Tactical Voting and Party Preferences: A Test of Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Studying the development of stable political attitudes, political scientists have argued that repeated voting for a political party reinforces initial party preferences, in a seemingly mechanistic process of habit-formation. However, the empirical evidence is scarce and the theoretical framework underdeveloped. Does the act of voting for a party improve an individual’s evaluation of this party? If so, is this effect simply due to habit-formation, or a more complex psychological mechanism? Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we examine the act of voting as a choice inducing dissonance reduction. We go beyond existing research, by focusing on tactical voters—a group for which the notion of habitual reinforcement does not predict an effect. The analyses reveal a positive effect of the act of voting tactically on the preferences for the parties voted for and may thus call for a revision of the traditional understanding of the role of voting in shaping party preferences.     

Hope and Critical Theory

Abstract

In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strong—but, argue, contingent—association that holds between hope and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justification of social hope; one which appeals to a notion of unfulfilled or frustrated natural human capacities, another which invokes a providential order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justification, turning instead to a notion of ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briefly consider their relevance for the project of critique today.     

Critical Theory,Democratic Justice and Globalisation

Abstract

One way of providing a focus for critical theory today is to articulate those substantive and robust norms of egalitarian justice that would appear to be presupposed by the idea of a republican and democratic constitutional order. It is suggested here that democratic justice requires the equalisation of effective communicative freedom among all structurally constituted social groups (SCSGs) and that this will have far-reaching implications that entail the deconstruction of all social hierarchies in both domestic and global orders. This argument is presented in three sections. The first defends the focus on groups rather than individuals in theorising democratic justice. The second intervenes critically in contemporary debates surrounding the theoretical relation between various aspects of justice including the demands of redistribution, recognition and political empowerment. The third turns to the challenges for critical theory presented by a complex and multifaceted process of globalisation and it defends a qualified form of cosmopolitanism and high lights the need for a radical democratisation of the international order.     

A Critical Theory of Social Suffering

Abstract

This paper begins by defending the twofold relevance, political and theoretical, of the notion of social suffering. Social suffering is a notion politics cannot do without today, as it seems indispensable to describe all the aspects of contemporary injustice. As such, it has been taken up in a number of significant research programmes in different social sciences (sociology, anthropology, social psychology). The notion however poses significant conceptual problems as it challenges disciplinary boundaries traditionally set up to demarcate individual and social phenomena. I argue that philosophy has a role to play in the attempt to integrate the diverging perspectives stemming from the social sciences. I attempt to show that, as it engages with the social sciences to account for the conceptual and normative issues thrown open by the question of social suffering, philosophy in fact retrieves the very idea of critical theory, as a conjugated critique of social reality and of its knowledge. I conclude by showing how the question of social suffering then becomes a useful criterion to distinguish between the different existing approaches in critical theory.     

Why Subjectivity Matters: Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the Subject

Abstract

In this paper it is argued that Habermas' critique of German Idealism is misguided and that his rejection of the philosophy of the subject is unjustified. Critical Theory needs to recognise the importance of subjectivity for all social philosophy if its theoretical aims are to be achieved. In order to demonstrate the relevance of subjectivity to Critical Theory the essay draws on analytic philosophy of mind and on the work of Manfred Frank and Dieter Henrich.     

Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine two turns towards the idea of the creative imagination in contemporary critical theory in the works of Axel Honneth and Cornelius Castoriadis. Honneth's work subsumes the idea of the creative imagination under the paradigm of mutual recognition. Castoriadis constructs the idea of the creative imagination from an ontological perspective. However, Castoriadis' idea of the primary autism of the creative imagination can be thrown into relief by Hegel's Jena Lectures. Hegel's and Castoriadis' work opens onto a subjectivity in tension, that is, a subjectivity that is forged out of a combination of subjective interiority, as well as the patterns of interaction that are multidimensional in their scope and create social spaces that force the subject beyond an initial closure.     

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

Abstract

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts’—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically