Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice
نویسندگان
چکیده
Voters’ political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.
منابع مشابه
Personalizing politics: a congruency model of political preference.
Modern politics become personalized as individual characteristics of voters and candidates assume greater importance in political discourse. Although personalities of candidates capture center stage and become the focus of voters' preferences, individual characteristics of voters, such as their traits and values, become decisive for political choice. The authors' findings reveal that people vot...
متن کاملFrom left to right: how the personality system allows basic traits to influence politics via characteristic moral adaptations.
Research on the association of personality to political orientation has suggested that direct influences are modest. Here we used a personality system model in which direct influences on political behaviour flow from moral values, with personality mostly acting on these characteristic moral adaptations, rather than directly affecting political attitudes. Study 1 in 447 subjects supported this m...
متن کاملCorrelation not causation: the relationship between personality traits and political ideologies.
The assumption in the personality and politics literature is that a person's personality motivates them to develop certain political attitudes later in life. This assumption is founded on the simple correlation between the two constructs and the observation that personality traits are genetically influenced and develop in infancy, whereas political preferences develop later in life. Work in psy...
متن کاملThe Politics of Mate Choice
Recent research has found a surprising degree of homogeneity in the personal political communication network of individuals but this work has focused largely on the tendency to sort into likeminded social, workplace, and residential political contexts. We extend this line of research into one of the most fundamental and consequential of political interactions – that between sexual mates. Using ...
متن کاملFeminism and Abortion in the United States’ Party Politics
Abstract The feminist movement in the United States like other countries has tried to establish equality for women. From the first attempts to gain constitutional right for vote, up to the current radical demands, feminists have struggled to make changes in the U.S. party politics and obtain their rights within the parties. One of the important issues in which women played a key role in party ...
متن کامل