Political psychology / edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe

With a list of contributors that reads like a "Who's Who" of political psychology, this comprehensive volume introduces the major concepts, debates, and themes in the field and provides an overview of its intellectual development, its disparate parts, the major controversies and some suggestions for the future direction of the field.
Part 1 of the volume presents six contrasting views on political psychology as a field. The book opens with an updated and revised version of a classic article on the nature of political psychology, an article that helped define political psychology at a critical point in its inception. Deutsch and Kinnvall note the long philosophical heritage of political psychology and then describe how political psychology became a separate field in the mid-20th century in response to dissatisfactions with the behavioral movement. The piece provides a valuable overview suggesting the richness of political psy chology and the key areas of concentration within the discipline. It finds that research clusters into 12 areas: the individual as political actor; politi cal movements; political leadership; political alignments and structures: intergroup relations; political processes; case studies; human development and the political economy, voting and decision making; foreign policy and group think; government and self-esteem; and identity and group conflict. The Deutsch-Kinnvall chapter ends by reassessing the field of political psychology utilizing the five tenets proposed in the first Handbook of Politi cal Psychology. As originally outlined by Hermann, the Handbook of Political Psychology suggested that when constructing work in political psychology, we need to focus attention on the interaction of political and psychologi cal phenomena, to ask how responsive and relevant is political psychology to societal problems, and whether context makes a difference for the prob lem being analyzed. We also need to emphasize the process as well as the outcome and to be tolerant of multiple methods for gathering and analyz ing data.