The Big Five Personality Traits in the Political Arena

Abstract

Recent political science research on the effects of core personality traits-the Big Five-contributes to our understanding of how people interact with their political environments. This research examines how individual-level variations in broad, stable psychological characteristics affect individual-level political outcomes. In this article, we review recent work that uses the Big Five to predict political attitudes and behavior. We also replicate some of these analyses using new data to examine the possibility that prior findings stem from sampling error or unique political contexts. Finally, we discuss several of the challenges faced by scholars who are currently pursuing or are interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. These challenges include refining theoretical explanations of how the Big Five shape political outcomes, addressing important measurement concerns, and resolving inconsistencies across studies.

Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia

“…Many studies include up to twenty questions per trait in order to maximize the internal validity of the measures. In our study we followed Gerber et al (2010Gerber et al ( , 2011aGerber et al ( , 2011b in using the simple standard Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) of Gosling, Rentfrow and Swann (2003). Respondents were asked, "Here is a list of characteristics that a person might have.…”

“…Moreover, while the TIPI is clearly quite crude, Carney et al (2008) examined a range of more subtle measures designed to address the possibility that liberals and conservatives might present themselves to the world differently, and their findings confirmed much of the existing literature. Gerber et al (2011a) compared the TIPI with the longer (44 items) Big Five Inventory (BFI) and found "little evidence that the choice of personality battery is particularly consequential in models predicting political attitudes" though for political interest and turnout there was variation between the two measures across all five traits (Gerber et al 2011a;280-2). Given that we are primarily interested here in attitudes, these results are reassuring.…”

“…Thus, rather than developing our own battery as some scholars have done (Anderson 2009, Mondak et al 2010, we translated an existing measure that has been used in a number of very prominent studies in political science (Gerber et al 2010(Gerber et al , 2011a(Gerber et al , 2011b and in hundreds more studies by personality psychologists. At the time of writing this article, the TIPI has been cited some 3000 times.…”

The politicians’ wage gap: insights from German members of parliament

“…The scarce research on the Big Five in the political arena suggests that politicians are more extraverted and more agreeable than the average citizen (Caprara et al, 2003;Gerber et al, 2011). If any, these results would suggest a negative selection into politics (in terms of income) due to the negative effect of agreeableness on earnings.…”

The Secret of Political Leaders’ Personal Appeal: (How) Do Personality Traits Matter?

“…The Big Five approach is extensively covered in literature (for a general review and relevance for political sciences, see John &Srivastava, 1999 andGerber, 2011) and a broader discussion of the model would go far beyond the limits of this paper. However, it should be noted that this particular theoretical approach was chosen due to the fact that the Big Five are seen as broad domains of personality, collectively representing a hierarchy that organizes and summarizes the vast majority of subsidiary traits" (Mondak, 2010, p. 25).…”