As the preceding pages have shown, one can gain a deeper understanding of political behaviour and the strength and utility of political psychology by emphasising its diversity of perspectives. Of course, the global world of political psychology extends beyond the boundaries of Europe and North America. Issues, topics, innovations in political psychology are not limited to what European academics and their North American colleagues choose to study. Nor are they limited to psychological issues. Around the world, new and creative ways of understanding the different manifestations of political behaviour are being developed: some are simply borrowing the models and the tools of their more prestigious American colleagues; others proceed independently, developing critiques, finding new gaps and imagining new research tools and hypotheses more suited to researching local social and political contexts. One of the major challenges of political psychology rests with how best to promote alternative ways of doing political psychology.

In its search for integrated and integrative perspectives, contemporary political psychology (especially in North America) is preoccupied with devising new technologies of research that can potentially change or transform the i eld. There is nothing wrong with this approach. The conceptual tools of cognitive science, evolutionary science, genetics, or the tools of neuroscience are pushing political psychology in new exciting directions. But problems can arise when this approach is used to predict and prescribe the future of political psychology. There is a lot of truth in Helen Haste’s statement: ‘predicting the future is hazardous; prescribing the future is a doomed exercise’ (2012, p. 1). It remains to be seen whether the future of political psychology lies with a dialogue with cognitive science, evolutionary science, or the neurosciences, especially when these approaches are drawn upon uncritically. This dialogue can potentially turn political psychology into a system governed by the problems and priorities of other fields. What we can be sure of, nonetheless, is that, as political psychologists, we can always turn to the lives of ‘concrete’ human beings, to describing and interpreting their social practices, social interactions, motivations, representations, as they appear to them in their full contingency.

Personality, political behaviour and the predisposition to intolerance

When political psychologists turn to the study of intolerance, they seem to be mostly preoccupied with what Allport has called ‘the horizontal dimensions that run through all individuals’ (1962, p. 409). Allport was writing about what psychologists routinely refer to as traits, predispositions, cognitions and motives that describe the ‘personality’ of individuals. What Allport described using a spatial metaphor is described by contemporary political psychology in not so different terms, as a ‘multifaceted and enduring internal, or psychological, structure’ (Mondak, 2010, p. 6). This chapter argues that although the influences of Allport’s ‘horizontal dimensions’ are some of the most discernible and significant, they are not the sole determinant of intolerance. This chapter contends that the nature of intolerance (and associated phenomena such as racism and moral exclusion) cannot be reduced to relatively stable inner predispositions or basic personality dispositions, and that the leaning of political psychologists to elucidate the general regularities of political behaviour can be profitably balanced, complemented by attention to culture, language, social interaction and the actual ways in which intolerance is enacted and accomplished by different ways of talking and behaving towards others.

In order to develop this argument this chapter discusses the appeal and manifestations of right-wing extremism in Western Europe, prejudice as collaborative accomplishment, and the extreme, moral exclusionary discourse against the Roma minority in Eastern Europe. One cannot understand fully the plural and contextual manifestations of intolerance if one only studies it as a predisposition underpinned by an authoritarian mindset. Intolerance needs to be studied in its own right – as it manifests itself, and as it is interpreted and enacted by social and political actors in social interaction and social practices. Intolerance is imbued with a variety of sociocultural meanings; it is the foundation and product of social activities.

The collective will and the ‘ideal’ democratic citizen

‘We, the people, feel and know that we have become more significant than ever before, with the narrowing of the barrier that separates “us” and our range of experiences from our elected representatives and their range of experiences.’ This is what social psychologist, Hadley Cantril, in his 1942 paper, ‘Public Opinion in Flux’, was writing about the importance of ‘good morale’ in American democracy, especially ‘national morale’ associated with the war effort. What Cantril acknowledged in 1942 (and he was not the only one) is what politicians, ‘spin doctors’, and so on take for granted today: the fundament of democracy lies in the ‘faith in the judgment of the common man’. Cantril was writing about the person, the ‘citizen’ who ‘given sufficient facts and motivated to pay attention to those facts … will reach a decision based on his [her] own self-interest as a member of a democratic community’ (1942, p. 151). When writing about ‘we, the people’ Cantril points to the direction of political democratic accountability (from citizens to their elected representatives) and thus brings into the foreground one of the most fundamental political hopes – that the will and reason of ‘the people’ ought to prevail. Cantril’s words express faith in the self-governing, autonomous and omnicompetent citizen (Dalton, 2008) – the ‘ideal’ democratic citizen.

This chapter shows how political psychologists’ concern with the ‘collective will’ is paralleled by a concern with, search for and description of the democratic citizen. The first part of the chapter maps the various meanings and expressions of this collective will condensed into the notion of ‘public opinion’. The chapter then goes on to describe the main assumptions behind researching and understanding the democratic competence of citizens, especially those related to political knowledge and political sophistication.

Mediated politics and political communication

The spectacle of contemporary politics around the world is intimately bound to a ‘multiaxial’ (Delli Carpini and Williams, 2001) media and communication environment. The nature of contemporary political communication is in continuous transformation (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008). This chapter offers a summary of the main tenets of a discursive approach to political communication. It starts by charting the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary psychology of political communication. The chapter then moves on to discuss how political communication can be conceived of as a social accomplishment, and an outcome of, as well as influence on, complex forms and networks of social practices. After offering some empirical examples drawn from work on the ethnography of political processes, discursive research on politicians’ communicative style, political advertising and political humour, the chapter closes with an outline of an alternative approach to political communication that relies specifically on the importance of investigating how political communications are actually produced, circulated and consumed in society. In doing so, this chapter argues that political psychologists can borrow creatively and learn from media, communication and discourse theorists interested in the complexity of political communications.

The rise of ‘self-expressive politics’ (Stanyer, 2007), the increased ‘personalisation’ (Castells, 2011) and ‘professionalisation’ of politics and political communication (Negrine, 2008; Wodak, 2011) are only some examples of how political phenomena do not exist outside communication processes, outside information and communications of and about politics. Politics and political processes need to be ‘packaged’ (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997; Franklin, 2004) in some communicative form or other in order to reach imagined, proximal or distal audiences. In most Western and Eastern European democracies, this is usually the job of politicians themselves, the mass media, ‘spin doctors’ and the increasingly powerful political public relations industry. Their role is to construct, direct, circulate and disseminate political communications (McNair, 2011).

Mass subjectivity and the democratic competence of nations

As argued in Chapter 1, citizens and publics inhabit ‘a political environment where they are continually encouraged by various actors to vocalize their views’ (Stanyer, 2007, p. 157). Some of the ‘actors’ to which Stanyer refers are academic psychologists, experts in public opinion polling who are interested in the aggregate description and distribution of the various dimensions of social and political behaviour: attitudes, motives, preferences, wishes, value orientations, and so on. Value orientations are perhaps the most important to understanding issues around political attitudes, social and political change, and political participation (Inglehart, 2009).

This chapter sketches the various attempts at describing the universal psychological structure of human values and the implications of such attempts for understanding democracy promotion and democratisation. It explores the tension between aggregate and universalistic models and contingent, contextual, particularistic manifestations of political behaviour. By focusing on the issue of questioning democracy promotion, this chapter shows how value orientations cannot be satisfactorily conceptualised outside an inter-subjective framework and ordinary ways of reasoning about values. The promotion of ‘formal democracy’ cannot work outside the framework of mass values offered by the existing socio-political context. The chapter ends by arguing that values should be treated as ideologically and culturally situated argumentative resources, and that researchers should emphasise not only their universalistic, but also their particularistic features, especially the fragmentary, multiple and unfinished nature of value searches, value expressions and value orientations.

From the archive model of memory to lived experience

Memory is at the centre of human experience. Memory is what makes us human. The past is a site of social meaning. These are statements with which the majority of psychologists agree. The truth of these statements rests on two fundamental questions: (a) how to study memory by incorporating the tension and interplay between preservation and loss, remembering and forgetting, the relationship between memory, identity and narrative: and (b) how to reconcile the distinction between memory as individual faculty, and memory as collective or social phenomenon. This chapter outlines some of the issues that arise from various attempts to find answers to these questions, especially those with particular relevance to political psychology. This chapter presents the main tenets of a sociocultural approach to researching social memory, with an emphasis on political narratives, commemoration and national memory of socio-political events and coming to terms with the past. The chapter ends with a brief outline of implications (and recommendations) for a political psychology of collective memory.

