The Good and Bad of Social Change: Ambivalence Toward Activist Groups

Inherent to any substantive social change is the disruption of the status quo. To the extent that individuals are motivated to preserve the current social system (e.g., Jost & Banaji, British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 1–27, 1994), even social change in pursuit of positive goals might evoke ambivalent reactions. Although activist groups might elicit positivity because they are assumed to have positive qualities and they seek positive goals, they might evoke negativity because their actions disrupt the current social system. These experiments examined two different forms of disruption of the status quo. In Experiment 1, a group gaining power elicited greater ambivalence than a group losing power, regardless of the valence of the group’s goal. Importantly, the conditions that evoked ambivalence did not inhibit behavioral support. Experiment 2 found that a new group elicited more ambivalence than an established group when pursuing a positive goal. Consistent with theories emphasizing maintenance of the status quo, these findings demonstrate that attitudes toward activist groups do not derive solely from self-interest.

Strange bedfellows: Coalition makeup and perceptions of democratic performance among electoral winners

We argue that the partisan makeup of governing coalitions affects perceptions of democratic performance among those who voted for a government party. We introduce ambivalence toward the governing parties as the mechanism that drives this relationship, and we argue that such ambivalence, which occurs when favorability ratings of the parties vary, will be more common where the parties are more ideologically diverse. After advancing our theory, we test our expectations with post-election survey data from several countries. Evidence demonstrates that coalition ambivalence is greater where governing parties are ideologically divergent, and, even when controlling for this ideological divergence, ambivalence leads to more negative perceptions of democratic performance, bringing the attitudes of electoral winners closer to those of individuals who did not vote for a party in government.     

Frayed Connections,Fraught Projections: The Troubling Work of Shirin Neshat

Moore discusses the work of visual artist Shirin Neshat exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from July to September 2000, which comprised the photographic series Women of Allah and the video installation trilogy Turbulent, Rapture and Fervor . Her emphasis is on the way in which Neshat's work addresses the critical issues of positioning, representation and cross-cultural reception. The exhibition was marketed as referring to 'the social, cultural, and religious codes of Muslim societies in general, and Iranian society in particular'. Moore argues, however, that the images tend to project a departicularized cultural context that encourages a neo-orientalist interpretation. She first analyses Women of Allah in terms of symbolic projections of womanhood during the Islamic revolution in Iran and in light of post-revolutionary gendered realities. A critique is also mounted of Neshat'snostalgic self-investment in the revolutionary scene. In a discussion of the later video trilogy, Moore disentangles gendered and cross-cultural binaries in order to theorize the space between the dual screens. Her conclusion is that this intermediate space figures the ambivalence of a displaced cultural perspective. As such, it forces a spectatorial enactment of the frayed or troubled connections that the artist makes between two cultural locales.     

The Cadillac,the mother-in-law,and the ballot: Individual and contextual roots of ambivalence in Swiss direct democracy

Citizens may experience irreconcilable and conflictive values or feelings about a political issue. They may, for instance, both believe in a woman's right to autonomy over her body (pro choice) and that human life begins before birth (pro life). This conflictive situation – referred to as ambivalence in relevant literature – has detrimental effects on political choices. For instance, ambivalence may enhance instability in candidates' evaluations, delay the formation of vote intentions, and finally weaken predictions on vote choices.This being, literature has less looked at what may induce ambivalence, and especially on how informational context may affect it. Our paper aims to compensate for this lack, by assessing under which individual and contextual conditions ambivalence has more chances to be felt by citizens. Through a series of hierarchical estimations based on post-electoral data on Swiss direct democracy and original data retracing content of political campaigns, we will demonstrate that individual determinants (political sophistication, exposure to political campaigns, and heuristics) as well as political campaigning (intensity and negativism) strongly determine the existence of ambivalence.     

Political Ambivalence as Praxis: The Limits of Consensus in Habermas's Theory of the Public Sphere

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Ko?akowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from Habermas’s work on the public sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism.