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Fifty years ago, Serge Moscovici first outlined a theory of social representations. In this article, we attempt to discuss and to contextualize research that has been inspired by this original impetus from the particular angle of its relevance to political psychology. We argue that four defining components of social representations need to be taken into account, and that these elements need to be articulated with insights from the social identity tradition about the centrality of self and group constructions in order to develop original insights into political psychological phenomena. First, social representations are shared knowledge, and the way interpretations of the world are collectively elaborated is critical to the way people are able to act within the world. Second, social representations are meta-knowledge, which implies that what people assume relevant others know, think, or value is part of their own interpretative grid, and that collective behavior can often be influenced more powerfully at the level of meta-representations than of intimate beliefs. Third, social representations are enacted communication, which means that social influence is exerted by the factors that constrain social practices as much as by the discourse that interprets these practices.Fourth, social representations are world-making assumptions: collective understandings do not only reflect existing realities but often bring social reality into being. Put together, these four components provide a distinctive theoretical perspective on power, resistance and conflict. The added conceptual value of this perspective is illustrated by showing how it allows revisiting ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude with implications for research practices and discuss how the proposed model of social representations invites us to define new priorities and challenges for the methods used to study political psychological phenomena.

This commentary outlines an approach to social representations which emphasizes the normative and dynamic nature of shared knowledge. Social representations both connect and divide people, for example through shared ingroup and outgroup stereotypes derived from antagonistic social representations. Through asymmetrical intergroup communication and influence, in turn, social representations are formed, maintained, and contested. In this dynamic process, powerful majorities attempt to define the meaning of new or otherwise important information as a function of their group norms, while subordinate minorities employ propaganda techniques of social influence to resist majority influence and propose alternative positions.

In this article, we first suggest that the approach presented by Elcheroth, Doise, and Reicher is particularly relevant in view of the \"neuroscientific turn \"that faces political psychology. Thus, we note that the distinction between content and process and the predilection for general, intrapsychological, and content-free explanations of political cognition and behavior are encouraged by these developments. We contrast the contribution of the social representations approach to the understanding of social conflict and social change with the approach promoted by these new perspectives. Next, we consider the four themes highlighted by Elcheroth et al. as distinctive of the social representations approach. We notice convergences between these themes and several areas of u mainstream \"social and political psychology and show that several of these themes have surfaced in these fields without making reference to this approach.

In this response to the commentaries, we make one concession and try to clarify two critical points raised by the commentators. The concession is about the common stock of knowledge on which social representations approaches draw in general and the model outlined in our article in particular. The two points we attempt to clarify concern the importance of both an intergroup perspective and of the structural components of power to our model of social representations.

Along with other South-European countries, since 2008, Greece has experienced deep economic and social dislocation, leading to a crisis of representation and triggering populist mobilisations and anti-populist reactions. This article focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted much attention in the relevant literature. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution from a discursive perspective, it articulates a brief yet comprehensive genealogy of populist and anti-populist actors (parties and media) in Greece, exploring their discursive strategies. Moving on, it identifies the main characteristics this antagonistic divide took on within the newly contested, crisis-ridden sociopolitical field, highlighting the implications for a contemporary understanding of cleavages, with potentially broader implications.

Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties is higher than at any time since the end of the Civil War. This essay describes how the modern polarization trend emerged and its implications for mass political behavior and public policy outcomes. We contend that contemporary political polarization must be understood in terms of both the ideological divergence of the parties and the expansion of the liberal–conservative dimension of conflict to a wider set of social and cultural conflicts in American society. We close with the speculation that the Republican Party has become the more fractured of the parties along the liberal–conservative dimension at both the elite and mass level.

Using an original data set of roll call votes and bill co-sponsorships across three high salience issues (immigration, labor, and education) and one low salience issue (social security), this article analyzes the 111th Congress to assess representation of Latinos. Partisanship is the key determinant in member behavior on voting, not the member's race or ethnicity or constituent demographics. For bill co-sponsorships, Latino members are only more active on high salience issue areas compared with non-Latino members. Increases in Latino population do not influence behavior. The results also indicate that African American and Democratic legislators offer Latinos considerable amounts of substantive representation.

The extensive scholarship devoted to the congruence of mass-elite policy preferences lacks consensus about the meaning, comparison, and measurement across political settings. This makes comparisons difficult and raises obstacles to advancing the debates. This symposium aims to identify the diversity of methodological choices and to reflect systematically on several key choices of particular importance in understanding the congruence. The contributions to the symposium compare and contrast how several types of measurement fare in diverse political contexts in Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and East Asia, and what we can learn from those methodological choices.

Applications of psychology to education and assessment often take for granted Western cultural assumptions about the nature of intelligence, ignore cultural features of human cognition other than language, and liken the influence of socialization on development to biological nutrition. Such oversimplifications can lead to stigmatizing culturally different persons as atypical or deficient and to perpetuating oppressive cultural hegemony. A cultural lens can benefit psychological science by facilitating communication with diverse audiences, channeling new knowledge into social progress, and generating theoretical insights about human behavior and experience, such as linguistic flexibility as a dimension of cognition, social responsibility as a dimension of intelligence, and intimate culture as a filter between larger social representations and the frame of reference for an individual mind.