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Populism is a powerful social force that has reshaped the political landscapes of many nations since the turn of the 21st century. Much of the success of populist movements is attributed to various social crises and a deep dissatisfaction with political systems. In the present issue, we sought to find papers that investigate what drives the demand for populist politics during crises on a psychological level and, correspondingly, how populist rhetoric influences the way individuals think about, and respond, to crises. In this editorial, we introduce a multidisciplinary issue and summarize the key themes stemming from the articles included. The contributions addressed various forms of crises; from identity issues to global transformations, and various aspects of populism; from the antiestablishment attitudes of the public, to the populist rhetoric of political actors. There was also a key theme centered on the role of emotions. We believe that these topics are of great interest to political psychologists of any mold. We hope that this special issue can play a part in increasing our understanding of how populism thrives during crises and in driving future research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a comparative political behaviour approach to examine the multifaceted nature of Turkey's European Union ( EU) membership bid from the perspective of the EU citizens. We propose a multidimensional explanation for EU citizens' attitude towards Turkey's membership by referring to the political psychology literature on attitudinal ambivalence. We examine whether EU citizens simultaneously hold multiple and conflicting considerations on Turkey's EU accession bid, and whether this ambivalence has attitudinal consequences. To that end, we use the Eurobarometer 66.1 data set to analyze the EU public attitudes on various aspects of possible Turkish EU membership. The findings show that the EU citizens maintain ambivalent views about Turkish membership across three domain pairs: economy-security, immigration-security and population-culture. The significant impact of these ambivalence domains on increasing support for Turkey's membership to the EU is further discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we investigate the effect of social networks on the quality of political thinking. First, the article introduces new social network concepts into the literature and develops the corresponding measures. Second, the article explores the quality of political thinking as a concept and develops its measures based on the volume and the causality of thoughts, and their integrative complexity. We make use of a survey to collect information on social networks and the experimental manipulation controls for the effect of policy frames. Our findings consistently show the significant negative impact of cohesive social networks on the quality of policy-relevant thinking. We conclude that close-knit social networks could create 'social bubbles' that would limit how one communicates with others and reasons about politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]