17:45 - 20:00
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Lior Sheffer
Discussant/s:
Miriam Sorace
Meeting Room U

Lior Sheffer, Eran Amsalem
Personality and the Policy Positions of Politicians

Matthew Rice, Jeffery Mondak, Megan Remmel
The Impact of Personality on Interest Group Ratings of U.S. Senators

Alessandro Nai, Loes Aaldering, Frederico Ferreira da Silva, Diego Garzia, Katjana Gattermann
The Dark Side of the Mood. Candidate Evaluation, Voter Perceptions, and the Driving Role of (Dark) Personality Traits

Mathilde Langgaard Sørensen
Does mindfulness training increase political tolerance? Reporting from a two-week field experiment

Dragana Vidovic, Gina Reinhardt
How Healthy is our Democracy: Public Health and Political Participation
Personality and the Policy Positions of Politicians
Lior Sheffer 1, Eran Amsalem 2
1 Tel Aviv University
2 Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Politicians’ support of or opposition to concrete policies is uniquely consequential for policymaking, public opinion, and a host of other societal outcomes. Explaining their policy positions is therefore a major research agenda in political science. Here, we evaluate the role of politicians' personality traits, measured with the Big Five typology, in shaping how liberal or conservative their economic and social policy positions are. While existing research establishes this link among non-elites, it is far from obvious that the same holds for politicians, who have systematically different personality profiles, and whose positions are constrained by party sorting. Using an in-person study of 895 incumbents in five countries who completed personality questionnaires and provided detailed issue positions, we find that Openness to Experience is a consistently strong and significant predictor of politicians' positions, but a null relationship for Conscientiousness. We discuss implications for the role of elites’ individual characteristics in policymaking.