Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:44:53.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2016

Adam J. Ramey ,
Jonathan D. Klingler  and
Gary E. Hollibaugh Jr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 163 - 184
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Adam J. Ramey is an Assistant Professor of Politics, New York University Abu Dhabi, PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi ([email protected]). Jonathan D. Klingler is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, 21 alleé de Brienne, 31000 Toulouse ([email protected]). Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 ([email protected]). All authors contributed equally to the paper. Support through ANR-Labex IAST is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Ken Benoit, Matt Blackwell, Richard Bonneau, Drew Dimmery, Conor Dowling, Michael Gill, Andy Harris, Pablo Hernandez-Lagos, John Jost, Slava Mihkaylov, Jeff Mondak, Jonathan Nagler, David Nickerson, Elena Panova, John Patty, Michael Peress, Dave Primo, Molly Roberts, Larry Rothenberg, Maya Sen, Jo Silvester, Arthur Spirling, Karine van der Straeten, and participants at the 5th Annual Text as Data Conference and the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy for comments and feedback. All remaining errors are their own. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2016.12

References

Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Alford, John R., and Hibbing, John R.. 2007. ‘Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments’. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 614(1):196–212.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Snyder, James M. Jr., and Stewart, Charles III. 2001. ‘The Effects of Party and Preferences on Congressional Roll-Call Voting’. Legislative Studies Quarterly 26(4):533–572.Google Scholar
Barlett, Christopher P., and Anderson, Craig A.. 2012. ‘Direct and Indirect Relations Between the Big 5 Personality Traits and Aggressive and Violent Behavior’. Personality and Individual Differences 52(8):870–875.Google Scholar
Barrick, Murray R., Mount, Michael K., and Strauss, Judy P.. 1993. ‘Conscientiousness and Performance of Sales Representatives: Test of the Mediating Effects of Goal Setting’. Journal of Applied Psychology 78(5):715–722.Google Scholar
Battista, James Coleman, Peress, Michael, and Richman, Jesse. 2012. ‘Common-Space Ideal Points, Committee Assignments, and Financial Interests in the State Legislatures’. State Politics & Policy Quarterly 13(1):70–87.Google Scholar
Bishop, Christopher M. 2006. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Borgatta, Edgar F. 1964. ‘The Structure of Personality Characteristics’. Behavioral Science 9(1):8–17.Google Scholar
Caprara, Gian Vittorio, Barbaranelli, Claudio, and Zimbardo, Philip G.. 2002. ‘When Parsimony Subdues Distinctiveness: Simplified Public Perceptions of Politicians’ Personality’. Political Psychology 23(1):77–95.Google Scholar
Caprara, Gian Vittorio, Schwartz, Shalom, Capanna, Cristina, Vecchione, Michele, and Barbaranelli, Claudio. 2006. ‘Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice’. Political Psychology 27(1):1–28.Google Scholar
Coltheart, Max. 1981. ‘The MRC Psycholinguistic Database’. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A (Human Experimental Psychology) 33(4):497–505.Google Scholar
Congressional Management Foundation and Society for Human Resource Management. 2013. ‘Life in Congress: Job Satisfaction and Engagement of House and Senate Staff’. Available at http://www.congressfoundation.org/publications/life-in-congress, accessed 7 July 2015.Google Scholar
Costa, Paul T. Jr., and McCrae, Robert R.. 1992. ‘Normal Personality Assessment in Clinical Practice: The NEO Personality Inventory’. Psychological Assessment 4(1):5–13.Google Scholar
Cox, Gary W., and McCubbins, Mathew D.. 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crespin, Michael H., and Rohde, David W.. 2010. ‘Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor’. Journal of Politics 72(4):976–989.Google Scholar
Dietrich, Bryce J., Lasley, Scott, Mondak, Jeffery J., Remmel, Megan L., and Turner, Joel. 2012. ‘Personality and Legislative Politics: The Big Five Trait Dimensions Among U.S. State Legislators’. Political Psychology 33(2):195–210.Google Scholar
Duckworth, Angela L., Peterson, Christopher, Matthews, Michael D., and Kelly, Dennis R.. 2007. ‘Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6):1087–1101.Google Scholar
Duckworth, Angela L., Tsukayama, Eli, and Kirby, Teri A.. 2013. ‘Is it Really Self-Control? Examining the Predictive Power of the Delay of Gratification Task’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39(7):843–855.Google Scholar
Eaves, Lindon J., and Hans, J. Eysenck. 1974. ‘Genetics and the Development of Social Attitudes’. Nature 249(454):288–289.Google Scholar
