Tooting my own horn: Here’s the university’s press release for my recent article. It gets things mostly right.

A down economy usually spells trouble for incumbents, but a new study shows that six Republicans up for re-election this year caught a break when John McCain lost the last presidential election.

The analysis found that some voters are less objective (and more forgiving) in evaluating their governor’s economic performance if the White House is controlled by the opposing political party.

“When there is an easy chance for people to pass the blame onto a party they don’t like, they’ll take it,” said Adam Brown, assistant professor of political science.

The study, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Politics, found that whenever the president and the governor belong to opposing parties, voters will overestimate the policy success of the level of government their preferred party controls. This means that members of the governor’s party will paint a rosier picture of their state’s economy when the White House is controlled by a member of an opposing party.

Take a current political situation as an example: since President Obama is a Democrat and Utah Governor Gary Herbert is a Republican, Utah Republicans are two to three times more likely to blame the poor economy on the president than if McCain were president. They’re also likely to say Utah’s economy is outperforming that of the nation—by more than the data may show. By contrast, Utah Democrats are likely to do exactly the opposite, blaming Governor Herbert instead of President Obama.

Brown used the economy, measured by unemployment rates, as an example of an unclear policy outcome because it’s difficult or even impossible for most voters to determine which level of government affects it the most.

“The economy is the haziest, but it also drives approval and elections way more than anything else,” Brown said.

Interestingly, Brown found the effect of unemployment on gubernatorial approval to be three to four times stronger among members of the president’s party than among members of the governor’s party. That is, members of the governor’s party are more willing to ignore poor economic performance when evaluating the governor than members of the president’s party.

Political scientists have long debated if people are capable of being objective when evaluating candidates, or if they simply toe party lines when they get to the polls. Brown’s findings imply that voters are more likely to be objective when evaluating areas where responsibilities are clearer, or when the president and the governor are of the same party.

“People can be objective as long as there’s not a partisan reason not to be objective,” Brown said.

For the study, appearing this month in Journal of Politics, Brown looked at previous research in years in which the economy was down, giving him the chance to see how people assign blame and estimate economic performance.

As for why voters rely on partisan cues when assigning blame for policy outcomes, Brown has one hypothesis.

“We just like to protect what we believe,” Brown said.

Yesterday, I wrote about Ansolabehere and Jones’s article in AJPS showing that voters really do hold members of Congress accountable for their voting record in Congress. On the very next page in AJPS, we find another article on the same theme. But Carson et al. want to change the way we think about this accountability. Usually, we think about the correlation between the voter’s and the member’s ideology. That’s the approach Ansolabehere and Jones took, since they were comparing voter preferences on specific issues to actual roll call votes on those same issues.

Carson et al. say that we should look at the partisan tilt of each member’s voting record. Look at partisanship, not ideology. Of course, ideology and partisanship are closely related. But Carson et al. argue that voters are more willing to tolerate ideological extremity than partisan extremity. In political sciency terms, voters would rather tolerate a bad DW-NOMINATE score than a bad party unity score. They back this claim up with both experimental and observational evidence.

This view makes sense. Think back to 2008, when the Obama campaign had great fun advertising McCain’s 90+% “presidential support” score. Likewise, it seems that a Republican in a House race could blast her opponent’s high party unity score in an effort to tie her opponent unfavorably to Pelosi.

It’s not clear to me how revolutionary this research is given the strong correlation between ideology and partisanship, but it’s certainly interesting to think that maybe voters dislike partisans more than ideologues.

Turns out that democracy works, at least when it comes to voters holding members of Congress accountable for their voting record. For accountability to happen, we need to see three things: (1) Voters need to have specific opinions on specific issues before Congress; (2) voters need to know how their member of Congress actually voted on those issues; and (3) the voter’s agreement with the member’s voting record should have a strong effect on the voter’s decision to vote (or not) for the member of Congress.

Political scientists have spilled a lot of ink over the past several decades debating whether all that really happens. Ansolabehere and Jones ran a survey to find out. Surprisingly, that hadn’t been done before. Turns out democracy isn’t quite perfect, but it works well enough. They look at each of the three steps listed above:

1. Most voters offered an opinion on most of the specific issues (from 2005-2006) that the authors asked about (partial birth abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, capital gains tax cuts, ratifying CAFTA, immigration reform, bankruptcy reform, the Patriot Act).
2. Most voters ventured a guess as to how their representative actually voted on each of this issues. The guesses weren’t perfect. On average, the guesses were accurate about 72% of the time. That’s not perfect, but it’s enough to produce accountability in the aggregate. As the authors remind us, “One need only require that the average perceptions of constituencies square with the [actual] voting records of Representatives. The law of large numbers would make the electorate as a whole act as if individuals were highly informed” (see pg 587).
3. To the extent that a voter’s policy preferences are similar to the member’s roll call record as perceived by the voter, voters are more likely to support their representative.

