Personalization entails increased focus on political individuals at the expense of political groups (Balmas et al. 2014). Research shows that personalization is found in election campaigns (Holtz-Bacha et al. 2014), media coverage (Van Aelst et al. 2012) and communication on social media (Kreiss et al. 2017). Moreover, strategies of personalization appear to be successful. Voters prefer independent politicians rather than party loyalists (Campbell et al. 2016), and they care about the public image of party leaders (Lobo, 2015) and candidates (Wattenberg, 1991). Thus, existing evidence suggests that politicians, who carry out a personalized style of representation, are more likely to make it in modern politics. However, we know next to nothing about which qualities make politicians better able or more likely to opt for a personalized style of representation. In this paper, we use insights from political psychology arguing that fundamental personality traits such as openness and extraversion are associated with preferences and talents for a personalized style of representation. Furthermore, we argue that the extent to which personality traits influence representative behavior depends on the institutional constraints imposed on the politician. We test our arguments on both British and Danish MPs holding office in 2017 using original survey data that provides unique personality profiles of 160 MPs. We analyze how personality traits influence representatives’ role perceptions, communication emphasis and task priorities. First, this paper contributes to the personalization literature by developing and testing theories of how politicians’ personal qualities is associated with different ways of understanding and performing representative tasks. Second, it contributes to the political psychology literature by providing tests of how and under which conditions elite personality matter for politics. One possible implication arising from the personalization of politics is a narrowing of the candidate pool, with certain types of politicians more likely to run, and succeed.