Efron, Bradley, and Tibshirani, Robert J.. 1994. An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, Andrew, King, Gary, and Liu, Chuanhai. 1998. ‘Not Asked and Not Answered: Multiple Imputation for Multiple Surveys’. Journal of the American Statistical Association 93(443):846–857.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., Huber, Gregory A., Doherty, David, and Dowling, Conor M.. 2011a. ‘The Big Five Personality Traits in the Political Arena’. Annual Review of Political Science 14(1):265–287.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., Huber, Gregory A., Doherty, David, and Dowling, Conor M.. 2011b. ‘Personality Traits and the Consumption of Political Information’. American Politics Research 39(1):32–84.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., Huber, Gregory A., Doherty, David, Dowling, Conor M., and Ha, Shang E.. 2010. ‘Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships Across Issue Domains and Political Contexts’. American Political Science Review 104(1):111–133.Google Scholar
Gosling, Samuel D., Rentfrow, Peter J., and Swann, William B. Jr. 2003. ‘A Very Brief Measure of the Big-Five Personality Domains’. Journal of Research in Personality 37(6):504–528.Google Scholar
Grant, Peter. 2006. ‘Politicians Grow Wary of Survey as Internet Spreads Attack Ads’. The Wall Street Journal, 25 October, p. B1.Google Scholar
Hall, Mark, Frank, Eibe, Holmes, Geoffrey, Pfahringer, Bernhard, Reutemann, Peter, and Witten, Ian H.. 2009. ‘The WEKA Data Mining Software: An Update’. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 11(1):10–18.Google Scholar
Hall, Matthew E. K. 2015. ‘Judging with Personality: The Justices’ Personality Traits and Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court’. Manuscript.Google Scholar
Hastie, Trevor, Tibshirani, Robert, and Friedman, Jerome. 2009. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction 2nd ed. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Heckman, James J. 1976. ‘The Common Structure of Statistical Models of Truncation, Sample Selection and Limited Dependent Variables and a Simple Estimator for Such Models’. Annals of Economic and Social Measurement 5(4):475–492.Google Scholar
Hollibaugh, Gary E. Jr., Ramey, Adam J., and Klingler, Jonathan D.. 2015. ‘Welcome to the Machine: A Model of Legislator Personality and Communications Technology Adoption’. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2629657, accessed 7 July 2015.Google Scholar
Hornik, Kurt, Buchta, Christian, and Zeileis, Achim. 2009. ‘Open-Source Machine Learning: R Meets Weka’. Computational Statistics 24(2):225–232.Google Scholar
Jost, John T., Nosek, Brian A., and Gosling, Samuel D.. 2008. ‘Ideology: Its Resurgence in Social, Personality, and Political Psychology’. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3(2):126–136.Google Scholar
Jovanović, Dragan, Lipovac, Krsto, Stanojević, Predrag, and Stanojević, Dragana. 2011. ‘The Effects of Personality Traits on Driving-Related Anger and Aggressive Behaviour in Traffic Among Serbian Drivers’. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour 14(1):43–53.Google Scholar
Kandler, Christian, Bleidorn, Wiebke, and Riemann, Rainer. 2012. ‘Left or Right? Sources of Political Orientation: The Roles of Genetic Factors, Cultural Transmission, Assortative Mating, and Personality’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102(3):633–645.Google Scholar
Karush, William. 1939. ‘Minima of Functions of Several Variables with Inequalities as Side Constraints’. MSc Thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Honaker, James, Joseph, Anne, and Scheve, Kenneth. 2001. ‘Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation’. American Political Science Review 95(1):49–69.Google Scholar
Klingler, Jonathan D., Hollibaugh, Gary E. Jr., and Ramey, Adam J.. 2015. ‘Don’t Know What You Got: A Bayesian Hierarchical Model of Neuroticism and Nonresponse’. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2608719, accessed 7 July 2015.Google Scholar
Küfner, Albrecht C. P., Back, Mitja D., Nestler, Steffen, and Egloff, Boris. 2010. ‘Tell Me a Story and I Will Tell You Who You Are! Lens Model Analyses of Personality and Creative Writing’. Journal of Research in Personality 44(4):427–435.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Harold W., and Tucker, Albert W.. 1951. ‘Nonlinear Programming’. In Jerzy Neyman (ed.), Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, 481–92. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lowe, Will, and Benoit, Kenneth. 2011. ‘Estimating Uncertainty in Quantitative Text Analysis’. Available at http://www.kenbenoit.net/pdfs/Midwest_2011_Lowe_Benoit.pdf, accessed 7 July 2015.Google Scholar
Mairesse, Francois, and Walker, Marilyn A.. 2008. ‘Trainable Generation of Big-Five Personality Styles Through Data-Driven Parameter Estimation’. In Johanna D. Moore, Simone Teufel, James Allan, and Sadaoki Furui (eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 165–73. Madison, WI: Omnipress.Google Scholar
Mairesse, Francois, Walker, Marilyn A., Mehl, Matthias R., and Moore, Roger K.. 2007. ‘Using Linguistic Cues for the Automatic Recognition of Personality in Conversation and Text’. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 30(1):457–500.Google Scholar
McCrae, Robert R., and John, Oliver P.. 1992. ‘An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and its Applications’. Journal of Personality 60(2):175–215.Google Scholar
