnesty International for example, also seek to put pressure on governments via political channels and by garnering media attention and public support. At the national level, there are also a range of organizations that constantly lead campaigns, often fighting against governments. Some of these organizations might employ lobbyists to further their causes, using private channels of communication with elected representatives and officials. Others may use petitions of demonstrations to gain media attention and build public awareness, sympathy, and support, in order to exert pressure on the same representatives. Many of these organizations compete with other employers of lobbyists, big businesses in particular. Additionally, and while we might not traditionally think of such actions as campaigning, some individuals resort to violence to impact public attitudes and government policy; the actions of terrorism groups fighting against British rule in Northern Ireland, as well as Islamistinspired terrorists are examples of groups that seek to influence governments and the public through their actions. The complex environment thus means each campaign must compete to gain awareness, interest, encourage support, and then mobilize supporters into action. As the environment becomes ever more complex and competitive, campaigns must be more sophisticated, innovative, and strategic to achieve their aims.

The Evolution of Campaigning The theoretical perspectives that aid the understanding of how campaigning has developed from a pragmatic and amateurish art to a strategically planned science are based on studies of election campaigns. However, the socioeconomic conditions that have led electoral campaigns to evolve apply to the whole environment. Campaigning has evolved in reaction to three broad trends.

The End of Class-Based Political Alignment It has been argued that up until the 1960s, politics was determined by social class. Parties could rely on large stable electorates and campaigns were simply focused upon mobilization. Competing organizations were few, and so representation was achieved through the ballot box and parties reinforced their representational link to the concerns and aspirations of their support base. Issue politics, around war and race, emerged in the mid- to late 1960s and saw parties challenged by protest and pressure groups. Social mobility weakened class identities as well as attachments to political parties. Parties increasingly had to adapt their tactics to

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persuade potential voters, drawing on the skills of the advertising industry, and to compete against myriad organizations focused on causes with strong grassroots support.

The Fragmented Media Environment The 1960s were an era when there were limited media outlets, and those that existed took a fairly deferential tone toward politicians. The rise of commercial media and the steady growth of new outlets led to a greater focus on presentation and attempts to grab the attention of an audience seeking entertainment rather than hard political news. The shifting media environment led political organizations to seek the services of public relations experts in order to gain media coverage as well as to capture the attention and support of citizens. Digital technology has incrementally added new layers of complexity as political organizations had to adapt their communication for websites, weblogs, and after 2005, social media platforms and microblogs. As audiences fragment across a range of channels and platforms, political organizations seek to gain purchase within the minds of citizens using whatever techniques and tactics are possible with the resources and legal constraints they face.

The Collapse of Deference and Trust While some political actors are still trusted and shown respect, the trend is toward cynicism among the public, and some argue this is the direct effect of a shift in media coverage of politics. Research has shown that coverage of the processes, the internal machinations, that occur within political organizations, as well as the coverage of scandals involving politicians, have led to reduced trust and increased cynicism among citizens. Some scholars have particularly pointed to the rise of attack journalists as a major influence on public attitudes toward politicians. The attack journalist claims to ask the questions the public wants answered and so adopts an adversarial tone when interviewing a politician, leading audiences to question the credibility and veracity of a politician’s claims. Political organizations have employed the use of “spin doctors” to attempt to combat attack journalism and gain supportive coverage. It is argued, however, that this has led to an escalation in the battle between political actors seeking to maximize positive coverage, and journalists seeking to advance their careers and put politicians under pressure. While political parties and their elected representatives and candidates face the worst impacts of these trends in the communication environment and broader

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society, to some extent they affect all actors involved, providing challenges and opportunities unequally across differing types of organizations.

Theoretical Perspectives on Campaign Development One heuristic for understanding the evolution of political campaigns is to separate the history into distinct eras. The 1960s represents the premodern or first age of campaigning when organizations tended to focus on face-to-face communication. It is in this era when the media offered a reasonably direct channel for politicians, but when parties also had strong, local organizations that could mobilize across communities within a nation. Parties also had a virtual hegemony over representation. The modern, second age is linked largely to the rise of television as the chief medium of public communication. It coincided, however, with significant social changes that led to the collapse of class-based cleavages and the rise of issue politics. Parties retained their importance but were challenged as the key providers of representation, particularly as media gave voice to myriad other organizations. The postmodern, third age sees the blending of interpersonal and mass media tactics in order to reach an increasingly fragmented audience with decreased trust in electoral politics. Whether we should talk of a fourth, Internet or hypermedia age to encompass the early years of the 21st century is a moot question. While this largely reflects the broad communication tactics of the postmodern era, it argues that there is no longer a hierarchy in political organizations. While parties still seek governing power, the grassroots can mobilize and lead challenges to governmental power and, due to the affordances of connectivity provided by social media, anyone can organize a political campaign if they are able to gain awareness and support through communicating across online networks. Concurrent with these ages, the evolution of campaigns is explained in three ways. 1. Professionalization. Political organizations have increasingly brought in a range of consultants from the worlds of corporate communication to aid them in developing campaigns that grab the attention of audiences, have resonance and salience, and heighten a sense of desire among potential supporters. Professionalization is a synonym for a range of developments: an increased strategic focus on campaign design and execution, leading to an increased appearance of sophistication and measurement of potential effects prior to execution, as well as the measurement of actual effects.

Professionalization has also been measured, with indices developed to assess the prioritization of dimensions such as central organization, allocation of resources, and the focus on a range of different modes of communication. Recent studies of European Union member states using these measures find that most parties, independent of nation or resources, are reasonably equal in their overall levels of professionalism, suggesting that political campaigns follow a blueprint for elections with innovations most likely to occur within the communication tactics dimension. 2. Marketization. The twin trends of fragmentation among media audiences and increased cynicism toward politics has given rise to the construct of the citizen consumer who approaches politics with a “what’s in it for me” perspective. The extent to which the dutiful and engaged citizen has been lost from the political landscape is highly debatable. However, it is argued that political organizations offer potential supporters value-based reasons for getting engaged with their campaigns. The trend may be exacerbated by the transference of personnel and approach to politics from the corporate environment. It is suggested that political actions, a vote, a click on social media, a donation, and so on are all given a value when they are promoted. Marketization, therefore, may reinforce or even create a search for value in political engagement as campaigns sell actions to potential supporters. 3. Mediatization. The power of the media as the chief means by which a political organization can reach any significant number of potential supporters is argued to have fundamentally impacted the design and implementation of political campaigns. Strategy is built around media, with timetables drawn up for gaining and then building on media coverage. Equally, communication is designed for media consumption with short phrases, or soundbites, built into speeches to fit naturally into short news items; events are designed and timed to suit media priorities and provide pictures that will suit news bulletins; leaders present themselves in ways to maximize positive coverage and seek an edge when trying to make the news. Mediatization is linked to a trend toward the personalization of politics, with political actors allowing the media into their private lives to provide interesting stories that will appeal to potential supporters in a way that hard political news might not.

Therefore, political campaigns have slowly become more strategic and professional in their approach to courting potential supporters, they borrow the

Political Campaigns

philosophy as well as techniques from corporate communication, and they increasingly pander to the demands of the media when designing both their strategy and communication. These three theoretical lines of enquiry explain differing facets of modern campaigns but should be seen as concurrent and simultaneous developments within the evolution of political campaigns.

Campaign Effects The greatest challenge is understanding what, if any, effect campaigns might have on citizens. Political campaigns certainly gather media coverage, and not only the election campaigns of the major parties or candidates. All campaigns can gain coverage if they fit into the media agenda or perform in some way the media believe will be interesting to their audience. If coverage equates to awareness, then the first stage toward success is achieved by many campaigns. Awareness is insufficient, however, unless it can motivate the aware into taking some action that is supportive of the campaign or its aims. While many campaigns may appear successful on the basis that one candidate or party gains sufficient votes to govern or be part of a governing body, it is unclear whether this is the result of the campaign or of other factors. Often pre-campaign polls predict the result well, suggesting that the campaign was more of a ritual, played out on the basis that it is necessary and because competitors would be campaigning, rather than with any clear sense that the campaign will in itself persuade potential voters to turn out or support the candidate or party at the center of the campaign. It is far easier to measure whether the campaigns of NGOs, which pursue gaining signatories to petitions, donations, or participation in other forms of action, are successful. Hypothetically, we can understand what effects ­campaigns should have by drawing on the field of communication psychology. Awareness in itself is not a necessary precondition for success. Rather key campaign messages must appear salient, important, and must resonate, appearing relevant among the intended receivers. Intended receivers may appear to be a broad section of society, but often campaigns segment citizens according to demographics, by their economic situation, or their political interests and predispositions on issues. Targeting messages enhances their salience and resonance as they speak directly to the concerns and hopes of the intended receiver. However, as with awareness, these also are not necessary factors for success. The organization leading the campaign must have credibility in the eyes of the receiver. Credibility can be achieved through communication performances, such as in interviews or debates, but credibility is usually a

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perception built up over time. Citizens will have built up an overall impression of an organization and its leaders based on event-based impressions. Each will be weighted positively or negatively forming an overall positive or negative attitude which determines credibility and so whether this particular campaign is worthy of attention. If an individual or organization has low credibility, usually due to a previous failure in their performance or behavior, it is then unlikely they will be listened to seriously. Campaigns do, however, convince some to perform actions. Campaign communication uses techniques from advertising to grab attention, using dramatic images and language which encourage the audience to engage cognitively. These communication tactics, known as peripheral cues, are ones which are designed to have momentary impact upon a receiver so that they are then stored in the receiver’s subconscious memory. The repeating of similar messages, aligned to a particular organization, leads the receiver to begin to associate the organization with the message and, in theory, when action is requested they will act on the information stored. In order to achieve a desired effect, the association must be between the organization and its stance on an issue of importance to the receiver that resonates with that receiver’s own concerns and desires. The message can be on a complex policy issue such as health, foreign policy, or the environment, or a simple message talking of hope and change; success is predicated on a receiver wanting the promised outcome to occur and believing the organization is capable of delivering. Many campaigns play more on fears than on hopes. Negative campaigns attempt to weaken support for an opponent by causing cognitive dissonance, making the receiver think twice about a choice they have made. A negative message may accept that a candidate, for example, is charismatic; but it will raise doubts about their authenticity and credibility, asking the receiver, often bluntly, if liking someone is sufficient to elect them. A range of organizations might campaign negatively in order lead their intended receivers to reconsider their predispositions toward issues, parties, or candidates, juxtaposing the stance of the receiver with those of the target of the attack. Research shows they polarize voters into partisan camps but can have significant impact on those with low knowledge and a shallow understanding of politics.

Conclusion Political campaigns are strategic and orchestrated attempts at persuading citizens to think and act in a way beneficial to the organization or individual leading the campaign. Due to structural changes in society,

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media audiences and media campaigns themselves have become increasingly professional; they draw heavily on lessons from corporate communication and are tailored to gain maximum coverage from mainstream media as well as reaching citizens directly using social media. Assessing effects is complex due to the plethora of communication which citizens face. However campaigns that build positive associations between their stance and an issue of concern among intended receivers and which are able to make those receivers cognitively engage have potential to shape behavior.

electability of individuals running for public office: their physical appearance. A large body of empirical research has shown that, in particular, the physical attractiveness of candidates has an important impact on their electoral fortune. In brief, candidates deemed attractive by voters can receive a vote premium of several percentage points in elections.

Darren G. Lilleker

Physical attractiveness carries positive connotations that go beyond the mere idea of beauty. Research in various disciplines shows that what is casually referred to as the “beautiful is good” theorem holds in many social settings. To name a few, attractive job candidates have increased chances of being hired, good-looking employees get a pay premium of several percentage points compared with not-so-good-looking individuals, and in negotiations good-looking individuals are treated more favorably. Politics is no exception to this general tendency. Many of the great leaders of the past (e.g., Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great) and present (e.g., Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau) share physical attributes that most would define as attractive (i.e., these leaders are handsome, proportionally built, and have a friendly face). These attributes are also beneficial in electoral politics. Two psychological reactions might favor attractive candidates. First, viewing an attractive candidate triggers a positive reaction in voters. This positive reaction is triggered by an involuntary activity over the cheek regions. Second, individuals and voters inadvertently associate physical attractiveness with other characteristics that are deemed important for politicians, not only friendliness and sociability but also competence, intelligence, and trustworthiness.

See also Civic Engagement; Cognitive Dissonance; Democracy; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts; Lobbying; Party Identification; Pressure Groups; Representative Democracy; Resource Mobilization; Social Influence; Social Movements; Talking Heads and Political Campaigns; Voter Identification; Voter Mobility

Further Readings Burton, M. J., & Shea, D. M. (2015). Campaign craft: The strategies, tactics, and art of political campaign management (5th ed.). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Canal, M. J., & Voltmer, K. (2014). Comparing political communication across time and space. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kriesi, H. (2013). Democracy in the age of globalization and mediatization. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lilleker, D. G. (2014). Political communication and cognition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Plasser, F., & Plasser, G. (2002). Global political campaigning: A worldwide analysis of campaign professionals and their practices. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Steger, W., Kelly, S., & Wrighton, M. (2013). Campaigns and political marketing. New York, NY: Routledge. Tenscher, J., Mykkänen, J., & Moring, T. (2012). Modes of professional campaigning: A four-country comparison in the European parliamentary elections, 2009. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 17(2), 145–168.

Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Candidates for political office normally form a societal elite. Most of them possess high levels of education, prestigious careers, and the necessary human and financial resources and connections to run for office. Yet, beyond these qualities there is another feature that, under certain circumstances, significantly improves the

Societal and Psychological Foundations of the “Beauty Premium”

Physical Appearance as a Heuristic Device Voters do not deliberately choose to vote for the most attractive candidate running for office. Instead, the physical attractiveness of candidates is utilized by voters as a heuristic shortcut that allows voters to make a decision based on the information available to them at the time of the election. In this sense, physical attractiveness works very much like other well-known heuristic shortcuts such as political party or ideology. In brief, voters are drawn to attractive candidates due to a series of involuntary, physiological reactions. In particular, thanks to campaign propaganda, the media, and social media, in contemporary elections voters are constantly exposed to the faces and images of candidates running

Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of

for office. Consequently, physical attractiveness becomes an extremely low-cost heuristic shortcut. Research has shown that, as a general rule, physical attractiveness plays a larger role the less informed and knowledgeable voters are about politics, the parties, and the candidates running for office. In other words, voters who know very little about the qualifications, experience, and skills of candidates running for office, and the programs of political parties, can only make an “educated vote choice” based on a heuristic device such as the physical appearance of the candidates. Mutatis mutandis, voters who possess high levels of information and political knowledge both in general terms and on the specific candidates running for office do not need to resort to a low-cost heuristic shortcut such as the physical appearance of candidates and, rather, can base their decision on other relevant information that they possess.

Measuring Physical Appearance During elections, voters become familiar with the face of candidates running for office. Citizens see the candidates’ face on billboards, posters, in TV ads, and in some countries even on the ballot. When gauging physical attractiveness, the literature uses this preponderance of the candidate’s facial characteristics and measures the attractiveness of candidates by evaluating the face of candidates. In more detail, most studies use a version of the so-called truth-of-consensus method by asking individuals—usually undergraduate students—to rank the physical attractiveness of candidates based on an ­official portrait of the candidate. The scale to rank politicians that is most often used ranges from 0 (very unattractive) to 10 (very attractive). The truth-of-consensus method has been replicated in several ways, including the use of web-based interfaces (e.g., Mechanical Turk) that allow for a more varied sample in terms of age, occupation, ethnicity, and the like. Whether conducted with students or through other means, these studies show that, despite the subjective element in any attractiveness judgement, survey participants nevertheless agree to a very great extent on which politicians are more attractive and which are less attractive. In other words, raters overwhelmingly agree about what constitutes a good-looking candidate and what constitutes a not-so-good-looking candidate.

Conditions for the Beauty Premium to Apply The effect of physical attractiveness on the vote totals of candidates and their chances of being elected hinges upon several institutional and noninstitutional conditions. First, physical attractiveness depends upon the

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electoral system being utilized to select candidates. Candidate-centered systems seem to be more permeable to the influence of attractive candidates than partycentered systems. In candidate-centered systems, the candidates tend to emphasize their personal qualities, skills, and experiences; and one of these qualities might be their physical attractiveness. In contrast, in partycentered systems, candidate lists consist of many candidates, some of whom might be good looking, while others might be not so good looking. In particular, in closed-list systems, political parties normally do not emphasize the individual qualities of their list candidates and focus their electoral campaigns instead on the party program, the party performance, and the party’s policy proposals. Therefore, the physical attractiveness of candidates will have a larger influence on voters in first-past-the-post systems as compared to proportional representation (PR) systems. In PR systems, if at all, voters might be influenced by the physical appearance of the top list candidate or the party’s head candidate. Second, research has shown that physical attractiveness plays a larger role in second-order or less important elections (e.g., regional elections or European ­elections, in the European context) as compared to firstorder or important elections (e.g., national parliamentary or presidential elections). As a general rule, the more important the election is, the more informed are the voters and the more they know about the candidates, parties, programs, and proposals. This knowledge frequently trumps the use of physical attractiveness as a heuristic device and voters cast their ballot based on who they think represents their interests best. In contrast, in second-order elections—which often do not trigger as much campaign activity and media coverage as the first-order elections—citizens, in the aggregate, have less knowledge about the candidates and programs; this is a situation where a heuristic device such as the physical attractiveness of the candidates can come in handy. Third, physical attractiveness is not an absolute, but rather a relative feature. It plays a larger role the more one candidate is attractive in comparison to his or her opponent. In other words, a very attractive candidate, who consistently ranks very high on an attractiveness scale, is not guaranteed to benefit from his or her physical attractiveness. Rather, the impact of a politician’s physical attractiveness on electoral fortunes also depends on the physical attractiveness of the opponent. When candidates run against opponents of equal or comparable attractiveness, the attractiveness of both candidates is likely to balance out in terms of electoral results. In other words, for physical attractiveness to matter there must be a gap between the physical attractiveness of the contenders; the larger this gap, the higher

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the beauty premium in terms of votes is likely to be. This also entails that a not-so-good-looking candidate is not disadvantaged per se. Rather, less attractive candidates are only disadvantaged when they run against better-looking candidates. Fourth, the influence of physical attractiveness on candidate success is dependent on the gendered composition of the electoral race. In intragender races, that is, when a woman runs against another woman or a man runs against another man, it is easy for the voters to distinguish who is the better looking candidate. However, the comparison of the physical attractiveness between candidates becomes trickier in intergender races, that is, when men run against women. In this scenario, voters begin to find difficulty in assessing the relative physical attractiveness of the candidates running—especially considering that voters might use different criteria to judge the physical attractiveness of a male politician and of a female politician. Similarly, it might also be difficult for voters to compare candidates belonging to different racial or ethnic groups and, therefore, physical attractiveness may play a smaller role in these types of races as well.

Not only do they display less knowledge and interest than do older generations, but studies have indicated that they also know less than previous generations of young adults. This decrease in political sophistication has two negative consequences. For one, it decreases conventional political participation. However, not all unsophisticated individuals abstain from voting. Rather, they look for heuristic devices that allow them to cast their vote. One of these shortcuts is the physical attractiveness of the candidates running for office. This entails that if political interest among the population does not increase, the physical attractiveness of candidates might continue to play a large role in determining the result of future elections worldwide. This applies even more if political parties were to start to deliberately nominate good-looking candidates in order to gain a comparative electoral advantage.

Indirect Influences of Physical Attractiveness in Elections

Banducci, S. A., Karp, J. A., & Rallings, C. (2008). Ballot photographs and cues in low-information elections. Political Psychology, 29(6), 903–917. Lenz, G. S., & Lawson, C. (2011). Looking the part: Television leads less informed citizens to vote based on candidate’s appearance. American Journal of Political Science, 55(3), 574–589. Praino, R., Stockemer, D., & Ratis, J. (2014). Looking good or looking competent? Physical appearance and electoral success in the 2008 congressional elections. American Politics Research, 42(6), 1096–1117. Rosar, U., Klein, M., & Beckers, T. (2008). The frog pond contest: Physical attractiveness and electoral success of the constituency candidates at the North Rhine-Westphalia state election of 2005. European Journal of Political Research, 47(1), 64–79. Stockemer, D., & Praino, R. (2015). Blinded by beauty? Physical attractiveness and candidate selection in the U.S. House of Representatives. Social Science Quarterly, 96(2), 430–446.

Physical attractiveness not only has a direct influence on candidates’ electoral prospects, it also benefits politicians and candidates regardless of the context. In particular, there are two positive side effects. First, the media, especially visual media, seem to be more interested in attractive politicians and candidates. Attractive candidates gain more TV exposure and benefit from this increased exposure when it comes to popularity. Second, attractive candidates are targeted less frequently by negative campaigns and, if targeted, they seem to suffer less from personal attacks. Probably because attractiveness is associated with friendliness, intelligence, and sociability, negative ads putting these qualities into question might not obtain the same results they obtain when these same ads are directed against a less attractive candidate, with whom voters do not associate similar positive traits.

Influence of Physical Attractiveness in Future Elections In the foreseeable future, the role of physical attractiveness as a heuristic device used by voters to choose candidates will likely increase rather than decrease. In fact, levels of political knowledge and interest have decreased in Western countries in recent decades. In particular, the younger generations know less and less about politics.

Daniel Stockemer and Rodrigo Praino See also Heuristics

Further Readings

Political Crimes A political crime is an act—or failure to act where this is a reasonable duty—which influences the interests of the state, its government, or the political system, specifically directed against that government or political system. Political crime is crime motivated by a particular

Political Crimes

ideological perspective. Ideology refers to unique systems, ideas, and abstract ideals that are professed as delivering life’s true meaning. Violent and nonviolent acts perceived as real or imagined threats to a government’s survival are classified as political crimes. Although the ramifications of political crimes may be severe, classifying events as political crime is complicated. The concept of political crime is confused by global differences in governance and the ways in which citizens are permitted to express their discontent. This entry briefly introduces political crime and discusses the implications of this type of crime from criminological and political perspectives. The entry concludes with a discussion of the relevant types of political crime occurring in the 21st century global community.

Criminological Overview Political crime is a challenging concept. Owing to a number of factors, research is limited regarding the scope of political crime. Crimes can generally be considered political when they legally have been deemed a danger to society. Some criminologists suggest that any effort to categorize an act as a political crime is a political act of its own accord. Most politically motivated criminal acts belong within existing categories of criminal behavior since it is not the act itself that characterizes a political crime but rather the motivations behind the offense. This does not discount the concept that political crimes have a distinct motivational nature that should not be overlooked. Criminologists tend to agree that a typology of criminal behavior that omits political crime is incomplete, neglecting a distinct category of criminal behavior. In the United States, there is no official classification of political crime, since Americans who disagree with governmental policies and perspectives may do so publicly without threat of arrest or imprisonment. In countries with little political freedom, protesting against the government is a punishable offense. In the United States, a specific legal category of political crime would be in direct conflict with the First Amendment and individual liberties set forth in long-standing American culture. However, this does not preclude the involvement of law enforcement upon the commission of a criminal act that is political in nature. Political offenders commit acts that violate the law for the purpose of challenging the philosophies of an individual, group, or governmental power. Political crimes include infractions both by and against the government and are committed in organizational, industrial, and individual contexts. Criminal acts committed by governmental entities with the goal of gaining or

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preserving power are referred to as state-organized crime or state crime. Conversely, crimes such as espionage, treason, sedition, terrorism, political assassination, and some religious crimes represent a direct ­challenge to a government in power. Offenders do not have to seek overthrow of a government or its leaders to be acting in a way that is characterized as political. A political system may distinguish a threat if individuals advocate change or reform to the established government. A threat may also exist when individuals seek to alter deep-rooted policies or employ disloyal actions. However, the scope is often less direct regarding many of these acts. In many instances, the mainstream supporter of an existing regime may deem criminalization of politically driven behavior as an appropriate result when the offender is motivated by political, ideological, religious, or other beliefs that differ from the current governing body. This is contrasted with the ethical propositions associated with enacting laws that criminalize ordinary political dissent. In some deeply tyrannical states, this results in criminalizing activities that promote human and civil rights, inhibiting individual freedoms and suppressing behavior that elsewhere may not be classified as criminal. In some circumstances, both citizens and the state commit political crime concurrently. Examples include American civil rights riots, Vietnam War protests, and the 1999 World Trade Organization riots, when both protesters and police were charged with committing criminal acts. In cases such as these, the individuals or groups penalized for a crime or defined as the political offender are largely determined by who possesses the most power. Certain cultures and traditions are encouraged and sustained through the principal social discourses of religion, the economy, society, and by other, less formal means such as customs and mores. Criminologists acknowledge that states invest their resources in maintaining order through this social conformity. A significant and inclusive theoretical definition of political crime differentiates it from other types of offenses while discerning it from the dynamics of nonideologically motivated crimes. Given the emphasis on criminal behavior and taking into account the limited agreement of researchers on political crime, the concept is outlined here as ideologically driven behavior that is lawfully classified as criminal. This description includes acts committed against the state as well as offenses committed by the state, including civil and human rights ­violations committed by the police and governmental entities. In contrast, this definition excludes acts that may be immoral, unethical, rooted in discrimination, or behaviors that secure power for one group over another but have not been deemed unlawful.

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Offender Dynamics Criminologists offer a shared depiction of the dynamics of a political offender—the ability to effortlessly neutralize criminal behavior through the steadfast belief that one’s behavior appeals to a higher allegiance, therefore permitting one to think of oneself in a positive light. This affords the offender a profound context for rationalizing criminal behavior. Political offenders with robust ideological stances and an innate willingness to sacrifice their life and freedom are the antithesis of psychopathy. Political offenders tend to view their actions as honorable notwithstanding the law, which makes their behavior very difficult to control. As political crime ranges in scope and severity, so too do political offenders. Political criminals share the collective trait of ideological motivation but are predisposed by a range of psychological, cultural, and situational factors that form the political criminality in which they engage.

Types of Political Crimes Political crime is typically categorized according to two types of offenses: oppositional crime and state crime. Oppositional crimes include political dissent, political protest, civil disobedience, riots, rebellion, sedition, espionage, treason, international and domestic terrorism, hate crime, and political assassination. State crimes include political repression, human rights violations, domestic espionage, and illegal surveillance. Shana M. Mell and William V. Pelfrey Jr. See also Moral Hazard; Morality and Politics; Obedience; Powerlessness; Trust

Further Readings Robinson, M. (2002). Justice blind? Ideals and realities of American criminal justice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ross, J. I. (2003). The dynamics of political crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ross, J. I. (2012). An introduction to political crime. Portland, OR: Policy Press. Szabo, M. D. (1972). Political crimes: A historical perspective. Denver Journal of Policy and International Law, 2(1), 7–22. Thomason, B. (2013). Political crimes in the transition to modernity: Anthropological perspectives. Anthropological Notebooks, 19(2), 39–56. Tunnell, K. D. (1993). Political crime and pedagogy: A content analysis of criminology and criminal justice texts. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 4(1), 101–114. Tunnell, K. D. (1993). Political crime in contemporary America: A critical approach. New York, NY: Garland.

Political Deliberation Political deliberation is the exchange of opinions and information that takes place among citizens with similar or different viewpoints. In contemporary democracies, this process has mostly occurred through three important mechanisms of political intermediation: interpersonal discussion, diverse exposure to media information, and new mechanisms of deliberation in Internet and social media (Twitter, Facebook, and more). Contributions on this area of political behavior and political psychology have increased exponentially during the last decade and a half, but they also present important limitations and contradictory findings.

Overview Political deliberation has moved to the forefront in contemporary democratic theory and has consequently been developed into a “working theory” in contemporary political behavior and political psychology. From the ideas of Aristotle in classical Greece to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, and those of contemporary political theorists, it has been assumed and expected that active and passive exposure to public political deliberation contributes to the formation of individuals’ positions on public issues, increases citizens’ political knowledge, and inculcates a sense of democratic citizenship. As such, political deliberation has increasingly become one of the fundamental characteristics for evaluating the quality of democracy today since it promotes an active and fully civic citizenry. Most of the literature that deals with the mechanisms of modern deliberation departs somewhat from the classic contribution by the work by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his Columbia University colleagues, which had dominated the discussion on American voting behavior during the late 1950s and 1960s. This initial interest in political deliberation and intermediation disappeared from the research agenda in political behavior for a while, overshadowed by the appearance of the sociopsychological (University of Michigan) and the ­ rational-choice (Anthony Downs) schools of voting behavior. However, more recently, there has been a rebirth of this topic thanks to the successful academic production of two groups of scholars. First, experts in contemporary modern voting intermediation (media exposure and interpersonal discussion) mostly centered around the Comparative National Election P ­roject, who, beginning in 1990 and departing from Lazarsfeld, have refocused their attention on the effects of political discussion and media exposure on voting preferences, participation, and some civic attitudes. Secondly, a

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group of distinguished political psychologists have made very important contributions regarding the effects of political discussion and media exposure on political knowledge and political persuasion. Finally, there has been a remarkable emergence of new mechanisms of political deliberation and intermediation in the Internet and social media, attracting the interest of academic scholars interested in collecting big data of political activism in those new spaces of political deliberation.

Limits and Problems The first limitation on this literature departs from the definition (or the theoretical conception) of political deliberation itself. As it has been well discussed by André Bächtiger and Seraina Pedrini, there are two types of political deliberation definitions. Type I is rooted in Jürgen Habermas’s model of communicative action, which considers that deliberation is communication oriented toward reaching common understanding and consensus. Type II includes any kind of information exchange or strategic form of communication produced in the public sphere that produces deliberative outcomes. The differences in these definitions creates a very important theoretical problem as the first is mostly focused on the persuasion produced by deliberation, searching for the “transforming capacity” of the exchange communication space, whereas the second tradition is primarily concerned with the informational output, the type of exchange, and its content. There are two problems with accepting the first definition. The first, especially when it comes to the study of political behavior, is that the source and type of informational exchange is endogenous to preexisting preferences (for instance, citizens look for information among those media who are closer to their ideological or party positions). Additionally, it departs from a normative ­ predisposition that assumes the exchange is inherently beneficial by promoting political persuasion and ­consensus, which is not always the case. As has been pointed out by many scholars, political deliberation is not always beneficial for democracy, at least in regard to the promotion of consensus, participation, and even citizenship. It depends on a lot of factors such as the type of the intermediation mechanism (discussion, mass media, social media), the type of exchange (homogeneous or heterogeneous), preexisting individual predispositions (such as the personal ties or party attachment), and contextual conditional factors such as the level of polarization of the party system. For instance, most political discussions take place between rather similar people with the aim of having an agreeable, entertaining, and reassuring conversation.

