Une étude de cas à propos de la responsabilité civique en système démocratique vs totalitaire
Social representations, conformity and minority processes.A case study about civic responsibility in a democratic vs a totalitarian system

Summary/Abstract: Tthis paper provides an empirical illustration of a theoretical proposal to explore at the societal level a possible link between the two most important theories formulated by Serge Moscovici: the Theory of Social Representations (1961) and the Theory of Social Change (1976). This proposal (Rouquette, 1999) is based on a general social psychological theory of the subject-citizen (Rouquette, 1988), which considers the citizen, the “object” of political psychology and a product of the social system, under three aspects: the citizen-as-thought-about, the citizen-who-thinks, and the citizen-who-acts. While going beyond the intra- and interindividual level, this proposal provided a theoretical link made at the societal level between social representations, conformity and minority processes: indeed, it suggested that the appropriation of the representation of the citizen-as-thought-about .by the citizen-who-thinks explains the ultimate conformity of the individual action to the representation of the citizen-as-thought-about. On the contrary, the minority process is likely to transform the representation of the citizen-as-thought-about. Hhere we illustrated this theoretical proposal with empirical data from a social psychological case study about civic responsibility in a democratic vs .a totalitarian system (France vs Russia). Tthe study used the structural approach to the social representations to analyze those of civic responsibility built by young adults (N=319) who were socialized in the two systems.

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