Loving a good fight: personality traits and reactions to conflict in TV debates

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of media influence on political behaviour by investigating the ways in which people with different personality types react to candidates’ conflicting rhetoric in televised debates during election campaigns. It analyses responses along three reaction types: evaluations of candidate character, debate performance, and voting intentions in two debate clips from the 2019 UK general election and 2022 Australian federal election. The study uses semi-structured interviews with respondents in the UK and relies on deductive, flexible thematic analysis. The findings show that respondents’ personality traits are associated with different reactions to conflict in televised debates, which are sometimes mediated by the nature of attack, partisanship and preconceptions about candidates especially in the UK debate.