Psyched Up for Party Reform: Towards a Psychological Approach to Party Politics

• In Event: Party Change and Party Adaptation in Democracies under Pressure

Abstract

Party reforms have been increasingly scrutinized as the symbol of parties’ resilience to their predicted decline. While existing research points out the role of external and internal shocks in leading to party reforms (electoral defeat, change of governmental status, membership decline, scandals, etc.), little research examines how individual actors make up their minds in these processes, especially from a psychological point of view. More puzzling, very few studies so far have linked it to citizens’ perceptions and preferences toward party reforms of different natures (programmatic, organizational and personnel reforms), even though reforms require building a coalition of support to be both efficient and legitimate. Understanding how individuals process their political environment and how differences in who they are influence their political attitudes toward political parties is crucial to examining the sources of democratic fatigue. Pursuing reform strategies disconnected from citizens’ demands might indeed fail to narrow the democratic deficit, and eventually could contribute to widening the gap between party elites and citizens.

This paper presents the first phase of a research project addressing this gap. It reports the preliminary findings of a choice-based gamified ‘vignette’ survey implemented in Belgium and the UK to investigate the individual-level determinants of citizens' perceptions and preferences towards party reform. Political psychology offers, in that regard, a promising perspective since it suggests that psychological characteristics are important cognitive constructs that can play a moderating role by biasing individuals' perceptions of their (political) environment. This study hence particularly focuses on the predictive power of psychological characteristics already known as touching upon how individuals perceive situational triggers and translate them into individual or group-based political decisions, namely openness, intellectual humility and moral foundations of group loyalty and respect for authority.

Preliminary findings show that respondents have distinctive perceptions of party shocks and consistently link clear reform strategies to it when placed in the role of ‘special advisors to the party leadership’ who have to draft a response to a manipulated scenario. The study shows group variations based on the respondents' previous vote, but it also suggests variations at the individual level depending on their level of intellectual humility and group loyalty in particular. The results also show the potential for greater use of methods already widely used in political psychology, with the gamification of vignette surveys at the forefront.

Author

• Thomas Legein, Vrije Universiteit Brussel