The link between personality and partisanship types: How Big Five traits and narcissism relate to positive and negative party identification in Germany

Since the seminal work of Campbell and colleagues in the 1960s, positive party identification has become one of the most used concepts for analysing political behavior (e.g., Huddy, Mason, & Aarøe, 2015; Johnston, 2006; Thomassen & Rosema, 2009). It is originally defined as one’s long-term, affective attachment towards a political party (e.g. Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960) and was found, amongst others, to shape political attitudes, turnout, and voting behaviour. In contrast, negative party identification and the related concept of affective polarization, the amount of interparty hostility between two parties, have become only recently a highly salient topic in Political Science. So far several studies in the US and others countries focused on its mobilizing consequence for electoral behaviour (Abramowitz & McCoy, 2019; Abramowitz & Webster, 2016; Bankert, 2020; Caruana, McGregor, & Stephenson, 2015; Maggiotto & Piereson, 1977; Mayer, 2017; Medeiros & Noel, 2014; Michael McGregor, Caruana, & Stephenson, 2015; Rose & Mishler, 1998) as well as its potential for increasing democratic dissatisfaction (Ridge, 2020; Spoon & Kanthak, 2019) and political conflict (Abramowitz & Webster, 2018). Which party one identifies with is often already transmitted in primary socialization (e.g., Kroh & Selb, 2009; Zuckerman, Dasovic, & Fitzgerald, 2007). However, apart from social group belongings and socialization experiences, individual differences such as personality traits also matter as they affect kinds of attachments (Gerber, Huber, Doherty, & Dowling, 2012; Turner, Oakes, Haslam, & McGarty, 2010). For example, previous studies already showed for positive party identification that such an attachment fulfils different individual needs: Openness to new experiences as well as agreeableness were found to relate positively to identifying with a political party (Bakker, Hopmann, & Persson, 2015; Gerber et al., 2012). So far, no study analysed the link between personality and negative party identification. However, analysing why voters negatively identify with a political party, due to its relation to political dissatisfaction and conflict, is important to understand the general mechanisms of partisanship, regardless of parties’ ideology. Furthermore, negative partisanship may not occur separately from positive partisanship. Rose and Mishler (1996) provided a typology of partisans that allow four types of adherents: apathetic, open (only positive), closed (both types) or negative. However, the rise of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, that were shown to have many strong opposers (Meléndez & Kaltwasser, 2021), makes it crucial to differentiate between system and anti-system parties. In this paper, I analyse how personality affects the likelihood for different types of partisan attachments. I rely on several major frameworks from personality psychology, the Big Five framework (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1976), the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (Back et al., 2013) as well as the concept of need for cognition. I rely on new data from an online survey with access quotas that was conducted in February 2021 (N=2,300). Based on social identity theory and optimal distinctiveness theory (Leonardelli & Toh, 2015), I show that a need for differentiation drives negative partisanship whereas a need for inclusion positively relates to ingroup-based attachments such as open partisanship.