That “as perceived by the voter” bit is critical. Still, the articles goes a long way toward showing that voters really do hold members of Congress accountable for their voting records.

Comment and Criticism

I have only one quibble with the article. They are asking people about bills that already came before Congress in the previous year. It’s possible that people changed their position on these bills after seeing how their Representative (and other Representatives from their preferred party) voted on it. This is a central part of the Michigan school’s “funnel model,” which says that voters start off with a partisan attachment, and they then adopt the issue positions that they perceive are consistent with that partisan attachment.

So, if we believe The American Voter, then maybe voters had different views about all these issues before Congress addressed them, but when they saw how their party took a side on each issue over the course of 2005-2006, their views shifted to match the party line. Thus, members of Congress aren’t responding to voters–voters are responding to members of Congress.

I’m not a huge fan of this line of argument from The American Voter, but it’s still an influential view within political science, so I expect that Ansolabehere and Jones may take some flack from Michigan loyalists.

No serious observer of American politics would be surprised if you made two basic claims: (1) Small-circulation media outlets (websites, cable channels, independent newspapers) can be far more ideologically extreme than large-circulation outlets (network news) that need to appeal to a large audience to remain profitable, and (2) people prefer media sources that confirm their existing biases.

In the most recent issue of AJPS, Nie and his colleagues have an article that makes those two claims. The claims seem perfectly plausible. And they present well-executed research backing them up. Their findings are consistent with a string of previous work making the same argument and coming to the same conclusion (they list several such studies along the way). The main difference: Previous studies have operationalized “small-circulation outlets” as talk radio or cable television, but Nie et al look at internet news sites. They find that more ideologically extreme folks are more likely to visit online news sites.

At the risk of sounding ungenerous, my reaction was “well, duh.” I suppose it’s important to have precise measurement, so it’s worth looking specifically at who is viewing online news sites even though we would expect to find that the same people who consume other niche media would also consume online news. And I suppose that’s a purpose of journals–to look carefully at specific questions. I’m not criticizing them for writing the article by any means. In fact, a “well duh” reaction means they thought to test something that the rest of us assumed was true without bothering to check for sure. Good for them.

So, in sum: People who visit online news and political sites are more politically extreme. Well, duh.

Thad Kousser: Ask anybody here what a “good” state legislature should look like. Can anybody actually answer that? Seth Masket: Campaigns can matter. In districts that Colorado’s wealthy Democrats targeted via 527s, Democratic candidates for state legislature did 4% better than in previous elections. Apparently, a team of four extremely wealthy Democratic donors singlehandedly swung the legislature to the Democrats. Adam Brown: Self-financed spending is not strategic. Candidates spend if they have it, regardless of their likelihood of victory. (Yes, that was a shameless self-promotion.)

David Konisky and Neal Woods: Smart state governments should encourage their biggest polluters to locate along state boundaries. That way, the state can reap the benefits of industry, but let all the pollution drift into neighboring states. Great theoretical story. Awesome maps showing locations of all polluters in each state. Trouble is, the presentation ended with Konisky saying that all the empirical tests produced null results. There’s no evidence that states are actually doing this. As far as the “gotcha” goes, what a letdown. But I suppose we should be glad about these null findings. Emily Huston: HAVA set minimal standards for voter identification, but allowed states to impose stricter standards. Why did some states impose strict standards but others did not? Emily threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, but none of it stuck. The question remains unanswered. That’s two “null results” papers in one panel.

Chris Mooney: The coolest guy in state politics. Received several well-deserved honors, including a giant red pen to commemorate his work as founding editor of State Politics and Policy Quarterly.

Dan Smith and Michael McDonald apparently make a LOT of money as expert witnesses in lawsuits. And Bob Erikson looks surprisingly like the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

Boris Shor will release his common-space scores of legislators’ ideal points later this summer after a publication in LSQ comes out. Woot! (See an example of what you can do with his data.) Jim Battista and Megan Gall are assembling demographic data for all 7,380 legislative districts by matching census tracts to districts. Sounds painstaking. No word yet on whether they’ll release the data publicly so that we can all freeride. Battista/Gall’s data combined with Shor’s could be awesome.

