Political change as group-based control: Threat to personal control reduces the support for traditional political parties
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Plos One
Date
2022-12-08Referencia bibliográfica
Rodríguez-López, Á... [et al.] (2022) Political change as group-based control: Threat to personal control reduces the support for traditional political parties. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0278743. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278743]
Sponsorship
Agencia Estatal de Investigacion PID2019-111549GB-I00/AEI 2014/15/G/HS6/04529 2018/30/M/HS6/00298Abstract
People desire agentic representations of their personal and collective selves, such as their
own nation. When national agency is put into question, this should increase their inclination
to restore it, particularly when they simultaneously lack perceptions of personal control. In
this article, we test this hypothesis of group-based control in the context of political elections
occurring during socio-economic crises. We propose that people who are reminded of low
(vs. high) personal control will have an increased tendency to reject traditional political parties
that stand for the maintenance of a non-agentic political system. We experimentally
manipulated the salience of low vs. high personal control in five studies and measured participants’
intentions to support traditional and new political parties. Across four of five studies,
in line with the predictions, low personal control reduced support for the main traditional
conservative party (e.g., Partido Popular (PP) in Spain, the Republicans in France). These
results appeared in contexts of national economic and/or political crisis, and were most pronounced
when low (vs. high) national agency was made salient in Studies 4 and 5. The findings
support the notion that rejecting the stability of the national political system can serve
as a means to maintain a sense of control through the collective self.