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Personality and Political Participation: The Mediation Hypothesis

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Abstract

Recent analyses have demonstrated that personality affects political behavior. According to the mediation hypothesis, the effect of personality on political participation is mediated by classical predictors, such as political interest, internal efficacy, political discussion, or the sense that voting is a civic duty. This paper outlines various paths that link personality traits to two participatory activities: voter turnout in European Parliament elections and participation in protest actions. The hypotheses are tested with data from a large, nationally representative, face-to-face survey of the Spanish population conducted before and after the 2009 European Parliament elections using log-linear path models that are well suited to study indirect relationships. The results clearly confirm that the effects of personality traits on voter turnout and protest participation are sizeable but indirect. They are mediated by attitudinal predictors.

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Notes

  1. The sample was stratified to autonomous region and size of municipality. Municipalities were selected randomly as primary sampling units, and from those sections were selected with probability proportional to size. In the final stage a person was selected by performing a random walk through the section with quota on age and sex. The interviews were administered by an interviewer in the person's home. In the analyses that follow poststratification weights provided by the CIS are always applied. They weight for autonomous region, city size, sex, and age.

  2. Missing data were dealt with by the full-information maximum likelihood estimator employed by Latent Gold under the assumption of missing at random (MAR). Estimation proceeded by EM iterations, after which the algorithm switched to Newton–Raphson until convergence was attained. Before iterations, 10 random sets of starting values were generated and iterated by EM. From these 10 resulting estimates the set with the highest likelihood was chosen as a starting point for iterations.

  3. The full estimates and the Latent Gold output are available as an Online Appendix given under Supplementary material.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors whose careful comments grealy helped improving the manuscript. For comments on previous versions we thank André Blais, Karen Jusko and the participants of the 2010 ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops on Personality and Voter Turnout, the 2010 ISPP Conference, and the Research Forum at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The paper would not have been possible without the support of the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas, the European Science Foundation (07-HumVIB-FP-004 “Voter turnout and abstention in context”), and the Research and Expertise Center for Survey Methodology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The usual caveat applies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultat de Ciències Polítiques i Sociologia, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Edifici B-Campus UAB, 0193, Bellaterra, Spain

    Aina Gallego

  2. Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Daniel Oberski

  3. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Daniel Oberski

Authors
  1. Aina Gallego
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Correspondence to Aina Gallego.

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Appendix: Question Wording of English Original Ten-Item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10)

Appendix: Question Wording of English Original Ten-Item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10)

Personality (BFI-10)

I see myself as someone who

  • … is reserved

  • … is generally trusting

  • … tends to be lazy

  • … is relaxed, handles stress well

  • … has few artistic interests

  • … is outgoing, sociable

  • … tends to find fault with others

  • … does a thorough job

  • … gets nervous easily

  • … has an active imagination

  • Disagree strongly (0)

  • Disagree a little (1)

  • Neither agree nor disagree (2)

  • Agree a little (3)

  • Agree strongly (4)

See Tables 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Table 2 Variables used in the study and their assumed measurement levels
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Table 3 Conditional probabilities of choosing each category of the two observed indicators of efficacy, given the latent variable
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Table 4 Measurement of protest participation
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Table 5 Loglinear effects of personality traits on predictors of voting
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Table 6 Loglinear effects of personality traits on predictors of protest participation
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Gallego, A., Oberski, D. Personality and Political Participation: The Mediation Hypothesis. Polit Behav 34, 425–451 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-011-9168-7

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