Personality and Voting

Abstract

After the establishment of the Big Five as adequate instrument for measuring human personality, the last decade has witnessed a strong increase in research on the relationship between personality and voting behavior. The large majority of the contributions has focused on direct effects of citizens’ personality and shown plenty of evidence for personality effects in different countries and for various kinds of political behavior. While studying direct effects is important in a rather new area of research to learn “what is going on”, it is now time to move forward to more sophisticated approaches. Thus, the panel wants to address two major short-comings which overlap with general themes of the whole section: 1) There has not been much comparative research on personality and voting behavior. Accordingly, the impact of contextual characteristics and its interplay with personality and other relevant factors in influencing voting behavior has largely been ignored. Considering different institutional and political characteristics might be particularly relevant since citizens with different personalities might react differently to external conditions. 2) The majority of previous research on personality and political behavior has not adequately considered the causal patterns which link both concepts. From a theoretical and logical point of view the interplay between personality, other individual-level characteristics, and voting behavior should be far more complex and needs to be represented adequately in terms of data (experimental data, panel data) and methods (path/causal models). This panel therefore welcomes papers focusing on various aspects, e.g., - the impact of personality on different kinds of voting behavior (party/candidate choice, turnout), - comparative analyses of personality effects on voting behavior, - the causal connection between personality, attitudes and other relevant factors, and voting behavior, - and analyses using different data sources (e.g., experimental data, panel data) or innovative methodological designs to address causality issues.

Title	Details
Attractiveness, Competence or Likeability? Appearance Effects in the 2013 German Election	View Paper Details
Beyond Party Identification: How Party Stereotypes fill the Gap after Dealignment	View Paper Details
Stability of Political Choices and Political Participation in Context: The Role of Conservatism in Political Decision-Making	View Paper Details
The Big Five, Party Identification, and Voting Behavior in Germany	View Paper Details