Being political in divisive times

To describe someone as political is rarely taken as a compliment. Being political evokes the idea of tensions, arguments, not being heard and nothing really changing. When politicians are positioned as 'playing politics' this is usually an accusation that they are not getting on with the business of government. Certainly, politics with a big 'P' is the formal, conflictual, hard-fought kind. 

However, for those of us distanced from this apparent battleground, politics with a small 'p' is never far away. Being political can involve outright activism, or an additional activity we occasionally do e.g., voting, but equally it represents skills we use in everyday life, perhaps even as a survival strategy.

In 2024, more than 4 billion people will be eligible to vote. Elections in Russia and Pakistan have taken place and the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, India and the European Parliament all have elections planned. Elections serve to revitalise democracy and there are bound to be plenty of occasions where politics will be the main point of conversation around the world. It is with this in mind that the current special issue has been developed.

Framed around the question of 'how to be political in divisive times', we have gathered contributors from academia, policymaking and practitioners to provide their insights and shed light on this question. In scoping out this special issue we had several aims – to increase our ability to hold politicians to account but equally to challenge the jaded view that politicians were untrustworthy and all the same. 

To increase the dialogue between citizens and their governments and equally, beyond the role of the state, to inform the everyday political decision-making of citizens by building our public capacity for 'being political' as citizens.

People can often shy away from being political in the UK, preferring to keep politics and religion off the table. The societal conditions of being political have changed considerably: the arrival of immediate online communications in the form of social media, the increased use of opinion polls, the use of referenda, have all blurred the distinction between direct and representative democracy. 

Today, if you want to create social or political change, you may well head to your social media platform and create a hashtag, before speaking to your local politician. Members of the public are developing political profiles and acting as political influencers. Politicians in turn have embraced social and mainstream media to be more relatable and mobilise potential voters. This move towards increased profiling and spectacle is sometimes called politainment.

Throughout the issue, contributors explore this kind of political lexicon. Terms such as 'playing politics', 'playing to their base', 'a week is a long time in politics', 'lies, damned lies and statistics', all shape our political discourse and are explored in the issue to increase political capacity. We also consider the crack-down on different ways of being political, including attempts to label certain groups as extreme and as such delegitimise their claims. We need to keep an eye, as psychologists, on processes which limit being political, such as restricting access to protesting or voting.

We have found over the years, particularly since the 2016 UK-EU Referendum, that we, as political psychologists, are most often asked the question – what can be done to bring polarised citizens back together. Commentators, governments, media, the public alike are seeking answers to this question. 

Across this special issue, we propose, perhaps counter-intuitively, that the challenge is not really getting all citizens to be on the same page, to rally around a shared identity or a common 'national' cause. We would not aspire to everyone voting for the same party after all. Rather, the challenge is to understand the capacities and conditions necessary to enable people, as citizens, to be political in divisive times.

We hope as guest editors, whatever your own psychology background, you will feel more engaged with the relationship between psychology and politics, inspired by the developments within political psychology and share articles from this special issue with others. We asked all our contributors to keep developing political skills and accessibility in mind when writing their articles.

You will soon spot that our contributors have often combined their analysis with their own stories across diverse contexts, including biographical stories shaped by civil war, social unrest and different state-sponsored ideologies. Political psychology, often arouses disagreement and strong emotions: please, read at your own pace, reflect on your reactions, take breaks and discuss with others if you can.

Capacities and conditions

Within this issue, we have focused on three dimensions: the psychological capacities needed to be political; the different forms (or means) to be political; and finally more macro factors influencing political conditions, divisiveness and polarisation. 

Political psychology is a relatively young discipline and we invited Neil Ferguson, who is actively involved in the International Society of Political Psychology, to offer a historical perspective on the development of political psychology. Appreciating fully the wider conditions under which people can be political involves situating political psychological accounts within historical, geographical, media and sociological contexts and several contributors come from these disciplines.

Developing capacities to be political – self-reflection and talking politics

The issue opens with an interview with Ivana Marková on the dialogical capacity of citizens. Ivana reveals how her own sense of the private and public forged within the vexed conditions of communist Czechoslovakia, shapes her lifelong work into the development of dialogicality – 'The capacity of the human mind to conceive, create and communicate about social realities in relation to the alter', or self-other relations (Markova, 2003).

