Exploring the Match Between Citizens’ Preferences and Politicians' Personalities

This paper examines the match between the personalities citizens want to see in public office and the actual personalities office holders have. The paper builds on the well-established assumption that citizens evaluate politicians based not only on their policies, but also based on the type of person they expect someone in office to be. Attributes we often hear around election times are trust, competence, and empathy—features relating to the personalities rather than the policies of politicians. The current study aims to examine which personalities ordinary citizens desire to see in public office in terms of Big Five personality traits. The Big Five have been shown to matter for a variety of political attitudes and behaviors, including partisanship (Caprara et al. 2003), media strategy (Amsalem et al., 2018), political participation (Vecchione & Caprara 2009), and even political success (Joly et al., 2018). Previous work has, however, overlooked citizens’ evaluations of politicians’ individual character in terms of the Big Five. Such an extension of the literature is important because (1) the Big Five offers a comprehensive model for understanding the personality as a whole; (2) it is, by far, the most theoretically developed and widely used theoretical framework for studying personality. Analyzing a large dataset gathered among 4,543 citizens and 383 incumbent politicians in Belgium, Canada, and Israel, we find that across contexts, citizens prefer politicians who display high levels of Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability, while showing much lower appreciation for Extraversion and Agreeableness. When attempting to explain these findings, we find that voters across countries display a strong preference for politicians with Big Five personality traits similar to their own. Finally, we compare the personality preferences of citizens with the actual personalities of politicians, documenting striking similarities between the two. Implications for representation and for personality research are discussed.