Personality and Political Participation: The Mediation Hypothesis (original) (raw)
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Personality Traits and Participation in Political Processes
The Journal of Politics, 2011
Using data from two recent surveys, we analyze the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political participation. We examine forms of participation that differ in domain (local politics vs. national campaigns) as well as in the amount of conflict involved, whether they are likely to yield instrumental benefits, and whether they are likely to be viewed as a duty-characteristics that may affect the relationships between dispositional personality traits and political activity. We find relationships between personality traits and: (1) both self-reported and actual turnout (measured using administrative records), (2) overreporting of turnout, and (3) a variety of other modes of participation. The effect of personality on political participation is often comparable to the effects of factors that are central in earlier models of turnout, such as education and income. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, these relationships vary depending on personality-relevant characteristics of each participatory act.
American Political Science Review, 2010
P eople's enduring psychological tendencies are reflected in their traits. Contemporary research on personality establishes that traits are rooted largely in biology, and that the central aspects of personality can be captured in frameworks, or taxonomies, focused on five trait dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. In this article, we integrate a five-factor view of trait structure within a holistic model of the antecedents of political behavior, one that accounts not only for personality, but also for other factors, including biological and environmental influences. This approach permits attention to the complex processes that likely underlie trait effects, and especially to possible trait-situation interactions. Primary tests of our hypotheses draw on data from a 2006 U.S. survey, with supplemental tests introducing data from Uruguay and Venezuela. Empirical analyses not only provide evidence of the value of research on personality and politics, but also signal some of the hurdles that must be overcome for inquiry in this area to be most fruitful. T he effort to identify and comprehend the underpinnings of human behavior requires attention to two broad classes of factors, those that are situational and those that are dispositional. Our accounts gain added nuance when they also contemplate the interplay between these two sets of forces. Recognition of these three pillars of behavior
Political participation, personality, and the conditional effect of campaign mobilization
Electoral Studies, 2017
Why are some people more responsive to campaign mobilization than others? I argue that the composition of a person's core personality makes some people more responsive to mobilization cues than others. However, the degree to which personality alters the effectiveness of mobilization also depends on the type of political participation for which people are being mobilized. I explore the determinants of political participation by looking at the interaction between the Big-5 traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability and the intensity of campaign environments. This paper demonstrates that despite the possible ameliorative effect mobilization has on unequal patterns of political participation, an enduring source of participatory inequality may very well be rooted in a person's core psychological structure.
Personality and political behavior
Oxford handbook of political psychology, 2003
Using data from two recent surveys, we analyze the relationship between personality traits, as measured by the Five-factor Model, and political participation, political ideology, partisanship, and vote choice. We confirm previous findings, including the strong positive association between the personality trait of Openness and liberalism and between Conscientiousness and conservatism, and also report several new results. We merged administrative records containing actual turnout and party registration status with our survey data. Using this novel approach, we confirm that the strong relationship between personality and politics holds when actual behavior is substituted for survey reports. We also measure the association of personality and several forms of political participation, including voting, contributing, and volunteering. The effect of personality on participation is often comparable to, or larger in magnitude than, the effect of factors that are central in earlier models of turnout, such as religious attendance, age, education, and income. 1 recent decades political science has only rarely taken note of, or contributed research on, the role of personality in political behavior.
Personality and Turnout: Results from the Finnish Longitudinal Studies
Scandinavian Political Studies, 2011
Scholars in the field of electoral participation have for long been aware that turnout is strongly connected to sociopsychological variables such as religiosity, party identification, political interest and sense of political efficacy. The impact of personality characteristics has remained largely unexplored until recently. Based on the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development (JYLS, original N = 369), this article analyses the links between individuals' personality traits and their propensity to vote at ages 36, 42 and 50. The personality traits are measured by using the five-factor model of personality consisting of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. The results show both extraversion and agreeableness to be positively associated with electoral participation, but the findings are not consistent at all ages. Finally, the analysis suggests that the effect of extraversion varies depending on the level of education. Whereas well-educated people are more prone to be habitual voters regardless of their level of extraversion, among less-educated respondents it has a more sizeable effect.
Personality traits, political attitudes and the propensity to vote
European Journal of Political Research, 2011
This article examines the link between personality traits, political attitudes and the propensity to vote in elections, using an Internet panel survey conducted in two Canadian provinces at the time of the 2008 federal election and the subsequent provincial elections. It first establishes that the two most proximate attitudes that shape one's propensity to vote are political interest and sense of civic duty. The article then look at specific personality traits (altruism, shyness, efficacy and conflict avoidance) that could affect level of political interest, civic duty and the propensity to vote in elections. In the last part of the analysis, a model is proposed and tested, according to which the impact of personality traits is indirect, being mediated by interest and duty. The article shows that the data are consistent with such an interpretation.
The Participatory Personality: Evidence from Latin America
British Journal of Political Science, 2010
To a substantial extent, political participation arises as a result of individuals' interactions with aspects of the social and political environment. The resources people amass, the social connections they develop and the messages they receive combine to influence their propensity towards political action. However, building on recent research on personality and political behaviour, 1 we posit that attention to these factors alone yields an incomplete account of the origins of participation. Our claim is that by their nature, some people are open to new experiences and others are not, some are responsible, some are outgoing and so on. These factors constitute fundamental elements of personality. We contend that enduring psychological differences-differences in personalityinfluence patterns of political participation. To incorporate personality in accounts of participation, a framework for the study of personality is needed, as are datasets that include indicators of both personality and political behaviour. For many years, viable personality taxonomies were lacking. Likewise, datasets on political participation that include measures of personality remain rare. Together, these circumstances assured that most research on political participation would omit attention to personality. But these circumstances are changing. Contemporary models of trait structure capture the breadth of psychological differences in parsimonious form, and, as a result, surveys on political behaviour have begun to include brief measures of central personality traits. We capitalize on these changing circumstances in this research note. Recent studies have shown that personality influences participation in the British, American and Italian contexts, 2 but extant work has not tested the possible impact of personality outside of advanced democracies-contexts that often have highly fluid political arenas. Using data from national surveys conducted in Uruguay and Venezuela in 2007, we explore whether the 'Big Five' personality trait dimensions matter for patterns in political participation in those nations. The focus on these nations extends the breadth of research on personality and participation in three manners. First, the move beyond advanced
Personality Traits and Political Participation: Evidence from South Korea
Political Psychology, 2013
Using a nationally representative survey fielded in 2009, we analyze the relationships between personality traits and various modes of political participation in South Korea. We find statistically significant relationships between personality (measured by the Five-Factor Model) and several nonelectoral modes of participation. Openness correlates positively with protest participation, rally attendance, financial contributions to political causes, news media contacts, and political activities via the Internet. Agreeableness correlates negatively with these five participation modes as well as petition signing. Conscientiousness is positively associated with individual political acts (e.g., contacting news media and elected officials and donation), while it is negatively associated with collective actions such as participation in rally. However, we do not find any significant relationship between personality and voter turnout. Reflecting an unusually conflictual political climate of South Korea in 2008, we discuss these findings' implications focusing on the personality-situation interactions.
Call for Papers: Personality and Voter Turnout
politicalcommunication.org
The term personality refers to the fact that people have different, relatively stable characteristics that influence their perceptions and behaviors. One of the most widely accepted models is the big five factor model, which advocates that individual personality differences can be ...
Personality Traits (“Big Five”) and the Propensity to Political Protest: Alternative Models
Political Psychology, 2013
In a representative panel study, citizens of Leipzig (East Germany) were interviewed in 1993 and 1996 about their incentives for and participation in political protest activities. Conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness to experience, and extraversion (the Big Five) were measured with 16 bipolar adjectives. The present report supplements a previous work of the authors that drew on the theories of rational choice and collective action and conceived of incentives as proximal causes and personality dispositions as distant causes of political protest. Based on structural equation modelling (SEM), the present article deals with the respondents' recurrent reports on protest incentives and protest acts as indicators of the latent construct protest propensity that is according to the predictions directly influenced by openness to experience (O+), agreeableness (A-), neuroticism (N-), and reciprocity orientation (N*E+) with 35% explained variance.