Read tweets sent during the conference by searching Twitter for hashtag #sppc.

Shortly before the 2008 Congressional elections, only 36% believed that most members of Congress deserved reelection. These numbers were not unusual. Since consistent polling began in the 1970s, Congressional approval has rarely been higher than 40%. Nevertheless, 94% of U.S. House members won reelection.¹

For years, political scientists have explained this seeming paradox by pointing out that members of Congress can win reelection by running against Congress. A representative can urge his voters to send him back time after time so that he can keep working to fix the broken system. As Fenno wrote in Home Style, “It is easy for each Congressman to explain to his own supporters why he cannot be blamed for the performance of the collectivity . . . because the internal diversity and decentralization of the institution provide such a wide variety of collegial villains to flay before one’s supporters at home” (1978, 167).²

In his textbook on Congressional elections, Gary Jacobson sums up the dominant view among political scientists: “Members are not held individually responsible for their collective performance in governing.” (2004, 227).

David Jones has a recent article in AJPS that challenges this long held view. Jones looks back 60 years to a report commissioned in 1950 by the American Political Science Association Toward a More Responsive Two-Party System. That report urged “greater party cohesion in Congress,” suggesting that the presence of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats makes it more difficult for individual voters to hold their representative accountable for Congress’s collective activities.

Jones argues that the APSA report was correct: If the two parties become more distinct (i.e. polarized), then it should be easier for voters to blame members of the majority party for Congress’s collectively bad (or good) performance. And, as it happens, there’s been quite a bit of research in recent years showing that Congress has, in fact, become more polarized.

If Jones is right, then we’re in a new era. It may have been true 20, 30, or 40 years ago that members of Congress could evade accountability for Congress’s overall activities, but rising polarization has enabled voters to punish or reward Representatives for Congress’s collective performance.

Evidence that Overall Congressional Approval Matters

To test this possibility, Jones compiled each incumbent Representative’s electoral margin going back decades, producing thousands of data points. He then regressed those vote margins on a variety of independent variables. Among others, he regressed vote margins on Congress’s overall approval ratings. More importantly, he also interacted those approval ratings with measures of polarization (party unity).

Take a look at Figure 1 from Jones’s article (below). Along the X axis, Jones shows each year back through 1976. Along the Y axis, he shows that estimated effect of overall Congressional approval on individual incumbents’ vote margins for that year.³ By the end of the series, the estimated effect of overall approval rises above 0.50 (for members of the majority party). In other words, a one percentage point drop in Congressional approval (perhaps from 40 to 39) leads us to expect a 0.50+ drop in each incumbent’s vote margin. This is a powerful effect, subject to a powerful interaction.

Figure 1, Jones 2010

It’s worth noting that there is not similar interaction for members of the minority. Back in the days of low polarization, minority members could win reelection by running against Congress, just like members of the majority. Rising polarization has not prevented minority party members from continuing to run against Congress–and why should it? Minority party members can continue to win by running against Congress, citing all the majority’s misdeeds. Nothing has changed for the minority.

Comment and Criticism

This is an interesting and worthwhile article. It leaves me wondering, though, why 90+% of incumbents continue to win reelection. I began this review by pointing out a seeming paradox from 2008–not from 1976. Even in the most recent Congressional elections, 36% of voters said that most members did not deserve reelection, yet 94% of members won reelection. More generally, we continue to observe Congress (overall) receiving markedly low approval while individual members receive very high approval from their constituents.

If Jones is correct, then we ought not to observe this pattern so strongly anymore, yet we do. I’m not sure how to respond to Jones’s analysis given this continuing disconnect between overall and individual Congressional approval. Perhaps Jones has a serious problem in his statistical analysis that I’m not seeing resulting in an inflated estimate of the interaction. Or perhaps Congressional elections are sufficiently different from Congressional approval that this paradox can persist in approval data even as it evaporates in election results. I’m at a loss to resolve this puzzle.

Imagine you’re a soccer coach. You’ve got 14 players on your roster, 11 of whom are on the field at any given time. How do you motivate your players to give it their best? In part, their personal ambitions drive them to play hard. But what “sticks” as a coach do you have to punish slacking off? You’ve got only one punishment: Taking a player off the field and substituting a player off the bench.