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The same can be said about exposure to media; people prefer to pay attention to like-minded commentary in the media to reinforce their opinions and have a more positive experience. However, exchanges with people holding different points of view, or exposure to media content espousing divergent opinions could also happen, resulting in an unpleasant experience that may have negative consequences. Additionally, this negative effect might depend on the type of mechanism. Mass media by definition produce greater exposure to heterogeneous political information than do interpersonal discussions, but ­heterogeneous interpersonal discussions, although less frequent, carry greater individual emotional cost in the exchange of information, especially when it takes crosscutting forms. Therefore, individuals might be avoiding politics or any other kind of deliberation in order to maintain interpersonal harmony after discussion with others with points of view that differ from theirs. But neither this personal emotional cost nor the need to maintain interpersonal harmony or reduce the discomfort of public disagreement is caused by cross-cutting media exposure alone. It might also be important to estimate the conditional consequences of content heterogeneity when the media transmit “hard news” or “soft news” or use episodic or thematic framings for information. Equally important is whether or not the negative effects of political deliberation occur when political discussion is not a problem-solving process—as it is assumed to be when analyzing deliberation—but is instead just a sociable flow of information, or when the orientation of political talk is not strategic but only with the aim of understanding. The effect of political deliberation might also be conditioned by certain political characteristics of the individual, such as individual political knowledge: Lessinformed citizens have more cognitive difficulties in dealing with cross-cutting discussions and rely more on emotions, making the experience more unpleasant and yielding more negative consequences for their political engagement. Among the politically less informed, “dangerous” personal deliberation makes them more dubious about, and less interested in, politics. This implies that more information could be the solution to the alarming effect of disagreement. However, this could be very problematic, because the access to and acquisition of information is not easy for many individuals, which can also be exacerbated by the inequality produced by access to and use of internet and new social media. Partisanship may also condition the effects of political deliberation. Although partisans are more interested in politics and more attentive than other individuals, they are also more vulnerable to the emotional cost of

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disagreement, leading to greater political isolation or disengagement and reducing chances for political persuasion: Such disagreement might reinforce preexisting positions. The implication of this is worrisome, as certain societies are becoming more polarized across partisan lines, making it more difficult for citizens to exchange opinions and accept political disagreement. Therefore, increasing political or ideological polarization not only reduces the space for “real public deliberation” (heterogeneous exposure), but it may result in a less consensual citizenry when the exchange does actually occur. Finally, the effects of political discussion depend on the type of social ties between the individuals and their intermediaries. Those individuals who are exposed to cross-cutting information within a context of strong social ties could produce more apathy and subsequent deliberation: it is more difficult to be interested in something that places the individual in conflict with family and friends. However, contemporary societies are changing, and political interactions are expanding qualitatively and quantitatively from traditional social and family circles. Citizens are exposed to broader social circles of horizontal equals and to more media information and cyber-deliberation, canceling out the potential negative effects of interpersonal exchange with individuals with strong social ties or partisan identification, but at the same time, increasing the political inequality of the internet divide. Mariano Torcal See also Decision Making; Direct Versus Indirect Democracy; Lobbying; Polling; Pressure Groups; Public Opinion; Risky Shift

Further Readings Gunther, R., Montero, J. R., & Puhle, H.-J. (Eds.). (2007). Democracy, intermediation, and voting on four continents. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Huckfeldt, R. (2007). Information, persuasion, and political communication networks. In R. J. Dalton & H.-D. Klingemann (Eds.), Oxford handbook of political behavior (pp. 100–122). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wolf, M. R., Morales, L., & Ikeda, K. (Eds.). (2010). Political discussion in modern democracies: A comparative perspective. New York, NY: Routledge.

Political Discourse The use of language in the conduct of politics has been a potent force in shaping the engagement of individuals and their participation in the political process. The

recognition of political discourse as a critical element in the development of the Western political tradition has had a long history. In ancient Greece, the Sophists gained prominence as itinerant teachers of public oratory whose goal was to provide instruction to students in the functions and powers of discourse. They fostered the rise of rhetoric as a tool to motivate and persuade introducing argumentation strategies to question, challenge, and debate. In this sense, they sought to level the playing field by providing students the art or techneˉ of achieving human excellence through their own initiative rather than by accident or noble birth. Plato reacted to the Sophists’ approach by cautioning in works such as Gorgias and Phaedrus about the manipulative power of language outlining differences between true and false rhetoric. For Plato, the goal was not to win a debate but rather to seek true knowledge. As city-states began to emerge, Aristotle argued that rhetoric was a fundamental element of citizenship. In doing so, he brought together the academic disciplines of rhetoric and politics in which the aim of rhetoric was to discover the persuasive means to achieve certain goals while the aim of politics was to make people happy. The Roman orator Cicero also understood the power of political discourse as a tool to shape the individual beliefs and influence political action to achieve certain political aims and objectives. The use of political discourse has since been an enduring element in the rise of the Western political tradition. In contemporary political life, the advent of advanced electronic communications has led to the ­globalization of political discourse, which has had an unprecedented impact in mobilizing and unleashing political forces in efforts to modify existing political arrangements. As part of the globalization process, new technological modalities, such as the Internet, have emerged and revolutionized the ways individuals engage in political discourse in both public and private spaces. This democratization of political discourse has allowed individuals access to various types of political engagement that had been unavailable to them in the past.

Problems of Definition Any attempt to define the phrase political discourse will immediately confront the challenge of coping with a range of contested meanings. In its most basic formulation, political discourse reflects a relationship between language and politics in which language serves as an indispensable tool for political action. However, the terms politics and discourse each take on various meanings depending on the context in which they are employed. In the case of politics, the term covers a wide range of subject matter and can only be vaguely defined

Political Discourse

until it is situated in a particular context that clearly specifies and delimits its meaning. For example, a number of scholars have traditionally defined politics in reference to issues such as power, conflict, and control. Within each domain, various aspects of political organization and activities are considered to reflect efforts to impose a particular political arrangement in accordance with a particular ideology. Politics also may include activities in a range of political environments in formal contexts such as political institutions, the media, grassroots organizations, town hall meetings, and special interest groups. Political speech also occurs in informal contexts such as personal blogs, social media, personal online videos, cartoons, and visual images. This can also be extended to include informal discussions of politics among individuals in public spaces or in the privacy of their homes. The concept of discourse is no less problematic to define. It has been used to denote conversations as well as types of thematic areas of study such as neoliberal discourse and civil discourse. Within the context of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “language games,” ­ discourse is viewed as spoken and written forms of ­language that act in goal-oriented ways across layers of social, cultural, and cognitive contexts. Other discourse scholars such as Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas view discourse within the context of norms within ­specific social fields (e.g., criminal justice, the media), subject matter (e.g., equality, oppression) and power relationships. It has been argued that almost all discourse engenders some type of political dimension. When language is used as a tool to manipulate thought to achieve a specific objective, the discourse, in whatever form, may be considered to have a political component. For example, within the context of office politics in the workplace, how a supervisor frames a problem may serve to favor one potential group or solution over another. Given that the terms politics and discourse can take on various meanings depending on the context in which they are used, when combined to form the phrase political discourse its meaning will necessarily remain vague and ambiguous until it is more firmly situated in a particular context. Political issues can be discussed in both institutional and noninstitutional settings with the speakers ranging from political officials to media elites to ordinary citizens. Whether it is a speech given on the floor of the Senate, a radio talk show host engaging his audience on a particular issue, or university students using social media to organize a protest against a university policy, each occurs in a unique context that affects the way the meaning of discourse is interpreted and understood. While there has been no shortage of categorization schemes to come to grips with the various ways political

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discourse has been conceptualized, there continues to be little agreement within academia on the definition of political discourse as a construct. To make the notion of political discourse a more manageable concept, scholars have sought to delimit its meaning by establishing certain criteria. For example, Christina Schaeffner provides a broad characterization of political discourse by conceiving it as a subcategory of discourse assessing its functional and thematic elements. Others have more narrowly defined political discourse along such criteria as the means of communication, the language of political actors, the political institutions involved, and the political themes expressed. Whatever categorization scheme is used, there seems to be a consensus that no set of criteria will be free of problems given the complicated and complex nature of capturing all the potential variations and conceptions of political discourse.

Research Because of the various ways political discourse is ­understood and conceptualized, the academic study of political discourse has engaged a number of theoretical perspectives that have led to a dizzying array of methodological approaches. The interdisciplinary nature of political discourse research underscores the complexity of the topic and the realization that investigations must go beyond traditional linguistic and discursive approaches. The rise of at least three culture-bound scholarly traditions that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century provides a broad framework to understanding contemporary approaches to political ­discourse analysis (PDA). The interdisciplinary approach to PDA is on prominent display in the diversified Anglophone tradition, which draws on a number of disciplines such as discursive psychology, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics and narrative analysis, among others, to critically examine various aspects of political discourse. Key scholars in this tradition, as noted by Zohar Kampf, include ­Norman Fairclough, Paul A. Chilton, Teun van Dijk, John Wilson, and Gunther Kress and Theo van ­Leeuwen. The influence of the cognitive tradition could be particularly observed in the work of Chilton and van Dijk who have examined the relationship between discourse and political cognition. Van Dijk has noted that PDA not only examines the content of political discourse but it can also be applied as a critical tool to critique how political discourse is used in an abusive way to maintain and sustain political power. In this sense, PDA can be viewed as a subset of critical discourse analysis (CDA) that views language as a tool of social practice to manipulate societal power relationships.

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A recent innovation in discourse analysis with applications to PDA has been the introduction of positioning theory by Rom Harré for use as a tool of discourse analysis within the context of discursive psychology. Positioning theory has been applied in political contexts to understand the impact of political discourse at the individual, organizational, and state levels across a range of domains such as political communities, legal circles, scientific traditions, and the media. The German tradition emerged as a post-World War II development, in which scholars motivated by their interest in trying to understand the language of the Third Reich, developed frameworks to assess sociopolitical transformations within German society. Examples of this tradition can be seen in the work of Martin R ­ eisegl and Ruth Wodak. The French tradition has been dominated by ­scholars with Marxist and neo-Marxist orientations who argue that all discourse occurs within particular ideological contexts that define the meaning of words and how they are used to generate tangible action in support of particular objectives. For example, within the context of terrorism the term freedom fighter will be understood and defined within a particular ideological perspective. The past decade has seen the growth in discourse research addressing a wide range of cultural environments. As compiled by Kampf in a study of 129 political discourse articles appearing in leading journals of ­ discourse analysis between 2010 and 2013, over 40 distinct cultural contexts were investigated attesting to the diversity of the field. Among these articles the rank order of the top six countries receiving the most attention were the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Sweden, and France. The study also identified seven broad thematic clusters of research topics that drew the most attention: persuasion and argumentation strategies, construction of discourses, representation of political actors and political relations, representation of political activities and events, mediated political interactions, political genres and speech acts, and political socialization.

Future Trends The impact and power of emerging technologies and their role in mediating political discourse to facilitate political action will continue to be of keen interest in the years ahead. The self-immolation in 2010 of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi and the protests that followed captured on mobile phones and posted to the Internet that led to the so-called Arab Spring highlighted the need to go beyond the analysis of language and culture. Technology that mediates the formation of

communities of interest on an almost real-time basis is transforming the way we consume political discourse that shape our political expectations and world views. Technology has also served to broaden civic engagement in the form of personal blogs and other modalities of individual expression such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. This democratization of expression has increased the volume and diversity of political discourse beyond traditional sources of political talk and text that will require more scholarly focus to understanding how these new voices are impacting political life at all levels. The scope of research into political discourse is expected expand beyond the examination of political discourse in the West. Although political discourse is being investigated in a greater range of cultural environments, the bulk of the research is still focused on the United States and European political cultures. However, following the trend in other areas of social science research and fostered by political volatility in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it is expected that more attention will be paid to investigating political discourse in non-Western political contexts as researchers seek to understand social movements and the impacts they are having in promoting or challenging political stability at all levels of society. William Costanza See also Civic Engagement; Cyberactivism; Media Framing; Political Deliberation; Political Participation; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Positioning Theory

Further Readings Aristotle. (1991). On rhetoric: A theory of civil discourse (G. Kennedy, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Chilton, P., & Schaeffner, C. (1997). Discourse and politics. In T. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction (Vol. 2, pp. 206–230). London, England: Sage. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Harré, R., & Moghaddam, F. M. (Eds.). (2003). The self and others: Positioning individuals and groups in personal, organizational, political, and cultural contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Political Ideology There are two basic ways to think about political ideology. On the one hand, political ideology may be thought of as a higher level aggregation of political preferences,

Political Ideology

not a preference on a specific issue like social security or abortion, but as the glue that holds various issue preferences together. Thus, modern liberalism, for example, indicates support for increased government spending not just in one area but broadly including education, health care, and food stamps, for example. Similarly, an ideological conservative prefers a generally smaller role for government in all of the above areas. Christopher Ellis and James Stimson refer to this aspect of ideology as operational ideology; it indicates the actual array of political attitudes and issue preferences that individuals hold. Alternatively, ideology may be considered a social identity or a symbolic ideology indicating that certain individuals define themselves as liberals while other people define their identity as conservatives. This social identity or symbolic model of political ideology conveys the ideological label that individuals prefer to use in describing themselves. Ellis and Stimson present evidence that while a majority of the American public is symbolically conservative, they are simultaneously operationally liberal. Philip Converse’s influential essay of 1964 provided one of the first systematic studies of operational ideology in the American public. He showed that most Americans are essentially nonideological; they may hold attitudes on specific policy issues but their issue preferences are not consistent across issues; in his words, they lack issue constraint. Converse also found that for most voters issue stability was quite low. That is, voters tended not to take the same position on issue from time 1 to time 2, thus raising doubts about whether voters had real issue preferences at all. Additionally, most citizens could not provide a coherent definition of ideological terms like liberalism or conservatism nor did they use these terms very frequently when describing candidates or parties. All of this evidence pointed to a public that for the most part was lacking in ideological thinking. According to Converse, the reason for the absence of ideology in the mass public was most likely due to the cognitive limitations of average citizens: they lacked sufficient knowledge about politics to form stable, consistent, ideologically oriented attitudes. Instead, their political attitudes primarily reflected their long-term partisan orientations and their current assessments of political candidates. In contrast, he suggested that political elites and a small segment of the mass public possessed the cognitive capabilities to hold ideologically consistent beliefs and attitudes that can be mapped onto the common conservative-liberal spectrum. Scholars can easily place these individuals on the ideological continuum and make accurate predictions about their policy choices based on these estimates. Politically knowledgeable individuals are more likely to be ideologically

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constrained, meaning that their political attitudes hang together in a coherent manner. But this was true of only a very small segment of the public in Converse’s estimation. For most individuals, ideology is largely dependent on partisanship. People tend to choose their ideological positions based on their partisan identity. Partisanship is a more motivating construct in political thinking than ideology, and adjusting political attitudes to be in line with partisanship decreases cognitive dissonance. Elites and activists, however, tend to structure their ideology by other factors and are more likely to have a partisan identity based on their ideological position. Three recent developments in research on ideology have challenged the essentially nonideological picture of the electorate painted by Converse more than 50 years ago. In the first place, as American politics has become more polarized in the last 5 decades there is some evidence that ideological thinking in the mass public may not be as uncommon as Converse suggested. As polarization has grown among elites, some scholars argue that the mass public has grown more ideological and polarized too. As the intensity of belief systems among ideological groups becomes more distinct, the opportunity for compromise diminishes and antagonism toward the other side grows. Elites certainly display this behavior, yet the debate continues as to whether the public shows similar characteristics. Thus, the prevalence of mass ideology continues to be a hotly contested topic among scholars of political behavior. Secondly, there has been a growing interest among scholars in a multidimensional conception and measurement of mass ideology. Traditionally, ideology has been assumed to be single-dimensional such that individuals could be arrayed across the ideological spectrum from extreme liberal to extreme conservative with moderates in the middle. The underlying ideology was assumed to be the role of government in the market economy such that liberals preferred a larger role for government while conservatives emphasized a smaller role for government. But recently there has been interest in a more nuanced conception of ideology that sees individuals as having preferences on not just economic issues like taxes, spending, and redistributive programs but also on social and cultural issues like abortion, same sex marriage, and the role of religion. According to this new formulation, therefore, political ideology is multidimensional, not unidimensional. Thus, voters may be economically conservative but socially liberal or vice versa, which provides a more complex picture of political ideology. These interconnected and stable beliefs form a worldview about how politics should be structured. Utilizing a multidimensional view of ideology shows that individuals can and do think beyond the traditional unidimensional scale. The other major

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takeaway from this research is that individuals who hold consistently liberal or conservative views on both dimensions might be more advantaged in the political system than those who hold conflicting views on economic and social issues (i.e., libertarians and populists). Thirdly, scholars have recently considered the impact of principles and values on political behavior. Individuals do not only think about politics on one or two dimensions ranging from liberal to conservative. Individualism, authoritarianism, and ethnocentrism also guide mass political reasoning, and these p ­ rinciples and values are intertwined with ideological thinking. Conservative individuals are more likely to hold ­individualist values and less likely to hold egalitarian values. These constructs are gaining traction as explanations for how individuals orient themselves toward politics. In conclusion, scholarship on political ideology has moved beyond the traditional issue of whether ordinary citizens have the cognitive capability to think about politics in ideological terms. More recently, interest has focused on three distinct but interconnected issues. The first is whether voters have responded to the growing ideological polarization of political elites and activists by becoming more ideological as well. The second is whether mass political ideology is more usefully conceived and measured as multidimensional rather than unidimensional. And thirdly, there has been growing interest in the study of political principles and political values and how they relate to ideology. These developments point to a renewed interest in the study of political ideology, placing it once again at the center of research on mass political behavior. Matthew Fowler and Edward G. Carmines See also Capitalism; Democracy; Dictatorship; Fascism; Religiosity; Socialism and Communism

Further Readings Abramowitz, A., & Saunders, K. (2008). Is polarization a myth? Journal of Politics, 70, 542–555. Carmines, E. G., Ensley, M. J., & Wagner, M. W. (2012). Who fits the left-right divide? Partisan polarization in the American electorate. American Behavioral Scientist, 56, 1631–1653. Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In D. E. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and discontent. New York, NY: Free Press. Ellis, C., & Stimson, J. A. (2009). Symbolic ideology in the American electorate. Electoral Studies, 28(3), 388–402. Ellis, C., & Stimson, J. A. (2012). Ideology in America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Feldman, S. (1988). Structure and consistency in public opinion: The role of core beliefs and values. American Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 416–440. Fiorina, M. P., Abrams, S. J., & Pope, J. C. (2010). Culture war? The myth of a polarized America (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Longman. Goren, P. (2013). On voter competence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Political Indoctrination Political indoctrination involves persuading people to adopt certain beliefs, ideas, values, and ideologies related to politics and governance. There are other forms of indoctrination, such as religious indoctrination, to which children are subjected, often in their homes, by their parents and in religious institutions. A French psychoanalyst, Clotaire Rapaille, argues that children are imprinted by their cultures during the first 7 years of their lives and these imprints shape their future behavior. The major schools of psychology, including behaviorism and cognitive psychology, all assume that socialization in the early years of life plays a highly important role in shaping adult behavior. It is reasonable to argue, then, that along with religious indoctrination, the political indoctrination process starts early in our lives. Indoctrination is a “fuzzy” concept that can be looked at from a number of ways since it involves matters such as communication, persuasion, rhetorical style, socialization, education, and identification. Political indoctrination is a covert part of children’s everyday experience in the United States when they recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school every morning, or it can be overt, direct, and targeted, in the form of commercials that political candidates run on radio and television or the videos that terrorist groups such as ISIS place on social media, designed to convince people to join them.

Communication and Indoctrination We can adopt Roman Jakobson’s model of communication, which says communication involves a sender, a message, and a receiver. The political indoctrination process involves an indoctrinator, a message whose contents are political and ideological, and indoctrinees, a person or group of people being indoctrinated. The process of being indoctrinated often occurs below the level

Political Indoctrination

of consciousness; people who are being indoctrinated generally do not realize this process is taking place.

Political Indoctrination and the Psyche There is a psychological element to persuasion that is important to recognize. Political indoctrinators appeal to unconscious elements in people’s psyches. Freud’s argument that our unconscious shapes much of our behavior is relevant here. The unconscious represents a major part of the human psyche and contains a great deal of content of which we are unaware. A marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, Gerald Zaltman, estimates in his book How Customers Think that the unconscious represents 95% of the psyche, and discusses how the unconscious mind affects purchasing decisions. We can apply to politics his ideas about purchasing and suggest that the unconscious is behind choices and decisions we make in the political realm. In essence, political indoctrination convinces us to “purchase” or vote for this candidate rather than another one or to fly to Syria to join ISIS. More recent cognitive research, as discussed in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, points to the role of heuristics (shortcuts in thinking) and implicit cognitive processes generally in how people make political choices. Political indoctrination may also be connected to the process of identification in which a person develops strong emotional ties to political figures and their causes. As Charles Brenner explains in An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, identification involves wanting to be like someone in one or several aspects of thought and behavior. We want to imitate someone we admire in various ways—one of which is to identify with someone’s political beliefs.

The Role of Mass Media and Social Media Gustave Le Bon’s classic study, The Crowd, published in 1895, deals with the way groups of individuals, under certain circumstances, when stirred by powerful emotions, can lose their individuality and become a “psychological” crowd. Becoming a member of a crowd, in which everyone thinks alike, can be seen as a kind of group-based political indoctrination, especially since crowds frequently have a political dimension to them. Robert Merton, in the introduction to the book, points out that Le Bon recognized the influence of newspapers on mass opinion. Newspapers and magazines (and now blogs) often are political in nature so exposure to media involves political indoctrination. Neither Le Bon nor Merton could have anticipated the development of the Internet or smartphone, which are full of ideological blogs and other forms of political information.

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After the development of the mass media, most overt political indoctrination has been done using newspaper advertisements and radio and television commercials, but lately social media are playing an increasingly important role in political messaging. Using the mass media to indoctrinate people for one cause or another is not new. In many countries, very popular religious shows on television, and in some cases television channels, play an important role in the political process since they support certain political parties and their policies. For example, there are many conservative radio shows in the United States that indoctrinate their listeners with the political beliefs of the talk show hosts. Linguists have been increasingly interested in the power of texts to shape political beliefs. A branch of linguistics, critical discourse analysis, directs its attention to the styles in which meaning is communicated by texts, in contrast to their content, or what they communicate. Thus, Norman Fairclough (1989), a prominent critical discourse analyst, points out that there are “connections between language, power and ideology that are hidden from people” (p. 5). It is the task of critical discourse analysis, he argues, to reveal these hidden connections. Fairclough’s analysis suggests that most of the communication to which we are exposed has ideological content and thus functions as a camouflaged or hidden form of political persuasion. Political indoctrination, we see, is a very complicated process that can be analyzed from many disciplines. We have to consider everything from the role of personality and the influence of the unconscious on our thinking and behavior (especially our voting behavior) to the development of mass media and, more recently, the Internet, the social media, and new technologies. Arthur Asa Berger See also Civic Engagement; Confirmation Bias; False Consciousness; Mass Communication; Media Framing; News, Television; Source Bias

Further Readings Berger, A. A. (2015).Media analysis techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brenner, C. (1974). An elementary textbook of psychoanalysis (Rev. ed.). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Dorfman, A. (1983). The emperor’s new clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and other innocent heroes do to our minds. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Enzenberger, H. M. (1974). The consciousness industry: On literature, politics & the media. New York, NY: Seabury. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London, England: Longman. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Le Bon, G. (1960). The crowd. New York, NY: Viking Press. Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. London, England: Sage. Rapaille, C. (2006). The culture code: An ingenious way to understand why people around the world act as they do and buy as they do. New York, NY: Broadway Books.

Political Mandates The term political mandate refers to the authorization that voters give to their political leaders to rule. The mandate is used by the elected or appointed leaders to carry out the explicit or implied wishes of their constituents. Leaders interpret these mandates as giving them the legitimacy needed to govern and carry out policy actions undertaken to satisfy their electorate; the people are the source of the political mandate. Politicians use various communication styles to promote their policies or influence the conversation at the political level as it relates to policy positions. The political leaders exercise ideological and partisan leadership when communicating with the electorate.

Democratic Systems In democratic systems, the legitimacy of governance systems comes from an evolving relationship between political leaders and their constituents, and political leaders with their political parties. The mandates mean they speak with the voice of the people, who share common characteristics or agree on the same values and policies. Democratic institutions require leadership in order to run effectively and efficiently. When politicians are seeking the support of the electorate (i.e., asking for the mandate), they list on their manifestos, or platforms, their promises of what they will accomplish. This seeking of a mandate takes place on a regular schedule in democratic systems. In parliamentary democracies, if leaders face a challenge to their leadership, they may return to their electorate for a renewed mandate in an election. However, the electorate may decline to renew it and choose an alternative. In such democracies, the decision is usually accepted.

Authoritarian Systems In authoritarian systems, the political mandates can still be determined by the perceived collective will of those permitted to vote. Initially, the mandate can came from a popularly supported revolution, but sometimes the mandate is lost because of a breakdown of the law. Then, the once popularly supported revolutionary government may be replaced by an authoritarian regime.

Nevertheless, these systems have mandates because they have supporters who benefit from the authoritarian regimes. The mandates come from these supporters, who receive socioeconomic and political influence and power from the authoritarian regimes. In addition, being recognized by other countries legitimizes such regimes’ ability to execute their policies, thereby legitimizing their political mandate.

The Electorate The electorate can be defined as the population of persons who are authorized to vote in an election. The nonvoting persons associated with the electorate may influence the voting decision. The enfranchisement of the electorate contributes to the acceptance of the political mandate by the rest of the population. Disenfranchisement of large segments of the population can occur because of one’s ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality of origin, criminal history, and sexuality. This disenfranchisement can differ if one is referring to political mandates for political associations (professional responsible associations, political parties, etc.). Disenfranchisement can come if one is not a registered member of the association (or profession), or if one supports a particular faction in the association. For democratic systems, the level of acceptance of disenfranchisement depends on the societal acceptance of it. It was once normal to disenfranchise voters based on gender, but that is no longer accepted in democratic systems. However, disenfranchisement can occur because the voter was convicted of a crime and served a prison sentence—this is practiced notably in the United States and the United Kingdom. If large segments of a country’s population are disenfranchised, it can be argued that the political mandates are being authorized by a (sufficiently) powerful minority. Sometimes, this divide can make governing difficult as people may not necessarily support the currently elected leader—they become the opposition to the mandate authorized by the powerful minority. Political mandates exist because people have consciously accepted that they would delegate decisionmaking powers to another person. However, the leaders must remember that in democracies their power can be taken away via the electorate. In democratic systems, political leaders are pressed to ensure that they have carried out the wishes of their electorates or attained the goals they pledged to accomplish during their elections. In authoritarian systems, leaders may initially have a mandate, but the failure to renew the mandate by a ­willing endorsement of the population can result in dictatorial approaches to hold onto power. As a result, oppressive techniques are often witnessed in regimes lacking civil liberties. The overall popular mandate is

Political Morality

eroded by these dictatorial practices. However, there are supporters who gain advantages from the authoritarian regimes and give the regimes a somewhat minorityendorsed mandate to continue to rule. The members of the electorate have a particular perspective influenced by their personal social and economic conditions, which influences their political choices. The members of the electorate, through their political collectives, elect their leadership with the aim of advancing their political agendas. The political ­mandate changes over time as the social attitudes and economic statuses of the respective electoral voting groups change. These changes can be decisive and can polarize the electorate. Such a polarization of the electorate means that political mandates can change in an election cycle or across generations. However, an active political party or collective works hard to engage with all of its potential voters to ensure it achieves the necessary support to legitimize its rule. No matter what political system is used by a country, political mandates are necessary for the general acceptance of political rule by the country’s leaders. This mandate comes from being elected or selected by the electorate and given power by proxy. This mandate can be renewed or removed by this electorate as part of their prerogative. Political mandates are often temporary for political leaders, but they are necessary for political leaders to rule. Daren Maynard See also Bureaucratic Politics; Parliamentarism; Party Systems; Political Deliberation; Rent-Seeking Behavior

Further Readings Azari, J. R. (2014). Delivering the people’s message: The changing politics of the presidential mandate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Baofu, P. (2007). Rise of authoritarian liberal democracy. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars. Dolenec, D. (2013). Democratic institutions and authoritarian rule in southeast Europe. Colchester, England: European Consortium for Political Research. Howard, P. N., & Hussain, M. M. (2014). State power 2.0. Brookfield, England: Ashgate. Shapiro, I., & Macedo, S. (Eds.). (2000). Designing democratic institutions. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Political Morality Discussions of political morality frequently refer to several classical sources, notably Niccolò Machiavelli’s much-quoted work The Prince (1513), in which he

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advises political leaders that they “must learn how not to be good,” meaning that in order to get and keep power, they must do things that are not permitted by the standards of ordinary life. Another influential source is Max Weber’s essay, “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), which distinguishes between an “ethic of ultimate ends” and an “ethic of responsibility”: The former, in Weber’s view, tends toward a sort of fanaticism that ignores consequences, while the latter is recommended as the right ethic for political actors who value the preservation of necessary institutions. A third source is ­Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Les mains sales (1971), which contrasts the ineffectual purist with the hard-headed realist who, like Machiavelli’s prince, accepts that there will be moral costs in advancing an important political cause. The English translation of Sartre’s title gave rise to an essay by Michael Walzer, “Dirty Hands” (1973), which, in probing the acceptable extent and limits of moral compromise, is a modern classic of political reflection. Instead of positing a conflict between morality and politics, should one speak, rather, of a “political morality”? Here are three reasons for doing so. First, alongside the Christian morality that Machiavelli identified with the standards of private life, there is an older morality, civic or patriotic, that calls upon citizens to overcome self-interest and to accept personal sacrifices for the sake of a common good. Second, a realistic political perspective must weigh short- versus long-term consequences, and cannot necessarily refuse all shortterm compromises if important longer term goals are at stake. Third, there is the issue of numbers: in ordinary life one’s decisions concern relatively small numbers of people, while larger numbers count on a political scale. Some empirical research on the famous “trolley problem”—a problem about what to do if one can divert a runaway trolley causing it to kill fewer people rather than more—suggest that numbers do in fact weigh with people, up to a point, in deciding on the right thing to do. The issues will depend of course on one’s basic view of the foundation of morality. A standard distinction is made in moral philosophy between utilitarian and dutybased approaches. The former weigh up the consequences of actions or practices, while the latter posit unconditional duties (“Thou shalt not . . .”). While critics have long complained that utilitarianism is too tolerant of damage to small numbers of people in order to benefit larger numbers, its defenders claim that the doctrine can take a much more nuanced view of circumstances and contexts and so avoid the tyranny of large numbers (e.g., Greene, 2013). Of more direct relevance to empirical work is the fine-grained account of moral sensibility constructed by Jonathan Haidt. According to Haidt’s work, in making political judgments people respond to five important cues: They are sensitive to

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issues involving care and harm, fairness and cheating, authority and subversion, loyalty and betrayal, sanctity and degradation. All of these cues, Haidt opines, have a basis in human evolution, and they continue to trigger basic political responses such as partisan allegiances. Haidt claims, with empirical support, that the political right is better placed to exploit these triggers than the political left. That judgment may be time- and contextbound, bearing in mind the rich variety of emotional triggers in the political psychology of the socialist tradition and other emancipatory movements. Another resource for the student of political morality is to be found in the history of major transformations in political values. What, for example, explains the rapid disintegration of support for the slave trade in early 19th-century Britain? Examining this and other major transformations, Kwame Appiah concludes that the principal dynamic is to be found in the sense of honor. It was a patriotic British desire to be better than their former colonies, combined with a competitive dynamic that developed among Protestant churches and other organizations seeking to take the lead. The explanation may seem incomplete, for honor can come to attach only to something already determined to be worthy, for some other reason. But Appiah’s thesis importantly draws attention to the social dynamics that give political effect to moral perceptions. Finally, another sense of “political morality” is found among political theorists from John Stuart Mill to Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and many other writers in the Anglo-American liberal tradition. Here the term refers to special constraints that apply in political and not in personal life—the opposite, intriguingly, of the Machiavellian claim. If, for example, we propose to impose some rule or practice on others by coercive means, we need to meet a higher standard of justification than we otherwise would; for example, we may be convinced of the truth or rightness of it but decline to impose it out of respect for the autonomy of other citizens. Understood in that sense, the term belongs to a normative rather than empirical domain, but political theorists need to be aware of the real-world conditions (discussed by Joshua Greene in 2013 and others) under which toleration of the disapproved other is actually possible.