Practitioners such as Matteo Bergamini (available on The Psychologist website) offer an account of how to be political, focusing on the importance of political literacy among young citizens; and Harald Weilnböck tackles the challenge of working with young people in Germany who are developing extreme political worldviews.

Developing the capacity to be political involves delving below our conversational skills into our motivations, defence mechanisms and intuitions. Bogdan Ianosev, taking Brexit and immigration as examples, explores how our intuitions can be mistaken and can lead to false beliefs about the world. 

Social psychologist Gordon Sammut details the aspiration drive behind voting, and why it matters for the politics of the present. Delving deeper into emotional literacy, Tabatha Baker explores defence mechanisms revealing the unseen role of such mechanisms in how we can handle conflict.

Appeals to drive, hard-wiring and the unconscious risks, of course, avoiding our own culpability. Is there a chance that we rather overplay polarisation, to avoid our own political agency or responsibility? When being political, do we exaggerate the other group's positions? Sandra Obradovic and Anthony English review the evidence to tackle the question of our own role in polarisation. They show how getting people to talk more with those who hold different political views (what Diana Mutz refers to as 'crosscutting exposure') can potentially discourage political participation. 

Ali Goldsworthy and Laura Osborne, two of the authors of the bestselling book Poles Apart, also consider our own role. With business leaders in mind, they want to encourage us to disagree without resorting to extreme acts.

Within the issue, we have invited four new student voices, all of whom have not been published before. Monica Hope and Kayleigh Laughlin, currently studying psychological inquiry at the Master's level at the Open University, bring a new and contemporary interpretation of the saying 'Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics'. Noemi Hrvatin, winner of the BPS Political Psychology Section Student Prize, considers how we might rein in some of our defensiveness when in dialogue with those with whom we disagree: 'Being political in divisive times requires courage, patience and an open heart', she writes (online). 

Rozena Nadeem, BPS Political Psychology Section Early Career Representative, considers her journey in political psychology so far, from choices in her psychology degree to becoming a Democracy coordinator and now working for a governance charity.

The means of being political – Protests, reconciliation and campaigning

As our contributors point out, if you don't do politics it will be done to you. We have drawn together contributors to consider the forms and means of being political. Colin Leach, Cátia P. Teixeira and Shaunette T. Ferguson reflect on the role of protests, through the example of Black Lives Matter, as a legitimate form of democratic expression and as a way of 'being political' that can promote social justice and societal well-being. 

Mónica González Gort and Laura Fonseca Durán, take the reader to Colombia to explore efforts at reconciliation within divided societies using education initiatives for peacebuilding efforts in divided societies. Ashley Weinberg talks with fellow psychologist Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, on her activism. Rosamund reflects on her campaign journey for a Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill, or 'Ella's Law', following the death of her daughter Ella from an asthma attack triggered by traffic pollution, pinpointing how public accountability around the air we breathe involves becoming political.

Sustained political commitment by psychologists is explored by Ashley Weinberg who has dedicated much of his professional life towards how we judge and understand politicians and the people who work for them. Ashley tells the story of recent gains achieved by working collaboratively with MPs' staff to obtain recognition of the conditions and protections needed in their work, that facilitate effective representation of the public.

Everyday conditions – politicians, media and urban environments and categories

In his contribution, Fathali Moghaddam reflects on how even the smallest decision – choosing a hijab – can be interpreted as political. Both Iris Žeželj and Jovan Ivanovic and Sammyh Khan and Yashpal Jogdand consider the changing nature of what it means to be 'political', in the contexts of Serbia and the Indian elections respectively.

Tina Askanius and Jullietta Stoencheva consider online media environments, a key concept central to OppAttune. They explain that online 'everyday extremism' dovetails with contemporary forms of online extremism disguising intent and 'authorship'. Everyday extremism 'avoid[s] overtly violent discourse or hate speech and instead draw on popular culture, irony and innuendo to cloak extremism and carry harmful ideas and images into the digital mainstream'.  

Urban geographers Ursula Reeger and Miriam Haselbacher take the case of the city of Vienna and imaginaries around how the city used to be, to explore how politicians 'play to their base' through the evocation of a sense of place.