This creates what we might call “the declining talent pool of soccer,” or more simply, the “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench. Thus, one of these situations may result: Your 11 best players might give less than a full effort (knowing that their imperfect effort is still better than a benchwarmer’s full effort), or your inferior benchwarming players might be the ones you put on the field.

The same problem arises when choosing government officials. The result is inferior governance.

The “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in the British Cabinet

In recently published research, Torun Dewan and David Myatt argue that the same dynamic limits the performance of governments. They’ve got the British cabinet in mind. With salaries and benefits defined by statute, the British Prime Minister’s only “stick” to motivate junior ministers is the threat of removal. But since ministers generally come from a small pool (the House of Commons), the PM can’t actually remove a minister unless the PM is willing to substitute in a less desirable alternate.

Thus, the longer a party controls the British cabinet, the less talented it will be at governing. Either the ministers remain in their positions for so long that the threat of removal loses its credibility, or else talented ministers are replaced with inferior ministers so often that the overall talent level crumbles. Eventually, the cabinet becomes so ineffective that that majority loses control of parliament, allowing the other party to start the same process all over again with its (initially) fresh talent pool.

Is There a “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in U.S. Elections?

I like Dewan and Myatt’s argument. It makes a lot of sense. It helps explain why there is often a “honeymoon” period after elections when the new government seems so effective.¹ In large measure, their argument works so well because it focuses on the British cabinet, where roughly 90 cabinet members (ministers and junior ministers) need to be drawn from a pool of 350 or so majority-party members of parliament. After all, the soccer analogy that I use above might not work so well if there were 1000 players on the roster and only 11 on the field.

Or would it? I think that the “benchwarmer” problem from the soccer analogy can apply just as well to American elections. Consider a member of the U.S. House running for reelection in his district. The only punishment that his “boss” (his voters) can threaten him with is removal from office, whether in the primary or in the general election. They have observed the incumbent over the past two years–longer if he has served several terms–and they understand his strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, they may be mostly unfamiliar with the challenger, who may be a political newcomer.

Thus, voters are faced with a dilemma: Should they keep the star player (the incumbent) on the field despite imperfect performance, or should they substitute in a less experienced, less tested benchwarmer? Elections aren’t merely a referendum on the incumbent’s performance.² Instead, it’s an evaluation of the incumbent that takes account of uncertainty about the challenger’s ability to fill the incumbent’s shoes.

The effect of all this might be that incumbents know they can safely underperform without having to worry much about losing their seats. Maybe that’s why over 90% of U.S. House members get reelected every two years.³ Despite all the recent hubbub about 2010 being an anti-incumbent election year, I’ll be stunned (like Sides and Yglesias) if that pattern changes much this year. Voters find it better to stick with the devil you know than with the benchwarmer you don’t.

When will state legislators take on broad revisions to state policy, and when will they focus instead on particularistic bills (that is, bills that benefit only their home district)?

Broad bills ensure that general state policies remain current and fair, but legislators might avoid them for two reasons. First, they are technically complicated; if you wish to revise the state highway code, for example, you will need expert advice and probably a few studies. Second, they are politically difficult to pass; since they influence the entire state, you’ve got to work to bring a coalition of legislators on board with your proposal. By contrast, “district” bills are technically less complicated; the process of campaigning generally gives legislators all the information they need about some pressing local problem. District bills are also politically easier to pass; since they don’t have any impact outside of a small geographical area, other legislators have no reason to oppose most district bills.

By examining every bill introduced in 13 states in 1881, 1901, 1921, 1941, 1961, 1981, and 1997–that’s over 165,000 bills–Gamm and Kousser try to explain why some states produce so many more district bills than others. In Alabama, only 53% of bills had statewide impact; in Nebraska, 77% did. In general, Gamm and Kousser find that states pass more district bills when legislators have incentives to build up their reelection constituency or to make themselves stand out as an individual, but they pass more statewide bills when legislators have incentives to develop their influence and power within the state legislature. There’s more to it than that, though.

Hypotheses and Findings

Gamm and Kousser identify specific conditions under which legislators might prefer to introduce district bills or statewide bills.

Hypothesis 1 (one-party dominance): When the major parties are evenly balanced in a state, you’ll see more statewide bills; when one party dominates, you’ll see more district bills. This prediction is based on Key’s seminal 1949 book, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key wrote that two-party competition produces “conditions favorable to government according to rule or general principle” (e.g. statewide bills); by contrast,  “in a loose, catch-as-catch-can [one-party] politics highly unstable coalitions must be held together by whatever means is available…. A loose factional system lacks the power to carry out sustained programs of action [e.g. statewide bills]” (pages 305, 308). In other words, two-party competition creates strong incentives for each party to form a statewide brand name by competing over statewide policies; in a one-party system, unstable factional coalitions within the supermajority party need to be held together with pork and other district bills. This hypothesis is confirmed in the analysis.

