Orthodox Mobilizations and Political Identities in Post-Soviet Georgia

Based on field research carried out over the last two decades, this article analyzes the labile nature of the relationship between religion and politics in Georgia. It aims to understand not only the rational and deliberate processes in which elites engage for political ends but also to grasp the diversity of actors and patterns of religion mobilization. It argues that three main types of articulations have developed since the 1990s: the mobilization of Orthodoxy (1) in the service of nation-building; (2) in the construction of an anti-elite popular identity; and (3) as a moral crusade. Each type of articulation involves specific social actors, organizational forms, and relations with political institutions.

Self-Silencing Strategies in Casual Conversations about Politics in Rural Poland

Self-silencing can be a discursive strategy for presenting personal opinions in casual conversations about politics, especially when these take place in an unpredictable or hostile socio-political environment. In such situations, political identities may be performed through the use of inferred forms, such as allusion, irony or implicit suggestion. In this article, forms of muting one’s voice by using indirect speech are tracked in interviews conducted among villagers in the mountainous Nowy Targ county in southern Poland at the beginning of the 21st century. The aim in presenting these examples is to show that sometimes selfsilencing can serve to make an adversary’s voice more audible, to help avoid definitive judgement and to create space for an exchange of opinions.

La rhétorique de la congolité dans la publicité en RD Congo. Enjeux d’un discours de populisme nationaliste en Afrique francophone

The field of advertising is a melting pot of ideologies, that is, of both cultural and political identities. Today, these are built in and through social discourses specific to the contemporary context. In DR Congo, the instrumentation of the Congolese paradigm with a hint of sovereignty has increasingly become a constant in the advertising discourse. It is a media dynamic of expression of a certain autarky against Western and Sino-American economic imperialism, through the promotion of the local industry. It is deployed through the rhetoric of « Congolity » which is understood in terms of a catalyst for the issues of a discourse of nationalist populism in a country of French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa.

The changing electoral market in Britain

The underlying purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the country’s electoral marketplace is more open than it once was and that, consequently, the competition for votes between parties is also more extensive. We begin with a consideration of how the electoral marketplace came to be relatively ‘closed’ in the first place, which entails an account of the historically derived linkages between parties and social groups in Britain, as well as the social psychology of fixed political identities. Following this, we examine how the electoral market began to open up after 1970, through a review of the widespread evidence of growing electoral instability since then. In truth, there never was an entirely closed electoral market in the UK, but since 1970 the evidence of significant electoral change suggests that the scope of competition has increased in line with an expansion of the market for ‘available’ votes.

Political Identities and Science Learning

This Current Insights explores emerging work that examines how students’ political identities influence and are influenced by science learning.

Polarisation vs consensus-building: How US and German news media portray climate change as a feature of political identities

Perceptions of climate politics often align with individual political leaning and associated media consumption patterns, pointing to a need for a fine-grained understanding of how the media integrate climate change with political identities. This study presents an in-depth qualitative analysis of political identity portrayals from 229 articles published in six German and US news outlets during May-July 2019. The results show that the outlets consumed by left- and right-leaning audiences emphasise oppositional identity portrayals, portraying features that are likely to trigger a negative response towards political identities typically op-posed by their recipients. The outlets with a more balanced or centrist audience offer a wider array of identity portrayals and emphasise policy questions over fundamental beliefs. Observed patterns differ considerably between Germany and the US, reflecting political and media system differences. The results add to understanding how the media contribute to political polarisation and consensus-building regarding climate change.