Abstract
We examine how the traits and values of both candidates and voters contribute to political choice, using the five-factor model of traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. 1,164 subjects reported their voting intention, their own traits and values, and those they perceived in the leader of one Italian political coalition (center-right or center-left). As hypothesized, voters simplified their personality judgments of politicians. Instead of the 5 trait factors and 10 basic values they employed in self-descriptions, they described the politicians using 2 trait factors (integrity and leadership) and 2 value dimensions (concern for others vs. self and excitement vs. caution). Logistic regressions revealed that voters own values predicted voting intention as hypothesized based on the policies advocated by the coalitions. Values trumped both own traits and demographic characteristics. The perceived traits and values of candidates accounted for additional variance in voting intention. The traits on which voters perceived a politician as weaker (Prodis leadership and Berlusconis integrity) were more decisive in orienting political preferences. We discuss explanations and implications of these findings.
References
(1998). Values and voting. Political Psychology, 19, 17–40.
(2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323–370.
(1980). Significance tests and goodness of fit in the analysis of covariance structures. Psychological Bulletin, 88, 588–606.
(1998). Weighted comparison of means. British Journal of Medicine, 316, 129.
(1994) Destra e sinistra [
Right and left ]. Rome, Italy: Donzelli.(1987). Multidimensional similarity structure analysis. New York: Springer-Verlag.
(2002) Le ragioni dellelettore. Perché ha vinto il centro-destra nelle elezioni italiane del 2001 [
The voters reasons. Why the center-right won the Italian elections in 2001 ]. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino.(2004, November). Leadership in Italy: The changing role of leaders in elections and in government. The association for the study of modern Italy (ASMI) conference. London. The Second Italian Republic. [unclear: contribution to congress?, whole book?]
(2007). The simplicity of politicians personalities across cultures and methods. International Journal of Psychology, 42, 393–405.
(1997). Politicians uniquely simple personalities. Nature, 385, 493.
(1999). Personality profiles and political parties. Political Psychology, 20, 175–197.
(2002). When parsimony subdues distinctiveness: Simplified public perceptions of politicians personality. Political Psychology, 23, 77–96.
(1994). Personality described by adjectives: Generalizability of the Big Five to the Italian lexical context. European Journal of Personality, 8, 357–369.
(2006). Personality and politics: Values, traits, and political choice. Political Psychology, 27, 1–28.
(2004). Personalizing politics. American Psychologist, 59, 581–594.
(1964). The importance of factor-trueness and validity versus homogeneity and orthogonality in test scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 24, 3–30.
(1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
(1986). The role of inference in the perception of political candidates. In , Political cognition (pp. 127–155). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
(1983). Factor comparability as a means of determining the number of factors and their rotation. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 18, 197–218.
(2003). Values, ideology, and structure of political attitudes. In , Oxford handbook of political psychology (pp. 477–508). New York: Oxford University Press.
(2004). I partiti politici italiani (1943–2004). Dalla resistenza al governo del Polo [
The Italian political parties (1943–2004): From the resistance to the government of Polo ]. Milano, Italy: Rizzoli.(2003). A very brief measure of the Big Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 504–528.
(2007). Value cleavages and partisan conflict. In , Electoral intermediation, values, and political support in old and new democracies: Europe, East Asia, and the Americas in comparative perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1968). A general nonmetric technique for finding the smallest coordinate space for a configuration of points. Psychometrica, 33, 469–504.
(2005). Toward a chequebook democracy? Business, parties, and the funding of politics in contemporary Italy. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10, 41–56.
(1984). Issues in the use and interpretation of discriminant analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 95(1), 156–171.
(1996). The quality of political leadership: A case study of John Major. British Journal of Political Science, 26, 229–244.
(2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.
(2005). Lombra del potere [
The shadow of power ]. Bari, Italy: Laterza.(1996). Social consequences of experiential openness. Psychological Bulletin, 120, 323–337.
(1996). The new American voter. Cambridge: Harvard. University Press.
(1990). Positive-negative asymmetry in evaluations: The distinction between affective and informational negativity effects. European Review of Social Psychology, 1, 33–60.
(1993). Information shortcuts and the reasoning voter. In , Information, participation and choice (pp. 17–35). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
(2002). The Big Five personality factors and personal values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 789–201.
(2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and cognition. Personality & Social Psychology Review, 5, 296–320.
(1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In , Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1–65). New York: Academic Press.
(1994). Are there universal aspects in the structure and contents of human values? Journal of Social Issues, 50, 19–45.
(2005). Robustness and fruitfulness of a theory of universals in individual human values. In , Valores e trabalho [
Values and work ]. Brasilia: Editora Universidade de Brasilia.(2006). Les valeurs de base de la personne: Théorie, mesures et applications [
Basic human values: Theory, measurement, and applications ]. Revue Française de Sociologie, 47, 249–288.(2001). Value hierarchies across cultures: Taking a similarities perspective. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 32, 268–290.
(2001). Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human values with a different method of measurement. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 32, 519–542.
(1991). Reasoning and choice: Explorations in political psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1990). Candidate appraisal and human nature: Man and Superman in the 1984 Election. Political Psychology, 11, 459–484.
The Economist. (2001, April 28). Why Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to lead Italy, p. 17.
(1995). The rise of candidate-centered politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
(1998). The decline of American political parties, 1952–1996. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