Hypothesis 2 (legislative salary): Legislators will introduce more district bills if they are paid more. California’s legislators earn six-figure salaries each year; Montana’s earn less than $10,000. Higher salaries create higher incentives to hold onto your job. Thus, higher salaries create incentives to deliver pork and other particularistic bills to voters in your district, even at the expense of pursuing the state’s general interest. This hypothesis is also confirmed in the analysis.

Hypothesis 3 (session length): Legislators will introduce more statewide bills if they are in session longer. California’s legislators are in session almost year round; in other states, legislators meet only one or two months per year. Because statewide bills are more complicated to write and pass than district bills, you will see fewer statewide bills in states with shorter sessions. As it happens, however, the data do not bear out this expectation; session length appears to have no relationship with the types of bills that pass.

Hypothesis 4 (turnover): Legislators can increase their statute within the legislature by building coalitions and passing statewide bills. As turnover decreases and legislators serve longer, they gain incentives to develop their stature within the legislature. As such, decreased turnover should lead to increased statewide bills. That’s the expectation, anyway. In the analysis, Gamm and Kousser find the opposite: Higher turnover leads to more focus on statewide bills. Perhaps their logic was off. Perhaps what’s really going on is this: Legislators who know they won’t stay long have less need to build up their reelection constituency (with district bills), so they can instead focus on statewide needs. I’m sure Kousser would rather not say this, but…score one for term limits?

Hypothesis 6 (district size): If districts are larger, legislators will focus more on statewide bills. Larger districts include more cities and towns, meaning that an individual district bill will reach a smaller portion of the district. In this situation, a more effective way to show the entire district that their legislator is attentive to their needs might be to pass statewide bills rather than district bills. This hypothesis is confirmed in the analysis.

Yes, I skipped hypothesis 5. I found it unpersuasive, and it ended up being statistically insignificant in the final analysis.

Punchline: If you want your legislators to pass general policies that benefit the state as a whole, pay them less, make districts bigger, and strive for partisan balance. If you want your legislators to pass pork and other district-focused bills, pay them more, make districts smaller, and promote one-party government.

Comment and Criticism

Gamm and Kousser are right to look to state legislatures to answer this question. Too often, folks think that they have to look at Congress if they want to study legislative process. The trouble with that is that there are no cross-sectional variations in the variables that we might expect to matter. In any given year, the majority party margin is the same for every member of the U.S. House; so is the salary, session length, average turnover, and so on. Sure, these things vary over time–but ALL of them vary from year to year, making it hard to tell which over-time variation is influencing the results.

Sometimes, folks who give up on Congress try instead to compare countries to one another. This approach is useful, but it introduces a host of other complications (variations in culture, constitutions, voting rules, etc.). The state legislatures are the perfect venue for this research question. The authors are able to study all the variables they care about, but all their observations are similar by virtue of their status as members of a common political system.

Yesterday I wrote about Mondak et al.’s recent APSR article about personality and political participation. On the very next page of the same issue of APSR, you’ll find a closely related article by Gerber et al. Where Mondak et al. used the “Big Five” personality traits to predict participation in politics, Gerber et al. use the same “Big Five” traits to predict ideology.

Together, these two articles are a must-read. They help explain why genes and other biological factors might influence our political leanings. Biological factors (especially genetics) are the dominant cause of these Big Five personality traits, which then remain stable throughout life. In turn, these Big Five traits influence our political leanings (Gerber et al.) and our political activity (Mondak et al.).

The Big Five personality traits

Both articles adopt the “Big Five” approach that, they claim, has become widely accepted among psychologists. Quoting two psychologists, Gerber et al. sum up these big five traits as follows:

The Big Five - Gerber et al., pg 113

As Mondak et al. note, these Big Five traits are often summed up as OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (where neurotic is the opposite of emotionally stable).

