Gregory A. Huber

Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts

Previous research on personality traits and political attitudes has largely focused on the direct relationships between traits and ideological self-placement. There are theoretical reasons, however, to suspect that the relationships between personality traits and political attitudes (1) vary across issue domains and (2) depend on contextual factors that affect the meaning of political stimuli. In this study, we provide an explicit theoretical framework for formulating hypotheses about these differential effects. We then leverage the power of an unusually large national survey of registered voters to examine how the relationships between Big Five personality traits and political attitudes differ across issue domains and social contexts (as defined by racial groups). We confirm some important previous findings regarding personality and political ideology, find clear evidence that Big Five traits affect economic and social attitudes differently, show that the effect of Big Five traits is often as large as that of education or income in predicting ideology, and demonstrate that the relationships between Big Five traits and ideology vary substantially between white and black respondents.

Personality Traits and Participation in Political Processes

Using data from two recent surveys, we analyze the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political participation. We examine forms of participation that differ in domain (local politics vs. national campaigns) as well as in the amount of conflict involved, whether they are likely to yield instrumental benefits, and whether they are likely to be viewed as a duty—characteristics that may affect the relationships between dispositional personality traits and political activity. We find relationships between personality traits and: (1) both self-reported and actual turnout (measured using administrative records), (2) overreporting of turnout, and (3) a variety of other modes of participation. The effect of personality on political participation is often comparable to the effects of factors that are central in earlier models of turnout, such as education and income. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, these relationships vary depending on personality-relevant characteristics of each par...

The Effect of Electoral Competitiveness on Incumbent Behavior

What is the marginal effect of competitiveness on the power of electoral incentives? Addressing this question empirically is difficult because challenges to incumbents are endogenous to their behavior in office. To overcome this obstacle, we exploit a unique feature of Kansas courts: 14 districts employ partisan elections to select judges, while 17 employ noncompetitive retention elections. In the latter, therefore, challengers are ruled out. We find judges in partisan systems sentence more severely than those in retention systems. Additional tests attribute this to the incentive effects of potential competition, rather than the selection of more punitive judges in partisan districts.

Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters' Limitations in Controlling Incumbents

Are citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians? Observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance. However, these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world. In this article, we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games. In three experiments, our participants (1) overweighted recent relative to overall incumbent performance when made aware of an election closer rather than more distant from that event, (2) allowed an unrelated lottery that affected their welfare to influence their choices, and (3) were influenced by rhetoric to give more weight to recent rather than overall incumbent performance. These biases were apparent even though we informed and incentivized respondents to weight all performance equally. Our findings point to key limitations in voters’ ability to use a retrospective decision rule.

Partisanship and Economic Behavior: Do Partisan Differences in Economic Forecasts Predict Real Economic Behavior?

Survey data regularly show that assessments of current and expected future economic performance are more positive when a respondents partisanship matches that of the president. To determine if this is a survey artifact or something deeper, we investigate whether partisanship is associated with behavioral differences in economic decisions. We construct a new data set of county-level quarterly taxable sales to examine the effect of partisanship on consumption. Consumption change following a presidential election is correlated with a countys partisan complexion, a result consistent with partisans acting outside the domain of politics in accordance with the opinions they express in surveys. These results support an expansive view of the role of partisanship in mass politics and help validate surveys as a method for studying political behavior.

Citizen Oversight and the Electoral Incentives of Criminal Prosecutors

cases and prosecutor behavior. We model voter oversight of prosecutors in light of these difficulties. Voters use the promise of reelection given ob? served outputs to induce prosecutors to reduce uncertainty through investi? gation and subsequently to punish the guilty and free the innocent. The model demonstrates that an optimal voter strategy is always to reelect prosecutors who obtain convictions. Most importantly, even voters who most fear wrongful convictions should reward success at trial. Voter atti? tudes and beliefs instead influence rewards for cases concluded out of

Challenger Entry and Voter Learning

We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voters positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.

Personality Traits and the Consumption of Political Information

In this article, we examine the relationship between dispositional personality traits (the Big Five) and the consumption of political information. We present detailed hypotheses about the characteristics of the political environment that are likely to affect the appeal of politics and political information in general for individuals with different personalities as well as hypotheses about how personality affects the attractiveness of particular sources of political information. We find that the Big Five traits are significant predictors of political interest and knowledge as well as consumption of different types of political media. Openness (the degree to which a person needs intellectual stimulation and variety) and Emotional Stability (characterized by low levels of anxiety) are associated with a broad range of engagement with political information and political knowledge. The other three Big Five traits, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Extraversion, are associated only with consumption of specific types of political information.

Neo-isolationism, balanced-budget conservatism, and the fiscal impacts of immigrants.

A rise in neo-isolationism in the United States has given encouragement to a new fiscal politics of immigration. Growing anti-immigrant sentiment has coalesced with forces of fiscal conservatism to make immigrants an easy target of budget cuts. Limits on legal alien access to social welfare programs that are contained in the 1996 welfare and immigration reform acts seem motivated not so much by a guiding philosophy of what it means to be a member of American society as by a desire to shrink the size of the federal government and to produce a balanced budget. Even more than in the past, the consequence of a shrinking welfare state is to metamorphose legal immigrants from public charges to windfall gains for the federal treasury.

What to Do (and Not Do) with Multicollinearity in State Politics Research

State politics scholars often confront data situations where the explanatory variables in a model are highly related to each other. Such multicollinearity (“MC”) makes it difficult to identify the independent effect that each of these variables has on the outcome of interest. In an effort to circumvent MC, researchers sometimes drop collinear variables from the regression model. Using simulated data, we demonstrate the implications that MC has for statistical estimation and the potential for introducing bias that the omitting-variables approach generates. We also discuss MC in the context of multiplicative interaction models, using research on the influence of the initiative on policy responsiveness as an applied example. We conclude with advice for researchers faced with MC in their datasets.