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
The Dark Side of the Mood. Candidate Evaluation, Voter Perceptions, and the Driving Role of (Dark) Personality Traits
Alessandro Nai 1, Loes Aaldering 2, Frederico Ferreira da Silva 3, Diego Garzia 3, Katjana Gattermann 1
1 University of Amsterdam
2 Free University Amsterdam
3 University of Lausanne

Pre-existing research demonstrated that voters’ perceptions of leadership traits impact overall candidate evaluations. This literature focuses primarily on politically relevant traits: competence-related traits, or character traits associated with leadership performance. Less is known about the impact of candidates’ personality traits, and especially the “darker” ones (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy). It is yet unclear to what extent the (perceived) presence or absence of dark personality traits in candidates influence public attitudes towards them - and to what extent this effect exists above and beyond the structuring role of partisan attitudes. To answer this question, this study uses a multi-method approach combining an experimental design and a post-electoral survey on the 2020 US Presidential election. The survey data (study 1) confirms the key role of partisanship as a driver of candidate perceived personality. The experimental evidence (study 2) confirms a causal relationship between (perceived) candidate personality and subsequent evaluation: exposure to a negatively (positively) framed candidate personality reduces (increases) candidate likeability, and that effects of (perceived) presence of darker traits are larger than the effects of their (perceived) absence. Across both studies, the results confirm the relevance of dark triad personality traits for candidate favourability, and the existence of asymmetric effects for presence vs absence of dark traits.