The Personality Basis of Political Preferences

Abstract

Personality and political preferences -2 Why do individuals differ in their political preferences? Answers to this question have often focused on the social contexts individuals find themselves living in. At the broadest level, people are assumed to adopt positions that reflect the interests, identity, or values of the groups they belong to (Mason, 2018) and to shift their beliefs in response to situations (e.g., recession or growing inequality) that arise at particular times. Political preferences are also generally thought to be learned in the context of various social relationships. One example of this is the tendency for people to acquire the political identities and preferences held by their parents (Jennings & Niemi, 1991;Sears & Levy, 2003) or others in their social networks (Huckfeldt, Johnson, & Sprague, 2004;Newcomb, 1943). In the study of mass belief systems, an even more important example is the phenomenon of top-down 'elite opinion leadership' in which citizens who identify with particular parties or ideologies adopt the sets of beliefs and issue attitudes modeled by leaders who share their partisan and/or ideological affiliations (Converse, 1964;McClosky & Zaller, 1984;Zaller, 1992; see also Abramowitz, 2010;Levendusky, 2009).Recently, researchers have pointed toward a different answer: the bottom-up consequences of personality differences. A burgeoning literature suggests that individual differences in psychological traits, needs, and motives reliably predict variance in political preferences (e.g.,

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review.

“…We only examine a subset of psychological variables that are commonly framed as causes or correlates of political ideology in the present investigation. Perhaps most importantly, we did not include measures relevant to threat sensitivity and existential needs, from physiological indicators (Bakker et al, 2020) to negativity bias (Johnston & Madson, 2022) to trait neuroticism (Federico, 2022), which features prominently in several explanatory accounts of political ideology (Hibbing et al, 2014; Jost, 2017). That said, the literature on these accounts is murky and either does not appear to replicate (Bakker et al, 2020; Johnston & Madson, 2022) or differs in both direction and magnitude across threat-sensitivity indicators, conservatism indicators, and contexts (Bergh & Brandt, 2022; Brandt & Bakker, 2022; Kahn et al, 2022).…”

“…Reflecting such pervasive definitional wooliness, political conservatism has often been operationalized in many studies using measures that include rigidity-related content, and vice versa (Malka et al, 2017). Moreover, the magnitude and direction of relations between “the right” and “rigidity” seem to vary greatly as a function of context, methodology, and individual differences (e.g., from norms in political discourse to measurement modality to people’s degree of political engagement; Federico, 2022; Johnston et al, 2017).…”

Abortion Attitudes: An Overview of Demographic and Ideological Differences

“…There are, however, a few reasons to expect that personality will correlate with abortion support. First, personality factors correlate consistently with a range of political preferences (for a thorough review, see Federico, 2022). In particular, Openness to Experience-a trait indexing people's preferences for novelty and culturally diverse experiences-correlates negatively with conservative policy positions on a range of issues including LGBT rights , resource redistribution (Johnston et al, 2017), and minority rights (Ziller & Berning, 2021), as well as conservative party choice (Chirumbolo & Leone, 2010;Rentfrow et al, 2009) and conservative ideological identification (Osborne et al, 2021;Roets et al, 2014;Sibley et al, 2012).…”

Left and right ideological orientations as intragroup strategies of cultural preservation and promotion

“…Liberalism also has social and economic manifestations (Helleiner, 2003;Mirowski & Plehwe, 2015). Social liberalism places greater emphasis on personal liberty, self-determination, body autonomy, and equality, and correlates to policies that mitigate social inequalities and promote social justice (Federico, 2022;Malka et al, 2014).…”