Mehl, Matthias R., Gosling, Samuel D., and Pennebaker, James W.. 2006. ‘Personality in its Natural Habitat: Manifestations and Implicit Folk Theories of Personality in Daily Life’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90(5):862–877.Google Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J. 2010. Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J., and Halperin, Karen D.. 2008. ‘A Framework for the Study of Personality and Political Behaviour’. British Journal of Political Science 38(2):335–362.Google Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J., Hibbing, Matthew V., Canache, Damarys, Seligson, Mitchell A., and Anderson, Mary R.. 2010. ‘Personality and Civic Engagement: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Trait Effects on Political Behavior’. American Political Science Review 104(1):85–110.Google Scholar
Muris, Peter, Roelofs, Jeffrey, Rassin, Eric, Franken, Ingmar, and Mayer, Birgit. 2005. ‘Mediating Effects of Rumination and Worry on the Links Between Neuroticism, Anxiety and Depression’. Personality and Individual Differences 39(6):1105–1111.Google Scholar
Neale, Thomas H. 1998. ‘Speechwriting in Perspective: A Brief Guide to Effective and Persuasive Communication’. CRS Report for Congress, 98–170 GOV. Available at http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs581/m1/1/high_res_d/98-170gov_1998Feb25.pdf.Google Scholar
Ozer, Daniel J., and Benet-Martinez, Veronica. 2006. ‘Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes’. Annual Review of Psychology 57(1):401–421.Google Scholar
Pennebaker, James W., and King, Laura A.. 1999. ‘Linguistic Styles: Language Use as an Individual Difference’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6):1296–1312.Google Scholar
Pennebaker, James W., Francis, Martha E., and Booth, Roger J.. 2001. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC 2001. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1997. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Poropat, Arthur E. 2009. ‘A Meta-Analysis of the Five-Factor Model of Personality and Academic Performance’. Psychological Bulletin 135(2):322–338.Google Scholar
Quinlan, John R. 1992. ‘Learning with Continuous Classes’. In Anthony Adams and Leon Sterling (ed.), AI ’92: Proceedings of the 5th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 343–348. Singapore: World Scientific.Google Scholar
Ramey, Adam J., Klingler, Jonathan D., and Hollibaugh, Gary E. Jr. 2015. ‘More Than a Feeling: Personality, Polarization, and the Transformation of the U.S. Congress’. Manuscript.Google Scholar
Rubenzer, Steven J., and Faschingbauer, Thomas R.. 2004. Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents. Sterling, VA: Potomac Books Inc.Google Scholar
Rubin, Donald B. 1987. Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Saucier, Gerard, and Goldberg, Lewis R.. 1996. ‘The Language of Personality: Lexical Perspectives on the Five-Factor Model’. In Jerry S. Wiggins (ed.), The Five-Factor Model of Personality: Theoretical Perspectives, 363–384. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Schuller, Björn, Steidl, Stefan, Batliner, Anton, Burkhardt, Felix, Devillers, Laurence, Muller, Christian, and Narayanan, Shrikanth. 2013. ‘Paralinguistics in Speech and Language—State-of-the-Art and the Challenge’. Computer Speech & Language 27(1):4–39.Google Scholar
Shevade, Shirish K., Keerthi, S. Sathiya, Bhattacharyya, Chiranjib, and Murthy, K. R. Krishna. 1999. ‘Improvements to the SMO Algorithm for SVM Regression’. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 11(5):1188–1193.Google Scholar
Shor, Boris, and McCarty, Nolan. 2011. ‘The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures’. American Political Science Review 105(3):530–551.Google Scholar
Sigelman, Lee. 2002. ‘Two Reagans? Genre Imperatives, Ghostwriters, and Presidential Personality Profiles’. Political Psychology 23(4):839–851.Google Scholar
Silvester, Jo, Wyatt, Madeleine, and Randall, Ray. 2014. ‘Politician Personality, Machiavellianism, and Political Skill as Predictors of Performance Ratings in Political Roles’. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 87(2):258–279.Google Scholar
Smola, Alex J., and Schölkopf, Bernhard. 2004. ‘A Tutorial on Support Vector Regression’. Statistics and Computing 14(3):199–222.Google Scholar
Tupes, Ernest C., and Christal, Raymond E.. 1992. ‘Recurrent Personality Factors Based on Trait Ratings’. Journal of Personality 60(2):225–251.Google Scholar
VandenBos, Gary R. 2007. APA Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Verhulst, Brad, Eaves, Lindon J., and Hatemi, Peter K.. 2012. ‘Correlation Not Causation: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies’. American Journal of Political Science 56(1):34–51.Google Scholar
Verhulst, Brad, Hatemi, Peter K., and Martin, Nicholas G.. 2010. ‘The Nature of the Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Attitudes’. Personality and Individual Differences 49(4):306–316.Google Scholar
Vetterli, Charles F., and Furedy, John J.. 1997. ‘Correlates of Intelligence in Computer Measured Aspects of Prose Vocabulary: Word Length, Diversity, and Rarity’. Personality and Individual Differences 22(6):933–935.Google Scholar
Volden, Craig, and Wiseman, Alan E.. 2014. Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Herbert F. 2009. The Total Survey Error Approach: A Guide to the New Science of Survey Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Ramey supplementary material

Ramey supplementary material 1

Download Ramey supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 825.3 KB
Supplementary material: File

Ramey supplementary material

Ramey supplementary material 2

Download Ramey supplementary material(File)
File 302.7 KB