Politikai közösség kilencven perc alatt.
Political Community in Ninety Minutes

The Cognitive, Evaluative and Emotional Dynamics of Identity Change at a Political Rally

Summary/Abstract: The paper unites three approaches mostly lacking synergy so far. The first is Henri Tajfel’s claim that social identity has three components: knowledge, emo- tion and evaluation. The second is the so-called emotional or affective turn in social sciences in general and in political science in particular. Finally, the third is the recent interest in the crowds and crowd behaviour in sociology. 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 conclud- ed 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 dynamics of the interference between the discourses and the emotions in creating, strengthening as well as weakening identities are pre- sented by applying the theory of interaction ritual chains by Randall Collins and the shame/anger theory by Thomas Scheff.

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