Effects of personality on ideology

Gerber et al. argue that these Big Five personality traits influence our political leanings. Each trait may have different effects on our economic ideology (free market vs interventionist) as well as on our social ideology (pro-choice/pro-equality vs pro-life/pro-tradition). They expect four of the five traits to influence ideology. The only exception is extroversion, which they expect to influence political participation (as Mondak et al. show) but not ideology. Their predictions:

Using a very large sample drawn from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), the authors confirm most of these predictions. I’ve pasted below their Figure 1. All hypotheses are confirmed. Their only error was in predicting that emotional stability would cause folks to lean left on social issues. As it turns out, emotionally stable folks lean right on both dimensions and neurotic folks lean left on both dimensions. So we learn that Conservatives are hard-working, organized, closed-minded, and emotionally stable. Liberals are lazy, disorganized, open-minded, and neurotic. Let’s see how the punditocracy spins that one. The effects of personality rival the effects of education and income.

Figure 1 from Gerber et al. 2010

Contextual effects

Gerber et al. also argue that these effects can be contextual, although they seem less committed to this possibility than Mondak et al, for whom environmental interactions were a critical part of the story. In particular, they argue that race might matter. For example, blacks tend to view poverty as caused by systematic forces rather than by laziness; as such, conscientiousness may have a weaker pull among blacks toward economic liberalism. Likewise, blacks tend to be surrounded by liberalism; thus, “openness” might actually lead blacks to question the liberalism that surrounds them rather than pulling them toward the left. Gerber et al. find support for these contextual interactions with a series of figures like the one below. When I look at these figures, though, it doesn’t look so much like an interaction to me–rather, it looks like it’s just harder to predict ideology using personality among blacks than it is among whites.

Figure 2a from Gerber et al 2010

Comment and Criticism

This article, together with the similar one by Mondak et al., is a must-read. I’m not sure whether I’m persuaded yet that I need to demand a personality index on every poll I work with. But these two articles introduce us to a new psychological approach that I’m sure we’ll see much more of.

Political scientists pay very little attention to personality when they study political behavior. Instead, they prefer to look at environmental variables (campaign spending, personal income, personal education, candidate quality, electoral competitiveness, electoral system, etc.).

A few years ago,  Alford, Funk, and Hibbing challenged that environmental approach by showing that political orientations are genetically transmitted. Later work by Fowler and his colleagues has confirmed that our political leanings are genetically influenced. But although this genetic research has drawn our attention toward biological influences, it has not produced a theory that can explain why biology matters.

The goal of Mondak et al.’s recent APSR article is to develop a theory that can link these genetic studies with the more widespread environmental studies. The figure below (from the article) summarizes the theory. Note that they expect neither environmental factors nor personality traits to have much of a direct effect on political behavior. Instead, most of the effect is interactive. For example, if a person has an extroverted personality type, and if a form of political participation is social (e.g. a caucus as opposed to donating to a candidate via internet), then you will expect that person to participate. Here’s the figure:

Figure 1 from Mondak et al 2010

By “personality,” the authors refer to the “Big Five” personality index widely used within psychological circles. The Big Five traits include these:

• Openness to new experience. Folks who seek new experiences and information as opposed to folks content with their lot.
• Conscientiousness. Organized, hard-working folks as opposed to lazy or sloppy people.
• Extroversion vs introversion.
• Agreeableness. Warm, kind, sympathetic, generous people as opposed to unkind, distant, cold, miserly people.
• Emotional stability vs neuroticism. Calm, relaxed, stable as opposed to tense, nervous.

The authors stress a single main point: We cannot understand the effects of personality without accounting for the environment, and we cannot understand the effects of the environment without accounting for personality. They illustrate this argument by showing that certain types of political participation can be predicted well by interacting personality traits with environmental variables, but the empirical analysis seems peripheral here. As I understand it, the main goal of this paper is just to get political scientists thinking about the importance of personality.

They expect this personality research to supplant genetic research. The genetic research has shown an interesting relationship between biological factors and political behavior but without providing any sort of theoretical mechanism. By contrast, psychologists have shown that genes and other biological factors “account for most of the variance in personality traits” (p 89), but personality traits are the proximate cause of later behaviors.

Comments and Criticism

These are novel arguments, and I look forward to seeing how they influence future behavioral research. At the same time, I find myself wondering how much there is to gain by looking at personality. The authors have argued that personality can influence political behaviors (turnout and other political participation). But the genetic literature has shown that genetics influence political dispositions (liberal vs conservative, Republican vs Democratic). If Mondak et al. really want to show that personality is the real (proximate) cause of anything “caused” by genetics, then they need to show that personality influences political dispositions as well.

Update: See my review of a study that does just that–Gerber et al.’s “Personality and Political Attitudes.”