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The Big Five personality traits and partisanship in England

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  • Aidt, T. S.
  • Rauh, C.

Abstract

We propose a new framework for the study of the psychological foundation of party identification. We draw a distinction between the part of an individual's party preference that is stable throughout adult life and the dynamic part responding to lifecycle events and macro shocks. We theorize that the Big Five personality traits exert a causal effect on the stable part of an individual's party preference and provide evidence from a large nationally representative English panel dataset in support of this theory. We find that supporters of the major parties (Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats) have substantively different personality traits. Moreover, we show that those not identifying with any party, who are close to holding the majority, are similar to those identifying with the Conservatives. We show that these results are robust to controlling for cognitive skills and parental party preferences, and to estimation on a subsample of siblings. The relationship between personality traits and party identification is stable across birth cohorts.

Suggested Citation

  • Aidt, T. S. & Rauh, C., 2017. "The Big Five personality traits and partisanship in England," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1745, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    • Handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:1745
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    Cited by:

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    2. Kauder, Björn & Potrafke, Niklas & Reischmann, Markus, 2016. "Do politicians reward core supporters? Evidence from a discretionary grant program," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 39-56.
    3. Markus Reischmann, 2016. "Empirical Studies on Public Debt and Fiscal Transfers," ifo Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsforschung, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 63.
    4. Toke Aidt & Christopher Rauh, 2019. "The Rise of the 'No Party' in England," CESifo Working Paper Series 7812, CESifo.
    5. Oosterlinck, Kim & Lacroix, Jean & Méon, Pierre-Guillaume, 2019. "A Positive Effect of Political Dynasties: the Case of France’s 1940 Enabling Act," CEPR Discussion Papers 13871, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Sarah Brown & Karl Taylor, 2019. "Charitable Behaviour and Political Ideology: Evidence for the UK," Working Papers 2019002, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics.
    7. Clément Brébion, 2021. "The works council wage premium in Germany: a case of strategic discrimination?," Working Papers halshs-03100169, HAL.
    8. Kauder, Björn & Björn, Kauder & Niklas, Potrafke & Markus, Reischmann, 2016. "Do politicians gratify core supporters? