Political psychology has paid rather little attention to personality traits when explaining political attitudes and political behavior in mass publics. The present paper argues that personality traits contribute to our understanding of political attitude formation and decision making of ordinary citizens. Based on the Five Factor Model of Personality, we state hypotheses regarding the effects of personality traits on partisan attitudes and vote choice in Germany. We test the hypotheses using survey data obtained from a random sample of the Germans eligible to vote. The evidence confirms that personality traits indirectly affect partisan attitudes and voting behavior in Germany in predictable ways even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. More specifically, Openness makes citizens more inclined to support parties endorsing social liberalism whereas low scores on Conscientiousness increase the likelihood of liking and voting for parties subscribing to economic or social liberalism as do high levels on Agreeableness. High levels of Neuroticism appear to promote support for parties that offer shelter against material or cultural challenges.KEY WORDS: Big Five, five factor model of personality, personality traits, partisan attitudes, voting behavior, GermanyIn political psychology, research on political elites differs remarkably from research on mass publics. As regards political elites, scholars often rely on personality traits to explain attitudes or behavior (

Multidimensional concepts are non-compensatory when higher values on one component cannot offset lower values on another. Thinking of the components of a multidimensional phenomenon as non-compensatory rather than substitutable can have wide-ranging implications, both conceptually and empirically. To demonstrate this point, we focus on populist attitudes that feature prominently in contemporary debates about liberal democracy. Given similar established public opinion constructs, the conceptual value of populist attitudes hinges on its unique specification as an attitudinal syndrome, which is characterized by the concurrent presence of its non-compensatory concept subdimensions. Yet this concept attribute is rarely considered in existing empirical research. We propose operationalization strategies that seek to take the distinct properties of non-compensatory multidimensional concepts seriously. Evidence on five populism scales in 12 countries reveals the presence and consequences of measurement-concept inconsistencies. Importantly, in some cases, using conceptually sound operationalization strategies upsets previous findings on the substantive role of populist attitudes.

Social media today provide an impressive amount of data about users and their societal interactions, thereby offering computer and social scientists, economists, and statisticiansamong others-many new opportunities for research exploration. Arguably, one of the most interesting lines of work is that of predicting future events and developments based on social media data, as we have recently seen in the areas of politics, finance, entertainment, market demands, health, etc. In fact, an average of one in seven research papers presented at the WWW, But what can be successfully predicted and why? Since the first algorithms and techniques emerged rather recently, little is known about their overall potential, limitations and general applicability to different domains.Better understanding the predictive power and limitations of social media is therefore of utmost importance, in order to be successful and avoid false expectations, misinformation or unintended consequences. Today, current methods and techniques are far from being well understood, and it is mostly unclear to what extent or under what conditions the different methods for prediction can be applied to social media. While there exists a respectable and growing amount of literature in this area, current work is fragmented, characterized by a lack of commonly accepted evaluation approaches. Yet, this research seems to have reached a sufficient level of interest and relevance to justify a dedicated section.This special section aims to shape a frame of important questions to be addressed in this field, and fill the gaps in current research with presentations of early research on algorithms, techniques, methods and empirical studies aimed at the prediction of future or current events based on user-generated content in social media.2

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 3 failed to consider how political attitudes systematically relate to the whole system of basic value priorities (Feldman 2003). The validation of a theory that identifies a comprehensive set of basic personal values and the near universal structure of relations among them (Schwartz 1992(Schwartz , 2006 makes it possible to do this. Permanent repository linkA recent study in Italy ) examined the possibility that the motivational structure of the 10 basic values in the Schwartz (1992) value theory constrains and

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link