Edmonds, D. (2016). Would you kill the fat man? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greene, J. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason and the gap between us and them. New York, NY: Penguin. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Pantheon. Kleinig, J., Keller, S., & Primoratz, I. (2015). The ethics of patriotism: A debate. Chichester, England: Wiley. Machiavelli, N. (1513/1950). The Prince. In N. Machiavelli, The Prince and Discourses. New York, NY: Modern Library. Sartre, J.-P. (1971). Les Main sales. Paris, France: Gallimard. Walzer, M. (1973). Political action: The problem of dirty hands. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2(2), 160–180. Weber, M. (1918/1946). Politics as a vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Political Participation Broadly defined, political participation refers to all voluntary activities by which ordinary citizens try to influence political outcomes. These activities cover such diverse forms as voting, taking part in campaigns and other organizational activities, contacting politicians, signing petitions, and attending demonstrations or participating in more confrontational protest events (such as occupations or sit-ins). While early empirical research on political participation in the 1940s and 1950s mainly focused on voting and electoral turnout, the repertoire of activities covered by empirical studies has expanded ever since. The topic is important, as political participation is essential for democracy and, therefore, is also a key topic for research interested in the quality and functioning of democracies. As Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady write in their groundbreaking 1995 book on the topic, Voice and Equality, “Citizen participation is at the heart of democracy. Indeed, democracy is unthinkable without the ability of citizens to participate freely in the governing process” (p. 1). This entry discusses definitions and how the various forms of activities have been grouped into modes of participation, as well as theories of political participation.

Richard Vernon See also Corruption; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Judicial Review; Rule of Law; Values and Politics

Further Readings Appiah, K. A. (2010). The honor code: How moral revolutions happen. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Expanding the Repertoire of Political Participation Most definitions of political participation share five aspects:

1. Political participation refers to people’s activities as citizens and not as elected representatives or public servants.

Political Participation

2. The focus is on actions and not solely on attitudes.



3. The activities are voluntary; that is, one is not forced to participate and does not receive pay for it.



4. The activities are triggered by the intention to influence the decisions of another actor or body.



5. The activities are political, as they are directed toward influencing a political outcome.

All five aspects are a matter of degree because it is not always easy to draw clear boundaries (e.g., between voluntary and paid work or between intentional and nonintentional acts). However, the fifth aspect is the one that has changed the most over time if we compare various definitions. Early definitions focused very much on those activities aimed at selecting government personnel, whereas later studies have extended the scope to include all phases of political decision making and toward influencing all kinds of decisions made by public representatives and officials. The term political outcome used above (and suggested by Henry Brady) is even broader, as it might potentially refer to any decision over the authoritative allocation of values—be it by elected representative and state officials or any other type of actor. Reflecting the change in definitions, the concrete forms covered by empirical studies have expanded over time as well. As stated, classical studies focused on the act of casting a vote in elections (and, sometimes, related campaign activities or the act of directly contacting elected representatives). In the late 1960s and 1970s, more and more forms have been covered—most importantly, all kinds of protest activities were added to the list of activities, such as signing a petition, taking part in demonstrations, unofficial industrial strikes, boycotts, occupations of buildings, or in other more confrontational acts. In their landmark study on political action, Samuel Barnes, Max Kaase and colleagues labeled these activities as “unconventional” to distinguish them from the “conventional” forms that had been at the center of scientific research so far. The label unconventional refers to activities that are either illegal or perceived as illegitimate by the wider public. This label seems no longer appropriate, as most of these forms correspond to social norms by now. Therefore, other authors have subsumed activities such as demonstrations, boycotts, and petitions under labels such as protest behavior, noninstitutionalized, or elite-­ challenging activities. Since the 1990s, yet another set of activities has been added to the list. This time, scholars put the emphasis on more individualized forms of political participation, such as political consumerism (i.e., the choice of goods and services due to ethical or

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political reasons) or civic and social engagement (i.e., membership and activity in various nongovernmental organizations). These are not just conceptual distinctions, but have also proved to be relevant in empirical terms, since persons who get involved in politics in one specific way might also be more likely to get involved in very similar activities. Thus, it is possible to distinguish broader bundles or modes of political participation—although note that these might vary across contexts and over time. As highlighted by Russel J. Dalton, the activities discussed so far are a part of a hierarchy with several thresholds. The first threshold is the transition from conventional to unconventional modes of political participation. The second threshold differentiates activities including lawful demonstration and signing petitions from forms of direct action, such as joining in boycotts. The third threshold refers to illegal but nonviolent acts (e.g., unofficial strikes or peaceful occupations). Finally, the fourth threshold involves violent activities, including both violence against persons and properties. Apart from these thresholds, authors have also suggested distinguishing the various forms of participation by their capacity to convey information, the variation in volume, and the requirements or resources needed from individual participants. For example, Verba and his colleagues emphasize that voting does not allow one to convey very specific pieces of information to the decision makers, varies only little over time, and mainly requires an individual’s time. By contrast, contacting an individual politician allows one to transmit more specific demands to the political system, varies more in volume over time, and requires time, but also the necessary skills to do it. Based on two other main criteria, Jan Teorell and his colleagues suggest a typology that combines all of the different forms (see Figure 1). They suggest distinguishing forms of participation with respect to (1) the main channel of expression (representational vs. nonrepresentational) and (2) the mechanism of influence (exit vs. voice). First, while representational forms (e.g., taking part in elections, party membership, or contacting an elected official) are directly targeted toward the formal channels of representation in liberal democracies, extrarepresentational activities are less driven by the logic of representation and do not primarily target representative officials. Second, some forms are more exit based, while others are more voice based in the sense that the main mechanism of influence is not exchanging one “product” for the other (exit) but, rather, trying to influence an outcome by directly raising specific demands (voice). In addition, Teorell and colleagues distinguish between those extrarepresentational forms that are highly targeted toward specific actors or institutions

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Political Participation

Channels of Expression Representational

Extra-representational

Voting

Consumer participation

Nontargeted: Party activity

Nontargeted: Protest activity

Exit based Mechanism of Influence

Voice based

Targeted: Contacting

Figure 1  Modes of Political Participation Source: Adapted from Teorell, Torcal, & Montero (2007).

(e.g., contacting a specific politician), and those that are nontargeted (e.g., protesting in the streets). Most often, empirical studies rely on survey data to assess the frequency and determinants of participation in the various forms. More precisely, respondents are asked whether they have taken part in the various forms during a specified time period (e.g., the last 12 months, 5 years, or ever). Of course, this raises the problem that what is usually studied is self-reported behavior and we do not know how often someone got involved in a certain type of activity during the period indicated in the survey question. The last point is especially problematic for forms that vary more over time as, for example, large-scale protest mobilization. For this case, scholars have also used alternative methods to collect data (e.g., the systematic coding of newspapers and other written documents).

Theories of Political Participation: Who Participates? Having clarified what is captured by the term political participation and the tendencies related to changes in repertoires and forms of participation, we turn to the central analytical question related to political participation: Who participates and how can we explain participation or the lack thereof? This question is of utmost importance since it contributes to an understanding of political inequalities—that is, unequal political voice and capacity to influence policy decisions that affect the life of citizens, as well as shape society and its transformation. The dominant approach to the study of political participation relates to the civic voluntarism model proposed by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady. In this essential reading, the authors propose that people participate because (a) they can, (b) they want to, and (c) they have been asked to do so. In other words, Verba and colleagues contend that people participate thanks to a

combination of political resources (they can), political attitudes (they want to), and recruitment networks (they have been asked to do so). These three sets of explanations are used individually or in combination to explain citizens’ participation in politics. The following sections focus on each explanation to discuss in more detail what are important readings in the field and their key findings.

Political Resources Political resources are derived from education, occupational status, and income, which contribute to political participation directly or indirectly through political attitudes. Indeed, education, occupational status, and income can be directly translated into political resources. In particular, income can be used to spend money to support political causes, donate money to political parties, or finance political candidates. However, education and occupational status support the acquisition of other political resources. They offer political knowledge, access to information, and the capacity to understand and process sometimes complex information, thereby facilitating participation. Hence, education and occupational status are central in the acquisition of other political resources that take the form of political attitudes—interest in politics, feelings of efficacy, or ­ political knowledge.

Political Attitudes The most important theory in relation to political attitudes and participation is that of postmaterialism proposed by Ronald F. Inglehart. Inglehart suggested that postindustrial transformation values shifted from materialistic to postmaterialistic; this process is what he refers to as the silent revolution of the late 1960s. As citizens gain material well-being, thanks to employment and social security, they turn to demands for

Political Participation

postmaterialistic goods, such as civic rights related to self-expression or related to issues of belonging and quality of life. These new sets of demands are related to the satisfaction of primary needs and appear first among the middle class, who benefit from the postindustrial turn. This shift in dominant values among the younger cohorts, which then spread to the overall society in Western democracies, results in transformed political participation. Indeed, Inglehart claims that postmaterialistic individuals are more prone to engage in elite-challenging forms of participation that allow them to more directly express their views about society.

Networks: Interpersonal and Organizational Regarding network and political participation, the dominant (although controversial) theory is that of social capital proposed by Robert D. Putnam. The United States has been praised for the richness of its civic networks and the importance given to individual involvement in various types of civil society organizations, from the more political ones, such as parties or associations, to bowling leagues or other sports clubs. However in his book, Putnam argues that citizens’ involvement in civil society organizations is declining and this, in turn, negatively affects political participation. The idea is that as citizens no longer engage in civil society organizations, they have reduced social and political trust, which in turn hinders political participation. Research by Putnam and others on social capital is mainly focused on the beneficial influence of organizational networks. However, interpersonal networks also play a role in explaining political participation. First, thanks to discussion about politics, citizens gain political knowledge and acquire new information about politics. This contributes both to political socialization and to recruitment into politics. However, as for example, Diana C. Mutz shows networks can also have a negative influence on participation when the information and the cues they provide are contradictory.

The State and Policy Feedback Furthermore, the forms and the repertoires of political participation vary by country, depending on citizens’ right to participate politically through various means, but also because of the specific political opportunity structures offered to participation. First, regarding citizens’ rights, we have in mind democratic regimes in which all forms of expression of political voice are recognized and valued. However, even in such a context, some forms of participation may be violent or even

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illegal and, therefore, differently accepted or tolerated by the authorities in place and the wider citizenry. Second, the openness of the political system affects citizens’ choice of preferred mode of action. This relates to horizontal and vertical power sharing. Moreover, it refers to elites’ positions on specific issues, the fact that they offer a united or a divided front, and that they are more or less accessible and responsive to external demands. In addition, the specific socioeconomic configuration affects political participation. On the one hand, the historical legacy affects collective memories and choices of action repertoires. On the other hand, the dominant issues debated in the public sphere may lead to different types of political action. Another approach on the influence of the state on political participation refers to the policy feedback effect. In this line of research, for example by Joe Soss, the focus of attention lies on the effect of policies on citizens’ political socialization—that is, how citizens learn from their interaction with the state to trust or distrust the state capacity and the motivation to respond to their demands. This line of research is interesting, as it contributes to the study of adult political socialization, which is much less developed than that of children and youth in the family, at school, or through interactions with peers. Furthermore, this area of study highlights the importance of citizens’ equal voice, that is, citizens’ equal capacity to have their voices heard and contribute to shaping public policies that will affect their lives.

Trends in Research on Political Participation Current research on political participation focuses on, among others, the relationship between genes, personality traits, and participation, or on the rise of new forms of participation related to the digital revolution. The idea of new forms is often put forward but is also criticized. Here the term is used to convey the idea of a renewal of political participation, which often draws from existing action repertoires that are rejuvenated, such as online petitioning, boycotting campaigns, and other culture-jamming events. As new forms of participation—whether on- or offline—develop, they ­ raise questions related to their political dimension. As stated in the definition, “influencing a political outcome” is a critical and controversial aspect of the definition of what counts as political participation. However, influencing a political outcome can be understood in a broader or narrower sense. Recent theoretical work on political participation, more specifically on creative political participation, highlights the importance of the meaning that citizens attach to their actions. Thus, any type of action can be an act of political participation if

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Political Persuasion and Rhetoric

those who perform it aim at conveying a political message. This understanding of political participation poses challenges to its study over time and space, as well as to our ability to capture individual participation in politics through survey questions. However, it offers promising avenues for the study of citizens’ involvement in democratic practices. Swen Hutter and Jasmine Lorenzini See also Activism; Civic Engagement; Collective Action; Disengagement; Mass Political Behavior; Personality Traits; Political Socialization; Resource Mobilization; Social Capital

Further Readings Barnes, S. H., Kaase, M., Allerback, K. R., Farah, B., Heunks, F., Inglehart, R., . . . Rosenmayr, L. (1979). Political action. Mass participation in five Western democracies. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Brady, H. E. (1999). Political participation. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, & L. S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of political attitudes (pp. 737–801). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Dawes, C., Cesarini, D., Fowler, J. H., Magnusson, P. K. E., & Oskarsson, S. (2014). The relationship between genes, psychology traits, and political participation. American Journal of Political Science, 58, 888–903. Inglehart, R. (1971). The silent revolution in Europe: Intergenerational change in post-industrial societies. American Political Science Review, 65, 991–1017. Inglehart, R. (1977). The silent revolution: Changing values and political styles among Western publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mutz, D. C. (2002). The consequences of cross-cutting networks for political participation. American Journal of Political Science, 46, 838–855. Niemi, R. G., & Hepburn, M. A. (1995). The rebirth of political socialization. Perspectives on Political Science, 24, 7–16. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Schlozman, K. L., Verba, S., & Brady, H. E. (2012). The unheavenly chorus: Unequal political voice and the broken promise of American democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Soss, J. (1999). Lessons of welfare: Policy design, political learning, and political action. American Political Science Review, 93, 363–380. Teorell, J., Torcal, M., & Montero, J. R. (2007). Political participation: Mapping the terrain. In J. W. van Deth, J. R. Montero, & J. A. Westholm (Eds.), Citizenship and involvement in European democracies: A comparative analysis (pp. 334–357). London, England: Routledge. van Deth, J. W. (2012). Is creative participation good for democracy. In M. Micheletti, & A. S. McFarland (Eds.), Creative participation: Responsibility-taking in the political world (pp. 148–172). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady, H. E. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Political Persuasion Rhetoric

and

Persuasion is a communicative action designed to cause others to do or believe something. In politics, persuasion is crucial for campaigns as their purpose is to ­convince as many as possible to support a cause and perform acts beneficial to that cause. Rhetoric is the art of persuasive communication, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques. The power of persuasive communication lies in the strategic use of rhetoric.

Persuasion, Propaganda, and Coercion Most political communication is loaded with rhetoric and designed to be persuasive to some degree. Persuasive communication is often linked to propaganda, a term the origins of which lie in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Propaganda, however, has become a rather pejorative term, associated with communication within authoritarian states and in particular Soviet ­Russia and Nazi Germany. Despite this, propaganda is a reasonable umbrella term for most persuasive political communication, as the simple meaning is communication with a purpose, meaning it is designed to make the receiver act in a way beneficial to the communicator but feeling that the action was the receiver’s choice. Arguably it is true that there are degrees of human agency and free choice involved; however, the skill of the communicator is to limit human agency through persuasive techniques. The power of the persuader relies on the art of rhetoric, and debates on the power of rhetoric have raged for thousands of years. Rejecting the teachings of Plato, who argued that much persuasive argumentation relied on empty sophistry, Aristotle argued that persuasion involved a relationship between the persuader and their audience and that rhetoric must demonstrate logos, ethos, and pathos. Successful, in other words persuasive, rhetoric had to be grounded in logic (logos) and the logic must be recognized by the audience. The ethos of the persuader was equally important, the extent to which the persuader was seen to be working for a positive goal and have good intentions. Pathos represents a clear understanding of the emotional state of the audience, connecting with them, their hopes and fears, and

Political Plasticity

being relevant to the context in which they are listening. Aristotle’s precepts remain fundamental to understanding how rhetoric works and the extent that persuasion is a two-way process involving the combined will of the persuader and their audience. Scholars discuss rhetoric in terms of the extent that the rhetorician attempts to limit human agency. Persuasion is argued to be an amoral concept involving the exertion of influence over another through the strength of argument alone. In theory, this allows the individual to put up a counterargument and assess the logic of the evidence used to underpin an argument. Where there are debates between opposing contenders for office, for example, each contender will be persuasive but in different degrees to different members of the audience. In contrast, political rhetoric may also attempt to manipulate members of an audience, exerting power over others through forced choice making. Manipulation can be extremely powerful if the communication plays on the emotions of the audience, in particular leading them to be fearful or under threat. Much negative advertising, a mainstay of many election campaigns, could be argued to be highly manipulative. Persuasion can also involve the most extreme form of manipulation, coercion, the preserve of authoritarian leaders and terrorist organizations. Coercion involves exerting power over another by force or threat of force. Some might argue that some negative messages involve coercion when the message portrays a threat as impending unless some action is taken, for example negative advertising, which portrays one contender for president as a threat in some way, perhaps to national security due to their moderate (or extreme) views. The different forms of persuasion raise some interesting perspectives that relate to the ethics of political communication.

Rhetoric and Ethics Many of the devices of rhetoric are those common within speech and literature, such as the use of metaphor and simile in order to simplify complex issues and make them resonate. Such devices can obscure the implications of pursuing certain policies, for example when simplifying foreign policy to struggles between good and evil. However greater concerns are raised regarding the use of devices such as epideictic rhetoric, which attributes praise and blame and categorizes a “we,” the insider who belongs, versus an outsider, a “them,” who is a threat. During the cold war (1945– 1989), any opponent of anti-Soviet policies was characterized as a communist sympathizer, thus undermining any argument for a more conciliatory stance. Similarly, in debates on military strikes against targets in territory declared to be part of Islamic state in 2014 and 2015,

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opponents have been characterized as terrorist sympathizers. The blunt definitions of us and them stifle pluralist debate and prevent consideration of the ­ broader issues and implications involved in pursuing such policies. These examples raise the question of ­ethics in ­relation to rhetoric. Persuasive communication can be used for any function, to change social attitudes, encourage healthy lifestyles, or gain support for war. Judgment is often made on whether the intended goal is moral. Yet debates rage over the extent to which manipulation is justifiable and in what contexts. In pluralist democracies, individual freedom over informed choices is seen as a core ­principle, yet there are constant attempts to influence attitudes and behaviors. The acceptable levels of manipulation are determined by society, with political communication seldom facing the same levels of scrutiny as corporate communication. In theory, a pluralist polity and media provides the counterbalance to the hegemony of any single line of argument. Provided the ­counterbalances operate appropriately there is seldom a problem, as unethical manipulation is exposed. However, when the media ally with a particular political position, and when opposition is dismissed, we can argue that a society can be manipulated using means of dubious ethical standards. Darren G. Lilleker See also Attitudes; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Political Campaigns; Political Morality; Propaganda

Further Readings Jowett, G. S., & O’Donnell, V. (2014). Propaganda and persuasion. London, England: Sage. Klemp, N. J. (2012). The morality of spin: Virtue and vice in political rhetoric and the Christian right. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. O’Shaughnessy, N. J. (2004). Politics and propaganda: Weapons of mass seduction. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Tessitore, A. (1996). Reading Aristotle’s ethics: Virtue, rhetoric, and political philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Political Plasticity A puzzling feature of political behavior is why change from dictatorship to democracy is extremely slow, difficult, and often unsuccessful, even following major revolutions that overthrow dictatorships. Consider

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what took place after revolutions in France (1778), Russia (1917), China (1949), and more recently in Iran (1979) and Egypt (2013) and other Arab Spring countries; shortly following the toppling of dictatorial regimes in these nations, dictatorship was reestablished under a new guise (e.g., in Russia, the dictatorship of the Tsar was replaced by the dictatorship of Stalin; in Iran, the dictatorship of the Shah was replaced by dictatorship of Khomeini). This lack of change led to the concept of political plasticity, introduced to help explain limits to malleability in political behavior, and particularly limits to how fast change can take place toward “actualized democracy.” (Previously, plasticity was used to discuss malleability in biological processes and neural networks in the brain, but the term political plasticity extends the discussion of malleability to the wider political domain.) In order to understand the difficult challenges nations face when trying to institute democratic systems of government following an antidictatorship revolution, it is useful to distinguish between macro-, meso-, and microlevel changes. At the macrolevel, institutional economic, political, and legal changes can be made rapidly. But in order for new economic, political, and legal systems to become functional, there must also be “supportive” change in social and psychological processes at the meso- and microlevels. Here is where the difficulty lies. Cognitive and social processes must change fast enough to enable individuals and groups to think and act in support of democracy, after having been socialized to think and act in support of dictatorship. Although democratic changes at the macrolevel may take place quite literally with a pen stroke (e.g., “free speech” can be granted overnight by a vote of parliament), behavioral changes at the individual and interpersonal levels tend to take place far more slowly, because they require transformations in styles of thinking and acting. The concept of political plasticity enables us to gain a better understanding of psychological changes in political behavior, a topic that has received little research attention. A major reason for this neglect is because most psychological research involves 1-hour experiments in a laboratory, rather than focusing on long-term processes in everyday life (as in Taylor & de la Sablonniére, 2014). Political plasticity points to the distinction between different types of change, and particularly change that is within system (first- and secondorder) in contrast to change that is between system (third-order). Most revolutions succeed in bringing about firstorder change and sometimes second-order change, but third-order change is far more difficult to achieve. Creating new constitutions has proven to be much faster and easier than changing microlevel thinking and acting

in line with the new constitutions. These microlevel changes involve changing values, attitudes, motivations, needs, and relationship patterns between people—these changes take place at a slow pace. However, there is hope to make these changes in the brief window of time following the revolution when national morale is high and citizens can unify behind new democratic values and motivations. The general population must acquire the social and psychological skills needed to become democratic citizens (at the collective and individual level); essentially, the population must display political plasticity. In a postdictatorial nation that is aspiring to become democratic, styles of cognition and social relations must change quickly enough to support the new democratic aspirations. Take for example the difference between leader-follower dynamics in dictatorial versus democratic governments. In extreme dictatorial environments, speaking out against the ruler is often punishable by death, creating a leader-follower relationship in which the follower is exceptionally docile (in public, at least). This relationship is oftentimes created over many generations and therefore culturally ingrained. Should a revolution occur in a dictatorial nation, the cognitive style of both leaders and followers must quickly change to support democratic governance. Publicly criticizing leaders and questioning government policies must become acceptable; a level of political plasticity must exist for this change to occur. In order for citizens to become politically “plastic,” they must actively develop and practice a variety of characteristics. These include the abilities to be ­self-critical, question traditional beliefs, alter personal opinions, abandon ethnocentrism, learn from others ­ different from themselves, seek information from alternative sources, be open to new experiences, actively create new experiences for others, apply universal moral principles, and actively seek experiences of higher value. The combination of these traits and patterns of behavior pave the way for third-order change (a change from one system to another), as they create psychological citizens supportive of democratic macrolevel changes. In the 21st century context, world powers operate under conflicting political systems, but there are no absolute dictatorships or absolute democracies. China and Russia are more dictatorial, while the United States and European Union nations are closer to democracy. However, there is no guarantee that democracy will prevail around the world in the longer term. There are numerous examples in history, from Athens 2,500 years ago to Germany in the 1930s, to Venezuela and Turkey in the early 21st century, when societies became less rather than more democratic. Change toward democracy requires transformations in the psychological

Political Psychologies of Terrorism

c­haracteristics of citizens and leaders, and such transformation is not easily brought about. In recent times, Japan was moved from being more dictatorial to more democratic in a relatively short time, but this was achieved through absolute control by foreign powers. After the defeat of Japan and its surrender to the Allies, U.S.-led forces reorganized Japanese society and pushed through enormous political and ­ economic changes from the late 1940s. By sheer force and top-down directives, “correct” behavior in many areas, including leader-follower relations, changed in major ways in post-World War II Japanese society. This example demonstrates that political plasticity in support of democracy can be increased through high levels of top-down control. However, the leaders who enjoy such top-down control have to want to bring about democratic change, and this is not often the case after power changes hands through revolution. The personality characteristics of leaders who grab power after revolutions—leaders such as Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, ­ Castro, and Khomeini—results in leader-follower relations more supportive of dictatorship rather than democracy. George Washington and Nelson Mandela are rare exceptions in history: leaders who came to power after revolutions, but voluntarily gave up power. Fathali M. Moghaddam and Charles Howard See also Democracy; Dictatorship; Political Participation; Social Movements

Further Readings Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Moghaddam, F. M. (2016). The psychology of democracy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Taylor, D. M., & de la Sablonniére, R. (2014). Toward constructive change in Aboriginal communities. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press.

Political Psychologies Terrorism

of

Terrorism is a particular species of political violence. It is violence or the threat of violence against noncombatants or property in order to gain a political, ideological, or religious goal through fear and intimidation. Usually symbolic in nature, the act is designed to have an impact on an audience that differs from the immediate target of the violence. While the attacks on the United States of

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September 11, 2001, and their aftermath have tended to focus international attention on radical Islamist terrorism, the spectrum of terrorism is broad and diverse, as illustrated in Figure 1. At the top tier are the three major divisions of political, criminal, and pathological terrorism. There is a widespread assumption in the lay community that groups and individuals who kill innocent victims to accomplish their political goals must be crazed fanatics. Surely no psychologically “normal” individual could perpetrate wanton violence against innocent women and children. In fact, students of terrorist psychology have ­concluded that most terrorists are “normal” in the sense of not suffering from psychotic disorders. Martha ­Crenshaw, a prominent international terrorism expert, has observed that the outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality. C. R. McCauley and M. E. Segal, in a major review of the social psychology of terrorist groups, concur that the best documented generalization is negative: terrorists do not show any striking psychopathology. In his 2005 book, The Psychology of Terrorism, John Horgan has emphasized that there are no individual psychological traits that distinguish terrorists from the general population. While, to be sure, some emotionally disturbed individuals have carried out acts of violence in the name of a cause, severe psychopathology is incompatible with being a member of a terrorist group. Indeed, terrorist groups regularly screen out individuals who are emotionally unstable. Just as the U.S. Green Berets or the Delta Force would not wish to have an emotionally unstable individual in their ranks because such a person would pose a security risk, neither would a terrorist action cell wish to have an emotionally unstable member in its ranks. It is not individual psychopathology, but group, organizational, and social psychology, with a particular emphasis on “collective identity,” that provides the most powerful lens to understand terrorist psychology and behavior. Criminal terrorism refers to acts of terrorism by an illicit enterprise in order to further its criminal goals. So, when narcoterrorists in Colombia assassinate a judge, the goal is not merely eliminating an official who has threatened their enterprise, it is also designed to intimidate other judges in order to give the drug lords the freedom to operate that they desire.

A Typology of Terrorism For the major category political terrorism, two main subdivisions are represented in Figure 1: at the middle tier, the level of the state, and in the lower tier, substate terrorism. State terrorism refers to when the state turns

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its own resources—the courts, the police, the military— against its own citizens. Argentina during the “dirty wars” is a prime example, when citizens opposed to the state were getting “disappeared.” Another example of terror by the state would be Saddam Hussein using chemical weapons against his own Kurdish citizens, which would be state chemical terrorism. To distinguish this form of terrorism from terrorism committed by non-state actors, the term state terror is customarily employed in referring to terrorism by the state. Statesupported terrorism, a matter of great concern to the United States, refers to the circumstance when a state covertly provides support to a terrorist group or organization to further its own national goals. The mean of support can include financial, training, logistical, and so forth, and the degree of control by the state will vary. The bottom tier represents the spectrum of substate terrorism, or terrorism from below. In the beginnings of the modern era of terrorism, two types predominated: social revolutionary terrorism and nationalist-separatist terrorism, also known as ethnic-nationalist terrorism. Steeped in Marxism–Leninism during the Vietnam War, the social revolutionary terrorists, represented by such groups as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Weather Underground in the United States, sought to overthrow the capitalist order. These groups have significantly declined since the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the exception of Latin American social revolutionary groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The nationalist-separatist terrorists, many of which emerged after World War I, represented by such groups as the

Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland; Fatah, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other secular Palestinian groups; and Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) (Basque Fatherland and Liberty), sought to establish a separate nation for their minority group. At the beginning of the modern era of terrorism, these groups regularly sought to capture public attention on behalf of their cause. There were often competing claims of responsibility for their terrorist acts. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this gradually changed, as no responsibility was claimed for upward of 40% of terrorist acts. These were the acts of religious fundamentalist terrorists. They were not trying to influence the West but to expel the West, with its secular, modernizing values. And they did not need a New York Times headline or a CNN story, for they were “killing in the name of God” and God already knew. In addition to religious fundamentalist terrorists, the category of religious extremist terrorists also includes millenarian or new religions terrorists, exemplified by the Aum Shinrikyo organization, responsible for the first major chemical weapons attack, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subways in 1995. With the decline in social-revolutionary terrorism at the end of the cold war, there was a concomitant rise in right-wing terrorist groups pursuing racist, anti-Semitic and “survivalist” ideologies. The same groups that used to warn against the Communist menace that had invaded the United States now turned their venom against what they characterized as the illegitimate federal government. In their view, the government is dominated by Jews—hence ZOG, the Zionist Occupied

I. Political Terrorism

II. Criminal Terrorism

III. Pathological Terrorism

Substate Terrorism

Sub-Supported Terrorism

Regime or State Terrorism

Social Revolutionary Terrorism (Left)

Right-Wing Terrorism

Nationalist-Separatist Terrorism

Religious Extremist Terrorism

Religious Fundamentalist Terrorism

Figure 1  New Typology of Terrorism Source: Adapted from Schmid (1984).

