Abstract
The chapter presents some concluding remarks that underline the most innovative aspects of the volume, starting from which in-depth considerations are proposed that aim to recompose a unified picture of the investigations presented in the different chapters. The in-depth considerations are conducted from an interdisciplinary perspective ranging from psycho-social literature to political science, political philosophy, and sociology. The ideas presented in the introduction and new elements linked to populism are resumed. It starts from the results given by the different chapters to analyze the way of dealing with populism in reference to uncertainty, amplified by the outbreak of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, to the role of positive emotions, to the promotion of deliberative democracy, to leadership also linked to the mediatization of politics, to the function of social media. In doing this, it tries to counteract the entirely negative readings of contemporary times, proposing a vision more anchored to the recently developed positive psychology while enhancing the emancipatory role that the elements of conflict can have in responding to existing imbalances. Particular attention is paid to some right-wing populist women leaders, analyzed in one of the chapters of the volume, and their way of optimizing the use of social media to exercise effective leadership that seeks to bypass the dominant androcentrism in politics without questioning it. In doing these final considerations, reference is made to mainstream and critical scholars, both as authors of the chapters and as scholars present in the literature. The concluding remarks intend to provide a hybrid point of view that answers some of the questions posed by populism. Finally, the three psychologies of the beginnings of political psychology are compared - the psychology of crowds, the psychology of the public, and the psychology of the nation and the race - with their developments stimulated by the different forms of contemporary populism. I conclude by underlining with Gergen the importance, for research, of an ethical and moral tension towards the future, knowing that, however careful and rigorous our analyses may be, chance always intervenes to question the conclusions we had arrived at.
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Notes
- 1.
As stated in the 2022 report, “The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) is an intergovernmental organization with the mission to advance democracy worldwide, as a universal human aspiration and enabler of sustainable development” (IDEA, 2022).
- 2.
“società fondata sul diritto non è una società del tutto bianco o tutto nero, ma una società della penombra, del dissenso e della mediazione, della ricerca per tentativi ed errori della soluzione ai problemi che sono nella maggior parte dei casi associati a sensazioni di stress, di timore, di rischio.”
- 3.
“…in una pluralità di segmenti tendenzialmente privi di radicamento in una sfera comunicativa comune, in una miriade di «bolle» in larga parte autoreferenziali e potenzialmente polarizzate.”
- 4.
The model shows that the effects of the mass media on political orientations follow a flow of communication that goes from the mass media to opinion leaders, and from these to peers in face-to-face interaction and in the community (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944).
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Sensales, G. (2024). Concluding Remarks. In: Sensales, G. (eds) Political Psychology Perspectives on Populism. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44073-1_11
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