The Big Five Model was used to assess the role of personality traits in orienting voting choice across five European countries (n = 1288). Findings from Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, and Poland showed that the Big Five were linked to party preference in theoretically consistent ways. Traits had substantial effects on voting, whereas the socio-demographic characteristics of gender, age, income, and educational level had weaker influences. In each country, voters’ traits are seemingly congruent with the policies of their preferred party. The Openness trait has been shown to be the most generalizable predictor of party preference across the examined cultures. Conscientiousness was also a valid predictor, although its effect was less robust and replicable. Similarities and differences across countries were discussed and linked to the nature of the respective political discourses.
After a long period of relative neglect, personality traits received scholarly attention in research on political behavior in recent years. Leaving aside studies dealing with political participation (Mondak, 2010), scholars found distinct personality profiles on the Big Five (John, 1990) to be associated with preferences for different political parties and ideologies. Among the Big Five, Openness predicts liberal and left-wing political views in a wide range of countries, including Germany (Riemann et al., 1993 and Schoen and Schumann, 2007), Italy (Caprara et al., 2006 and Caprara et al., 2008), Belgium and Poland (Van Hiel, Kossowska, & Mervielde, 2000), and the US (Barbaranelli et al., 2007, Carney et al., 2008, Gosling et al., 2003 and Jost, 2006). The Conscientiousness trait predicts conservative and right-wing political views. Unlike Openness and Conscientiousness, Energy/Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability have weaker and less consistent relationships with political orientation. Yet, prior research is limited to specific political settings and mostly focused on measures of political conservatism and/or liberalism and ideological self-placement.
The current study expands on past work by examining the effect of the Big Five on vote choice in five European countries that differ widely in terms of cultural and historical roots. We build on the notion that personality traits serve as distal predictors of vote choice. Traits are stable dispositions that are partially inherited and formed early in life. In interaction with environmental factors, these dispositions shape socio-political attitudes, value orientation, and policy preferences (Caprara et al., 2009, Lee et al., 2010, McCrae, 1996 and Sibley and Duckitt, 2008), which in turn affect vote choice. Voters, inter alia, aim at voting for a party that does not contradict their ideological and policy predisposition. In a nutshell, vote choice is rooted in personality traits since citizens vote for parties whose ideological and policy stances fit their ideological preferences, that in turn are affected by basic personality dispositions.
We examined the impact of traits on voting in five European countries, by exploring whether findings are consistent across nations that differ considerably in terms of political systems, party systems, and democratic tradition. We first studied Italy, Spain, Germany, and Greece. In these four countries, the political system is essentially organized around two ideological poles (left and right) and includes two dominant center-left and center-right parties. We then extended the study to Poland, where the current electoral competition is taking place between two main right-wing parties. This represents a rather unusual case in the European political scene. Taken together, this analysis may contribute to deepen our understanding of voting behavior in a cross-national perspective, which is a central theme of political science (Mondak, 2010).
In each country, we focused on the choice between the two main parties around which most of the electoral competition revolves. We then included voters of minor parties, when the number of cases was large enough to obtain reliable estimates. Thereby, we expand on prior research which mostly ignored third parties’ voters or conflated them with the voters of main parties. Both strategies are flawed because third parties have gained in political significance and have specific ideological and policy stances that distinguish them from main parties.
