Psychology and Political Participation

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on what psychology as a field brings to the understanding of three types of political participation: (1) voting and other types of conventional political participation, (2) volunteering, and (3) collective protest behavior. The research is organized in a framework that reviews the psychological mediators of the relationships between political participation and individual differences in personality and life experiences. By considering these separate literatures in the same chapter using the same framework, it is possible to identify the variables that are both common and unique to each tradition and recognize new potential research directions in each domain. Specifically, the voting and conventional political participation literature lacks a consideration of politicized identities and life experience variables, the volunteering literature lacks a consideration of individual difference variables and moderators, and the collective protest literature lacks a consideration of other potential psychological mediators of relationships between individual difference variables and activism.