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

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