New Religious Terrorism

Single-Issue Terrorism

Political Psychologies of Terrorism

Government—and accordingly, is illegitimate. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, responsible for the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal office building in Oklahoma City, were right-wing terrorists. And finally, single-issue terrorism refers to terrorism in pursuit of causes such as the environment and animal rights. That groups would be motivated to take human life in order to preserve animal life or to preserve the environment suggests that the cause is not the cause. There is a multiplicity of individual motivations. For some, it is to give a sense of power to the powerless; for others, revenge is a primary motivation; for still others, it is for alienated individuals to belong, to gain a sense of significance. Within each group, there are motivational differences. A clear consensus exists that it is not individual psychopathology but group, organizational, and social psychology that provides the greatest analytical power in understanding this complex phenomenon. Terrorists have subordinated their individual identity to the collective identity, so that what serves the group, organization, or network is of primary importance. In considering the psychology of nationalist-­ separatist, social revolutionary, religious fundamen­ talist, and right-wing terrorists, given how different are their causes and their perspectives, these types would be expected to differ markedly. We can distinguish among terrorist organizations with broad social support, terrorism arising from diaspora/émigré populations, antiregime terrorism within a society, and the global Salafi jihad. Given the diversity of these causes, there is no reason to believe that there is one single terrorist mindset, one overarching terrorist psychology. Why should we assume that the motivations and attitudes of individuals and groups who are pursuing such diverse causes are the same? Thus we should be considering terrorisms—plural—and terrorist psychologies—plural.

Generational Dynamics and Psychological Warfare Since there is a diversity of terrorist causes, the typology of terrorist groups also reflects a diversity of generational provenance. Indeed, as reflected in Figure 2, the two groups most prominent at the beginning of the modern era of terrorism, nationalist-separatist terrorism and social-revolutionary terrorism, have generational dynamics that are polar opposites. The X in the middle cell of Figure 2 indicates that individuals who are at one with families who are loyal to the governing regime do not become terrorists. Generational issues are particularly prominent for the two types of terrorism that dominated the scene at the onset of the modern era of terrorism, social-revolutionary terrorism and ­nationalist-separatist terrorism.

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Figure 2  Generational Pathways to Terrorism This generational matrix was first introduced by the author in Post (1984).

As reflected in Figure 2, the generational dynamics of social-revolutionary terrorists and nationalist-­ separatist terrorists are in many ways mirror images. The social-revolutionary terrorists, whose generational dynamics are represented in the lower center cell, are striking out against the generation of their parents who are loyal to the regime. Their acts of terrorism are acts of revenge for hurts, real and imagined. A member of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction declared, “These are the corrupt old men who gave us Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” Gillian Becker addresses this dynamic with the German social-revolutionary terrorists in her aptly titled book Hitler’s Children. In contrast, the nationalist-separatist terrorists, who emerged after World War I, represented in the upper right-hand cell, are loyal to parents and grandparents who are disloyal to the regime. They are carrying on the mission of their parents and grandparents, who were damaged by the regime. Whether in the pubs of Northern Ireland or the coffeehouses in Gaza and the occupied territories, they have heard of the social injustice visited upon their parents and grandparents, they have heard their parents complaining of the lands stolen from them; it is time for justice to be served. They have been raised on this bitter gruel of victimhood; hatred has been “bred in the bone.” They are carrying out acts of vengeance against the regime. The oppression by the dominant group and the government has led to a defensive intensification of the identity of the minority group. Just as they felt dehumanized by the dominant group, so too they dehumanized “the enemy,” justifying their violence as required by “the other.” Often members were influenced to join by a close relative; some join to avenge the death of a family member killed in the name of the cause. Each of these groups was fighting for a mission that, at the onset at least, expressed the goals of the people. The sociopolitical environment was accepting and supporting, with members winning praise for their service and

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dedication to the cause. Their prestige was enhanced by the membership in these separatist organizations. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the acts of terrorism were perpetrated by nationalist-separatist terrorists and social-revolutionary terrorists, who wished to call attention to their cause and accordingly would regularly claim responsibility for their acts. They were seeking to influence the West and the establishment. But in more recent decades, no responsibility is claimed for upward of 40% of terrorist acts. Some theorists have proposed that this is because of the increasing frequency of terrorist acts by radical religious extremist terrorists. Traditional groups include Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and Sikh radical fundamentalist extremists. These organizations are hierarchical in structure; the radical cleric provides interpretation of the religious text justifying violence, which is uncritically accepted by his “true believer” followers, so there is no ambivalence concerning use of violence. Accordingly, these groups are particularly dangerous, for they are not constrained by Western reaction. Despite the belief perpetrated by religious fundamentalists that the use of violence is religiously sanctioned, the degree of violence that may be utilized has come under debate among varying groups. For instance in 2005, Zawahiri, the deputy to Osama bin Laden, reprimanded Zarqawi in an open letter for excessively violent campaigns, specifically the wave of public decapitations being carried out on his watch. Zarqawi had been named the emir of al Qaeda of Iraq, in exchange for his allegiance to bin Laden. This was al Qaeda’s attempt to reassert control over the rogue group, which was depicted, in its unconstrained aggression, as threatening the broad appeal of Islam. Zawahiri highlighted al Qaeda’s understanding of the power of the media when he said in a letter that the media are a battleground, and that al Qaeda is in a battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community. In fact, Zarqawi’s group, precisely because of the extremity of violence it practiced, had outpaced al Qaeda in its appeal to alienated Muslim youth. This extremity of violence that was practiced by Zarqawi has been a hallmark of the Islamic State (ISIS/ ISIL), an aspect of the organization that has been a major factor in the success of their recruiting efforts. The number of foreign fighters that have joined the Islamic State is estimated to be around 30,000, with roughly 4,500 recruits from Western countries. The decapitation campaign featured in the organization’s increasingly violent videos has promoted the Islamic State’s stature as the most dangerous radical Islamist threat. The Islamic State has an acute awareness of the shock value that the beheadings and the abundant use of violence conjure and the role that the media play in attracting new recruits. The appeal of the Islamic State

to alienated Muslim youth is precisely because of the extremity of violence it practices, representing the pure embodiment of jihad in the service of radical Islam. The resultant rivalry between the Islamic State and al Qaeda has led to an increase in violence by al Qaeda. The Islamic State has been proclaimed a caliphate by its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Abu Bakr burst forth on the international stage in a video appearance during the first Friday prayer service of Ramadan in July 2014 at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul. In stark contrast to the limited images that were circulated of him in the past showing him clean-shaven, he displayed a long beard and wore a black turban and black robe, reminiscent of Nasrallah of Hezbollah, reinforcing his image as descending from the Prophet. He called on the world’s Muslims to obey him, declaring that under his direction, the Muslim world would be returned to “dignity, might, rights and leadership.” Reflecting a grandiose expansion of his stature he declared, “I am the wali (leader) who presides over you.” This reflected his need to be seen in his preeminent role, suggesting a narcissistic leadership personality. This emphasizes the importance of understanding the context in which terrorism develops, in understanding the cultural, political, and economic context in which terrorist identities are shaped. A review of the differing provenance of the variety of terrorist groups portrayed in Crenshaw’s major volume Terrorism in Context demonstrates how strikingly different are the backgrounds that shaped the youth attracted to the path of terrorism. For some groups, especially nationalist-separatist terrorist groups, this collective identity is established extremely early. The importance of collective identity and the processes of forming and transforming collective identities cannot be overemphasized. This in turn emphasizes the sociocultural context, which determines the balance between collective identity and individual identity. Terrorists have subordinated their individual identity to the collective identity, so that what serves the group, organization, or network is of primary importance. It is useful to unpack the life course of terrorists and consider the psychological processes they are undergoing at different phases. The process of becoming a terrorist involves a cumulative, incrementally sustained, and focused commitment to the group. For the majority of contemporary terrorists, there is an early entrance onto the pathway into terrorism—whether religious or secular—with many subsequent “way stations.” In particular, there is a continuing reinforcement by manipulative leaders, consolidating the collective identity as well as externalizing, justifying, and requiring violence against the enemy.

Political Socialization

This implies that early intervention is required, for once a youth is embedded within the group, his or her extremist psychology will be continually reinforced. The power of group dynamics—especially for the closed group—is intense, and once an individual is in the group, it is very difficult to penetrate their psychology and extricate them. Given that the attraction to, and entrance onto, the terrorist path is a gradual process (which for some groups begins in early childhood), changing the influences upon this pathway will necessarily occur over an extended time frame. As a number of observers have pointed out, a vicious species of psychological warfare waged through the media cannot be countered with drones, smart bombs, and missiles but must be countered with psychological warfare. Jerrold M. Post See also al Qaeda; Counterinsurgency; Deterrence and Crime; Dictatorship; Islam Versus Islamism; Islamic State; Lone Wolf Terrorism; Torture

Further Readings Becker, J. (1978). Hitler’s children: The story of the BaaderMeinhof Gang. London, England: Panther. Crenshaw, M. (1981). The causes of terrorism. Comparative Politics, 13, 379–399. Crenshaw, M. (Ed.). (1995). Terrorism in context. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hoffman, B. (1998). Inside terrorism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Horgan, J. (2005). The psychology of terrorism. New York, NY: Routledge. McCauley, C. R., & Segal, M. E. (1987). Social psychology of terrorist groups. In C. Hendrick (Ed.), Review of Social and Personality Psychology (Vol. 9, pp. 231–256). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Post, J. M. (1984). Notes on a psychodynamic theory of terrorism. Terrorism, 7(2), 241–256. Post, J. M. (2007). The mind of the terrorist: The psychology of terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmid, A. P. (1983). Political terrorism: A research guide to concept, theories, data bases and literature. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Science.

Political Socialization The process of political socialization (PS) has been ­classically defined as the “learning of social patterns corresponding to [an individual’s] societal position as mediated through various agencies of society” (Hyman,

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1959, p. 25). Distinguishing PS from other types of socialization (e.g., ethnic, cultural), this definition still serves as the foundation for the majority of empirical research in this area, despite methodological advances and new attention to previously underresearched aspects of PS. Because it was assumed that PS was relatively stable throughout life, early research focused on analyzing this process during early childhood. However, more recent studies have found that ideas and attitudes acquired during childhood change through emerging adulthood due to multiple factors, such as personality, maturation, and past experiences. Therefore, current research has expanded beyond the effects of the classic socialization agents (i.e., parents, peers, school) to include other relevant factors such as overarching context and individual cognitive development. Yet, ­ the research to date offers a fragmented perspective of the process with heterogeneous results related to PS outcomes (e.g., voting behavior, political engagement, identities, intergroup attitudes, prejudice, and discrimination). This fact highlights the need for further research from childhood through emerging adulthood that also considers a wider range of multiple socialization agents, the overarching context, and a greater number of ­outcomes-related PS processes.

The Socioecological Framework and Political Socialization A socioecological approach may provide a useful lens to understand previous inconsistencies in the PS research. In the macro system (i.e., national level), differences between establish democracies and conflict-affected societies emerge. In democracies, PS is oriented toward the adoption of “democratic” values (e.g., equality, dialogue) and the parties contend for the support of young people. However, in postconflict societies, children and adolescents are exposed to very different political dynamics, morals, and cultural cues across socialization agents. For example, as noted by Meytal Nasie and colleagues, in protracted conflicts, national politics often promote the creation of a conflict-supporting psychological repertoire from a very early age. Furthermore, the media often play a key role in amplifying national messages, though it may also serve as a source of alternative information. In established democratic societies, exposure to alternative information can either (a) trigger alternative political ideologies and even nonconventional forms of collective action (based on a more stable political context) or (b) promote disengagement among youth. However, in conflicted societies, children exposed to those alternative messages may instead develop political attitudes and behaviors oriented to transform the underlying conflict.

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Political Symbolism

That is, alternative information may offer avenues for more constructive political identities and forms of engagement. In the mesosystem, schools are the most important socializing agent in both types of societies. Beyond the influence of teachers, PS is affected by textbooks content and the approach to subjects like history, which help to define students’ collective memory. In addition, parent choice of schools (e.g., public/private, single-identity/ integrated) may further shape PS processes of youth. The amount of time that youth spend in school makes it one of the main sources of peer influence as well. Thus, schools may reflect and accentuate the influence of parents, and to a certain extent peers, as the two main PS agents at the microsystem. Although parents are generally considered the primary source of political knowledge during early childhood, their influence may differ from one context to another and even from one child to another. In established democracies, peer groups have also been proven influential in PS processes, especially by late childhood and adolescence as youth become more independent and choose their social relationships. In postconflict societies, children with politically active parents tend to have congruent p ­ olitical attitudes when they are consistent with the conflictsupporting repertoire. However, parents with alternative ideologies may have children that display similarly active political engagement, but with dissimilar ideological perspectives. Thus, more research is needed to understand the multiple ways parents influence PS. Finally, PS is affected by individual factors, such as developmental processes and personal experiences. Cognitive development during childhood greatly affects perceptions of the environment, community, and social interactions. Moreover, in conflict settings, youth may experience more or less direct exposure to violence, which in turn shapes intergroup attitudes and political participation. Research designs that aim to tease apart multiple social ecological factors may shed light on how numerous socializing agents interact, how cohort and age effects interrelate, and how broader contextual differences are filtered through parents and schools to influence PS processes from childhood through emerging adulthood.

under what conditions and for which youth these processes translate into major differences in political engagement, political identities, and other PS outcomes. Therefore, longitudinal studies that consider mediators and moderators of PS processes could deepen understanding of previous cross-sectional results. Identifying which socializing agents are relevant under specific conditions would also provide further insight related to further behavioral outcomes of PS, such as more effective reduction of prejudice or changes in political ideology across the life course. Finally, further PS research should include nonconventional forms of political participation, as new technologies have a remarkable and influential impact on youth engagement. Studying PS using a socioecological approach could contribute to the formation of a more integrated body of literature that could deepen insight into the potential constructive contributions that young people can make in political settings across the world.

Conclusion

The study of political symbolism examines how symbols influence political preferences, identifications, and behavior. It thus intersects with several areas of research in political science, including nationalism, institutional legitimization, political allegiance, social movements, and electoral behavior. The entry first discusses how scholars define political symbols and conceptualize their role. It then turns to the factors that make political symbols effective in influencing political attitudes and

Political socialization both shapes and is shaped by intergroup relations across generations. Yet, current empirical research typically focuses on single socialization agents, without a fuller consideration of the influence of context and the mechanisms underlying the PS processes. Future research should explore why and how agents and contexts affect the development of PS, and

Judith Escuin Checa and Laura Taylor See also Egocentrism; Equality of Opportunity; Ethnocentrism; Social Class

Further Readings Dinas, E. (2013). Why does the apple fall far from the tree? How early political socialization prompts parent-child dissimilarity. British Journal of Political Science, 44(4), 827–852. Hyman, H. H. (1959). Political socialization: A study in the psychology of political behavior. New York, NY: Free Press. Nasie, M., Diamond, A. H., & Bar-Tal, D. (2015). Young children in intractable conflicts: The Israeli case. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(4), 365–392. Neundorf, A., & Niemi, R. G. (2014). Beyond political socialization: New approaches to age, period, cohort analysis. Electoral Studies, 33, 1–6.

Political Symbolism

Political Symbolism

behavior. It concludes by discussing whether political symbolism is an inescapable feature of political life.

Definition and Role of Political Symbols A political symbol can be any object, person, word, performance, or gesture that represents a political institution, hierarchy, movement, belief, or ideology. Flags, kings, and queens can thus serve as political symbols, as can songs, poems, and national heroes and heroines, among many potential other examples. Some political symbols are “purpose built” (e.g., flags), while others are objects or practices that exist independently but have become imbued with symbolic significance (e.g., national landscapes). In principle, anything can serve as a political symbol if people associate it with some aspect of political reality. Political symbols are significant in three main ways. First, symbols simplify and “summarize” the political structures and practices for which they stand. The French flag, for example, represents and encapsulates the many different institutions, practices, and understandings that together constitute the social and political entity called France. From this perspective, symbols are signposts that help people cut through the complexity of their political environment, making its different aspects easier to apprehend, recognize, and categorize. Second, in addition to their cognitive importance, political symbols can connect institutions and beliefs with emotions. Such emotions may include pride, a sense of moral commitment, and a willingness for selfsacrifice. Accordingly, experimental studies show that when people are brought into contact with their national symbols they tend to display higher levels of national consciousness and pride. This affective quality of symbols is important because emotions in turn influence political preferences and behavior. By strengthening affective attachments to leaders, institutions, and ideologies, symbols can increase their perceived legitimacy and promote political obedience. Even many authoritarian regimes with almost unlimited coercive power over their populations have therefore been ardent promoters of political symbols, from Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia to present-day North Korea. Finally, political symbols can help make a polity or political movement more cohesive. Underpinning this is the observation that a symbol’s meaning is typically multilayered, multidimensional, and ambiguous; the same symbol can trigger different associations and induce different cognitions and emotions in different people. This ambiguity allows actors to rally around a given symbol even if they differ on what that symbol stands for. For instance, in many states terms such as freedom and justice are laden with symbolic

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significance and help to legitimize the legal and institutional order. It is precisely because these terms are ambiguous that they can serve as effective symbolic rallying points, enabling different actors to unite around them despite enduring differences regarding their meaning.

What Makes Political Symbols Effective? A central question in the political symbolism literature is how and when political symbols become affectively charged and able to shape political preferences and behavior. One determining factor appears to be the extent to which a symbol’s enactment unites citizens in communal experiences. From pledges of allegiance in schools to singing the national anthem before football games and public minutes of silence to commemorate the war dead, such symbolically infused rituals can intertwine individuals with their political community and the community with its leaders, norms, and institutions. Some of these symbolic enactments are woven into people’s everyday routines. Others consist of setpiece dramatizations that can absorb the participants into collective exuberance and intense devotion. The gigantic Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany with their meticulously scripted speeches, chanting, music, and visual effects are a frequently cited, extreme example of such dramatizations. Some political symbols, moreover, derive their strength from being rooted in wider identities and traditions. These may include universal human experiences such as birth and kinship, captured by frequent allusions to citizens as “brothers and sisters” and to nations and ­ political movements as “families.” Other political symbols emanate from preexisting religious practices, ethnic identities, and historical memories, and often benefit from the social legitimacy and recognition these enjoy. By extension, such symbols assume a bridging function that can make them especially important during periods of rapid political change. For example, against the backdrop of profound economic transformations, the ­ Chinese Communist Party has increasingly incorporated themes borrowed from Confucianism into the party’s symbolic repertoire. Its ostensible aim is to promote a sense of continuity and to legitimize its policies by ­symbolically connecting them to China’s ancient past.

Is Political Symbolism Inevitable? Political symbols offer a representation of political reality that is “abbreviated” and to some extent emotionally slanted. For some theorists, this makes political symbolism inherently problematic as it prevents people from apprehending their political world “as it really is” and

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may lead them to support rulers and policies that go against their self-interest. An example is the use of nationalist or “patriotic” imagery to generate support for dictatorships or military aggression. Yet political anthropologists suggest that all types of political systems have symbols, and such symbols cater to human needs that themselves are universal. As concerns the first role of symbols discussed above, social and political reality is too complex and multilayered ever to be apprehended in its raw form without the cognitive shortcuts, signposts, and summaries that ­symbols provide. The second—emotional—aspect of political symbolism, too, is probably inescapable as it reflects the affective dimension that to some extent inheres in all forms of social and political behavior. Nevertheless, to assert that all politics is in part symbolic says nothing about the kinds of beliefs and behavior that different symbols help sustain in different contexts. Nazi symbolism produced powerful emotional pulls and a willingness for self-sacrifice but so, too, have many struggles for democracy. The challenge for political scientists is to explain how in different political circumstances political symbols acquire specific meanings and help sustain particular political allegiances and forms of behavior. Tobias Theiler See also Legitimacy, Forms of; Mass Political Behavior; Obedience; Political Ideology; Political Socialization; Ritual in Politics

Further Readings Arnhart, L. (1985). Murray Edelman, political symbolism, and the incoherence of political science. Political Science Reviewer, 15, 185–213. Cohen, A. (1979). Political symbolism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 8, 87–130. Edelman, M. (1985). The symbolic uses of politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Firth, R. (1973). Symbols: Public and private. London, England: Allen & Unwin.

Politics After Tragedy Sudden, shocking events that are cast by the news media, interest groups, and political leaders as “tragedies” can gain a great deal of attention. Events as disparate as oil spills, airplane crashes, natural disasters, technological disasters, and terrorism, or other mass killings, can lead people to seek to make sense of what happened, and why. In social and political life, we make sense of these tragedies by telling stories. Indeed, the term tragedy has a particular meaning among students

of theater and rhetoric. A tragedy is a particular narrative form that involves a bad fate befalling a hero or a heroine. The ultimate tragedy is often the result of a series of mistakes or small upsets that build until the unavoidable, catastrophic end of the story. The story often involves heroes and villains, particularly when the tragedy is clearly caused, accidentally or purposefully, by an identifiable actor, such as a company, group, or individual. Much of the storytelling around events focuses on arguing about what caused the tragedy and who should be held responsible.

Tragedies in the Policy Process Tragedies are important political events because they cause people to ask questions about these events. What happened? Why did this happen? Was there any reasonable way to predict such an event? If so, could the recent tragedy have been prevented? Because of the high visibility of the recent tragedy, the tragic event gains sudden, widespread attention in the news media, from the public, and among policymakers. Political scientists say that these kinds of events rise to the top of the news, public, and institutional agendas—that is, to the top of the things to which we are paying attention at any one time. They gain considerable news media attention because tragedies are by definition dramatic, and provide fodder for “good” stories, in journalistic terms. John Kingdon calls sudden, attention-grabbing events focusing events, because they focus the attention of both the public and policy-makers on the problems revealed by the tragedy. Policy-makers act because a tragic event may be evidence of a policy failure that, if remedied, will prevent the event’s recurrence. Examples of such potential policy failures abound. For example, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, people both mourned the extreme loss of life that followed the event, and then asked hard questions about “How could this have happened?” Many ideas about policy failure were debated. Some argued that the security screeners at airports were lax or incompetent and had allowed people with weapons to get on planes and hijack them. Others argued that regulators failed to require that cockpit doors be locked. After all, runs this argument, cockpits had been breached before, with bad results, so why weren’t they locked as a matter of policy, prior to the hijacking? This is an example of how the accumulation of small events leads to one unimaginable tragedy. Kingdon argues that policy change results when people who promote ideas and solutions in the policy process cause two of the three streams of the process to join at a time of opportunity. Those streams are the politics stream, which contains the general state of politics in the nation as well as the “national mood” about

Polling

“how things are going”; the problem stream, which contains ideas about the problems the nation faces and how to fix them; and the policies stream, which contains all the potential solutions to problems that emerge. A tragic event can change all these streams: It reveals a problem; it motivates people to find solutions to the problem, and the event may yield changes in politics or the national mood that make change more likely. The September 11 attacks revealed problems with national security, immigration, and aviation security. They motivated people who already had ideas for solving these problems to promote them. This was at a time when the political climate supported change.

Recent Examples of Tragedies Smaller events also can be tragic. In the early 1990s in the Seattle area, four children died of complications related to food poisoning they suffered when eating hamburgers at the Jack in the Box fast-food chain. The food poisoning was a result of the beef containing E coli bacteria. This would not have posed a problem if the hamburgers had been cooked to the proper temperature. They were not, and the E coli were not killed, resulting in dozens of sick people and the four dead children. The fact that it was children who died made the story even more tragic in the public mind, and Jack in the Box was forced to admit wrongdoing, pay legal settlements, and change the way it cooks its food. In both of these cases, concern for victims motivated decision makers (either in or out of government) and led to stories being told about the causes of these tragedies, which led to decisions made to prevent a recurrence of a tragedy. But in some policy areas, this is not the case. After the fatal Sandy Hook school shooting, many calls arose for stringent gun control legislation. But the National Rifle Association objected to these proposed policy solutions and claimed that the victims of this event were being “exploited” for political purposes. The politics of recent mass shootings do not follow the pattern described above; rather, the politics of gun control are so contentious that all that happens afterwards is an acknowledgement that the loss of life from such events is tragic, with little serious effort to enact new policies to address the problem. Thomas A. Birkland See also Art in Political Campaigns; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Irrationality; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Public Opinion

Further Readings Birkland, T. A. (2007). After disaster. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

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Jones, M., Shanahan, E., & McBeth, M. (Eds.). (2014). The science of stories: Applications of the narrative policy framework in public policy analysis. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan. Kingdon, J. W. (2011). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Longman. Stone, D. A. (1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104(2), 281–300.

Polling Polling is a sampling or collection of opinions on a person or subject, conducted from either a random or selected group of persons, usually for the purpose of analysis or prediction. Politics remains one of the more common contributors to polling, whether in terms of a referendum on an important political consideration of the day (e.g., the decriminalization of marijuana) or of a field of candidates for political office (e.g., the U.S. presidency in 2016). The political polling referred to above, which, as Sunshine Hillygus reports, began in scientific form with the 1936 election, is not only ­usually conducted throughout the weeks and months preceding a major national election, it also occurs on the day of the election. As Stephen Fisher, Jouni Kuha, and Clive Payne point out, it is now commonplace in a large number of countries for the news media to sponsor exit polls in order to offer their viewers a forecast of the election results soon after the polls close. In this regard, an exit poll involves choosing a sample of ­polling stations, contacting voters leaving the polling station, and essentially asking them to replicate their vote for the interviewer. This entry briefly examines various aspects of polling, with particular attention to how polling, especially the highly publicized exit polling that takes place on election night, remains an exercise fraught with difficulties even in the modern era of politics. Following an overview of the process of political polling, current issues in exit polling, as well as some involving traditional pre-election polling, are discussed. The final portion of this entry delves into some of the political or public choice considerations related to how media report exit polls in politics.

Overview Any statistical relationships explored through various types of polling are probabilistic rather than deterministic. As such, the focus on polling by social scientists and others typically involves a recognition and understanding of the various biases and inaccuracies inherent in polling practices, particularly those related to

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elections and referenda. Although polling was historically done in a face-to-face (i.e., first person) manner, advancements in telephony during the 20th century allowed for telephone polling, while later advancements leading into the 21st century have permitted Internetbased polls. Each of these advancements both potentially cures and causes various biases and inaccuracies associated with polling, such that modern-day polling remains an exercise in error minimization. Despite the presence of biases and inaccuracies in various types of political polls, the practice of polling remains a useful and important exercise to candidates, voters, and others who closely follow politics. In their study of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, for example, economists Christopher Duquette, Franklin Mixon, Richard Cebula, and Kamal Upadhyaya examine the relationship between the aggregate national polling averages provided by RealClear Politics (see www.realclearpolitics.com) and ­ the political candidates’ share prices generated through InTrade, the former “prediction market” platform founded in 1999, offering participants the opportunity to purchase shares relating to the occurrence of an event, such as a particular election outcome (e.g., the 2012 election contest between Barack Obama and Mitt ­ ­Romney). These researchers find only one-way causality between the RealClear Politics and InTrade data series, suggesting that voters use pre-election polling to inform their buy-side decisions (through InTrade) regarding the election. Stated differently, voters seem to place enough trust in the accuracy of modern-day polling to “invest” portions of their incomes in predictions about the ­outcomes of a national election.

Current Issues in Exit Polling As statistician Jose Pavía-Miralles indicated in 2005, “The 1990s was not the best of decades for electoral polls” (p. 1113). His research of national elections in England, France, and Spain during this period turns up striking polling errors, including those conducted on election night, in all three countries. As he indicates, the first available data on election night come from a small sample of votes cast—data that “cannot be considered a random or representative sample of the election results” (p. 1114). Thus, as Pavía-Miralles points out, the efforts of ordinary forecast procedures are often futile in terms of providing guidance to candidates, newscasters, and others interested in assessing early information on the outcomes of various elections. Given the nonrandomness associated with the early voting returns, Pavía-Miralles points out that elections analysts can still expect that a certain consistency between elections will exist (e.g., a proportionally high Republican vote in the past will be followed by a

proportionally high Republican vote in the present), such that the results of past elections, which are readily available to pollsters and others, should be compared to each new incoming polling result in order to provide more accurate forecasts of the likely election outcome, particularly in the case of swing elections (i.e., vote changes between political parties). His statistical model, which incorporates data from past elections, along with data from early returns of the current election, proves highly accurate in predicting current election outcomes. As he states, “using both past and incoming polling station vote proportions, [such a] model produces continuously revised predictions” that, having been validated by accurately predicting several regional parliamentary elections in Spain throughout the 1990s, “demonstrate[e] the technique’s efficacy in . . . generat[ing] quick, highly reliable, and accurate forecasts,” (p. 1120) even within only a few minutes after a small percentage of votes (i.e., the early election returns) are reported. Perhaps recognizing the issues, and solutions to them, raised in the research by Pavía-Miralles, researchers John Curtice and Nick Sparrow report in 2010 that polling in the United Kingdom evolved over the first decade of the 21st century to incorporate what they refer to as “non-demographic weights and adjustments” that are meant to overcome what was recognized as a pro-Labour Party bias in prior U.K. polling. In particular, these researchers note that three practices were adopted to address (1) the idea that one party’s supporters were more likely to vote than other parties’ supporters, and (2) the notion that voters, on occasion, are reluctant to declare their voting intentions to political pollsters, a phenomenon often referred to as nonresponse. To address the former issue (i.e., differences in voter turnout by political party), pollsters in the United Kingdom began a practice of querying potential voters about their likelihood of casting a ballot and whether they had voted in past elections. In terms of the latter issue (i.e., nonresponse), potential voters were also asked about their party affiliations and how they voted in past elections, thus harkening back to the 2005 research conducted by Pavía-Miralles described above. To correct for nonresponse, pollsters took on the practice of assuming that those who decline to declare their voting intentions or party affiliations will likely vote for the party for which they voted in the prior election. How well did pollsters’ attempted solutions to the pro-Labour Party bias work in practice? Curtice and Sparrow report evidence from the final polls in the 2010 U.K. elections indicating that “the pro-Labour ‘bias’ that has apparently dogged the UK polling industry for two decades appears finally to have been overcome.” These researchers also note, however, that the newer polling practices described above generated a new

Polling

source of bias in that they overestimated another party’s (Liberal Democrats’) eventual vote total, particularly so in Internet polling (compared to polls conducted by telephone), resulting in “surprisingly little impact on the overall accuracy of the polls” (p. 684). Research on nonresponse bias by Michael ­McDonald and Matthew Thornburg reveals that respondents’ answers to questions posed by pollsters depends in part on how those questions are posed, such as when telephone surveys of early voters replace traditional ­ in-person exit polling. This issue is also addressed by Costas Panagopoulos, who explores the demographic and attitudinal aspects of exit poll nonresponse that occur for both exit polls conducted at voting precincts and those conducted by telephone. And, in an interesting experimental study by Casey Klofstad and Benjamin Bishin, voters in the 2008 U.S. presidential election were surveyed either after exiting the polling station (i.e., a traditional exit poll) or prior to entering the polling ­station (i.e., a so-called entrance poll). Their results indicate that entrance polling produces a significantly lower (item) nonresponse rate than that generated by traditional exit polling, thus warranting further exploration by social scientists.