In his book The Sense of an Ending, British novelist Julian Barnes writes: ‘As the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty as to what you are or have been.’ The quotation expresses, in a nutshell, the contingency of selfhood. What it intimates is that biographical time does not correspond exactly to biographical reality, but to the multiple reconstructions of the unfolding past/time by people. What Barnes has found, as so many of us have, is that what we call ‘individual memory’ about one’s life appears only apparently as a ‘property’ of the self. Instead we find it distributed beyond one’s own person, ‘beyond one’s head’ (Bruner, 2001), as it were, and mediated by personal and social relationships, and the material environment. Our relationship to the past and others is an unfinished business. Our memories (and identities) are not essences we carry within us, but rather a result of particular configurations and constellations of the subject in relation to networks of distributed and mediated activities. Our memories are located within mental, material and cultural spaces.

Visions of politics and discourse

In his book, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, the American political scientist Murray Edelman is offering his own description of politics. He argues that ‘because politics does visibly confer wealth, take life, imprison and free people, and represent a history with strong emotional and ideological associations, its processes become easy objects upon which to displace private emotions, especially strong anxieties and hopes’ (1967, p. 5). Edelman’s ‘definition’ of politics proposes a vision where politics is the agent and driver of a transformation of society’s order: a politics that does things to people. This is a vision of politics shared by many a political scientist and political psychologist. It is the power of its symbolism that leads most researchers to focus more on politics as process rather than on politics as social action, more on what politics does to people rather than on how politics is done by people in and through discursive and social practices. This chapter is an attempt at showing how the balance can be profitably shifted towards understanding politics and political discourse as a complex form of social activity. This chapter outlines the relationship between politics and language. It argues that political language is a multifaceted form of social activity that justifies careful study in its own right. Chapter 8 expounds on some propositions developed here, using empirical analyses of political rhetoric.

For discourse analysts, language is central to (the conduct of) politics. As Chilton and Schäffner argue, ‘it is surely the case that politics cannot be conducted without language, and it is probably the case that the use of language in the constitution of social groups leads to what we call ‘‘politics’’ in a broad sense’ (1997, p. 206). For researchers interested in the ethnography of political processes, ‘true’ politics is what happens behind the scenes, the ‘backstage’ of politics (Wodak, 2011).

From belief systems to social representations

There is an explicit consensus in political psychology that the functioning of a political community is linked to the kinds and variety of beliefs that social actors (elite and mass publics) develop in relation to politically relevant objects, or ideologies, and how these beliefs are organised in relation to others. As Doise and Staerklé argue, ‘democratic functioning of a political community is characterised by antagonistic positioning towards socially relevant topics’ (2002, p. 153). This chapter outlines some of the issues that arise from attempts to describe the social organisation of beliefs, with an emphasis on the links between communication, identity and community, and lay constructions of political categories.

In doing so, this chapter presents the main tenets of social representations theory as a theory of social communication and social knowledge. Serge Moscovici’s notion of ‘social representation’ is one of the concepts that has been instrumental in the crystallisation of the idea of society as a ‘thinking’ and ‘knowledge system’. The chapter ends with a discussion of the original contribution of social representations theory to explaining the heterogeneity and diversity of social and political knowledge, the tensions, changes and transformations of modern social and political life.

Understanding political behaviour: from social hierarchy to social categorisation

Since its inception as a discipline, political psychology was concerned with developing psychological (and societal) models for understanding political behaviour. From the early and classic writings to modern approaches, political psychology has developed, promoted and transformed its theories to describe how societies are socially and politically organised. This chapter outlines the relationship between social categorisation and social mobilisation, as well as that between collective identities and collective action. It argues that by exploring the link that social and political actors institute between identities and social action, one can gain a better grasp of political behaviour as a complex form of social practice. Using examples from various social settings and contexts, this chapter shows how identities are constructed (reconstructed) in the context of social practices and are created to manage social situations and organise (collective) social action.

