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.

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.”

More accurately, we don’t know which “why” is the real “why.” Folks who have published evidence of these perceptual biases have also offered lots of different reasons for them, and we have yet to see research that sorts those various reasons out.

In the current issue of AJPS, Gerber and Huber write an article that claims to do exactly that: Test the possible explanations of these perceptual biases against one another. At least, that’s what you would think their article does after reading the introduction. Once you get into it, you find that they really only test two of the possible theories against each other. The remaining theories that have been suggested go untested, meaning they may or may not be true.

Briefly, these are the six theories that have been given to explain why Republicans and Democrats rate the economy differently. I use boldface to indicate Gerber and Huber’s preferred label for each theory:

• Endogenous partisanship (i.e. reverse causation). Perhaps people shift their partisan leanings over time as they observe how each party manages the economy.²
• Divergent criteria. Perhaps voters evaluate Democratic-led governments on a different basis than they evaluate Republican-led governments (e.g. giving greater weight to unemployment relative to inflation).
• Partisan cheerleading. Maybe Democrats just like to cheer on Democratic-led governments by claiming that the economy is doing better when Democrats are in power.
• Selective exposure. Maybe Democrats and Republicans experience different economic realities (e.g. work in different sectors) or read different newspapers.
• Selected perception. Maybe Democrats and Republicans mentally screen out negative information about their party while uncritically accepting positive information.³
• Partisan perceptions (i.e. beliefs about confidence). Maybe voters believe that their party’s politicians are more competent at managing the economy, so they assume the economy will perform better when their party is in power. The logic here is very different from “endogenous partisanship”; see below. (This is Gerber and Huber’s preferred theory.)

Method and results

Gerber and Huber do not test all of these theories. Rather, they design a test that holds all of these possible mechanisms constant except two: Partisan cheerleading and partisan perceptions. They use CCES interviews from immediately before and immediately after the 2006 Congressional elections, which produce a surprise turnover of both the House and the Senate from the Republicans to the Democrats.

These pre- and post-election interviews were only a few weeks apart. During that time, not much changed in the real economy (as measured by stock prices, oil prices, inflation, unemployment, and so on) or in the reported economy (based on a comparison of NY Times and Wall Street Journal economic coverage). As such, Gerber and Huber argue (persuasively) that divergent criteria, selective exposure, and selective perception cannot explain any differences in the pre- and post-election interviews. To control for the “endogenous partisanship” theory, they use a panel of the same respondents for both interviews, enabling them to hold partisanship constant across the two waves.

These methods leave only two theories capable of explaining any shift in respondent evaluations of the national economy that occurred between the pre- and post-interviews: Cheerleading and partisan perceptions. Let’s be clear here: Of the 6 possible causal mechanisms that Gerber and Huber identify, they test only 2 of them.

They argue that they can differentiate between these last two theories by looking at two sets of dependent variables. Either theory would predict that respondents would adjust their perceptions of the national economy in a partisan manner following the election: Democrats would become more optimistic, Republicans would become less optimistic. But for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, Gerber and Huber argue that only the “partisan perceptions” theory would also predict that respondents would adjust their nonpolitical perceptions (e.g. general level of happiness, expected level of Christmas/vacation spending).

Sure enough, Gerber and Huber find that Democrats became much more optimistic about the national economy in the post-election survey; Republicans did the opposite. But they also found that Democrats became more optimistic about their personal lives. Because of that latter finding, they conclude that “partisan cheerleading” does not explain the results, but “partisan perceptions” does.

What it means

Here’s what they say it means:

… partisanship leads to a general attribution of desirable traits to those who share one’s partisanship (Conover and Feldman 1982). A similar phenomenon emerges in psychology research, in which individuals are prone to falsely attribute unobserved positive qualities to individuals whom share characteristics with them while falsely attributing unobserved negative qualities to individuals whom they do not feel warmly toward. While there is no doubt that some citizens have sophisticated and deeply held views about economic policy…, for many Americans, there is no rational basis to suppose that one party is better than the other at managing the economy. If such positive or negative traits are attributed to the parties nonetheless, it could generate the patterns of economic assessments and behaviors observed here.

Take that, Anthony Downs.

Parting shots

I have trouble with this claim: “For many Americans, there is no rational basis to suppose that one party is better than the other at managing the economy.” If that’s true, is our entire democratic process a farce? We can probably all agree that Democrats prefer more government services while Republicans are torn between wanting low taxes and wanting a ridiculously large defense budget. If nothing else, don’t those decisions about tax rates and government spending influence the economy in some way?

At the same time, I don’t question their broader point at all. It seems downright likely that a voter would tend to think more highly of a politician’s capabilities for the simple reason that the voter and politician are on the same “team.” (Case in point: The Robber’s Cave experiment.)

So I’m left wondering: Can’t we have both? Isn’t it possible that parties do manage the economy differently, and also that voters have biased beliefs about each party’s capabilities?

I’m also a bit disappointed by the bait and switch in this article. The authors had me expecting a test of all 6 theories listed above. Instead, they tested only two, confirming one and weakly rejecting the other. But although the scope of this article isn’t as broad as the authors pitch it as, the article is nevertheless excellent. The methods are precise and enable an accurate test of two theories. Let’s hope that future research can do just as good a job of testing the other possible theories.