Current Issues in Pre-Election Polling Although many voters are often more concerned with election-night polls than most other pre-election polls, political scientists have also done exhaustive research on the vagaries of traditional pre-election day polling. Panagopoulos has, for example, studied accuracy and bias in both national and subnational pre-election polling for the U.S. presidential election of 2008. As he indicates, this election was unique in that it pitted nonincumbents—Barack Obama (D-IL) against John ­ McCain (R-AZ)—in a general election contest. This particular general election also occurred after a primary campaign season that saw “noteworthy pre-election polling setbacks” that failed to detract from the accuracy of the final national pre-election polls for the general election, which were “among the most precise on record.” Panagopoulos’ multivariate analysis of the accuracy of pre-election polling in 2008 concludes that poll timing is typically unrelated to polling accuracy or bias; that phone polls are generally more accurate than Internet polling; and, in an interesting twist, that polls indicating the voting preferences of registered voters may more accurately project an election’s outcome than polling samples collected from likely voters. Traditional pre-election polling also involves a number of issues other than those associated with various methodologies (i.e., telephone surveys vs. in-person surveys). For instance, political scientists Christopher

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Stout and Reuben Kline examine more than 400 gubernatorial and senatorial elections across 40 U.S. states during the 1989–2008 period and find “that pre-­ election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared to white male candidates” (p. 480), a result they coin “the Richards effect,” after former Texas Governor Ann Richards. More ­specifically, these researchers estimate the bias in preelection polls at more than three percentage points. Interestingly, a large portion of the bias is explained by a particular state’s social attitudes on gender issues. In another branch of the literature, economists John Morgan and Phillip Stocken examine strategic behavior in political polling, where in large polls constituents (voters) tend to self-sort into either “centrists,” who respond truthfully to pollsters, or “extremists,” who do not respond truthfully to pollsters. These authors find that polling processes that fail to account for this type of strategic behavior by voters produce biased predictions and mischaracterize the poll’s margin of error. In a related study of strategic behavior by voters, economists Jeremy Burke and Curtis Taylor show, through formal modeling, that polling of larger electorates results in misrepresented preferences, as respondents/voters attempt to influence the voting behavior of others (i.e., subsequent voters). As they state, the incentive for [a voter] to misrepresent his true ­preferences to a pollster derives from a desire to influence the voting behavior of other citizens. In particular, the . . . probability that an individual votes is decreasing in the number of other citizens who share his preferences. Hence, by lying, [a voter] can increase turnout among citizens who prefer the same alternative as him and decrease turnout among citizens who prefer the opposing alternative. (2008, p. 226)

Lastly, in terms of strategic behavior by poll r­ espondents (potential voters), political scientist Patrick Hummel considers a model in which the winner of a primary election faces a third candidate in a subsequent general election. As Hummel indicates, prior to the ­primary election, there is a pre-election poll on how voters would vote in a hypothetical general election ­ between one of the candidates in the primary election and the third candidate, which is a procedure commonly practiced by political pollsters in the United States. Hummel’s (2011) model indicates “that voters have an incentive to misrepresent their voting intentions in the pre-election poll in order to influence voter beliefs about candidate electability in the general election and possibly cause voters to vote differently in the primary election” (p. 463), thus extending the idea of strategic behavior beyond a general election and into pre-general election contests.

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The Politics of Exit Polling The issue of strategic behavior by poll respondents raises questions about how the national news media, which in the United States is often accused of exhibiting a liberal or left-leaning political bias (i.e., a pro-­ Democrat bias) by Republican candidates, uses exit polling in their election-night newscasts. A 2004 study by economists Wilson Mixon, Amit Sen, and Frank Stephenson examines such a “controversy” involving ­ the closely contested 2000 U.S. presidential election won by Republican George Bush, the then-former Texas governor, over Democrat Al Gore, the then-sitting vice president. In their investigation of the political ­“accusation that media networks ‘called,’ or projected ­[presumably using exit polling], a winner faster in those states won by . . . Gore than in those states won by . . . Bush,” Mixon, Sen, and Stephenson find that, after controlling for other factors likely to impact how quickly a state is called, states called for Gore were called 14 to 18 minutes faster than those called in favor of Bush. Thus, their econometric results tend to support the accusation of media bias. Relatedly, economist John Lott finds, using voting data from 1976 to 2000, a large drop in Republican voting in Florida’s western panhandle during the same 2000 U.S. presidential election, while little change is revealed by those data in the voting rates of non-Republicans in that same geographic area. Lott attributes this result to the media’s early calls for Gore, as noted in Mixon, Sen, and Stephenson. Lott’s contention is made plausible by the fact that western portions of the Florida panhandle adhere to Central Standard Time (CST), while the rest of the state adheres to Eastern Standard Time (EST), which precedes CST by one hour.

Conclusion Despite the various biases and inconsistencies associated with polling—both of the exit poll and traditional pre-election poll varieties—political scientists Jens Groβer and Arthur Schram find, using an experimental approach, that higher overall voter turnout rates exist when political polls are available to inform the electorate about the levels of support for the various candidates than when political polls are prohibited. Most citizens support the goal of higher voter turnout, so despite their flaws, political polls play an important role in democracies. At the same, professional pollsters continue to grapple with biases and inaccuracies that are encountered in the process of polling, and, as such, accounts such as this one are always somewhat of a work in progress. Franklin G. Mixon Jr.

See also Attitudes; Decision Making; Election Rigging; Mass Political Behavior; Political Campaigns; Propaganda; Voting Behavior, Theories of

Further Readings Burke, J., & Taylor, C. R. (2008). What’s in a poll? Incentives for truthful reporting in pre-election opinion surveys. Public Choice, 137, 221–244. Curtice, J., & Sparrow, N. (2010). Too clever by half? The impact of weighting and adjustments on the accuracy of the final polls. International Journal of Market Research, 52, 678–686. Duquette, C., Mixon, F. G., Jr., Cebula, R. J., & Upadhyaya, K. P. (2014). Prediction markets and election polling: Granger causality tests using InTrade and RealClearPolitics data. Atlantic Economic Journal, 42, 357–366. Fisher, S. D., Kuha, J., & Payne, C. (2010). Getting it right on the night, again—the 2010 UK general election poll. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society—Series A, 173, 699–701. Groβer, J., & Schram, A. (2010). Public opinion polls, voter turnout, and welfare: An experimental study. American Journal of Political Science, 54, 700–717. Hillygus, D. S. (2011). The evolution of election polling in the United States. Public Opinion Quarterly, 75, 962–991. Hummel, P. (2011). Pre-election polling and sequential elections. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 23, 463–479. Klofstad, C. A., & Bishin, B. G. (2012). Exit and entrance polling: A comparison of election survey methods. Field Methods, 24, 429–437. Lott, J. R., Jr. (2005). The impact of early media election calls on Republican voting rates in Florida’s western Panhandle counties in 2000. Public Choice, 123, 349–361. McDonald, M. P., & Thornburg, M. P. (2012). Interview mode effects: The case of exit polls and early voting. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76, 326–349. Mixon, J. W., Jr., Sen, A., & Stephenson, E. F. (2004). Are the networks biased? “Calling” states in the 2000 presidential election. Public Choice, 118(1/2), 53–59. Morgan, J., & Stocken, P. (2008) Information aggregation in polls. American Economic Review, 98, 864–896. Panagopoulos, C. (2009). Pre-election poll accuracy in the 2008 general elections. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39, 896–907. Panagopoulos, C. (2013). Who participates in exit polls? Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, 23, 444–455. Pavia, J. M. (2010). Improving predictive accuracy of exit polls. International Journal of Forecasting, 26, 68–81. Pavía-Miralles, J. M. (2005). Forecasts from nonrandom samples: The election night case. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 100, 1113–1122. Stout, C. T., & Kline, R. (2010). I’m not voting for her: Polling discrepancies and female candidates. Political Behavior, 33, 479–503.

Positioning Theory

Positioning Theory Positioning theory is concerned with the psychological and social processes through which local moral orders are collectively constructed and collaboratively upheld in social interactions. These moral orders regulate social actions. Politicians making declarations such as “Illegals have no right to stay in America” or “The accusations against me are all politically motivated” are positioning themselves and others, and positioning theory is a highly effective and suitable way to better understand such behavior. At the heart of moral orders regulating behavior are rights, which others owe us, and duties, which we owe others. There are also supererogatory rights, a right that one has but might forgo for the sake of others (e.g., to help the police, a newspaper editor agrees to delay the publication of a story) and supererogatory duties, these being duties one takes on in addition to what is normally expected (e.g., Sam dives into a river to save a child, going “beyond the call of duty” as a citizen). A position is a set of rights and duties that constrain the actions of individuals and groups (including organizations, corporations, and even nations). Positioning theory is rooted in the ideas of John Austin, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, and Rom Harré and rests on the assumption that all higher order mental processes arise out of social interactions. Thus, the focus of positioning theory research is not on private cognitive processes within isolated individuals (as in traditional research), but on behavior emerging out of the collectively constructed moral order. For example, Fathali Moghaddam, Elizabeth Hanley, and Rom Harré explored how Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state, used various narrative strategies to position himself, the Soviets, and the Chinese in such a way as to both keep negotiations going, and bring the Chinese closer to the United States and farther away from the Soviets. One way to better understand positioning theory is to compare and contrast it with role theory. Traditional role theory focuses on the actor’s position and how different positions control and shape the actor’s narrative and actions. However, positioning theory is far more dynamic than role theory. In role theory, roles are difficult to change, and have formal definitions, while positioning theory deals with discursive practices that are easily changeable, debatable, and can be short-lived. Aspects of human interactions or forms of social roles are constantly changing and being evaluated over time. For instance, during a conversation, actors have certain roles such as speaker or listener, which can quickly change across contexts or interactions. Next, we

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highlight the dynamism of positioning theory by considering three main elements. Central to positioning theory are three interconnected elements: illocutionary force, position, and storyline. Illocutionary force is best understood by clarifying the act-action distinction (from John Austin). An action is any intentional activity; an act is the social meaning of an action. The same verbal formula, gesture, and marker may have a wide range of meanings based on who is performing them, where, and for what reason. For example, saying “OK” might in certain circumstances mean something is “satisfactory.” But saying “OK” may also be a way of reluctantly agreeing to something or saying that something is acceptable but not really very good. The second main element in positioning theory is position. The question of who has the right or the duty to use certain words in certain ways is dependent on the distribution of rights and duties, sometimes made explicit. Each distribution of rights and duties is a position. For example, a school principal has the right to discipline a student in her school, but not a student in another school. If the principal walked into another school, students there would have the right to disregard her “commands.” Police have a duty to stop speeding drivers, while civilians do not. In other words, positions have this similarity with roles, in that they exist outside of the people who occupy them, as part of the common knowledge of a community, family, church, and so on. The third condition is story line, a loose cluster of narrative conventions according to which a social episode unfolds and positions arise. Each episode of human interaction consists of one or more story lines, and these are usually accepted (often implicitly) by those taking part in the episode. Individuals and groups in social interaction can develop competing story lines, involving competing assignment of rights and duties. For example, consider the story line from politician X: “We have to make America great again by giving priority to real Americans, and kicking out everyone else behind a wall,” as opposed to the story line from politician Y, “America is already great and we can get more justice by making sure everyone has a fair chance at success.” These are two contrasting story lines about “the American story,” and they are associated with different distributions of rights and duties. Positioning theory enables the understanding of fluid social interactions, where individuals and groups develop competing story lines. Fathali M. Moghaddam and Hyangseon Ahn See also Art in Political Campaigns; Framing Effects; Identity Politics; Mass Communication; Ritual in Politics; Vote Identification

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Further Readings Harré, R., & Moghaddam, F. M. (Eds.). (2013). The psychology of friendship and enmity: Relationships in love, work, politics, and war. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Harré, R., Moghaddam, F. M., Pilkerton-Cairnie, T., Rothbart, D., & Sabat, S. (2009). Recent advances in positioning theory. Theory & Psychology, 19, 5–31. Harré, R., & van Langenhove, L. (Eds.). (1999). Positioning theory. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Moghaddam, F. M., Hanley, E., & Harré, R. (2003). Sustaining intergroup harmony: An analysis of the Kissinger Papers through positioning theory. In R. Harré & F. M. Moghaddam (Eds.), The self and others: Positioning individuals and groups in personal, organizational, political, and cultural contexts (pp. 137–155). Westport, CT: Praeger. Moghaddam, F. M., Harré, R., & Lee, N. (Eds.). (2008). Global conflict resolution through positioning analysis. New York, NY: Springer.

Positive Peace Positive peace is a term coined by peace scholar Johan Galtung, who differentiated between negative and positive peace. Negative peace denotes the absence of direct (physical) violence, often found in the form of a postwar cease-fire. Positive peace describes more than just the absence of violence and instead describes a situation in which peace is also a state of social justice. The thinking of positive peace can be said to have led to a more proactive approach to peace-building interventions, which now go beyond the facilitation of military cease-fires. Negative peace is defined by absence, that is, the absence of organized violence and violent conflict. In a situation of negative peace, it may be that there is no open, violent conflict anymore, but that less visible manifestations of violence still operate in society. In contrast, positive peace is characterized by presence, that is, the presence of additional values such as equality, cooperation, political freedoms, empowerment, human rights, or social justice. However, there is no consensus on what exactly the factors of a positive peace are. They range from freedom and equality to growth, government, and business, with a varying emphasis on which of those factors are a priority for the achievement of a sustainable peace. Galtung emphasizes interdependence as one of the most important factors of achieving positive peace. This form of peace has to be voluntary and free, as Galtung does not believe deterrence to be capable of leading to positive peace. The fact that justice features prominently in widely used definitions of positive peace means that positive

peace is often equated with “just peace.” In contrast to negative peace, which puts emphasis on maintaining the status quo, positive peace is generally oriented toward change and strives to improve unjust social, political, or economic structures. It is proactive in that it aims not just to eliminate direct (physical) violence, but also to address situations in which structural violence prevails. Structural violence can be defined as injustice built into social structures (such as schooling, housing, political representation, and so forth) that leads to unjust treatment or discrimination against particular social groups. Attempts to build positive peace therefore challenge (often disguised) manifestations of structural violence. The elimination of structural violence ties into what Galtung calls the need for positive relations between groups as a basis for the establishment of positive peace. The latter also has a time dimension as negative peace can often be brought about efficiently (through a ceasefire or peace agreement), whereas positive peace requires a much more long-term approach needed for the establishment of sustainable structure of equality, freedom, and justice. The context of the cold war, during the course of which Galtung developed the distinction between negative and positive peace, offered only minor examples of the latter but plenty of the former. In the search for a way to peace between the Soviet bloc and the U.S.-led coalition, attempts to facilitate disarmament on both sides can be seen as important steps toward the establishment of negative peace, in that these efforts reduced the likelihood of an outbreak of violent war. However, as this did not include positive (proactive) steps to lead to more than the mere absence of violence, positive peace was not the automatic result of disarmament measures. Positive peace, in this context, would have to have included the active reconstruction of relationships, the acknowledgement of mutual interdependence, as well as addressing questions of inequality—not just between the warring parties, but also within. Famous for its annual publication of the Global Peace Index, the Institute for Economics and Peace has increasingly devoted attention to positive peace and developed a matrix, called the Positive Peace Index (PPI), through which the institute measures and ranks countries. The PPI builds on, but notably differs from, Galtung’s original design, by emphasizing, for instance, the business environment or the level of official corruption, as key indicators of whether positive peace has been established in a country. In this context, the ­Institute for Economics and Peace argues that positive peace can facilitate resilience and thus empower entire societies to cope with difficult challenges in the long run. In 2015, the list was headed by Denmark, while Somalia took the last rank.

Poverty Trap

The notion of positive peace can be seen as reflected in the ways in which peace-building missions have developed since the early 1990s. The era of the cold war had been shaped by status-quo–oriented peacekeeping missions, providing military personnel to facilitate cease-fires and thus to help create negative peace. Peace building, as the attempt to create sustainable and just postconflict structures, then represents an endorsement of the notion of positive peace. The goal of primarily internationally led peace-building operations was, at least rhetorically, the creation of lasting structures of injustice and oppression. This development went hand in hand with an increasing scope of peace-building interventions and has therefore faced criticism for providing a tool through which societies in conflict can be controlled and governed. Peace building has indeed taken on a much larger range of tasks, often intervening deeply into underlying societal structures, including political systems, economic organization, as well as legal matters. In that vein, the notion of positive peace inherent in peace-building operations can open up questions around the meaning of a just and egalitarian society as well as questions around who has and should have the authority to define and operationalize social structures accordingly. Stefanie Kappler See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Intractable Conflicts; Negative Peace; Reconciliation

Further Readings Galtung, J. (1964). An editorial. Journal of Peace Research, 1(1), 1–4.  Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. Institute for Economics and Peace. (2015). Positive Peace Report 2015. Retrieved from http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#/ page/news/1264 Roberts, D. (2008). Post-conflict statebuilding and state legitimacy: From negative to positive peace? Development and Change, 39(4), 537–555.

Poverty Trap A poverty trap is a situation in which an individual, household, or other economic entity (such as a whole economy) is unable or unlikely to escape the socioeconomic situation of poverty on its own effort, despite individuals taking optimal decisions. Poverty is thereby

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understood either in monetary income terms (e.g., ­falling below a poverty-line threshold) or as a broader concept. A poverty trap is usually caused by some forms or combinations of market failures, most notably involving financial borrowing constraints, coordination failure, or information asymmetries. If such imperfections are relevant enough, the market equilibrium will not produce the possible social welfare optimum. Accordingly, and owing to the self-reinforcing nature of a poverty trap, its potential existence and understanding is of immense policy relevance since a policy intervention is necessary to escape the “bad equilibrium” poverty trap and achieve a welfare-optimizing “good equilibrium.” However, institutions may themselves reinforce market failures or become a key source of poverty traps. This entry summarizes key mechanisms for poverty traps at the micro- (household) and macrolevel (economy wide), the evidence for their existence, their possible interactions, and potential policy implications.

Microeconomic Poverty Traps A household (or individual) might be trapped in poverty because the latter does not allow it to save after consumption, while savings are necessary for some investments to escape poverty. For example, a farmer might generate income increases by investing in machinery or fertilizer, but as its own subsistence consumption literally eats up current production, no savings will be left for investment. Given that potential investment of poor households might result in higher future income generation, access to finance and borrowing should usually be sufficient to escape such poverty traps, so the latter usually involve some form of financial market imperfection; that is, poor households have no or limited option to borrow (often because of no collateral). The situation can be aggravated under lumpy investment costs: While poor households might be able to save and borrow a limited amount, this might not be sufficient to cover the fixed costs necessary for an investment to escape poverty (e.g., some machinery). Furthermore, poor households might not only be ex-ante credit constrained but discouraged from investment if the new production technology is more prone to shocks. Lacking insurance or other consumption smoothing, poor households might thus be better off staying with the low-return, low-risk technology instead of putting themselves in jeopardy of lower consumption in some future periods after investment, given that they already consume close to the subsistence minimum. A more recent literature has highlighted the possibility of behavioral poverty traps caused by the fact that being in poverty negatively affects rational decision making. That is, budgetary or social preoccupations

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related to the state of being poor consume mental resources, which are limited in nature, thereby leaving less for other cognitive tasks, which then leads to counterproductive or suboptimal behavior. It is important to stress that those studies imply a causal effect of poverty on decision making and not merely a correlation caused by the fact that bad decision makers end up poor. Furthermore, they go beyond cumulative long-term effects of poverty, such as effects of childhood malnutrition on adult cognitive capacity, but can be caused by sharp transitory income shocks. On the other hand, while estimated impacts of such poverty-induced cognitive impediments can be large, it is not sure whether they will give rise to a proper poverty trap or rather slow down income improvements of the poor. Overall, there are various studies documenting the existence of such microeconomic poverty traps for several countries. However, while poverty and associated inequality in most countries are a quite persistent phenomenon, poverty traps based on the most conventional theoretical explanations and mechanisms do not seem to be widespread. For example, the low costs of calorie intake are at odds with “nutritional poverty gaps,” where undernourishment prevents poor households from performing productive physical work (although this does not rule out possible malnutrition). Similarly, investment costs of different production technologies appear too granular to reconcile with models of poverty traps based on lumpy investment and relevant borrowing constraints. This suggests that the discrete distinction of a “bad” and “good” equilibrium in most poverty trap models is too simplistic and that in reality there might be a multitude of temporary local equilibria, potentially caused by a complex interaction of various mechanisms. Accordingly, households might be able to escape poverty but their development path would be nonlinear and slow due to the gravitating forces of local equilibria. This would be in accordance with recent cross-country evidence that poverty levels in the developing world do converge, but very slowly.

Macroeconomic Poverty Traps The key rationale of microeconomic poverty traps can also be expanded toward a country’s macro economy. (Historically, most macroeconomic models of poverty traps precede those of microeconomics.) One of the most basic explanatory mechanisms is that of an S-shaped savings function on the economy’s aggregate level. That is, at low development levels, the savings rate is low as households consume higher fractions of their incomes to satisfy basic needs. Only once the economy is developed enough can households save a higher fraction of their income. Because savings and associated

capital accumulation are essential for development in most growth models, this makes a poverty trap possible where the “high-development equilibrium” is never reached for some developing countries due to their low savings. Similar arguments can apply to all other fundamental drivers of economic growth that might themselves depend positively on the development level. For example, if good institutions drive growth but development itself improves institutions, an economy might be trapped in a low-development, poor-institutions equilibrium. However, it is important to stress that the twoway relationship between development level and growth fundamentals is necessary but not sufficient to end up in a poverty trap, which will depend on the relative magnitude of both effects in this relationship. Another form of macroeconomic poverty traps might arise if advanced sectors of an economy produce positive externalities (or with increasing returns to scale) but economic agents face coordination failures which make them stay in the traditional sector. For example, a modern manufacturing sector might benefit from technology diffusion, knowledge networks, and learning-by-doing or capital–good market externalities. But as those benefits only kick in with a minimum number of firms producing in the modern sector, no individual producer has an incentive to switch from the traditional low productivity to the modern sector, if the latter is small in size. Although the idea of macroeconomic poverty traps has increasingly fallen out of fashion among economists in recent decades, it might be premature to neglect the possibility of their existence altogether. One reason is that the knowledge about possible poverty traps potentially induced policies designed to overcome them. Not observing poverty traps in macroeconomic data is hence no evidence against their possible existence. But even when looking at data for the last 4 decades, it seems that the lowest income countries significantly fell short of the average global growth performance. Figure 1 plots the annualized per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate between 1970 and 2010 against the logarithm of initial GDP in 1970 (for countries below the 1970 median income level, labeled developing countries for simplicity). Two observations are worth highlighting. First, very few of the poorest countries in 1970 could keep up with the global average growth rate of 1.8%, with Zimbabwe (ZWE) and Burundi (BDI) de facto experiencing zero growth (below 0.2%). Of course, low growth rates are no specific feature of lowest income economies, as several observations in the income range from Côte d’Ivoire (COD) to Zambia (ZMB) highlight. However, the growth variation in that higher income range is much higher, with Equatorial Guinea (GNQ) reaching growth close to 8%, for

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example. In contrast, for the eight lowest income economies (the bottom decile of the depicted sample), growth averaged 1.15% which is significantly different from the global mean growth rate of 1.8%.2 Second, if macroeconomic poverty traps exist, we should see a nonlinear relationship between initial income and subsequent growth that should be flat or positive in the lower income part of the distribution. In fact, this is what we observe in the left third of Figure 1: The positive relation from the cubic regression suggests that lower income countries also experienced less growth, consistent with the notion of a macroeconomic poverty trap.3 Of course, this is no compelling evidence for the existence or relevance of macroeconomic poverty traps, and clear testable hypotheses for the latter are difficult to establish more generally, especially since genuine ­poverty traps are hard to distinguish from rigidities or slow-convergence patterns in aggregate macro data. From a policy perspective, however, this distinction seems somewhat artificial because market failures that create binding development constraints have to be addressed, no matter whether they produce genuine poverty traps or extremely slow convergence patterns. A detailed country-level analysis of what constitutes

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these constraints thus seems more important because even if macro poverty traps exist to a substantial extent in the developing world, this does not mean they are of the same nature for all countries.

Micro/Macro Interactions A potentially important (and to date underexplored) channel in this context is the interaction between micro and macro factors. For example, if the savings rate depends on the income level, it might be important to look beyond aggregates of how incomes are distributed within an economy. That is, of two economies at the same aggregate income level but with two different income distributions, one might be caught in a poverty trap, while the other one is not. Similarly, most models of microeconomic poverty traps do not provide a role for stochastic macroeconomic fluctuations that are particularly high in developing economies. Once one allows for this possibility, it is possible that of two identical households with some borrowing constraints, the one in a country with lower macroeconomic fluctuations will be more likely to invest in a higher risk, higher return technology and hence not end up in a poverty trap.

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Figure 1  Growth and Convergence Patterns in the Developing World Source: Data are taken from Penn World Tables 7.1 in PPP p.c. terms. Growth rates are calculated exactly (not as log changes). China is used as Version 2. Notes: We can reject equality of growth rates at the 10% and 5% level against a two-sided and one-sided alternative, respectively. The regression equation is growth = −6.497524 + 2.91 × ln(GDP) − 0.43 × [ln(GDP)]2 + 0.02 × [ln(GDP)]3, with all parameter estimates being statistically significant at the 5% level. A nonparametric “lowness” estimator predicts almost the same pattern, including the positive relation in the lower income range.

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A Philosophical Note Taking a more philosophical perspective, poverty traps are especially easy to interpret in the context of ­rationality-based welfare theory: Agents’ rational decision with respect to a certain welfare function will not improve their welfare. However, taking other perspectives might prove to be enlightening as well. For example, in a capability perspective, a poverty trap could be understood as limiting the sets of joint capabilities down to a level where agents are forced to make dire decisions which deprive them of basic necessities without increasing their real freedoms.

Policy Responses The most important policy implication of the preceding discussion is that “one size does not fit all.” Instead, it is important to identify the most binding constraints in economies likely to fall into a poverty trap, which can also change over time for a given country if multiple local equilibria exist due to interactive poverty trap effects. Given the complexity that such a situation would imply, it is also unlikely that the “big push” policy prescriptions emerging from early poverty trap models— such as foreign aid to overcome the savings trap or large-scale public investment to overcome coordination failure—are sufficient to do the job, no matter how beneficial they might be on their own. Moreover, if one accepts the notion that microeconomic poverty traps do exist, structural policies aiming to address overall market efficiency are unlikely to benefit the poorest. This creates an argument for targeted interventions and social policy programs. Furthermore, the recent e­ vidence that even transitory shocks can give rise to poverty persistence highlights the potential role for stabilization policies that limit economic fluctuations. Finally, an analysis of potential sources for poverty traps should not overlook the role of institutions, or the interactions between the “rules of the game” and economic agents. Not only can policy failures aggravate market failures, but institutions themselves can provide self-reinforcing social inefficiencies that cause poverty to persist. Konstantin M. Wacker See also Capitalism; Dependency Theory; Economics and Political Behavior; Elite Theory (Pareto); Justice Motive; Malthusian Cycle; Resource Mobilization; Social Welfare; Tokenism

Further Readings Azariadis, C., & Stachurski, J. (2005). Poverty traps. In P. Aghion & S. N. Durlauf (Eds.), Handbook of economic growth (pp. 295–384). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.

Crespo Cuaresma, J., Klasen, S., & Wacker, K. M. (2016). There is poverty convergence (Working paper 213). Vienna, Austria: Vienna University of Economics and Business. Dercon, S., & Christiaensen, L. (2011). Consumption risk, technology adoption and poverty traps: Evidence from Ethiopia. Journal of Development Economics, 96, 159–173. Kraay, A., & McKenzie, D. (2014). Do poverty traps exist? Assessing the evidence. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3), 127–148. doi:10.1257/jep.28.3.127 Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science, 341(6149), 976–980. Ravallion, M. (2012). Why don’t we see poverty convergence? American Economic Review, 102, 504–523. Wacker, K. M. (2016). Convergence, poverty, and macroeconomic volatility: A Latin American perspective. In J. T. Araujo, M. Clavijo, E. Vostroknutova, & K. M. Wacker (Eds.), Understanding the income and efficiency gap in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chap. 7). Washington, DC: Directions in Development, World Bank.

Powerlessness Powerlessness is the condition of individuals or groups unable to determine or influence their own destiny. Though intuitively clear, the notion has no straightforward definition and is rarely used as such. At the most basic level, it is often interpreted as a lack or deprivation of power, a more common but no less ambiguous concept. Powerlessness is also often associated or conflated with notions such as alienation, domination, anomie, and political or social exclusion. Instead of adjudicating between all approaches, this entry offers an overview of the underlying lines of dissent in the conceptualization of powerlessness. It then investigates a few approaches at the crossroad of psychology, social, and political sciences that each focuses on powerlessness in direct or indirect ways.

A Multifaceted Concept First, powerlessness can be conceived at an individual or collective level. A psychologist will be more interested in personal perceptions, whereas a sociologist or a political scientist will look into groups or institutions. However, this opposition is relative since most theories tackling powerlessness try to build a bridge between micro- and macrolevels: powerlessness is experienced at the most individual level, yet it is inscribed in a wider social setting that determines the asymmetry of power. For example, a migrant housemaid may experience ­serious abuses and be unable to escape them. Her powerlessness, then, is not only embedded in the social context of the host society that may not be supportive of foreign female workers but also in more global

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relationships of economic dependence between third world populations and developed countries. Second, the concept can refer to the absence of control either on one’s own actions and decisions (lack of power to . . . ) or on other players’ actions or decisions (lack of power over . . . ). The two perspectives are likely to overlap (an individual or group without agency will probably not exert a notable influence on another) but they lead to different research agendas. The first perspective entails a hierarchical understanding of powerlessness and could inspire, for instance, research on the low voting turnout of disenfranchised social groups or on the loss of effective protection by refugees fleeing a war. The second perspective relies on a more relational approach to power and finds applications ranging from gender power relations in family settings to international relations theory. Third, powerlessness can be considered as either objective or subjective. Objective powerlessness holds that the lack of control over oneself or others is due to one’s position in economic, racial, or gender structures, or to a deprivation of those resources necessary to achieve one’s goals. In that perspective, the powerlessness of groups or individuals derives from external, constraining forces: a 19th-century Black slave in the southern United States owed his condition to his being a “negro.” Subjective powerlessness pertains to the realm of representations and emotions. There might be a discrepancy between “reality” and perception: Individuals would miss opportunities out of unawareness regarding possible choices, thus reinforcing their own actual powerlessness! This could be the typical case of a wife subjected to domestic violence yet unable to even consider taking action by escaping or filing a complaint. Conversely, belief in one’s capacity to control one’s destiny in spite of real obstacles can lead to unsuccessful outcomes such as the ill-fated mobilization of Chinese students, intellectuals, and workers in 1989 that was forcefully subdued by the regime (Tiananmen massacre). Fourth, powerlessness can be regarded as absolute or relative. The authors who discuss this issue usually agree that although individuals may in certain circumstances experience a sense of absolute powerlessness, they always retain some autonomy as to react to external pressure. Powerlessness is then construed as relative. For example, unable to challenge openly the laws defined by the state and its powerful elites, peasants can still evade them through the everyday forms of resistance explored by James Scott (e.g., dissimulation, pilfering, poaching, tax fraud). In some extreme cases however, when the sheer physical integrity of individuals or groups is involved, one can wonder how their powerlessness can be relativized: What measure of power did the Jews retain on the threshold of gas chambers during the Second World War? This remains a hard

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question to answer. With these debates in mind, four specific fields have been selected to further investigate the many faces of powerlessness: alienation, political mobilization, institutions and organizations, and international politics.

