The Subtle Appeal of Dark Traits: Why Candidates’ Personality Traits Matter, and For Whom

The personality of political leaders matters - and, indeed, scholars have been paying increasing attention to it recently. Evidence exists that certain personality profiles could be more conducive to electoral success – for instance, Joly et al. (2018) find that politicians low in agreeableness tend to be more successful, Scott and Medeiros (2020) highlight the potentially detrimental role of openness, and Nai (2019b) shows that candidates high in conscientiousness and psychopathy tend to attract more votes, whereas extraversion might be detrimental. Beyond this direct effect, some research suggests that voters tend to vote for candidates with personalities that “match” their own, while others suggest that some candidates might seem more appealing for voters with certain personality profile, but not for others; for instance evidence suggests that conscientiousness is positively associated with support for one of the most important examples of contemporary autocratic tendencies – Vladimir Putin – and that voters scoring low on agreeableness are more likely to support populist parties Yet, evidence showing this “homophily” effect at play is surprisingly scarce, and usually based on real-world candidates - thus unable to disentangle the endogenous effects played by partisanship. This paper therefore asks the question to what extent do different personality profiles of candidates appeal more to some voters than others. This fundamental question is explored via an experimental online survey with a sample of US citizens (n=1800) drawn from the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing website. We create mock candidates whose personalities are manipulated to represent ideal-types in terms of the Big Five (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness) and Dark Triad (narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) traits. Respondents’ individual differences on these same personality inventories, and other proximate constructs (such as tolerance to negativity, and conflict avoidance), measured prior to experimental exposure, are expected to moderate the effect of exposure to different candidates’ personality profiles on their perception and affective evaluation.