Personality's influence on political orientation extends to concrete stances of political controversy in Germany – Cross-nationally and consistently
Author(s) / Creator(s)
Grünhage, Thomas
Reuter, Martin
Abstract / Description
Growing evidence suggests that the general personality structure predisposes the political or ideological orientation. Here, we first replicated findings of associations between Big Five factors openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, and self-reported political orientation in a large German sample. However, the new aspect of our study is the addition of Wahl-O-Mat (WoM; a prominent voting advice application) as a measure of concrete policy-positions. Here, a score of accordance between a participant’s and the several German parties’ stances on current and relevant policy-issues is computed. Given that political science identifies trends towards a dealignment of voters with political parties and a decreasing significance of socio-structural factors, an issue-based approach to vote choice may become critical in the future. Therefore, we investigated whether personality’s influence on political orientation also extends to stances about specific issues and, thus, is not restricted to self-placements. As expected, WoM-scores also showed meaningful correlations with personality traits: accordance with right-of-center-parties is negatively related to openness and agreeableness and positively related to conscientiousness. Finally, we recruited smaller samples in the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Australia, and Bulgaria and showed that the associations mentioned above are cross-nationally replicable. We conclude that personality influences not only self-perceived political identity but also attitudes towards current issues of political controversy. In both cases, the effects of personality were mediated by Right-Wing-Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation.
Keyword(s)
ideology political orientation personality Voting Advice Application RWA SDOPersistent Identifier
Date of first publication
2020-10-15
Journal title
Journal of Social and Political Psychology
Volume
8
Issue
2
Page numbers
686–707
Publisher
PsychOpen GOLD
Publication status
publishedVersion
Review status
peerReviewed
Is version of
Citation
Grünhage, T., & Reuter, M. (2020). Personality's influence on political orientation extends to concrete stances of political controversy in Germany – Cross-nationally and consistently. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(2), 686-707. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v8i2.1133
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There are no other versions of this object.
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Author(s) / Creator(s)Grünhage, Thomas
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Author(s) / Creator(s)Reuter, Martin
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PsychArchives acquisition timestamp2022-04-14T11:23:44Z
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Made available on2022-04-14T11:23:44Z
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Date of first publication2020-10-15
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Abstract / DescriptionGrowing evidence suggests that the general personality structure predisposes the political or ideological orientation. Here, we first replicated findings of associations between Big Five factors openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, and self-reported political orientation in a large German sample. However, the new aspect of our study is the addition of Wahl-O-Mat (WoM; a prominent voting advice application) as a measure of concrete policy-positions. Here, a score of accordance between a participant’s and the several German parties’ stances on current and relevant policy-issues is computed. Given that political science identifies trends towards a dealignment of voters with political parties and a decreasing significance of socio-structural factors, an issue-based approach to vote choice may become critical in the future. Therefore, we investigated whether personality’s influence on political orientation also extends to stances about specific issues and, thus, is not restricted to self-placements. As expected, WoM-scores also showed meaningful correlations with personality traits: accordance with right-of-center-parties is negatively related to openness and agreeableness and positively related to conscientiousness. Finally, we recruited smaller samples in the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Australia, and Bulgaria and showed that the associations mentioned above are cross-nationally replicable. We conclude that personality influences not only self-perceived political identity but also attitudes towards current issues of political controversy. In both cases, the effects of personality were mediated by Right-Wing-Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation.en_US
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Publication statuspublishedVersion
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Review statuspeerReviewed
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CitationGrünhage, T., & Reuter, M. (2020). Personality's influence on political orientation extends to concrete stances of political controversy in Germany – Cross-nationally and consistently. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(2), 686-707. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v8i2.1133en_US
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ISSN2195-3325
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Persistent Identifierhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12034/5631
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Persistent Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.6235
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Language of contenteng
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PublisherPsychOpen GOLD
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Is version ofhttps://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v8i2.1133
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Is related tohttps://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.4200
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Keyword(s)ideologyen_US
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Keyword(s)political orientationen_US
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Keyword(s)personalityen_US
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Keyword(s)Voting Advice Applicationen_US
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Keyword(s)RWAen_US
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Keyword(s)SDOen_US
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Dewey Decimal Classification number(s)150
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TitlePersonality's influence on political orientation extends to concrete stances of political controversy in Germany – Cross-nationally and consistentlyen_US
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DRO typearticle
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Issue2
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Journal titleJournal of Social and Political Psychology
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Page numbers686–707
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Volume8
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Visible tag(s)Version of Recorden_US