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5 - The Personality Basis of Political Preferences

from Part I - Foundations of Political Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

By
Christopher M. Federico
Edited by
Danny Osborne  and
Chris G. Sibley
Danny Osborne
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
Chris G. Sibley
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
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Summary

In this chapter, I review current research on the relationship between personality and political preferences, with an eye to its complexities and the ways in which it is conditioned on other variables – including the contextual factors mentioned at the outset. To provide context, I briefly review research on the structure of political preferences. Next, I summarise a now-substantial body of work suggesting a relationship between rigidity in personality and right-wing political preferences, and then describe moderators of and boundary conditions to this relationship. Finally, in an effort to reconcile increasingly varied findings on political differences in cognition and motivation, I offer an integrative perspective on when the relationship between rigidity and political differences will be ideologically asymmetric and when it will be symmetric.

Keywords

PersonalityMotivationRigidityIdeologyIndividual differences
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology , pp. 68 - 88
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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