Taking Campaigns Personally: The Big Five Aspects and Political Behavior

Abstract

How do political campaigns and personality traits interact to produce differences in political behavior? This dissertation examines this question, demonstrating across a variety of behaviors and traits that political campaigns cannot be understood without considering the influence of personality traits, nor can personality in politics researchers continue to ignore the influence of situational factors such as political campaigns. Working within the structure of the Big Five personality system and using a series of experiments, I show that political campaigns alter the expression of personality traits, changing how dispositions influence voters' likelihood of voting, political participation, attitude polarization, and information seeking. I claim that voter personality cannot be understood in isolation from the political context (or vice-versa); instead, personality effects are heterogeneous contingent on the political situation.