Academic

Gerber, Huber, Ha, Dowling, and Doherty on Personality & Ideology

By Lawrence Solum

Alan Gerber , Gregory Huber , Shang E. Ha , Conor Dowling and David Doherty (Yale University - Department of Political Science) have posted Personality Traits and the Dimensions of Political Ideology on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

We use three large N nationally representative surveys to investigate the relationships between the Five Factor Model personality traits and political ideology. Prior examinations of the relationships between personality traits and political ideology have yielded mixed results. Numerous studies have shown that ideology is associated with the personality traits Openness and Conscientiousness, but the relationships between the other three personality traits (Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Emotional Stability) and ideology are weak and inconsistent across samples. We find that the failure to link these traits to political ideology is an artifact of the coarse measurement of political ideology used in prior work. Once ideology is decomposed into social and economic dimensions there is a strong association between economic attitudes and Agreeableness and Emotional Stability. Our finding that four of the five personality domains are strongly linked to political ideology implies that the role of personality in political attitudes may be substantially stronger and more general than suggested by previous research.

And from the paper:

Our analysis presents substantial evidence that the relationship between personality traits and issue attitudes differs across the two issue domains we examined here. In the realm of social attitudes these relationships mirrored the most commonly identified relationships between Big Five traits and political ideology: Conscientiousness is associated with conservatism and Openness is associated with liberalism. However, when we examined the relationships between personality traits and economic attitudes we found evidence of other important relationships. Specifically, we found substantial evidence that Emotional Stability is associated with conservative economic attitudes and Agreeableness is associated with liberal economic attitudes. In addition, we found more limited evidence (i.e., in only one sample) that Extraversion is associated with conservative economic attitudes. In contrast to the previous literature, which is based on models predicting overall ideology, we find that four of the five personality traits are strongly linked to an important dimension of political attitudes.

Very interesting.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 04, 2009 (boomark / email).