Matthew V. Hibbing

Personality and Civic Engagement: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Trait Effects on Political Behavior

Peoples enduring psychological tendencies are reflected in their traits. Contemporary research on personality establishes that traits are rooted largely in biology, and that the central aspects of personality can be captured in frameworks, or taxonomies, focused on five trait dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. In this article, we integrate a five-factor view of trait structure within a holistic model of the antecedents of political behavior, one that accounts not only for personality, but also for other factors, including biological and environmental influences. This approach permits attention to the complex processes that likely underlie trait effects, and especially to possible trait–situation interactions. Primary tests of our hypotheses draw on data from a 2006 U.S. survey, with supplemental tests introducing data from Uruguay and Venezuela. Empirical analyses not only provide evidence of the value of research on personality and politics, but also signal some of the hurdles that must be overcome for inquiry in this area to be most fruitful.

Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations

Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts—including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that peoples physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations.

The Participatory Personality: Evidence from Latin America

To a substantial extent, political participation arises as a result of individuals’ interactions with aspects of the social and political environment. The resources people amass, the social connections they develop and the messages they receive combine to influence their propensity towards political action. However, building on recent research on personality and political behaviour,1 we posit that attention to these factors alone yields an incomplete account of the origins of participation. Our claim is that by their nature, some people are open to new experiences and others are not, some are responsible, some are outgoing and so on. These factors constitute fundamental elements of personality. We contend that enduring psychological differences – differences in personality – influence patterns of political participation.

Orientations toward Conflict and the Conditional Effects of Political Disagreement

We examine how differences in individual orientations toward conflict condition the effects of disagreement on political tolerance, knowledge, and participation. Past research, while recognizing the importance of individual-level moderators, has focused primarily on conflict aversion as an explanatory factor. Using three surveys, we show that individuals’ possess distinct positive and negative orientations toward conflict both of which condition the effects of political disagreement. We find that people who are more positively disposed toward conflict experience more of the benefits and bear less of the costs of political disagreement than those with less positive and more negative dispositions. Possessing a positive orientation toward conflict appears to be a precondition for disagreement to produce higher levels of political tolerance and differences in both positive and negative orientations account for large gaps in both political knowledge and participation.

The Correlates of Community Attractiveness

Anyone familiar with American communities knows that they vary significantly in terms of their physical attractiveness. In this study, the authors explore the community-level correlates of attractiveness using data from all of Iowa’s 954 cities and towns. Each of the communities was visited by a researcher who scored it in terms of its attractiveness. The authors correlate these ratings with a variety of community-level sociodemographic, economic, and attitudinal indicators. The results show that attractive communities tend to be larger, wealthier, and more civic-minded than other communities. Attractive communities also tend to have a higher percentage of elderly and college-educated residents. Further analysis revealed that population, wealth, and education are correlated less strongly with attractiveness as community size increases, whereas civic mindedness is correlated more strongly with attractiveness as community size increases. The authors discuss what their findings mean for communities trying to become more attractive.

Estimating Self-Reported News Exposure Across and Within Typical Days: Should Surveys Use More Refined Measures?

Mass communication researchers have an interest in accurately measuring media exposure. Survey measures often ask respondents about the number of days in a week or the hours in a day that they use a medium. These two strategies (and their composite—hours per week) have yet to be directly compared to one another, so their relative usefulness for researchers is unknown. Analyses of data from the 2008 American National Election Studies Time Series Study suggest few benefits from measuring news exposure using both approaches. The measures of exposure as days per week, minutes per day, and minutes per week (the product of the first two) operate similarly as predictors of political knowledge, perceived issue distances between presidential candidates, days per week talking about politics, levels of community involvement, and voter turnout.

Side by Side, Worlds Apart: Desired Policy Change as a Function of Preferences AND Perceptions

The degree to which people desire policy change is a function of two factors: preferences for future policies and perceptions of current policies. Political scientists, pollsters, and pundits know a good deal about people’s policy preferences but surprisingly little about the distance of those preferences from policy perceptions . In this article, we assess the distance between policy perceptions and policy preferences to calculate the amount of policy change desired. The data come from an original survey tapping respondents’ preferred and perceived policies and from those few National Election Surveys where parallel items on policy preferences and perceptions were posed. By incorporating policy perceptions alongside of preferences, our findings provide a better indication of the gulf between the policy change desired by liberals and the policy change desired by conservatives. The findings help explain polarization in the United States where differences in policy preferences alone often do not indicate extreme diversity.

The Trump Draw: Voter Personality and Support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican Nomination Campaign

This study explores how variation in voters’ personality traits, as represented by the Big Five framework, corresponded with variation in judgments regarding the leading presidential candidates during the 2016 nomination campaign. We argue that the context of a crowded field and an atypical candidate in the Republican nomination campaign activated personalistic criteria for candidate evaluation—voters’ own personality traits plausibly gave direction to their candidate assessments, and personality was a useful basis on which to differentiate between eventual winner Donald Trump and the other leading Republican competitors early in the primary process. Analyses make use of data from a large national survey fielded at the time of the Iowa caucuses. Results show that voters with a particular constellation of personality traits—high conscientiousness and extraversion, and low openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism—favored Donald Trump as compared with Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, and the remainder of the Republican field.

The Physiology of Framing Effects: Threat Sensitivity and the Persuasiveness of Political Arguments

Framing effects are among the most commonly studied type of political information that shapes public opinion. We advance research on differences in susceptibility to framing effects by exploring whether, and how, physiological traits condition responses to messages in the political environment. In particular, we propose that the effectiveness of a frame depends on how well that frame’s argument matches the physiological predisposition or “outlook” of the recipient. We hypothesize that individuals who possess particular traits (we focus on physiological threat sensitivity) are more likely to be persuaded by frames that trigger those predispositions. To test this claim, we replicate and extend Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley’s (1997) landmark framing experiment about political tolerance in response to a Ku Klux Klan rally. We find that participants high in threat sensitivity are more susceptible to frames that invoke physical danger, suggesting that physiological predispositions can help explain the influence of framing effects.

Sex differences, personality, and ideology: a deeper investigation via contexts in a study of local politics

There is a puzzle in existing research literatures. Some studies suggest that sex differences impact political attitudes and behaviors, others contend there are sex differences in personality, and still other research implies that personality underpins political attitudes and behaviors. Despite empirical trends and studies suggesting tendencies that underpin behavior, there is no theory to suggest how sex, personality, and ideology are related to political behavior. We attempt to wrestle with this puzzle utilizing data from a study of men and women serving on local boards and commissions. Our findings suggest that, indeed, there appear to be types of people in terms of sex, personality, and ideology who gravitate to service on certain types of boards and commissions, but many of the relationships we identify require an understanding of local context and culture that the existing literatures on sex difference and personality do not speak to. This sets the stage for more nuanced studies of why sex, personality, and ideology may matter for political behavior (and why they may not), as well as the trouble with taking a particular approach to studying political behavior – namely one that focuses on correlations between traits in lieu of a focus on persons and their choices in local contexts.