Highlights
• Provides insights into citizens’ personality trait preferences for politicians.
• Ideal politician is more stable, extravert, conscientious, open, honest than voter.
• Citizens seek personality similarity in basic value-related traits.
• Personality similarity is mediated by core ideological views.
• Similarity may ensure affective closeness and ideological representation.
Abstract: What makes voters prefer a certain type of politician? First, we argue that voters’ trait preferences follow a “desired leadership” principle. We show that citizens want the ideal-type politician to be more emotionally stable, extravert-assertive, more deliberate-conscientious and open, more honest, but also somewhat more disagreeable than the average citizen. Second, we argue that voters prefer a model candidate with similar basic value-related personality traits. Importantly, we show that trait congruence is partly mediated by core ideological preferences and thus ensures democratic representation. The study’s findings have implications for personalization of politics and democratic representation, because personality traits can be vital cues for voters deciding whether candidates will act in their interest and represent them well.
Keywords: Congruency modelAssumed similarityLeader personalityIdeological attitudesPolitician
6. Summary and conclusion
If candidates are taking over as figureheads in electoral campaigns, the question naturally arises, what makes voters prefer a certain type of politician? We start from the assumption that a politician’s personality is a powerful anchoring cue and heuristic in that regard. Such a heuristic might become even more decisive in a world where candidates use personalized communication and campaigning through various social media channels. In doing so, candidates themselves serve as the faces of their parties, which allows and forces candidates to constantly create images of themselves. From such images, voters can infer the personality traits of candidates that are—in analogy to parties’ ideological leanings—relatively stable individual differences in behaviors that allow voters to extrapolate the what and how of politicians’ likely future behavior.
This leads us to develop two principles that guide voters’ preferences for personality traits in politicians. First, we contend that voters expect politicians to be more capable or “better” than themselves on traits associated with leadership (the “desired leadership traits” principle). Our results show that, when compared to the general population, voters want politicians to be more emotionally stable, extravert-assertive, more deliberate-conscientious and open, more honest, but also somewhat more disagreeable—many of the traits associated with leadership, political ambition, and higher media visibility.
Second, we contend that voters seek representation by candidates who exhibit personality congruence with their own personality (the “voter-politician congruence” principle). This is partly due to the sheer emotional liking of likeness that allows for identification with the candidate. However, as we were able to show, to some degree, homophily is also due to ideological reasons and permits voters to determine what candidates would do once they are in office. We have demonstrated that greater SDO partly explains (mediates) a preference for politicians who score low on agreeableness, while greater RWA partly explains a preference for politicians low on openness and high on conscientiousness.
6.1. Implications
Our research has several important implications. First, one could be tempted to conclude that political campaign content is taking a backseat as individual personalities are increasingly superseding parties as cues and targets in political elections. We argue that, on the contrary, people’s vote choice is not necessarily becoming less political when voters shift from choosing between parties to choosing between candidates, since personality is not void of ideologically relevant content. As we have shown, ideological leanings shape preferences for politicians’ personalities.
Second, we put forward an explanation for why the general public will demand certain traits from their leaders, who are expected to accomplish certain tasks and navigate the country into a stable and prosperous future.
Third, we further develop the theory on personality trait matching and provide a bridge between the two—at times mutually exclusive—concepts, namely, desired similarity (representation) between the targets and desired exceptionality (need for a leader). In the literature on personal relationships and mating, for instance, there exist two approaches: people look for partners who are similar to themselves (assortative mating), and there are absolute preferences (aspirational assortative preference), i.e., traits that are more generally endorsed (Liu et al., 2018). We argue that even in an asymmetrical relationship like the one between voters and politicians, similarity plays an important role and limits aspirational considerations. Voters generally want to be represented by their politicians, i.e., seek similarity, but on traits that are conventionally associated with good leadership, they expect politicians to be more capable than themselves.
Fourth, and of crucial importance, we provide for an account of why voters might seek trait similarity with politicians. The congruency model, as outlined by Caprara and Zimbardo (2004), demonstrates voter-politician similarity in traits but leaves room for speculation about the mechanism and the function of the similarity principle (see Caprara et al., 2007). We try to close this gap and suggest that similarity serves two functions. First, a preference for similarity might stem from a mere liking of likeness, which allows for affective closeness to the politician in question. Second, however, we introduce a new way of looking at personality trait similarity and argue that it also serves a political function, namely, ideological representation. We demonstrate that similarity on openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness is partially explained—and thus partially mediated—by ideological beliefs (SDO, RWA). This lends support to several theories arguing that our personality is an organizing system that translates into motivational goals or values, including SDO and RWA, which eventually guide ideological orientations and political behavior (Caprara and Vecchione, 2017, Duckitt and Sibley, 2010, Jost et al., 2009).
6.2. Limitations and future avenues
Finally, we want to discuss some limitations of the current study and propose avenues for future research. Our studies lack a standardized personality inventory tailored to the job of politicians. This is because we used a personality inventory that would lend itself to a bipolar rating scale format without creating (huge) social desirability. A contextualized measure with item content applicable to the job of politicians is, however, missing thus far. A suitable and more extensive measurement of personality would also allow for delving deeper into personality facets or “dark” or “socially malevolent” traits, such as narcissism and machiavellianism. Hence, future studies might investigate whether and which of the more specific traits and socially malevolent traits are preferred/accepted by voters, who does so, and under what circumstances (context).
Further, we asked respondents to rate what their ideal politician would look like (see also Kinder et al., 1980, Roets and Van Hiel, 2009), although with somewhat different question framing (“lead the country and ensure that the population is doing well”/”which of the following character traits make a good politician”). However, with this format, we cannot assess whether respondents thought of one or several abstract model politicians or whether they had a concrete man or a concrete woman in mind (see Kinder et al., 1980). Nevertheless, we think that this does not interfere with our conclusions about an idealized picture of aspired traits and the congruence with them. We did not ask respondents whether they would indeed vote for particular politicians that exhibit these traits (and that carry other confounding variables such as a party). Future research might want to address this and examine more closely whether desired traits by voters are indeed decisive as vote determinants.
The two samples investigated in the present work are, of course, limited in their generalizability. While Study 1 allowed us to make inferences about expectations regarding more specific personality facets, Study 2 does only measure perceptions about broad personality domains. In addition, although the Austrian sample (Study 2) was based on a random population sample, the German sample (Study 1) was not representative of the general population. It thus remains to be determined to what extent the reported findings can be generalized to other samples, for instance, outside Europe.
Another avenue to follow up on the present research is the homophily (or similarity) principle between voters and politicians more generally and its significance for political representation. In the political science literature, the homophily principle is not at all new. For example, it is well established that voters tend to support candidates with similar sociodemographic characteristics (Campbell et al., 1960, Cutler, 2002). Additionally, similarity in physical traits, such as facial similarity between voters and candidates, seems to create liking (e.g., Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, & Collins, 2008). More recently, Bankert (2016) found that even nonpolitical social similarity with the party prototype (e.g., hobbies, lifestyle) intensifies feelings of partisan identity. With candidates becoming more important voting cues, future research might want to further investigate voter-politician similarity as well as which specific traits make the “ideal” politician.
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