The increased desire for social recognition, authenticity, social change, identity affirmation and choice requires a dynamic social psychological understanding of these processes. The chapter offers a commentary on the cross-sectional nature of identity, the multiplicity of social identifications and positions in response to, or as an effect of, social categorisation. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the need to place the notion of identity at the centre of political psychology’s theoretical and empirical language.

What Do We Mean by Status?

The signalling of qualifications can be seen in the following recent developments, cited here as mere examples:

Here we move from the description of what is being done to an outline of what can be done, before attempting to formulate what should be done.

If there is to be a policy or some kind of public intervention regarding the existing mechanisms for signalling the status of translators, what are the basic options available?

Free Market or Controlled Entry?

The first fundamental question would seem to be whether this should be an entirely free market, where anyone can translate, or if there should be formal restrictions on who can be allowed to translate in exchange for financial recompense.

Bearing in mind that most people in the world are plurilingual, and since translation is one of the basic things that people do with language (alongside speaking, listening, writing, and reading), there can be little question of restricting the activity of translating. On the contrary, generalised translating should be encouraged, as empowerment in the field of cross-cultural communication. The availability of free online translation memories and machine translation services, together with web-based software for collective volunteer translating (“crowdsourcing”), means that generalised translating can be expected to expand, whether we like it or not. Our question here cannot concern restricting an activity, or controlling who can or cannot be paid for a service. It more exactly concerns the efficiency and effectiveness of the possible mechanisms for signalling status.

Here we sketch out case studies of the way the various signalling mechanisms interact in Germany, Romania, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and Spain, as well as the external comparison countries the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The case studies broadly address the following questions:

We look at the general language policy of each country, the main features of academic qualifications, the professional associations, and the specific systems in place for sworn or authorised translators. In each case, we propose some tentative conclusions about the ways academic and professional signals are working, especially in relation to the size of each potential market.

The United States, Canada, and Australia have been selected as comparison bases because they have all seen close critical attention to accreditation and certification systems in very recent years.

Germany

Germany is a significant case study because of the specific weight of the German economy within Europe, its successful export orientation, its high levels of foreign-language competence, the presence of immigrant languages, and a well-established and generally successful system of translator training and associative representation.

Some of the data collected in the course of this research indicate the need for a reality principle with respect to the rough numbers of professional translators and interpreters that could be working within a given national or regional industry. For example, when the Romanian Ministry of Justice lists 32,856 “certified translators and interpreters”, it is difficult to see how so many people could be translating in an economy of that size. Similarly, the 2008—10 statistics for Australia show NAATI certifying 1,856 people a year as translators and interpreters, in a country where the main translator association has only about 500 members. Some kind of measuring stick is needed to tell us when such figures seem incorrect or should be attributed to special factors.

One available instrument is particularly blunt but potentially useful. Parker (2008) estimates the “latent demand” for translation and interpreting services in all the countries (and for 2000 cities!) in the world. This basically means estimating the size of the translation and interpreting industry in “efficient” high-income countries for which data are available, then relating the size of the industry to national income, and finally applying that formula across the globe, as if language services were a function of no more than macroeconomic indicators. Despite those very naive assumptions, the numbers may act as a garde-fou for other cross-country comparisons.

The above case studies present the ways the various signalling mechanisms interact in different countries. Behind the synchronic regional variation, it is possible to see translators gaining status in a general historical process, which plays out in different ways in different situations. To understand that general historical process, we turn to the sociology of professions, and more particularly to various models of diachronic professionalisation.

Most of the models have historically been based on professions in the United States, and the most relevant applications to the general field of translation are actually from the greater China region (Tseng 1992, Ju 2009, Chan 2012) and the United States (Witter-Merithew and Johnson 2004), in both cases with reference to interpreters. Here we review the models and the applications, then we attempt to adapt them to the recent history of translators in Europe.

Models of Professionalisation

Professionalisation can be understood as the process whereby occupations seek to upgrade their status by adopting organisational and occupational attributes and traits (US National Center for Education Statistics 1997). As early as 1928, Carr-Saunders defined professionalism (later more commonly referred to as “professionalisation”) as “specialized skill and training, minimum fees or salaries, formation of professional organizations, and code of ethics governing professional practices” (1928: 8).