Collective memory for political leaders in a collaborative government system: Evidence for generation-specific reminiscence effects

Meier, Beat (2020). Collective memory for political leaders in a collaborative government system: Evidence for generation-specific reminiscence effects. Memory and Cognition, 49(1), pp. 83-89. Springer 10.3758/s13421-020-01076-8

Preview

Text Meier2020_Article_CollectiveMemoryForPoliticalLe.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (359kB) | Preview

Collective memory is shared by a group and is part of that group’s identity. Memory for political leaders is a prototypical case of collective memory. The present study investigated collective memory for Swiss federal councilors in order to test the trajectory of collective memory across four different generations (i.e., Millennials, Generation X, Baby-Boomers, and Silents) in a collaborative government system. In contrast to a presidential system, Switzerland is governed by seven equal councilors who share power and responsibilities. Thus, the individual member of the government is less important, the number of councilors is larger compared to a presidential system, which may influence collective memory. The results revealed a recency effect as well as a generation-specific reminiscence effect, but no primacy effect as reported for presidential systems. These results indicate that the contribution of semantic memory and autobiographic memory to the trajectory of collective memory vary across government systems. Specifically, for a collaborative government system, autobiographic memory has a stronger contribution to the trajectory of collective memory.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

273 since deposited on 11 Aug 2020
12 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item