Identity Change in Ninety Minutes: The Cognitive, Evaluative and Emotional Dynamics of Identity Change at a Political Rally

The paper will unite three approaches mostly lacking synergy so far. The first is Henri Tajfel’s claim (Tajfel 1972: 292) that social identity has three components: knowledge, emotion and evaluation. The second is the so-called emotional or affective turn in social sciences in general (e.g., Barbalet 2001) and in political science in particular (e.g., Braud 1996, Huddy 2001, Berezin 2002, Marcus 2002, Neuman et al 2007) especially in movement studies (e.g., Goodwin et al. 2001). Finally, the third is the recent interest in the crowds and crowd behaviour in sociology (e.g., Neville – Reicher 2011, Reicher 2011). The research underpinning the paper focused on a political rally in Budapest in 2013 which was meant to be a mass event in order to unite and mobilize the fragmented political left half year before the parliamentary elections but concluded in a passionate anger by the crowd against the leader of Hungarian Socialist Party the biggest leftist organization in Hungary. Tajfel’s claim draws the analyst’s attention to the interdependence on and interference between the three aspects in developing and changing political identities. The seven speakers, constructing and offering the crowd different versions of leftist identity, put forward cognitive and evaluative as well as emotion inciting discourses that had intertwined and reinforced each other by the time the socialist leader entered the scene. The dynamics of the interference between the discourses and the emotions in creating, strengthening as well as weakening identities will be presented applying the theory of interaction ritual chains by Randall Collins (2004) and the shame/anger theory by Thomas Scheff (e.g., 1990). The research and the paper will, therefore, support the claim by Steven Reicher that instead of presupposing identity loss at crowd events, one should look for the signs of identity change through the interaction within the crowd and between the crowd and the political leaders. References in the abstract Barbalet, Jack M. (2001) Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure. A Macrosociological Approach. Cambridge University Press. Berezin, Mabel (2002): Secure states: towards a political sociology of emotion. In: Barbalet, Jack (ed.) Emotions and Sociology. Balckwell Publishing. Braud, Philippe (1996) L’émotion en politique: problèmes d’analyse. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Collins, Randall (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press. Fergus, Neville and Stephen Reicher (2011) The experience of collective participation: shared identity, relatedness and emotionality. Contemporary Social Science Vol. 6, No. 3. Goodwin, Jeff - James M. Jasper - Francesca Polletta (eds.) (2001): Passionate Politics. Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Huddy, Leonie (2001) From Social to Political Identity: A Critical Examination of Social Identity Theory. Political Psychology, Vol. 22, No. 1. Marcus, George E. (2002) The Sentimental Citizen. Emotion in Democratic Politics. The Pennsylvania State University Press. Neuman, W. Russell - George E. Marcus - Ann N. Crigler - Michael MacKuen (eds.) (2007) The Affect Effect. Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Reicher, Steven (2011) Mass action and mundane reality: an argument for putting crowd analysis at the centre of the social sciences. Contemporary Social Science Vol. 6, No. 3. Scheff, Thomas J. (1990) Microsociology. Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. Tajfel, Henri (1972) La categorization sociale. In Introduction à la psychologie sociale. Vol. 1, edited by Moscovici, Serge. Paris: Larousse.