Personality and Political Representation - The Relationship Between Personality Traits, Policy Positions and the Prioritization of Women’s Issues

This study explores the determinants affecting politicians’ priorities and preferences regarding women’s issues. Moving beyond the simplistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women, we analyze whether various personality traits of politicians are associated with their prioritization of this policy domain as well as their policy position on women’s issues. Based on previous psychological research on the Big Five traits (Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability), we theoretically expect politicians scoring high on Openness to Experience to take more liberal positions on social policies and therefore to be more likely to prioritize and support women’s issues. In contrast, conscientious politicians rather tend to adopt more conservative policy positions and consequently will not pay much attention to women’s interests. Moreover, we hypothesize that these effects are stronger for female than for male politicians. Using original data from a comparative survey of elite politicians in Germany and Switzerland, the results confirm our hypothesis about the positive effect of Openness to Experience on the priority that individual politicians assign to the representation of women’s issues. We do not find any significant effects for Conscientiousness. These findings contribute to the study of women’s representation as well as to the booming literature on the effect of personality traits on politicians’ self-reported policy positions and preferences.