Collective actions and political behavior: scientific production of Brazilian Social Psychology (1986-2011)

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the scientific production about collective actions and political behavior written by authors of Brazilian social psychology. The main issue is to analyze how the authors understand the politicization of social relations and the process of building a democratic society. The authors were selected from three sources – Research Groups of the CNPq, Work Groups of the ANPEPP, and Psychology and Society Brazilian Journal – and the papers were analyzed by the perspective of the Plural and Radical Democratic Theory (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe). The discussion demonstrates the distance of the articles in relation to the conception of the political based on the articulation between three moments – moment of the articulation, the moment of the contingency, moment of the antagonism – and the implications these distance. Moreover, the discussion suggests the emergence of social psychology in the debate about the political through a resumption of the concept of the hegemony in a non-essentialist perspective.