Powerlessness and Alienation The most canonical use of the notion of powerlessness in social sciences is found in the theory of alienation. Alienation, according to the economist and political theorist Karl Marx, is a process of “estrangement of the self” caused by workers’ lack of control of the means of production and by the appropriation of the goods they produce by capital owners. Therefore, in a Marxian perspective, alienation is the objective condition of ­economic powerlessness, an inevitable byproduct of the capitalist society. The notion has since been explored by non-Marxist analysts and became one of the most popular concepts in sociology from the 1950s to the early 1980s. However, the focus has changed over the years. Sociologists increasingly worked on feelings of alienation and expanded the meaning of the concept. Sociologist Melvin Seeman, for instance, sees five variants of alienation in the sociological literature: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, political isolation, and self-estrangement. For their part, political sociologists have defined political alienation as an individual sense of powerlessness toward the political system, that is, a belief the individual holds regarding his own impotence as he expects his participation in the political process to have no actual influence on public affairs. Most studies conclude that alienation has an observable influence on political behavior, but authors d ­ isagree as to its nature. For some, the sense of powerlessness leads to political apathy, which is characterized by not voting, a lack of knowledge or interest in politics, and noninvolvement in other forms of political participation. Conversely, political negativism (e.g., protest voting in general elections or referenda, rejection of the political establishment, attraction to fringe parties) has also been associated with alienation: The electoral ­success of populist figures is often explained by the ­support of voters who did not feel represented by the traditional elites. A more radical interpretation of political negativism assumes that alienation drives disenfranchised individuals toward authoritarianism and ethnic prejudice. Hannah Arendt, for instance, contends that the historical success of totalitarian movements during the interwar period demonstrates that alienated masses do not spontaneously support liberal democracy and universalistic values. Each of these views is supported by different conjectures regarding the emotions triggered by the realization of one’s own political powerlessness: resignation and

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fatalism on one side (hence deeper powerlessness), resentment and rebellion on the other (hence a perceived decrease in powerlessness). The two views can be reconciled through the assumption that alienated classes in a democratic society tend to remain quiescent under ordinary circumstances but are prone to mobilize into mass movements or to follow an authoritarian leader when some event further discredits the political elite or when a clever demagogue manages to harness collective frustration or racist hatred. Such processes can also be observed in undemocratic contexts. The Arab Spring is quite illustrative. For many decades, Arab societies were regarded as passive in the face of repressive regimes. However, the self-immolation in an obscure location in Tunisia of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor motivated by powerlessness in the face of police abuses, lit a wildfire that reached many Arab countries in early 2011. Scores of people took to the streets and, in a few cases, their mobilization led to the demise of longstanding dictatorships.

Powerlessness and Political Mobilization The puzzle of political mobilization has long occupied social scientists: Why do some disenfranchised groups try to overcome their powerlessness while others do not? Many studies link such mobilizations to a sudden deterioration of economic conditions (what Ted Gurr refers to as “relative deprivation”). Such circumstances may indeed create a favorable context for the rise of a social movement, but the ability of a group to organize and voice its claims depends on the possession of relevant political resources: financial means, access to the media or political arenas, experience in activism, scientific expertise, and so on. The concept of resources is understood broadly and may include social structure factors such as the size and economic status of the mobilized group, the density of sociability networks, and the intensity of collective identity. J. Craig Jenkins and Charles Perrow have applied the resource mobilization theory to the case of farm workers’ movements in California from 1946 to 1972. Farm workers were then a perfect example of a politically powerless group by virtue of its composition and isolation in society. Most of its members were Mexicans or short-term workers; oversupply of labor, individual mobility, and linguistic-cultural cleavages prevented the development of stable community ties or effective unions. Yet, their movement became highly successful in the late 1960s. Three factors were found to account for this change: an increased support by the American ­Federation of Labor, a more balanced reaction from the political elite, and the backing by liberal organizations concerned with poverty and minorities issues. Jenkins

and Perrow conclude that the powerlessness of farm workers had been overturned not by internal mutation or reversal of strategies but by the support of powerful groups that possess the necessary skills, means, and political access to start a union. In this perspective, powerlessness is an objective state of groups lacking appropriate political resources and therefore unable to change their economic predicament.

Powerlessness in Public Institutions and Political Organizations Powerlessness and alienation do not only relate to the economic status as argued by Marx and his followers. Modern societies are composed not only of classes, but also of organizations such as firms, parties, associations, and administrations that produce a double phenomenon of powerlessness. First, a research tradition dating back to the pioneering sociologist Max Weber and the efficiency ­ expert Frederick W. Taylor has shown that bureaucracies generate powerlessness among their members. In organizations, power does not only mean access to decision-making processes; it also entails the ability to exclude others from them. Robert Michels, another pioneering sociologist, coined the notion of “the iron law of oligarchy” to qualify the social dynamics that lead to the creation in every political organization of a self-reproducing elite that controls the allocation of resources, monopolizes the highest positions, and serves its own objectives first, somehow disempowering the rank and file. In addition, modern organizations and bureaucracies tend to control closely their low-ranking members with tools such as regulations, legal forms, schedules, wage scales, quality systems, and even pledges of allegiance. Meant to increase the predictability of work practices, these tools drastically restrict people’s professional autonomy. Public management research shows that the invention of new methods of employee “empowerment” such as quality circles and project management actually increase hierarchical scrutiny. Second, the functioning of certain administrations may also affect the autonomy or even personality of the citizens they are supposed to look after. Prisons, asylums, hospitals, and residential schools tend to operate like total institutions. These are defined by Erving Goffman as closed spaces where most aspects of the life of large classes of individuals are run under the same authority and rules, tightly structured and scheduled according to a rational plan that leaves little room for individual choices or privacy. They also promote standards of conduct that supposedly serve best the interests of the individuals and expect them to comply ostensibly with the staff’s judgments. Such totalitarian features

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may be observed to a lesser degree in more open organizations: Unemployed workers have to prove that they are applying for jobs or reducing their spending; people who want to regain the custody of their children have to comply with social services’ idea of a perfect parent. The citizen who falls under the control of administrations often experiences humiliation, constant fear of civil servants’ disapproval, and a general sense of powerlessness. However, as intrusive as administrative regulations may be, staff and citizens retain a range of adaptation strategies: full-on rebellion, lying, negotiation, ritualism (formal observation of rules without emotional involvement or adherence to the goals of the organization), and corruption. Therefore, in most cases, powerlessness remains relative and leaves room, albeit narrow, for action or mobilization.

Powerlessness in International Politics Power is probably the most important concept of international relations theory. Generations of scholars have focused on big powers and how their foreign policies interact as to determine issues of war and peace, the fate of territories and populations, and the shaping of the international political and economic order. Powerlessness has rarely been of concern to them. Starting from the 1960s however, some strands of scholarship started studying powerless actors in the international system. This section offers an overview of three of them. In the 1960s, with the major wave of decolonization in Asia and Africa and the rise of development issues, dependency theory analyzed the problem of persistent underdevelopment in many parts of the world. Its proponents argued from a Marxist perspective that world capitalism had given way to an international order based on the exploitation of the poor countries by the rich ones through a deeply unequal trade system. This system allowed the wealthiest nations to maintain a biased division of labor, with the poor countries providing cheap raw material, agricultural products, and labor while importing expansive goods manufactured in the industrial countries. This dependence perspective and other related approaches, such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory, highlight the powerlessness of so-called third world countries and peoples in the face of an international system tailored by Western countries. International institutions that have been created in the aftermath of World War II like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund still mirror Western primacy through the distribution of seats, positions, shares, and resources. Both institutions have been able to force on many developing countries neoliberal structural adjustment programs. The late 2000s

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financial crisis has shown that even in the West, financially faltering states and their peoples could be powerless in the face of their donors. Despite his election (September 2015) on an anti-austerity program and wide popular mobilizations, Greek Prime minister Alexis Tsipras was compelled to renege on his electoral promises and comply with the demands of the European Union and the IMF. Powerlessness in international politics is not only found at the global level of international structures; it also can be observed at the most basic level: the individual. Though international relations scholars have long been blind to individuals, the end of the cold war allowed them to see that most of the conflicts took place within countries, that most of their victims were unarmed—and hence largely powerless—civilians rather than soldiers and that the state could be a primary source of danger for its own citizens either by repressing them or by failing to protect them. Two situations appear emblematic: the genocide in Rwanda (April-July 1994), during which about 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered; and the war crimes and genocides during the wars in former Yugoslavia (1991–1999). These situations have encouraged new thinking in the field of international relations by both scholars and practitioners. First, the notion of “human security” was put forth in UN circles starting from 1992. Positing that the individual is—or should be—the primary referent of security, this notion indirectly pleaded for the protection and empowerment of powerless people all over the world by “freeing them from fear and from want.” This notion has highlighted the ubiquity of powerlessness especially in developing countries and it has related it to the persistence of violent conflict worldwide. Another notion was developed within the United Nations (UN) in the late 1990s: the responsibility to protect (R2P), which tries to strike a balance between national sovereignty and the need to address the powerlessness of people in the face of massive abuses in their countries. External actors theoretically have no say in the state’s internal affairs (e.g., its institutions, its ideological orientations, its handling of minorities or social movements). But in the light of the 1990s conflicts, this noninterference principle was increasingly regarded as a green light for states to repress their populations. R2P was devised within UN circles in order to square the circle. It considers that states have a responsibility to protect their population and should they fail to do so, the international community is entitled to step in. Both the notions of human security and R2P have brought to the fore the powerlessness of people in poverty and conflict contexts, but actual practices of selective interference (the international community did intervene in Libya in 2011 but not in Syria despite similar

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circumstances) have left significant pockets of powerlessness worldwide. The final perspective on powerlessness in international relations turns to a core practice: foreign policy, the instrument through which a state relates with other actors at the international level to promote its own interests and shape its environment accordingly. Powerlessness arises when an actor is objectively unable to do so, whatever the means committed to its goals. The Iraqi regime was powerless at the turn of 2002–2003 in the face of the American military campaign that led to the fall of the regime. Conversely, neither the military might of the United States nor its long-term foreign policy could provide for the stabilization of Iraq or Afghanistan, which raises the question of the power secured by military assets in contemporary conflicts. Another example raises an equally complex issue: the extent to which some international actors are content to be powerless because powerlessness allows them to avoid paying the price of a difficult decision or course of action. Though it has incomparably more leverage today than it used to have before the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has progressively relinquished any assertive policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process though its long-stated objective, a two-state solution, has been increasingly jeopardized. The claim of powerlessness has allowed the EU to evade costly political actions such as disagreement with the United States or a crisis with Israel, while avoiding to be held accountable for actual policies contradicting its commitments. Ultimately, powerlessness appears as an unavoidable feature of all asymmetric social relations and as such is a political issue. The recent rise of empowerment strategies in all areas of public policy (e.g., development cooperation, education, health) and within organizations shows a growing awareness of the ubiquity of a multifaceted phenomenon that challenges humanistic and democratic values. In that perspective, the opposite of powerlessness is not so much power as empowerment: the enablement of individuals and communities to control their fate and govern themselves. Elena Aoun and Joël Ficet See also Alienation; Collective Action; Dependency Theory; Resource Mobilization; Voter Disenfranchisement

Further Readings Dean, D. G. (1960). Alienation and political apathy. Social Forces, 3, 185–189. Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Horton, J. E., & Thompson, W. E. (1962). Powerlessness and political negativism: A study of defeated local referendums. American Journal of Sociology, 5, 485–493. Jenkins, J. C., & Perrow, C. (1977). Insurgency of the powerless: Farm workers movements (1946–1972). American Sociological Review, 2, 249–268. McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. American Journal of Sociology, 6, 1212–1241. Michels, R. (1915). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. New York, NY: Hearst’s International Library. Scott, J. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Seeman, M. (1959). On the meaning of alienation. American Sociological Review, 6, 783–791. Wallerstein, I. (1976). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York, NY: Academic Press. Zimmerman, M., & Rappaport, J. (1988). Citizen participation, perceived control, and psychological empowerment. American Journal of Community Psychology, 5, 725–750.

Praetorianism The Praetorian Guard was an elite military force that was originally created to protect the Roman emperors (perhaps analogous in some respects to Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the SS in Nazi Germany, and more recently, Iran’s Republican Guard). Over several hundred years of Roman history (31 B.C.E.–312 C.E.), as the guard gradually gained more military and political power, including the power to install and remove emperors, it became a symbol of pervasive corruption and venality, and this is the sense in which the term is evoked here. There is a rich scholarly tradition on praetorianism, much of it associated with its obvious connection to military dictatorships, mostly in developing countries. Praetorianism can be contrasted with professionalism when assessing the role of the military in society and government. Professionalism refers to how a military elite seeks the status of a body of experts, dedicated to national defense and the rational management of violence, placing their skills at the disposal of the state. Praetorianism, on the other hand, refers to the tendency of the military to play an active and even decisive role in the political process and selection of political leaders. The norm governs the practice. As a professional practice, the military is supposed to be “above” or at the service of politics. But this status or role can also lead to

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praetorianism by providing the justification for assuming control of the state when civilian leadership fails to meet the military’s standards for social order and stability. Professionalism is thus generally associated with the governance of advanced industrial societies and constitutional governance; praetorianism with less developed nations and dictatorships. Some of the literature analyzes praetorianism as it manifested in nation states undergoing m ­ odernization— specifically, managing the transition from ­traditional to modern social, political, and economic institutions by resorting to military or other forms of nondemocratic rule as the most efficient way to marshal resources and implement social policies. Other studies, however, use the term more commonly to refer to the process of social, political, economic, and cultural decay, where power is exercised to maintain privilege gained by force or corrupt means. As an active political force, the military is more symptomatic of social dysfunction than rationality. Its political leverage rests on society’s inability to organize its resources in terms of generally accepted goals. Military intervention stems from alienation, not social consensus. As Amos Perlmutter states, “Praetorianism is generally associated with the disintegration of an old order and the rise of a decapitated new one” (as cited in Binder 1988, p. 385). Praetorianism tends to become a self-sealing appreciative system that undermines institutions to the point where the only acceptable values are those that reinforce corruption and self-serving behaviors. As government and institutions become more pervasively corrupt and venal, the more people mistrust them. Institutions become the last place that individuals look to for the nurturing of affirmative public values. Instead, institutions are seen as settings in which only the foolish or stubborn act with integrity and high ethical standards and success are measured only by personal gains in power and wealth. Institutions no longer serve the public but are maintained for their own sake, for the interests of those who hold power, and to maintain order. Thus praetorian times are associated with a limited capacity to develop and sustain a strong public culture, much less a democracy. Perlmutter identifies four social conditions that can give rise to praetorianism: a low degree of social cohesion, the existence of fratricidal classes, social polarity and nonconsolidated middle class, and weak mobilization of resources (for the state). It appears possible that these conditions and a transition of similar magnitude are underway even in the developed political economies of the 21st century and the era of globalization” (also called a transition to postmodernism). While the parameters and destination of this transition are not yet fully developed, one can at least identify some of the characteristics of

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praetorianism and how these characteristics are emerging in the current situation. One indication that these phenomena may be relevant beyond the usual model of a military dictatorship is the point made by scholars such as Hugh Heclo, Joseph Stiglitz, and Simon Johnson, who suggest the applicability of developing country models (bubble economies, debt crises, risk of deflation) to “fully developed” states such as the United States, along with a long list of corporate, government, and nonprofit agency scandals, resulting in unprecedented public cynicism, alienation, and institutional c­ orruption. Contemporary praetorianism has sent an unfortunate signal around the globe: Corruption can run rampant even in the world’s most advanced democracies. Danny L. Balfour See also Corruption; Dictatorship; Fascism

Further Readings Adams, G. B., & Balfour, D. L. (2012). Toward restoring integrity in praetorian times: The value of “putting cruelty first.” Public Integrity, 14(4), 325–339. Binder, L. (1988). Islamic liberalism: A critique of development ideologies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Callahan, D. (2004). The cheating culture: Why more Americans are doing wrong to get ahead. Orlando, FL: Harvest Books. Heclo, H. (2008). On thinking institutionally. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Huntington, S. P. (1965). Political development and political decay. World Politics, 18, 386–440. Johnson, S. (2009). The quiet coup. The Atlantic Online. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/ print/200905/imf-advice Perlmutter, A. (1969). The praetorian state and the praetorian army: Toward a taxonomy of civil-military relations in developing politics. Comparative Politics, 1, 382–404. Rapoport, D. C. (1960). Praetorianism: Government without consensus (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Berkeley, CA. Stiglitz, J. E. (2010). Free fall: America, free markets and the sinking of the world economy. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Prejudice Gordon Allport (1954) famously defined prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he [sic] is a member of that group” (p. 9). This definition of

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prejudice as hostility, dislike or the generalized negative evaluation of an entire group of people remains a core component of the definition of prejudice in many areas today. As various commentators have argued, however, the definition of prejudice-as-antipathy is incomplete. Focusing on antipathy misses the powerful effect that patronizing attitudes which position one group as weaker than the other and in need of protection can have for maintaining social inequality and hierarchy. Because of this, many recent psychological theories have taken a different perspective and tend to define prejudice as those ideologies, attitudes, and beliefs that help maintain and legitimize group-based hierarchy and exploitation. This revised definition of prejudice shifts research on prejudice away from a sole focus on attitudes and beliefs that are socially unacceptable because they are pejorative or express negative affect. Instead, this revised definition of prejudice takes a broader perspective and highlights the importance of determining whether certain beliefs, attitudes, ideologies, stereotypes, and so forth, function to help maintain hierarchy and exploitation.

Prejudice in Specific Domains Research assessing prejudice on the basis of gender (i.e., sexism) and ethnicity (i.e., racism) both highlight the importance of considering beliefs, attitudes, ideologies, stereotypes, and so forth that may on the surface seem caring or egalitarian, yet help maintain and justify discriminatory practices. As noted by Peter Glick and Susan Fiske, ambivalent sexism theory, for example, identifies two key forms of sexism: hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism fits the definition of prejudice-as-antipathy as it reflects negative and antagonistic attitudes toward gender-nonconforming women. Benevolent sexism, in ­ contrast, tends to express attitudes toward women who fulfill traditional gender roles as wonderful but weak and as needing protection by men. This ideology can seem subjectively caring, and yet it has powerful effects that maintain inequality and justify discrimination against women in numerous domains. Research on racism indicates that people can express pro-egalitarian sentiments but simultaneously hold nonconscious or implicit racial biases. This is known as aversive racism. Similarly, the theories of symbolic and modern racism state that racism toward African Americans in the United States tends to be based on the combination of negative affect, threat and fear, blended with attitudes that may not seem overly prejudiced in isolation, such as the denial of continuing discrimination,

and an emphasis on meritocracy and opposition to affirmative action.

Causes of Prejudice Allport also famously noted that people who are prejudiced (in terms of expressing negative affect) toward one group also tend to express prejudice toward other groups. This effect has been widely replicated and is referred to as generalized prejudice. The phenomenon of generalized prejudice suggests that there are stable individual differences that explain why it is that some people tend to be consistently more prejudiced than others. There are two key (or dual) processes that inform this explanation. These processes focus on group-based competition and social threat. The dual-process model of ideology and prejudice outlines the societal and personality factors that generate these two processes, and hence explains why some people tend to be more prejudiced than others. The first process is caused by the combination of a societal context that is high in competition and inequality coupled with the personality trait of low agreeableness (or tough-mindedness). People low in agreeableness tend to develop a schematized view of the social world as a competitive “dog-eat-dog” ­jungle. This worldview, in turn, causes people to develop a competition-driven motive for group-based dominance and superiority. This motive (often referred to as social dominance orientation) in turn predicts prejudice. The second process is caused by the combination of a societal context that is high in danger or threat coupled with the personality trait of low openness to experience (or social conformity). People low in openness tend to develop a schematized view of the social world as dangerous, disordered, and full of moral corruption, and this in turn causes people to develop a threat-driven motive for group-based security and social cohesion (known as right-wing authoritarianism). Together, social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism predict prejudice. Chris G. Sibley and Danny Osborne See also Authoritarian Personality; Profiling; Race and Ethnicity; Social Cognition; Voter Disenfranchisement

Further Readings Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Bergh, R., & Akrami, N. (2016). Generalized prejudice: Old wisdom and new perspectives. In C. G. Sibley & F. K. Barlow (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of the psychology of

Presidentialism prejudice (Chap. 19). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. L., & Pearson, A. R. (2016). Aversive racism and contemporary bias. In C. G. Sibley & F. K. Barlow (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of the psychology of prejudice (Chap. 12). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (in press). The dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice. In C. G. Sibley and F. K. Barlow (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of the psychology of prejudice (Chap. 9). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 491–512. Glick, P., & Rudman, L. A. (2005). On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Jackman, M. R. (1994). The velvet glove: Paternalism and conflict in gender, class, and race relations. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sibley, C. G., & Barlow, F. K. (2016). An introduction to the psychology of prejudice. In C. G. Sibley and F. K. Barlow (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of the psychology of prejudice (Chap. 1). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Presidential Character See Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character

Presidentialism Presidentialism is a form of government in which the executive and legislative branches of government are elected separately from each other. This differentiates presidentialism from a parliamentary system, in which candidates run for seats in the legislature and then form a government based on a majority party or coalition. All presidential systems are divided into two major categories, pure presidentialism and semi-presidentialism. This entry begins by introducing these main varieties of presidentialism and then discusses the implications of presidentialism for democratic governance. The entry concludes with a discussion of the consequences of presidentialism for mass political behavior.

The Varieties of Presidentialism The contemporary theoretical vision of presidentialism is strongly influenced by the major contributions of

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Maurice Duverger, Matthew Shugart, John Carey, and Robert Elgie. Pure presidentialism, so called, is a form of government in which there is a directly elected president who serves for a fixed term, where cabinet (government) members are not collectively responsible to the legislature, and where the legislature serves for a fixed term. Pure presidentialism exists in the United States, a majority of Latin American countries, and in several countries of Asia and Africa. Under semipresidentialism, a directly elected fixed-term president coexists with a prime minister and cabinet who are collectively responsible to the legislature. There are two major forms of semipresidentialism: premier-presidentialism whereby the prime minister and cabinet are collectively responsible solely to the legislature, and president-parliamentarism, where both the prime minister and cabinet are collectively responsible to both the legislature and the president. The paradigmatic case of the premier-presidential system is that of France. It can be met in several other European countries, particularly in eastern Europe, and elsewhere, ­primarily in Africa. The president-parliamentary system is relatively rare. It was used in Germany in the early 1920s to early 1930s. Currently, it can be found in ­Russia, Sri Lanka, and several other countries.

Implications for Democratic Governance It is usual to assess the implications of presidentialism for democratic governance by comparing it to the parliamentary form of government. From this perspective, the proponents of presidentialism argue that it has several major advantages. Besides the obvious fact that under presidentialism, the pattern of governmental responsibility is much clearer than under parliamentary systems, in which the composition of government often depends on coalition bargaining rather than reflects the choice of the people, these advantages are as follows. First, in contrast to parliamentary government, presidentialism is based on strict separation of powers so that the executive and legislative branches may scrutinize each other’s actions, thus creating a system of checks and balances. Second, it is sometimes argued that presidentialism endows the executive branch with an advantage of responding more rapidly to emerging situations. Third, being immune from the consequences of parliamentary crises, presidentialism may be beneficial for political stability. The critics of presidentialism, such as Juan Linz, point to several “perils” posed by presidentialism to democratic governance. Most importantly, by producing winner-takes-all electoral outcomes and polarizing the electorate, presidentialism may lead to the breakdown of democratic government, as has happened in the past in Peru and several other countries.

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Pressure Groups

Political stability and government efficacy may be jeopardized in a situation when the president and the parliamentary majority belong to different political parties or pursue different policy agendas. Besides, presidential systems make it difficult to remove a president from office even if his or her incapacity becomes apparent. Semipresidential systems were invented, more or less purposefully, in order to neutralize these threats. It is widely believed that while premier-presidentialism does indeed provide a remedy for some of them, president-parliamentary systems do not. In the end, ­ however, there is no decisive evidence that presidentialism is either beneficial or detrimental for democracy. Many scholars contend that both the advantages of presidentialism and its perils may materialize or not depending on the cultural context, the level of economic development, and party system properties.

Consequences for Political Behavior In behavioral terms, the main difference between parliamentary government and presidentialism is that while the former fosters an institutionalized form of politics and policymaking, normally centered around political parties, the latter generates a more personalized form of political behavior in which political actors, and primarily presidents and presidential aspirants, are largely independent from political parties or other organized entities. Given the centrality of these actors in presidential systems, this greatly reduces incentives for party loyalty and generates organizationally weak political parties, such as in the United States, or fluid and unstable party systems, such as in many emerging democracies. At the same time, presidential electoral campaigns are concerned more with issues of national importance than with local political problems, as a result of which presidentialism can be conducive to the development of national political parties. There is also some evidence that the number of parties in presidential systems is smaller than under parliamentary government, which reflects higher degrees of polarization in presidential contests and can be viewed as beneficial for party system development, especially in new democracies. One of the major consequences of presidentialism for voting behavior is that it greatly increases the role of candidates’ personality traits in shaping the political attitudes of the electors, which occurs at the expense of such traditional determinants of voter choice as party identification, programmatic positions, or salient issues. The tendency toward greater personalization of voter choice, while certainly assisted by the rise of the electronic media, is largely a product of presidentialism. In the recent decades, this tendency, often referred to as presidentialization, has been registered not only in

presidential systems but also in many parliamentary systems. Grigorii V. Golosov See also Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character; Democracy; Parliamentarism; Party Identification; Party Systems

Further Readings Elgie, R. (2011). Semi-presidentialism: Sub-types and democratic performance. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Poguntke, T., & Webb, P. (Eds.). (2005). The presidentialization of politics: A comparative study of modern democracies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Shugart, M. S., & Carey, J. M. (1992). Presidents and assemblies: Constitutional design and electoral dynamics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Pressure Groups There are many synonyms for pressure groups, such as interest groups, nongovernmental organizations, campaigning groups, and advocacy groups, with the last three seen by the groups themselves as conveying a more favorable image. Pressure groups are organized entities that seek to influence public policy but do not normally seek public office or compete in elections. They are a key feature of a democratic society, based on the principle of freedom of association and of the need for government to take account of the diverse range of opinions that a more factional or fragmented society produces. However, they can also reinforce biases in the political system and make it more difficult to govern effectively and fairly. This entry considers how they exert influence, their relationship to democracy, and whether they reinforce biases in the political process.

The Growth of Pressure Groups Since around 1970, the number of interest groups has proliferated, particularly “cause” groups campaigning on a particular issue. There are a number of reasons for this trend. Foremost among them are higher levels of education. Education to first-degree level or beyond is one of the best predictors of group membership and activism, even more so than level of income. This, of course, means that campaigning groups tend to reflect the values and priorities of the better educated sections of the population. Disillusionment with traditional forms of political activity has also reinforced this trend.

Pressure Groups

In the United States, political parties are relatively weak and this has given pressure groups more space in which to operate.

How Groups Exert Influence The literature has made a distinction between insider groups and outsider groups. The former category seek to exert influence by entering into a dialogue with government, reinforcing their arguments with evidence and research. The latter category resort to a range of protest activities from demonstrations to various forms of direct action. Direct action can range from stunts of various kinds to forms of sabotage that can be prosecuted as criminal damage or attacks on individuals. The milder forms of direct action are primarily intended to publicize the cause and garner further support, while the more extreme forms are intended to prevent the activity objected to, such as using animals in experiments, from continuing to take place. Some analysts regard the insider-outsider distinction as dated as some groups operate on both sides of the divide, but most groups still operate as insider groups as this gives them access to decision makers. Where pressure groups focus their activity depends on whether power is concentrated in a particular polity. Thus, in the United States, much attention is focused on the legislature, whereas in European countries the focus is on the executive branch of government. Some countries, such as the United States, give more opportunities than others for interventions through the judicial system, although these are increasing elsewhere. Many pressure groups can no longer confine their activities to the national or subnational level. Groups in the member states of the European Union generally need to exert influence on the European institutions, either through European-level federations or on their own behalf. International organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations and its agencies become targets of group activity.

The Impact of Social Media Campaigning groups have made substantial use of the traditional media for some time. They have been particularly adept at using visual images that make a strong impact. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube offer new opportunities for campaigning groups. In part, they simply offer a more efficient means of keeping in touch with existing supporters and reinforcing their support for the group’s campaigns. Social media can also reduce the transaction costs of setting up and maintaining a group. All that is needed is a laptop

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or similar device, a website, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. Potentially, this is a great democratizing force and offers a new way of engaging citizens with the political process. However, it can also be exploited by established groups engaged in so-called Astroturf lobbying, where groups are set up as apparent grassroots or citizen organizations but are in fact backed by sectional or private interests.

Pressure Groups and the Quality of Democratic Governance Historically, pressure groups were often set up in such a way as to limit membership participation and allow control by an elite group. Opportunities for participation by members in policy formation may be limited, but they may be content simply to give financial support to a group whose objectives they agree with. Where members do have the opportunity to vote for the executive or on policy resolutions, turnout is often poor. There is a concern that groups are becoming less capable as democratic actors in their own right with a greater role taken by professional staff. Internet-based activity may simply encourage “slackitvism,” where a mouse click is substituted for democratic debate and engagement. One of the established arguments of the interest group literature is that business interests represent a privileged category of interest, able to exert both structural power and lobbying power. Structural power arises from the view that particular interests are vital to the success of the economy so that governments took substantial and expensive measures to protect the financial services sector following the global financial crisis. Business does not, however, always get what it wants. Although trade unions have declined as a countervailing force, environmental groups have become increasingly important. Reputational damage can influence the ability of business as a whole or a particular sector to get its case heard. The growth of single-issue interest groups reflects a greater fragmentation of society where interests cannot be as readily aggregated by political parties as they were in the past. However, pressure groups are going to continue to be part of the political landscape. What has been lacking is a debate about how they fit into our understanding of democratic politics and what we might to do to ensure that they adhere to the standards of transparency and accountability they demand of politicians. Wyn Grant See also Lobbying; Social Movements

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Print Media

Further Readings Baumgartner, F. R., & Leech, B. L. (1998). Basic interests: The importance of interest groups in politics and political science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beyers, J., Eising, R., & Maloney, W. (2008). Research interest group politics in Europe and elsewhere: Much we study, little we know? West European Politics, 31, 1103–1128. doi:10.1080/01402380802370443 Grant, W. (2001). Pressure groups and British politics. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave.