Stephen Sawyer, in his interview with Tetiana Shyriaieva and Evangelia Vergouli, states 'To my mind, all the disciplines of the social sciences – from sociology to psychology to history to economics – are historically linked to the rise of democracy'. Stephen locates the origins of democracy in France, alongside many contributors who reference Ancient Greece. Many analysts are also articulating certain features of democracy as occurring much earlier and beyond Europe (Lionnet & Shih, 2005; Dallmayr, 2017).

Epistemic considerations shape analytical categories and the terms of reference of policies; they in turn shape what we know about people's political worldviews. Taking the silent generation as an example, Sue Nieland, Sarah Crafter and Kesi Mahendran challenge what we know about older people and the Brexit vote. They recommend that pollsters and attitude surveys disaggregate and break down the 65+ age category, which currently contains 18 per cent of the population and three generations so that variances in political outlooks and capacities will not be missed. 

The political question of ageing in the workplace is taken up by Clare Edge and Emma Swift, (available online), founders of the Working Older Women 'WOW' network, who are leading a research initiative to consider gender-based structural inequalities compounded in later life by gendered employment and health experiences (including menopause), complicated by stigma, culture and legislation, negatively impacting women.

Undoubtedly the extremeness of our politics relates to the cost-of-living crisis and material conditions, William Warda considers what is needed for democracy to develop in post-war Iraq, in the face of deeply entrenched corruption. Ioannis Ntotsikas, Antonis Dimakis, Myrto Droumpali, Dimitrios Barkas and Xenia Chryssochoou explore how concepts such as 'the people' and 'the nation' make sense in the aftermath of sweeping austerity and social turmoil in Greece.

The final image

If you are in an experimental frame of mind, before reading any of the articles turn to the back and take a look at the final photograph we have chosen. Much has been explored on the role of photography and electoral appeal. Roland Barthes shows how photographs of politicians heroise the viewer – they spirit away the political and evoke a manner which says 'I am the same as you'. There is no politician in the image we chose, as far as we can tell. Instead, it is a seemingly mundane everyday image – a small p political image. Where does the image take you?

It has been a pleasure to work closely with Jon Sutton and his team, share ideas with our contributors and create this special issue. We see it as the beginning of a dialogue on democratic capacities and political conditions; a potential resource for growing local, national and global democracies. We hope the ideas, studies, theories and debates in this issue work to support a more dialogical democracy. 

We hope for participation within a colourful democracy, diffracted beyond the usual black-and-white binaries – reflected in the image selected by The Psychologist for the front cover. People have the political agency to shape their worlds, whether navigating political conditions, heading to the polls to cast their votes, or using political skills in everyday life. We very much welcome your feedback on this issue.

• Explore the whole issue via our Archive, or download the PDF here; or read in The Psychologist app. 

Introducing the editors

All of the guest editors are political psychologists located in the UK. This is the first time the Political Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society has guest-edited an issue of The Psychologist. The section was founded by two of the members of the editorial team, Ashley Weinberg and Kesi Mahendran, along with a committed group of talented colleagues, and was ratified in 2019.

The section was created in response to the growing interest in political psychology and to develop a unique take on political psychology, which was distinct from the existing societies.

Kesi Mahendran founded the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory (PDPC) in 2020; Sue Nieland is one of the co-founders, and all members of PDPC have contributed to this special issue. Sandra Obradović and Kesi Mahendran have been long-time collaborators, sharing a common interest in national and European identity and collective memory.

Together they lead the OppAttune project, which brings together a consortium of 17 partners across 15 countries to understand the rise of extreme political narratives; many partners from the project have contributed articles.

When inviting contributions to this special issue, we sought contributions far and wide, from attendees at the most recent UK Political Psychology Conference in 2023, a joint endeavour between the Political Studies Association and the BPS Political Psychology Section. Finally, we invited students and early career researchers to contribute from their perspectives.

Key sources

Barthes, R. (1957/1970). Photography and Electoral Appeal in Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press. 
Dallmayr, F.R. (2017). Democracy to come: Politics as relational praxis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lionnet, F. & Shih, S.M. (Eds.). (2005). Minor transnationalism (p.1). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Marková, I. (2003). Dialogicality and social representations: The dynamics of mind. Cambridge University Press.