Personality bases of foreign policy postures: A Big Five aspects approach

Over the past eight decades scholarship has gathered evidence that personality traits partially root different ideological orientations towards the world. Although international issues have been proved relevant to domestic political processes (e.g., voting behaviour), only a handful of previous studies have explored the personality correlates of the citizenry’s attitudes towards international affairs. Our comprehension of political processes remains incomplete without understanding whether and how personality (its domains and aspects) affects attitudes towards international affairs, and to what extent we have evidence of the existence of an international dimension of political ideology. In this article, I explore how attitudes towards international issues are associated with basic dimensions of personality. I move beyond limited extant work in the area showing that (a) Big Five personality domains and component aspects are associated with multiple dimensions of attitudes towards international affairs, (b) that these effects are as or more important than more commonly studied demographic effects, and (c) that these effects are independent of more general personality-ideology associations (i.e., robust when controlling for general measures of liberal-conservative ideology). The aspect-level approach provides nuance to extant domain-level findings and helps characterise the psychological bases of international postures. The findings suggest that personality domains, and more specifically, aspects, play a significant role in shaping political orientation towards the world. The nature of the international dimensions of ideology is more nuanced than previous scholarship suggests, in particular when we explore them through the lenses of personality psychology.