Print Media Mass media are defined as any means of communication that reach a large number of people. Media scholars distinguish between two basic kinds of mass media: print media and broadcast media. Print media includes books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers while broadcast media includes television, radio, and the Internet. For most of American history, print media served as the public’s primary source of political information. Although news audiences have largely abandoned print media in favor of broadcast media over the last 4 decades, newspapers are widely read by political elites, drive the agendas of broadcast outlets, and provide the most substantive discussions of public affairs. This entry briefly reviews the history of the American print media, the democratic responsibilities of the press, and the ever-evolving business models that have financed the production of print media in the United States.

History of American Print Media In colonial America, printers were small and their newspapers were designed to advertise their print shops. Political news about the colonies was rarely reported and most published content was plagiarized from London newspapers. As conflict with England escalated during the 1760s, however, politics began entering the press. By the time of the ratification debates, newspapers were widely acknowledged mouthpieces of p ­ olitical parties and factions. Most notably, the pro-ratification Federalists used their control over newspapers to marginalize anti-Federalist critiques of the Constitution. Seeing their value as tools of communication, political parties began heavily subsidizing the costs of newspapers during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Yet the economics of printing during this era meant that newspapers were published infrequently and objective reporting about politics was nonexistent.

Daily newspapers did not become commonplace in the United States until cheap paper, rapid printing technology, and the telegraph emerged in the mid-1800s. As newspapers began to compete for a larger share of an increasingly literate audience, the penny press era gave way to a period of yellow journalism—in which sensationalized reporting about violence, scandal, war, and corruption dominated newspaper coverage. Using the profits from this yellow journalism, newspaper magnates like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst began consolidating individual newspapers into vast media empires during the early part of the 20th century. By 2010, nearly 80% of the nation’s daily newspaper circulation was controlled by a handful of massive media conglomerates. This consolidation, coupled with the emergence of journalism as a profession with a ­distinct set of norms and routines during the 1920s, exerted a homogenizing effect on newspaper reporting around the country. Once the primary source of news for Americans, newspapers have seen their audience shares decline over the last 100 years in the face of competition from radio, television, and the Internet. Since 2000, high fixed costs and sharply declining revenues have led newspapers to invest less in political reporting. In fact, there are only a handful of newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, that still provide original reporting on domestic and international affairs. The vast majority of newspapers rely on the Associated Press wire service for their national and world news content.

Democratic Responsibilities of the Press As Doris Graber argues, the press is expected to do four things in a democratic society: (1) provide a forum for discussing diverse policy ideas, (2) give voice to public opinion on important political issues, (3) serve as citizens’ eyes and ears to evaluate the performance of politicians, and (4) act as a public “watchdog” that barks when it finds misbehavior in the halls of government. Fulfilling these responsibilities is difficult in media systems, such as in the United States, where news outlets are privately owned. The need to generate profits ­compels media companies to value audience size over content quality. The first priority of a media outlet must be reporting that sells rather than reporting that meets the high informational demands of democracy.

Business Models of Print Media Providing political coverage has been a money-losing proposition throughout American history. The high

Prisoner’s Dilemma

costs of producing and distributing news, coupled with the public’s relatively low level of interest in public affairs reporting, have forced print media outlets to find creative ways of subsidizing political reporting. While political parties bore the costs of producing newspapers early in American history, most contemporary print outlets operate according to a much different business model. Specifically, modern print newspapers bundle together a diverse array of content—weather forecasts, cartoons, sports scores, movie times, human interest stories, government news, international reports, and stock prices—into a single product that is used to attract revenue from both consumers and advertisers. Consumers pay to read this eclectic bundle of content and advertisers pay to have access to the consumer’s attention as they flip through the paper’s pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the bundle as attractive as possible to the broadest possible set of readers and advertisers. The costs of political reporting are subsidized by the profits produced by audience interest in other kinds of reporting. This business model served newspapers very well from the late 19th through the 20th century. A number of factors, however, have recently conspired to threaten the viability of newspapers in the United States. First, many Americans no longer turn to newspapers to learn about the news. In 2013, less than 30% of Americans cited newspapers as an important source of news (compared with 50% citing the Internet and 69% citing television). As a result, the daily circulation of newspapers in the United States has declined to levels not seen since the 1940s. Second, one of the primary revenue streams for newspapers—classified advertisements— has been all but eliminated by niche advertising sites on the Internet. Craigslist alone, for example, was estimated to have cost local newspapers over $5 billion in classified ad revenue between 2000 and 2007. Finally, the price of advertising through print media has declined substantially in the face of competition from online advertisers, such as Google, that can provide more targeted appeals to consumers. Over the last decade, newspaper ad revenues have fallen by more than 65%. In order to deal with revenue shortfalls, many newspapers have cut the number of journalists on staff and outsourced their reporting to wire services. Pressures to reduce staff have been particularly pronounced at regional newspapers, which provide the bulk of reporting on state and local government. Collectively, therefore, these developments have seriously challenged newspapers’ ability to provide a forum for discussing diverse policy ideas, to give voice to public opinion, to evaluate the performance of politicians, and to act as a public watchdog. In short, the changing information

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ecosphere has made it exceedingly difficult for newspapers to fulfill their democratic responsibilities. Kevin Wallsten See also Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills; Democracy; Mass Communication; Political Discourse

Further Readings Bennett, W. L., & Entman, R. M. (Eds.). (2000). Mediated politics: Communication in the future of democracy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Graber, D. A., & Dunaway, J. (2014). Mass media and American politics (9th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Schudson, M. (2002). The news media as political institutions. Annual Review of Political Science, 5(1), 249–269. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.5.111201.115816

Prisoner’s Dilemma The prisoner’s dilemma is a well-known paradigm in game theory with manifold applications in disciplines including economics, political philosophy, and evolutionary biology. It represents a social dilemma, in its classic form, between two players.

The First Prisoner’s Dilemma The prisoner’s dilemma was invented by the researchers Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood in 1950. In their original study, the game was not yet called prisoner’s dilemma, but “a non-cooperative pair.” The original prisoner’s dilemma was formulated as a normal form game with the following payoffs: The payoff matrix was common knowledge and the payoffs were in pennies. The two players AA and JW made decisions simultaneously, played the game repeatedly (finitely) for 100 periods, and kept information on previous decisions. Table 1 The Payoff Matrix of the Original Prisoner’s Dilemma by Flood and Dresher Player 2: JW

Player 1: AA

Option 1

Option 2

Option 1

–1, 2

1/2, 1

Option 2

0, 1/2

1, –1

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Note that for this original study of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Flood and Dresher were aware of the works of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern as well as that of John Nash and designed the game to test their predictions. The subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in the original prisoner’s dilemma is that AA always plays option 2 while JW always plays option 1 (lower lefthand corner in Table 1). This equilibrium can be found by elimination of dominated strategies. That is, for any set of initial strategies of AA and JW, they will make themselves better off by adjusting their strategies to 2 for AA and 1 for JW. This game constitutes a social dilemma, because the earnings in the Nash equilibrium are 0 pennies for AA and 1/2 pennies for JW in every period. The earnings for both players could be greater if they were able to achieve AA playing option 1 and JW playing option 2 (upper right-hand corner in Table 1). Then AA could earn 1/2 penny in every period and JW could earn 1 penny in every period. This outcome can be described as the social optimum in that it creates the greatest total payoff. Table 2 reproduces Flood and Dresher’s results, that is, the frequencies of strategies that were played by AA and JW respectively. The strategy pair (1, 2) was played in 60 out of 100 periods. Interestingly, the two players began playing the Nash equilibrium strategies more often in the first periods than in the later periods. Flood and Dresher write that the two players played as if they were considering side payments, maximizing the total amount of earnings, even though there were no side payments in the game. The original Prisoner’s Dilemma work concludes with a letter from John Nash to Flood and Dresher that criticizes the experiment as being one large multimove game. Flood and Dresher were happy to receive Nash’s letter, although they did not intend to change their understanding of their findings.

The Name Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Story Behind It The name prisoner’s dilemma for the game invented by Flood and Dresher was coined by Albert William

The General Form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma A well-known vocabulary has emerged around the general form of the prisoner’s dilemma. Much like the matrices in Tables 1 and 3, the general form of the prisoner’s dilemma is depicted in Table 4. The variable R symbolizes the reward that each player gets from cooperation, S is the so-called sucker’s payoff of a player who cooperates while the other player defects, T is the temptation payoff for defecting while the other player is cooperating, and P is the punishment payoff due to mutual defection. The relationship that establishes the social dilemma is S < P < R < T. The Nash equilibrium is DD while CC would yield the greatest overall payoff. A second requisite is that 2R > S + T, such that collusion is not profitable.

Applications of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Table 2  Flood and Dresher’s Results Player 2: JW

Player 1: AA

Tucker. The archetypical story leading to this name is that the two players are prisoners who are suspected of committing a crime together. The two strategies are to remain silent or to confess. The prisoners are questioned separately and simultaneously. If both keep silent, each prisoner faces a relatively short prison term, say 4 years. Yet, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a shorter prison term, say 1 year, if the prisoner confesses the crime and the other does not. Based on the confession, the other prisoner will be sentenced to a longer prison term, say 12 years. Hence, individually each prisoner is given the incentive to confess the crime and thereby shorten their own prison term while extending the prison term of the other prisoner. If the two prisoners were able to come to a binding agreement and decide cooperatively, they would be able to achieve the shortest total prison term of 4 + 4 = 8 years by agreeing to keep silent mutually. They are however questioned separately and simultaneously. For this reason, the dominant strategy is to confess—hence their dilemma. Table 3 presents an example for the game of two prisoners. Ever since its invention, the prisoner’s dilemma and story behind the name are well known to students of many disciplines around the world.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 1

8/100 periods

60/100 periods

Option 2

14/100 periods

18/100 periods

Social dilemmas are ubiquitous. The prisoner’s dilemma has been employed to describe countless phenomena and circumstances. An example from political philosophy is the state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in Leviathan, published in 1651. Unlike the more optimistic outlook provided by John Locke (1632–1704), Hobbes’s description of the state of nature is that of a bitter fight for survival. The two possible strategies are either (1) being on guard and attacking or robbing another individual or (2) dedicating

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Table 3 The Payoff Matrix of a Prisoner’s Dilemma, Framed as a Story of Prisoners Prisoner 2 Keep silent

Confess

Keep silent

4 years, 4 years

12 years, 1 year

Confess

1 year, 12 years

8 years, 8 years

Prisoner 1

Table 4  The General Form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Player 2

Player 1

Cooperate

Defect

Cooperate

R, R

S, T

Defect

T, S

P, P

resources to the peaceful production of goods. Individuals could be happier and more productive if life was peaceful, but each individual has an incentive to rob another peaceful, off-guard individual and make an easy profit. To overcome the Nash equilibrium of the ongoing fight for survival, Hobbes writes that individuals are willing to give up their personal right to the authority of an absolute sovereign Leviathan. This ruler is able to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma inherent in the state of nature and to provide the grounds for a more sophisticated and productive society. In intellectual property jurisdiction scholars have argued that the establishment and protection of patents contributes to overcoming the prisoner’s dilemma of innovation versus imitation. Each firm could invest resources into innovation to bring new products to the market, for instance a new type of medication. Without patents, each firm however individually hopes to imitate the innovation of the other firm without investing any resources into the innovation process. If both firms rather imitate than innovate, the outcome is socially inferior and no new products get invented. A modern political example of a prisoner’s dilemma is the cold war, the nuclear arms race of the United States of America and the Soviet Union after 1945. Both superpowers of the 20th century invested great amounts of their resources into building and maintaining enormous armies and arsenals of nuclear weapons that could have destroyed the other superpower manifold times. The resources devoted to these standing armies came at great costs to other areas of public expenditure

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that could have increased welfare of both superpowers’ populations. Neither superpower, however, gave in to disarmament for fear of the other superpower’s taking advantage of it. Unlike the case of the Leviathan in Hobbes’s political philosophy, there was and still is no global entity to enforce mutual disarmament of superpowers. The prisoner’s dilemma has also been employed to characterize processes in evolutionary biology. Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton invited different strategies to be submitted for a computer tournament simulation in which strategies were matched randomly for 200 moves. In the first round, 14 strategies were submitted and a random strategy was added to the simulation. Anatol Rapoport’s strategy of tit for tat proved especially robust against defection, and yet able to achieve gains from cooperation. It achieved the ­highest average score and was declared the winner. The tit-for-tat strategy is rather simple: It lets the player play the strategy of its counterpart in the previous period. The first period play is “cooperate.” Hence, if the strategy meets other cooperative counterparts, gains from mutual cooperation will be achieved. Likewise, tit for tat only runs into the sucker payoff S once if the population of other strategies is purely defective. A second round of the tournament with 62 submitted strategies confirmed the power of tit for tat in terms of robustness against defection, stability and initial viability. The key insight is that reciprocity is a powerful strategy in the evolutionary process, even against pure defectors. Further research followed Axelrod and Hamilton’s seminal contribution. For instance, Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund present a strategy of ­“win-stay, lose-shift” that outperforms tit for tat when trembling hand errors occur with some positive probability and which is able to exploit unconditional cooperators. The tragedy of the commons, which describes problems such as overpopulation and overuse of natural resources, is a further application of the prisoner’s dilemma. Garrett Hardin argues that it is necessary to turn commons into private goods or regulate behavior such as procreation in order to circumvent the tragedy that those who act cooperatively suffer from defective behavior.

Game Extensions and Experimental Findings The prisoner’s dilemma can be regarded as the nucleus of countless extensions and experimental findings. Next to the prisoner’s dilemma itself, the trust game, the l­inear public goods game, and the common-pool resource game are three of the most well-known and researched paradigms in experimental political science and economics.

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The Classic, Simultaneous Prisoner’s Dilemma As described above, even the inventors of the ­ risoner’s dilemma, Flood and Dresher, reported experip mental results from two individuals playing the game for 100 periods. They find that in 60 out of 100 periods the two players achieved the social optimum and ­overcame the dilemma. Ample evidence followed showing that mutual defection is not the predominant strategy in most prisoner’s dilemma experiments. Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange conducted the first prisoner’s dilemma experiment with actual prisoners and compared it to students. Unlike the original story, their results show that prisoners, too, are able to solve their dilemma. Comparing prisoners to students, they report a greater cooperation rate of prisoners than of students.

The Sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Trust Game In a world beyond pure defection, which is underlined by the early findings in prisoner’s dilemma experiments, each player has to take at least two considerations into account. First, she has to reflect, feel, and realize whether she is intrinsically motivated to cooperate and achieve the social optimum, for instance to satisfy her preferences for efficiency or altruism. Second, she needs to estimate the probability that her counterpart is equally willing to cooperate (in equilibrium, after iterated considerations). In order to cooperate in the simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma, a player needs to be both intrinsically motivated to cooperate and hold the belief of a sufficient probability of cooperation by the counterpart. In order to separate these two considerations, the sequential version of the prisoner’s dilemma provides insights. Here, a random player 1 decides to cooperate or defect in the first stage. In the second stage, player 2 learns player 1’s decision and thereafter decides to cooperate or defect. In this sequential version, player 1 should only consider the likelihood of player 2 to ­cooperate and act on this belief. The intrinsic motivation of player 1 does not play any role, since it is profitable (and efficient) to cooperate as long as player 2 cooperates as well. Conversely, player 2 is informed about player 1’s decision and does not have to form any belief of the probability of cooperation. Here only the intrinsic motivation to cooperate should determine player 2’s decision. It has been shown that player 2’s decisions are largely driven by preferences for efficiency and reciprocity and that stake size and repetition decrease reciprocal decisions. The trust game extends the prisoner’s dilemma in that it is sequential and decisions are made on a continuous scale rather than on a binary one. In the first stage, player 1 decides how many tokens (typically

between 0 and a given amount) to transfer to player 2. The transfer from player 1 to player 2 is tripled and then given to player 2. In the second stage, player 2 decides how many tokens to transfer back to player 1, between 0 and the received, tripled amount. The transfer back to player 1 is not multiplied. This game is equally a social dilemma in that the total welfare can only be increased by tripling the tokens sent from player 1 to player 2. Yet, player 1 needs to trust player 2 not to keep all of the gain to himself. Similar to findings in the sequential prisoner’s dilemma and against narrowly selfish Homo economicus assumptions, trust game results typically show strong preferences for reciprocity such that player 2’s transfer increases with the initial transfer received from player 1.

n-Person Prisoner’s Dilemmas In addition to sequential play and extending the decisions from a binary to a continuous action space, an enormous literature is concerned with n-person prisoner’s dilemmas. The linear public goods game is the archetype of this extension. Its classic payoff function is πi = wi − ai + G/n (∑ aj). In this function, πi is the payoff of individual i, with i = 1, 2, . . . , n. The parameter wi is the initial endowment to spend from, ai is the contribution of i to the public good, and G/n is the marginal per capita return. To create a social dilemma, it is necessary that G >1 > G/n > 0. It is then the Nash equilibrium that all individuals contribute a = 0, while it would be socially optimal for all individuals to contribute all their endowments to the public good. Hence, the two outcomes, the Nash equilibrium and the socially optimal outcome, are extremes of the linear function. To underline this feature, the game is often called linear public goods game. Decisions in the game are often examined in repeated interaction over time. The typical result in the linear public goods game is that mean contributions are well above zero and around half of the endowment in early rounds of the repeated game and approaching, but not reaching, the Nash equilibrium. Countless variations and generalizations of the linear public goods game exist, for instance regarding the group size, the benefit from contributing, risk and uncertainty over outcomes, heterogeneity of individuals, and contributing versus appropriating from the public good. Another fruitful avenue is the extension of the linear public goods game by preplay or postplay stages like communication, punishment, and rewards. Another game related to the prisoner’s dilemma is the common-pool resource game. While the linear ­public goods game is concerned with public goods (nonrivalry and non-excludability in consumption), the common-pool resource game represents the extraction from the commons (rivalry, but non-excludability in

Procedural Justice

consumption), for instance fisheries and forests. The payoff function of an individual i is typically ui(x) = w(e − xi) + (xi/∑xi)∙[A∑xi − B(∑xi)2]. The individuals have to decide how many tokens to invest into extraction from the common-pool resource and how many tokens to invest into an alternative option. The latter part of the payoff function in the common-pool resource game is a quadratic function that first increases with the investment into extraction x, but decreases after a threshold that depends on parameters A and B. Overextraction is the typical Nash equilibrium while the social optimum is moderate extraction. Unlike the linear public goods game, the common-pool resource game is typically calibrated such that both the Nash equilibrium and the social optimum are interior solutions. Overextraction is often observed in the standard game, but mechanisms like communication, punishment, rewards, and the establishment of output-sharing groups have been found to achieve socially superior outcomes.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma as a Measurement Tool The prisoner’s dilemma and its extensions cannot only be used in experiments to study behavior and policy interventions in the laboratory, but also as a measurement tool for trust and reciprocity in field settings. Joseph Henrich and his collaborators document how these games can help to understand incentive compatible decision making of individuals. For instance, the measurement of social capital can be done by using these games. The organization of different societies can be studied by examining the effectiveness of different mechanisms that promote cooperation and trust. Menusch Khadjavi See also Collective Action; Moral Dilemmas; Public Goods; Social Capital; Tragedy of the Commons

Further Readings Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science, 211, 1390–1396. Berg, J., Dickhaut, J., & McCabe, K. (1995). Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games and Economic Behavior, 10, 122–142. Chaudhuri, A. (2011). Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: A selective survey of the literature. Experimental Economics, 14, 47–83. Flood, M. M. (1952). Some experimental games. Rand Research Memorandum, RM-789-1. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Greig, D., & Travisano, M. (2004). The prisoner’s dilemma and polymorphism in yeast SUC genes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 271, S25–26.

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Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248. Hardin, G. (1971). Collective action as an agreeable n-prisoners’ dilemma. Behavioral Science, 16, 472–481. Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (2004). Foundations of human sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen smallscale societies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Khadjavi, M., & Lange, A. (2013). Prisoners and their dilemma. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 92, 163–175. Kreps, D. M., Milgrom, P., Roberts, J., & Wilson, R. (1982). Rational cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma. Journal of Economic Theory, 27, 245–252. Ledyard, J. (1995). Public goods: A survey of experimental research. In J. Kagel & A. E. Roth (Eds.), Handbook of experimental economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ostrom, E., Walker, J., & Gardner, R. (1992). Covenants with and without a sword: Self-governance is possible. American Political Science Review, 86, 404–417. Poundstone, W. (1992). Prisoner’s dilemma. New York, NY: Doubleday. Rapoport, A., & Chammah, A. M. (1965). Prisoner’s dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Roth, A. E. (1993). The early history of experimental economics. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 15, 184–209. von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Procedural Justice Procedural justice focuses on the perceived fairness of procedures and processes used in dispute resolution, decision making, and resource allocation. Procedural justice may be contrasted with distributive justice, which focuses on the perceived fairness of the outcomes distributed or allocated, and interactional justice, which focuses on the perceived fairness of the interpersonal treatment they receive from another person. Interactional justice has two components: informational justice (explanations provided about how procedures were implemented or why outcomes were distributed in a certain way) and interpersonal justice (people are treated with respect and dignity).

Theories of Procedural Justice In 1975, John Thibaut and Laurens Walker published their groundbreaking book, Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis. As such, they are responsible for the emergence of the social psychology of procedural

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justice. Over the past 4 decades, their work has stimulated an ever-increasing volume of research on the study of procedural justice across a variety of fields and disciplines (e.g., psychology, law, political science, management). In addition, new theories of procedural justice emerged, which built on the conceptual foundation laid by Thibaut and Walker, but also expanded the ­conceptual focus of theories of procedural justice. The first studies of the social psychology of ­procedural justice focused on the perceived fairness of two different procedures used in dispute resolution—inquisitorial and adversarial. In comparing inquisitorial and adversarial procedures, an important distinction is made between decision control, which is control over the judgment in an adjudication, and process control, which is control over the presentation of evidence and arguments in an adjudication. The research has found that adversarial procedures, which have more process control, are perceived as more fair than inquisitorial procedures, which have less process control. In other words, people’s perceptions of the fairness of the p ­ rocedure was shaped by the distribution of process c­ ontrol—more process control enhances the perceived fairness of the procedure. This finding has also been referred to as the “voice” effect or the “fair process” effect. Theorizing on the social psychology of procedural justice expanded its focus of analysis to include the procedural rules that people use to assess the fairness of procedures. The first list of procedural rules included consistency (across people and time), bias suppression (procedures are neutral, not impacted by biases), accuracy of information (evaluations are correct, utilizing all available information), correctability (opportunity for appeal of decision), representativeness (input from people affected by the decision), and ethicality (conforms to personal standards of ethics and morality). Additional procedural rules have been identified to include giving advance notice, timely feedback, reasonableness, or using common sense in enforcing policy or implementing procedures. Up until the mid-1980s, the focus on process control and procedural rules can be viewed through the lens of the self-interest model. That is, people prefer certain procedures or procedural characteristics as they try to maximize personal gain. Focusing on procedural fairness concerns in the self-interest model was a means to balance a person’s short-term gain focus with the goal of long-term relationship maintenance, which was necessary to long-term gain. While the self-interest model has predictive validity, it is incomplete, as it ignores the importance of noncontrol issues that can influence the sense of procedural justice (e.g., people value group membership, people want information about their status in the group). Relational models of procedural justice have emerged to address these issues.

The first relational model of procedural justice was the group values model, which was later refined as a relational model of authority. In this model, the neutrality of the decision-making procedure, trust in the third party decision maker, and the information the experience with authority figures or decision makers communicates about social standing (quality of interpersonal treatment)—influence both procedural preferences and judgments of procedural justice. A second relational model is the group engagement model. Based on social identity theory and relational models of procedural justice, this model suggests that a group’s procedural justice process influences members’ identification with the group, which in turn shapes people’s willingness to cooperate in groups, organizations, and societies.

Why Procedural Justice Is Important Procedural justice is important because it has been found to be a key antecedent to perceptions of legitimacy of authority and trust in the leadership of groups, organizations, and societies. These perceptions of legitimacy and trust are central to facilitating people’s cooperation, including working harder on behalf of the group, organization, and society. The impact of procedural justice has been found in a variety of contexts (e.g., legal, political, workplace) and across cultures. Procedural justice has been found to have an effect on people’s reactions to legal institutions (e.g., courts) and authorities (e.g., judges, police officers). For example, procedural fairness had a positive impact on the attitudes of defendants in court cases about their ­outcome, the judge, and the court. Further, procedural fairness can make negative outcomes court cases more acceptable to defendants. People’s encounters with police officers are also shaped by perceptions of procedural fairness. Procedural justice effects have been found in the political arena in terms of people’s reactions to government policies and authorities. Take the case of government policy on benefits and taxes. Independent of outcome favorability, people’s judgments about such ­ policies are influenced by perceptions of procedural fairness. One key driver of perceived procedural fairness is providing people opportunities for voice in the formulation of policy. Similarly, people’s evaluations of political incumbents and trust in government is also shaped by perceptions of procedural fairness. Procedural justice affects a wide range of attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. Procedural fairness effects have been found in a variety of organizational contexts, including organizational change, the delivery of bad news, personnel selection, performance evaluation, and pay and compensation systems. Procedural

Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness

justice has a positive impact on outcome satisfaction, organizational commitment, legitimacy of organizational authorities, trust in leadership, work performance, and organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, procedural justice can mitigate employee withdrawal and negative reactions to organizational decisions. Robert J. Bies See also Justice Motive; Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness; Retributive Justice; Rule of Law

Further Readings Leventhal, G. S. (1980). What should be done with equity theory? New approaches to the study of fairness in social relationships. In K. Gergen, M. Greenberg, & R. Willis (Eds.), Social exchange: New advances in theory and research (pp. 27–55). New York, NY: Plenum. Lind, E. A., & Tyler, T. R. (1988). The social psychology of procedural justice. New York, NY: Plenum. Thibaut, J., & Walker, L. (1975). Procedural justice: A psychological analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Tyler, T. R., & Bies, R. J. (1990). Beyond formal procedures: The interpersonal context of procedural justice. In J. S. Carroll (Ed.), Applied social psychology and organizational settings (pp. 77–98). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Tyler, T. R., & Blader, S. L. (2000). Cooperation in groups: Procedural justice, social identity, behavioral engagement. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Tyler, T. R., & Lind, E. A. (1992). A relational model of authority in groups. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 115–191). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Procedural fairness and substantive fairness are d ­ istinct but overlapping dimensions along which the fairness of activities and outcomes may be measured. They are at times also discussed as procedural and substantive ­justice and, in the American constitutional tradition, as procedural and substantive due process. This entry provides an overview of these concepts, and it discusses significant tensions that arise within and between the two.

Procedural Fairness Procedural fairness refers to the impartiality and adequacy of procedures used to render a judgment or an

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outcome. An institution exhibits procedural fairness when, for example, it treats all individuals under its authority as equals by subjecting them to identical procedures, but also when it affords each person procedures adequate to address his or her interests. Already, within this description, a critical distinction emerges between fairness as impartiality and fairness as adequacy. Whether one focuses on one standard or the other can profoundly influence one’s assessment of the fairness of procedures. American constitutional law illustrates this tension well. For example, equal protection doctrine requires strict scrutiny of public affirmative action programs using racial preferences, establishing color blindness, or formally equal treatment, as the constitutional standard against which such programs must be justified. ­Similarly, in voting rights cases, equal protection upholds the principle of “one person, one vote” and repudiates unjustified abridgments of the equal exercise of the franchise. By contrast, constitutional due process doctrine requires assessments of the adequacy of governmental procedures. For example, in the seminal case of Goldberg v. Kelly, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the termination of welfare benefits without the opportunity for a pretermination hearing denied recipients due process of law. The Court reasoned that procedural due process is contextual and must take into account each individual’s interest and capacity for effective participation in the government’s process. In subsequent cases, the Court ruled that, before a court may deprive an individual of property, it must provide procedures sufficient to address the factual complexity of the dispute. Thus, according to procedural due process, the issue is not whether the government and the welfare recipient or, in a private civil litigation, the plaintiff and defendant, are treated as equals in a neutral process but whether the treatment provided to each party adequately accounts for the seriousness and complexity of the issues raised and grants each party effective means to be heard. Standards of impartiality and adequacy differ in that impartiality concerns the formal equality of procedures to which each person is subjected and adequacy concerns the content of procedures because it requires that one assess whether procedures are sufficient to fulfill their appointed purposes. Procedural adequacy does not require either formal equality or process perfection. For example, the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of a right to counsel in criminal cases ensures that each defendant may have the assistance of counsel, but it does not require that all criminal defendants be provided counsel of equal quality or that a defendant’s conviction must be voided upon a finding that counsel committed any error. Rather, a defendant is entitled only to the level of counsel that he or she can afford or that the state provides, and only the most egregious errors will satisfy the

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standard required to demonstrate a constitutional violation due to ineffective assistance of counsel. Finally, procedural adequacy implies a principle of proportionality, and thus even when the constitutional right to due process is concerned, additional procedures will be required only if their cost can be justified based on their expected contribution to the achievement of just results.

Substantive Fairness Substantive fairness generally refers to the justness or accuracy of outcomes, measured in terms of desert. Substantive fairness is violated when the innocent are convicted and the guilty go free, and when the person responsible for some wrong is not held accountable to compensate the victim. It may also be violated when a judgment follows the letter of the law but one’s moral intuitions contradict the law’s conception of desert. For example, in the public debate regarding sentencing guidelines applied to convictions for the distribution of powder and crack cocaine, opponents of substantially higher sentences for the distribution of crack cocaine typically argue that differences in the form of the drug do not justify such different sentences. Additionally, in the American constitutional context, the doctrine of substantive due process is violated when the government fails to justify the denial of a fundamental right or interest. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the guarantee of substantive due process is violated when the government denies an individual the right to privacy or to sexual and reproductive freedom.

Tensions Between Procedural and Substantive Fairness Definite tensions exist between procedural fairness and substantive fairness. First, procedural fairness turns on neither the accuracy nor the substance of outcomes. Whereas substantive fairness generally equates justice with desert, procedural fairness defines justice as the outcome of a fair process. Procedural fairness therefore does not allow dissatisfaction with the substance of an outcome to impeach the fairness of the process. Second, assessments of the substantive fairness of particular outcomes are susceptible to influence by the degree of confidence that one has in the fairness of the procedures that yielded those outcomes. Although some disagreement exists among social psychologists regarding the capacity of moral intuitions about desert to override one’s sense of procedural fairness, leading research in the field has found that a person’s reactions to decisions by institutions correspond with their assessments of the justice of decision-making procedures. This finding contradicts a common intuition that people

judge the integrity of decision-making procedures based on whether those procedures yield expected results. Third, although procedural fairness and substantive fairness are distinct concepts, beliefs about procedural fairness are informed by assumptions about what procedures are most likely to yield accurate judgments. For example, returning to the example of constitutional due process doctrine, a sociohistorical commitment to adversariality has shaped the U.S. Supreme Court’s judgments regarding the adequacy of administrative and judicial procedures. The Court has reasoned that, because disputants themselves are in the best position to gather the evidence relevant to their disputes and have the greatest incentive to pursue their interests zealously, due process requires that they be given adequate procedural tools to advance their positions. The assumption of course is flawed, because one’s interest in a dispute may drive one to engage in gamesmanship, or even deceit, and override one’s commitment to a just outcome. Thus, ironically, the more substantial the tools given to a party to prosecute his case, the greater the risk of system distortion as the party seeks to use those tools not to reach the right result but to further his or her own ends. Stephen M. Rich See also Justice Motive; Procedural Justice; Retributive Justice; Rule of Law

Further Readings Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995). City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989). Connecticut v. Doehr, 501 U.S. 1 (1991). Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U.S. 109 (1986). Doherty, D., & Wolak, J. (2012). When do the ends justify the means? Evaluating procedural fairness. Political Behavior, 34(2), 301–323. Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972). Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U.S. 67 (1972). Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970). Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003). Grey, T. C. (1977). Procedural fairness and substantive rights. In J. R. Pennock & J. W. Chapman (Eds.), Due Process: Nomos XVIII (pp. 182–205). New York: New York University. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965). Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Hooker, B. (2005). Fairness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 8, 329–352. Lind, E. A., & Tyler, T. R. (1988). The social psychology of procedural justice. New York, NY: Springer. Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976). Napier, J., & Tyler, T. R. (2008). Does moral conviction really override concerns about procedural justice? A reexamination of the value protection model. Social Justice Research, 21, 509–528.

Profiling Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964). Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Sunstein, C. R. (2006). Two conceptions of procedural fairness. Social Research, 73(2), 619–646. Tyler, T. R. (1988). What is procedural justice? Criteria used by citizens to assess the fairness of legal procedures. Law & Society, 22(1), 103–135. Tyler, T. R. (2000). Social justice: Outcome and procedure. International Journal of Psychology, 35(2), 117–125.

Profiling Profiling ties in with the larger police practice of wanting to predict criminal behavior in order to prevent a new or a future crime from happening. The frequency with which profiling has been used in criminal investigations, as well as the volume of literature addressing this topic, has grown steadily over the past 30 years, and profiling is now commonplace within police practices worldwide. This upward trend has occurred in the absence of a well-defined profiling framework or compelling scientific evidence that profiling, irrespective of its specific form, is reliable, valid, or useful. This entry introduces the concept of profiling in the light of prediction and discretion. In doing so, the entry pays specific attention to what can be seen as the most problematic form of profiling: racial, or ethnic, profiling. The entry concludes with a discussion of the consequences of profiling on the perceived legitimacy of the criminal justice system.

Criminal Profiling Although profiling can occur throughout the criminal justice system, the practice is most often related to the investigative and enforcement stages and the actions of police and military officials. Profiling as such is an investigative technique developed by the FBI aimed at identifying the major personality, behavioral, and demographic characteristics of offenders based on an analysis of the previous crimes they committed. This form of profiling is referred to as criminal profiling and, depending on whether the focus is on figuring out who has committed the crime or on figuring out the location where a suspect might be hiding, sometimes further specified as psychological or geographical profiling. The process of profiling can be classified as either clinical or statistical. Clinical profilers use training, knowledge, experience or intuition to generate predictions. Statistical profilers, on the other hand, draw from descriptive and inferential statistical models derived from an analysis of characteristics of offenders who

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have previously committed similar types of crime. Criminal profiling is thus used after a crime has been committed. The use of criminal profiling is widespread. Nevertheless the practice has been subject to criticism. First, the concept of criminal profiling is based on three assumptions: Offenders who commit similar crimes share similar personal characteristics; offenders are consistent in the way they commit crimes; and offenders can be distinguished from the way they commit crime. There has been no substantial empirical evidence that these three assumptions hold up in practice. This makes the theoretical basis of criminal profiling not as strong as one would like it to be. Second, although practitioners of criminal profiling claim high accuracy numerically, no research has been done to verify these claims. The evidence supporting the positive claims is mostly anecdotal and lacks systematic research methods. Since it is unknown how criminal profiling influences the criminal investigation, investigations could be influenced by methods that are not validated or perhaps based on false assumptions leading to, for instance, a form of tunnel vision.

Racial Profiling Over the past few years, law enforcement has become more focused on wanting to predict and prevent crimes from happening by means of proactive profiling: profiling even before an actual crime has happened. Since there is no reasonable suspicion of a crime in these situations, this preventive shift has resulted in an increase of discretionary powers for law enforcement officials. In their choices of who to stop and search, to stop and question, or to stop and frisk, ­officials enjoy a great deal of autonomy. Whereas discretion is necessary to ensure an efficient and just ­functioning of the criminal justice system, the element of subjective choice inherent in discretion also opens the door to abuse and misuse. When using (clinical) profiling as a means of predicting potential future behavior, law enforcement officials will have little to no solid information to base their decision on, which will stimulate their tendency to look for the so-called symbolic assailant: a stereotypical image of what they think a criminal looks like. According to the focal concerns and attribution theory, when faced with limited information and little time, law enforcement officials run the risk of basing their choices and decisions on generalizations relating to race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or nationality instead of on the basis of individual behavior or objective evidence. Racial profiling is the alleged law enforcement practice of using skin color as a pretext to stop, question, or

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search minorities. Instead of using the term racial profiling, in the European context, it is more common to speak of ethnic profiling. At the core of the racial profiling issue is the supposition that police disproportionally target minorities during their normal patrol duties without their being an objective reason to do so. This has led to phenomena like “driving while Black,” referring to the disproportional traffic stops of Black drivers, and “flying while Arab,” referring to the disproportional checks at airports of people of Arab descent and Muslims. Besides being discriminatory, racial profiling is also unlikely to be an effective policing strategy, as criminals can simply shift their activities outside the profile.

Profiling and Procedural Justice Following procedural justice theory, the public’s perceptions about the lawfulness and legitimacy of law enforcement form an important criterion for judging policing in a democratic society. Lawfulness refers to police compliance with constitutional, statutory, and professional norms. Legitimacy is related to the public’s belief about the police and its willingness to recognize police authority. Research in various countries consistently shows that minorities are more likely than Whites to view law enforcement with suspicion and distrust. They feel disproportionately singled out by the police because of their race or ethnicity. Procedural justice is widely considered to be a central factor underlying not only the legitimacy of law enforcement, but also the legitimacy of the criminal justice system as a whole. According to procedural justice theory, when police treat citizens fairly and respectfully, people are more inclined to view the police as legitimate, to comply with their instructions, and to be satisfied with police conduct. Perceptions about police and their behavior are thus very powerful influences on police-community relations. Racial and ethnic minority perceptions that the police lack lawfulness and legitimacy, based largely on their interactions with the police, can lead to distrust of the police, which can have serious consequences, such as riots. However, not only does lack of trust undermine the legitimacy of law enforcement, but without such legitimacy, the police also lose their ability and authority to function effectively. Police organizations rely on information from the community to solve and prevent crime. Lack of community support would therefore inhibit law enforcement’s ability to combat crime. Maartje van der Woude and Tim Dekkers See also Procedural Justice; Race and Ethnicity; Rule of Law; Stereotypes

Further Readings Harcourt, B. E. (2007). Against prediction: Profiling, policing, and punishing in an actuarial age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harris, D. A. (2003). Profiles in injustice: Why racial profiling cannot work. New York, NY: New Press. Tyler, T. R. (1990). Why people obey the law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Capitalism

During the Middle Ages, Europe was characterized by a feudal system in which people worked for nobles in exchange for protection and the use of land. Beginning with the crisis of the feudal system in the 14th century and continuing through the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, capitalism gradually replaced feudalism in Europe. Capitalism is a system in which private individuals or corporations own the means of production, including workplaces, machinery, and raw materials, that were once owned by the artisan who made the goods. Within this system, the activities of these individuals involve profit-motivated investment of capital, or money and assets that are invested with the intent of making more money. These private individuals are capitalists and make up a ruling class Karl Marx refers to as the bourgeoisie. Capitalism and the success of the bourgeoisie are especially dependent on profits through low costs of production, often in the form of wage labor. Wage labor is work that is done for the owners of production, the employers, in exchange for a wage or salary. This form of labor is important to capitalism not only through its role in low-cost production but also through its role in consumption. Because wage laborers cannot produce everything they want or need themselves, they become the producers of goods as well as the consumers, an essential part of capitalists’ success. For instance, when producing the Model-T automobile in the early 1900s, Henry Ford attempted to make the product cheap enough and wages high enough so that the Ford factory workers could afford the cars they produced. This strategy, used by Ford and other capitalists, allowed the wage laborers themselves to become a large consumer base and an important source of profit. Marx uses the term proletariat to refer to these wage laborers, or those who sell their labor in exchange for wages. The term was originally coined by the Romans to describe those who were free but did not own any property. The Roman proletariat had little actual power, as they were not needed by the elite, who instead relied

Proletariat and Capitalism

on slave labor. Also called the working class, or class of wage earners, the proletarians of capitalism similarly sell their labor in order to survive. Wage laborers in the capitalist system, or Marx’s proletarians, are similar to the original Roman proletarians in that they are free to seek work wherever they choose or not to work; however, like that of the Roman proletarians, freedom for wage laborers only extends so far. In the capitalist system, for instance, it can be difficult for laborers to survive without paid work and there are often limited choices of work or employers. Moreover, because of mass production and the division of labor, wage labor becomes tightly controlled and monotonous, turning wage laborers into wage slaves who act only as “an appendage of the machine” (Marx, 1848/2012). Members of the proletariat, however, do not often recognize or question their subordinate position within the capitalist system. This is because not only does the ruling minority own all the means of production (e.g., factories, land, machinery), but it also shapes society’s ideology in ways that support group-based inequalities and unequal resource distributions. Through the control of education, religion, and mass media, capitalists shape public opinion; the most prevalent social beliefs become those that best serve the material interests of the ruling class. Because of the ways in which ideology presents relations of domination as relations of freedom and serves to justify the inequalities of the capital system, members of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are unaware of their positions within the class society, a phenomenon referred to as false consciousness. Through false consciousness, members of the bourgeoisie become convinced by the rationalizations of social inequalities and come to believe they are entitled to the power and privileges of their position. Similarly, although it goes against their material interests, the proletarians absorb these notions of justification, accept their subordinate position, and refrain from demanding a fairer system. Despite the influence of false consciousness, clear lines of division inevitably emerge between those who own the means of production and those who have only their labor to sell in the capitalist marketplace. Eventually, according to Marx’s theory, through repeated clashes (which are actually class based, but not necessarily recognized as such at the time), the proletarians begin to identify with other members of their class and recognize true interests and their relationship to other classes. In this way, class consciousness emerges. When the members of the working class realize their labor is being exploited by those who own the means of production, they begin the process of acting as a social class guided by their true class interests. Class conflict begins as contests between individual laborers and individual employers but leads to contests

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carried out by workers of a factory, of a common trade, or of a region, joining together to form an “incoherent mass.” There is constantly growing pressure on the proletariat as capital becomes concentrated in even fewer hands, machinery improvements make livelihood even more precarious, and competition between workers themselves increases and keeps wages low. According to Marx, despite this pressure and competition between individual workers themselves, the actual material interests of the proletarians become more influential ­ and they join together to maintain the rates of wages and create permanent associations. This unionization and organization of the proletariat into a class and a political party eventually leads to major class-based victories and the proletariat revolution. Thus, according to Marx, following the proletariat revolution the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, during which a vanguard governs in the interests of the proletariat. There is a gradual transformation in the psychological characteristics of all people, so that they work for the collective good rather than for personal profits. Collective ownership of capital does not extinguish enterprise and creativity because individuals have learned to work for the interests of all society. The central government and its security apparatus disappear because the class interests they protected no longer exist. Consequently, the proletariat through the destruction of the capitalist class system develops a classless system with a consciousness focused on a collective profit rather than personal profits. A problem with Marx’s ideas about the proletariat revolution and dictatorship is that he assumes an “end of history” and a classless society as the end point. In practice so far, those who become dictators on behalf of the proletariat simply continue the group-based inequalities—as demonstrated by the examples of the Soviet Union and communist China. Sierra Campbell and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Democracy; Dictatorship; Economics and Political Behavior; End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Marxism; Socialism and Communism; Springboard Model of Dictatorship

Further Readings Boucher, G. (2012). Understanding movements in modern thought: Understanding Marxism. Durham, England: Acumen. Fulcher, J. (2004). Capitalism: A very short introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Heller, H. (2011). The birth of capitalism: A 21st century perspective. London, England: Pluto Books. Retrieved from

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Propaganda

http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/stable/ j.ctt183p671 Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2012). The communist manifesto. In J. Isaac (Ed.), The communist manifesto (pp. 73–102). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1848) Moghaddam, F. M. (2008). Multiculturalism and intergroup relations. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Propaganda Propaganda is the intentional manipulation of information by powerful people or organizations (or organizations seeking power) in order to influence the behavior of large groups in the interests of the propagandist. This definition stresses that propaganda achieves its effects through persuasive communication (the use and misuse of information) rather than through the use of economic incentives or physical coercion. Propaganda is thus not directly coercive, though it may be accompanied by coercion. It also emphasizes that we speak of “propaganda” primarily in contexts where particular organizations or people—states, commercial corporations, insurgent groups, churches—are intentionally attempting to affect the behavior of large groups, rather than in contexts where individuals attempt to persuade one another privately, or where decentralized and largely uncontrollable information flows influence people’s beliefs and activities. The con man who persuades his mark to part with his money is not using propaganda; he is merely deceitful, even if he uses the techniques in the propagandist’s arsenal. Similarly, ­ the cultural transmission of many beliefs in society is not by itself propaganda, unless it is steered by powerful organizations in an effort to influence people’s actions toward the organizations’ ends. Propaganda is thus best studied as a political tactic.

A Short History of Propaganda The word propaganda comes from the Latin term for spreading or disseminating something. Early uses of the word referred to the propagation of the Christian faith: the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) was established by Pope Gregory XV in the early 17th century. The term did not originally have a negative connotation, and in any case it was not used often; propaganda as “mass persuasion” was instead discussed under the rubric of rhetoric. But though the neutral meaning of the word still survives (e.g., when we speak of “public health propaganda

campaigns”), several social and political developments beginning in the early 20th century combined to give the term a more negative connotation as deceptive mass persuasion. First, all belligerents in the two world wars made explicit efforts to manipulate the flow of information to their advantage. Propaganda offices existed in Great Britain and the United States during the First World War, for example, which consciously and sometimes deceptively used the emerging mass media (radio and newspapers) in order to mobilize the civilian population and weaken the enemy’s morale. And during the cold war that followed World War II, both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, engaged in propaganda operations against one another. Second, many regimes, but especially the “totalitarian” regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, began to make use of these mass media to tightly control and shape information for their own ideological purposes. The Nazis had their Ministry of Information and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels, and the communist regime in the Soviet Union had its Commissariat of Enlightenment, whose mission involved the use of “agitation and propaganda” to spread the party line, create the “New Soviet Man,” and prevent counterrevolution. Third, new techniques of commercial advertising emerged in the consumer cultures of the advanced capitalist states, especially the United States after the Second World War. These techniques supposedly exploited people’s psychological weaknesses to make them buy products and services they did not genuinely need. These developments are also connected with the emergence of new technologies for spreading information to large groups of people: universal state-directed schooling, large-circulation newspapers, radio, movies, and eventually television. These technologies, intelligently used and deployed, promised unheard-of influence, even control, over the “mass” of the population. Indeed, new techniques of communication using the mass media were thought to give some people the ability of “manufacturing consent,” as Walter Lippmann put it his famous 1922 book, Public Opinion (and Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman repeated in their own 1988 book of that same title). To be sure, rulers have always attempted to influence a population’s beliefs in order to secure their power through means that are in some sense “propagandistic,” such as spectacular public rites, imprinted coinage, monumental architecture, artistic displays, and the like. Many of these communicative techniques for the legitimation and maintenance of power are as old as civilization itself. But the combination of the new mass media, new techniques of persuasion, and the entry of “ordinary” people into politics, revived older concerns about

Propaganda

deceptive rhetoric in political and social life, which we now think of as “propaganda.” Such concerns have always been particularly acute in times when popular participation in politics is possible. In 4th century BCE democratic Athens, for example, the problem of persuasive rhetoric was a live concern for both pro- and antidemocratic thinkers, because the structure of Athenian politics enabled those skilled in rhetoric to influence large groups of people; however, rhetorical skill was not necessarily correlated with a concern for, or knowledge of, the common good. Plato famously argued that the rhetorical skill of intellectuals and teachers of rhetoric was often deployed to make “the stronger argument seem weaker, and the weaker argument stronger,” undermining the possibility of rational deliberation in the assembly for which Athenians prided themselves. And the interest in both rhetorical techniques (what we might today call techniques of ­propaganda) and the ethical limits of mass persuasion is a consistent theme for thinkers writing in republican contexts, from Aristotle, Isocrates, and Demosthenes in Athens to Cicero and Quintilian in Rome to Machiavelli and Guicciardini in 16th-century Florence. Modern propaganda encompasses much more than persuasive rhetoric at large group gatherings, including phenomena as diverse as schooling and “reality” television. But we still tend to speak of propaganda properly speaking where large-group persuasion is at issue, since the modern phenomenon of propaganda emerged in the context of mass politics, as the historian Philip Taylor has noted. And while it is possible to speak of propaganda in societies without popular participation in politics, in such contexts persuasive mass communication recedes in importance. At best, we find the attempt to legitimate power through the skillful deployment of rituals and symbols (which is found in all societies), but not the persistent and calculated manipulation of information intended to produce specific changes in the beliefs or behavior of populations.

Does Propaganda Persuade? The idea that information can be skillfully presented to produce enduring change in people’s beliefs, and hence actions, is implicit in the roots of the term in religious proselytism. There is a range of possibilities here, however. At one extreme, we find the idea that information can be so manipulated, and people can be so gullible, that propaganda simply indoctrinates, easily changing people’s beliefs or attitudes in line with the beliefs and attitudes of the propagandist and without much regard to their expressed interests. Many of the early theories of propaganda accepted a model of mass persuasion that was likened to a hypodermic needle, in which

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one-sided information presented by a propagandist was absorbed passively by the population as if injected into their brains. This view was supported by early studies by behavioral psychologists that seemed to show that many advertising and propaganda techniques could reliably exploit the quirks of human psychology to deceive people to act against their real interests; the “motivational research” of Ernest Dichter from the 1930s provides a good example of this literature. And it had the advantage of seeming to explain why totalitarian regimes would invest so much effort into controlling the public sphere: Control the information environment, and the values and attitudes of the population would automatically follow. But it turns out that substantially and reliably changing people’s beliefs through propaganda is very hard to do, especially when propaganda messages conflict with people’s deep-seated values or the evidence of their everyday lives. Indeed, despite the early claims of the “motivational research” literature, social psychology research on persuasion is full of inconsistent or null results. A striking 2014 study by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan and his collaborators, for example, attempted to figure out whether providing some forms of information to parents could increase vaccination rates to children. Parents were randomly assigned to receive one of four “interventions”: Doctors could provide plain information about the lack of evidence that vaccination causes autism, information about the dangers of disease that could be prevented by vaccination, emotionally charged imagery about sick children, or dramatic anecdotes about the children who nearly died of measles for lack of vaccination. Yet the study showed that no intervention made any difference to parental “intent to vaccinate.” This is not an isolated case. Many other studies suggest that providing people with arguments supporting a certain point of view sometimes makes them change their beliefs, but sometimes it simply entrenches them; and associating a message with an expert sometimes increases its credibility, but sometimes decreases it. Successful persuasion is highly dependent on contextual factors. The same lack of consistency is found in studies about the effectiveness of commercial and political campaign propaganda. Although individual advertisements can have an effect in isolation (through, e.g., framing effects), most advertising appears to be surprisingly ineffective at actually selling products or persuading people to vote for particular candidates, though it may have indirectly desired effects (for the propagandist) like increasing brand awareness or voter turnout among specific groups. Indeed, there is little evidence that even pervasive, constant propaganda is capable of substantially changing people’s beliefs and attitudes when their

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Propaganda

deep-seated values and lived experiences conflict with its message. Studies about “coercive persuasion” by psychologists Edward Schein and Albert Biderman long ago debunked claims about the possibility of brainwashing (a term invented by the journalist Edward Hunter in the 1950s), showing that social pressure and credible threats of coercion can generate high levels of compliance with power holders without substantially changing people’s beliefs. Ethnographic studies in societies subject to pervasive propaganda, such as Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination about the cult of personality of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, do not find that most, or even many, people believe these official propaganda messages even when they are constantly exposed to them. And political scientist Timur Kuran has convincingly shown that under sufficiently coercive conditions, many people will “falsify” their preferences, appearing to act in ways that suggest belief in propaganda messages even when they do not have such beliefs—a common condition in the communist states of the mid-20th century. The point of these examples is not that propaganda never works to change people’s beliefs and attitudes. But it seems to be most effective in this role when the distance between propaganda messages and the preexisting beliefs and attitudes of the public is not large, or when cultural linkages between propagandists and their audience are clear and consistent. In particular, propaganda serves more often to amplify preexisting beliefs and attitudes or to increase their salience than to change them. For example, a company may advertise its products in a supermarket to ensure that positive attitudes toward them are readily “activated” among consumers walking in who already feel well disposed, not to persuade people who are unlikely to buy them. Politicians, similarly, typically try to deploy symbols and narratives that “resonate” with the preexisting beliefs of their audience, not to radically change them. By the same token, propaganda messages are especially ineffective when belief in them would conflict with the preexisting cultural identities of the recipients. Indeed, some researchers find that for some culturally polarized issues—where “belief” in particular propositions is a credible marker of belonging to a particular group—propaganda is almost completely ineffective. According to this “cultural cognition” paradigm (developed by the legal theorist Dan Kahan, among others), this may account for why, for example, belief (or lack of belief) in global climate change or evolution in the United States seems so difficult to change via information campaigns. It is also worth stressing that the effectiveness of propaganda techniques “in the lab” and their effectiveness “in the wild” are different things. This is especially clear in the case of propaganda within competitive elections or markets. If propaganda for candidate A has to

compete with propaganda for candidate B, then A’s propaganda techniques can be expected to be less effective than they would be if A did not have to compete with B, regardless of their psychological effectiveness in isolation. And though both A and B may be forced to use propaganda to avoid losing relative advantage in an electoral campaign, the net effect on the electorate of their joint efforts may well be zero. But even where political actors face no competitors to their ability to regulate information flows, as in some of the great dictatorships of the last century, they may still face severe credibility problems that limit the effectiveness of their propaganda efforts. When governments can lie with impunity or without fear of contradiction, many citizens assume that everything they say is a lie, as we know from historical accounts of life under the communist regimes. And the fact that governments can flood the public sphere with propaganda does not mean that they can engage people’s attention. Even Goebbels, the infamous Nazi minister of propaganda, was acutely aware of the need for propaganda “not to be boring” (as he put it in a speech to radio broadcasters in 1933) if it was to keep people’s attention. Yet despite the efforts of the Nazi propaganda machine, historians note that many Germans drifted away from explicit propaganda and toward music or entertainment media that did not push a particular official message. Over the long term, and in the absence of much competition from alternative sources of information, it is certainly possible for constant propaganda to shift people’s values and attitudes in particular directions— especially among the young. The economists Alberto Alesina and Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, for example, have conducted studies that show East Germans, exposed to socialist regime propaganda for 45 years, have today more redistributive and economically egalitarian preferences than do West Germans, who were not similarly exposed. And the economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth have similarly shown that Germans who came of age when the Nazis were in power had more anti-Semitic attitudes than Germans who came of age before or after. Yet the usefulness of such effects to holders of power should not be exaggerated: The fact that East Germans had more redistributive preferences than West Germans did not ensure the popularity of the regime or stabilize it when protests began in 1989. Indeed, it was precisely because East Germans felt that the socialist regime had shown itself incapable of living up to the standards of its own propaganda that many turned against it when the opportunity presented itself.

Other Functions of Propaganda in Politics Despite its limited effectiveness as indoctrination, even boring, not credible, and unwatched propaganda can

Propaganda

have important political effects that serve the interests of holders of power. First, propaganda can serve as a credible signal of the strength of a state or political regime, and second, it can also produce a particular ideological climate that makes it difficult for alternative visions of the social and political order to gain traction. The idea that propaganda can be a signal of strength comes from studies of authoritarian regimes. In these regimes, at least some propaganda appears to be literally incredible, presenting views that are either c­ ompletely at odds with the everyday experiences of ordinary people or of no interest to them. Examples abound. Hafiz al-Assad was declared to be Syria’s “premier pharmacist,” and Kim Jong-il was said in the North Korean state newspaper to have mastered the art of teleporting. ­Official state newscasts in Soviet countries were often mocked in popular culture for their wooden language and their obvious lies; in Romania under Ceaus‚ escu, even the weather information was occasionally falsified. And in Imperial Rome, the historian Paul Veyne has noted the specific message of propagandistic art was often simply inaccessible to the masses. Yet the point of such propaganda may not be to persuade readers or viewers but to credibly show that the state is strong, and thus, to discourage opposition. Unbelievable or unread propaganda can be a signal of strength because it shows that the state thoroughly dominates the public sphere; and it often works in concert with the threat of coercion to secure political acquiescence from a population, since to publicly contradict the state in these contexts means to expose oneself to social or political sanctions. Given the obvious difficulties in measuring public opinion in highly authoritarian or historical contexts, much of the evidence for the use of propaganda as signaling comes from historical and ethnographic studies. But some systematic quantitative evidence of these uses of propaganda also exists. The political scientist Haifeng Huang, for example, has shown that Chinese students who get better grades in required political education classes at university— classes that are generally agreed by students to be boring and useless—do not show increased support for, or satisfaction with, the Chinese Communist Party, but they do show a diminished willingness to challenge it. The second way in which propaganda may be useful to holders of power in a society even if individual propaganda messages are ineffective at persuading people is if they tend to entrench certain ideologies or views of the world. Influential leftist theorists from Antonio Gramsci to Noam Chomsky have argued, for example, that the incentives of media producers in liberal capitalist societies will lead them to reinforce concepts, ways of speaking, and problem definitions that favor the capitalist class and close off opportunities for alternatives to capitalism. The point is not that individual

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propaganda messages are always believed, but that they “naturalize” a particular view of the world, making it seem inevitable. Thus, though liberal capitalist democracies appear to allow for a wide range of opinion, in practice, they systematically marginalize certain discourses and groups. That some discourses are marginalized even in liberal democracies with guarantees of freedom of speech is not in dispute. But it is harder to evaluate the idea that the reproduction of a certain range of views, through (say) the economic incentives of mass media, constitutes propaganda. At one extreme, this position reduces to the old hypodermic needle theory, in which mere exposure to a certain range of ideas is sufficient to deceive the masses regarding their true interests. The more defensible position suggests instead that economic and social circumstances will tend to bias public discourse in ways that tend to favor the powerful even in liberal societies with open public spheres. But the question of whether and which of these biases are normatively justifiable is beyond the scope of this entry, being a matter for political and social philosophy. Xavier Márquez See also Authoritarianism; Brand Identity and Loyalty; False Consciousness; Fascism; Framing Effects; Hegemony; Mass Communication; Political Ideology; Political Indoctrination; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Socialism and Communism; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Alesina, A., & Fuchs-Schündeln, N. (2007). Goodbye Lenin (or not?): The effect of communism on people. American Economic Review, 97(4), 1507–1528. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York, NY: Pantheon. Huang, H. (2015). Propaganda as signaling. Comparative Politics, 47(4), 419–437. Jowett, G. S., & O’Donnell, V. (2014). Propaganda and persuasion (5th ed.). London, England: Sage. Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York, NY: Harcourt. Schein, E. H., Schneier, I., & Barker, C. H. (1961). Coercive persuasion. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Taylor, P. M. (2003). Munitions of the mind: A history of propaganda. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Voigtländer, N., & Voth, H.-J. (2015). Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/ content/112/26/7931.full Wedeen, L. (1999). Ambiguities of domination: Politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary Syria. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Prospect Theory

Prospect Theory Prospect theory is a psychological theory of choice under conditions of risk and uncertainty, which accurately describes people’s choices. The originators of prospect theory, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, felt that such a descriptively accurate theory was needed because people’s choices deviated systematically from the predictions of the then—in the 1970s—dominant theory of choice under risk: expected utility theory. Decision making by political actors typically takes place under conditions of risk and uncertainty, suggesting that prospect theory has much to offer to political science. This entry provides a summary of prospect theory’s key characteristics, discusses some applications in political science, and addresses some problems and, if existing, their solutions that arise in prospect-theoretical applications in political science.

Prospect Theory’s Key Characteristics Prospect theory has been developed based on experiments with student samples, but its key findings have been corroborated with samples from the general population, military decision makers, physicians, patients, and taxpayers. Prospect theory’s key characteristic is its finding that people’s choices differ across contexts or domains. If they face losses (like a falling standing in the polls or a deteriorating socioeconomic situation), people typically opt for the risk-seeking choice, that is, the choice with the largest variation in its outcome. Conversely, if they face gains (like an improved standing in the polls or a prospering socioeconomic situation), they generally opt for the risk-averse choice, that is, the choice with the smallest variation in the outcome. This is called the reflection effect. People use a reference point to determine whether they find themselves in the domain of losses or of gains. This reference point often is the status quo, but it can also be an expectation or aspiration level. Another characteristic of prospect theory is loss aversion. This is people’s tendency to want to avoid losses because the pain of losing something (say, −5% of votes) is larger than is the pleasure of winning something (+5% of votes). Ample experiments have demonstrated that the pain of losing is two to two-and-a-half times as high as is the pleasure of winning. A characteristic of prospect theory that thus far has hardly been used by political scientists is probability weighting. Probability weighting refers to people’s ­tendency not to treat probabilities linearly and to their sensitivity to the possibility of ensuring a sure outcome. This results in a pattern whereby small probabilities

(generally