Introduction: Origins, Developments and Current Trends

The aim of our Handbook is to discuss theoretically, methodologically and empirically what political psychology has become in a European and global context, how it investigates its core subject matter and what some of the main findings have been. Theoretically, the Handbook seeks to pluralise political psychology as a field by discussing how historical and contemporary approaches and ways of defining political psychology have depended on context and discipline. In particular, the book shows how moving beyond the state of the discipline as traditionally defined opens up novel theoretical discussions as well as alternative methodological approaches and empirical focuses. The content of the book further illustrates how political psychology needs to expand in terms of theoretical depth, methodological diversity and European-specific examples and approaches to account for a broad variety of work that is currently being undertaken across universities in Europe and elsewhere. The Handbook takes an interdisciplinary approach and aims at understanding how political, economic and social forces interact with psychological dynamics and how these are mutually researched and reinforced across a number of relevant empirical cases.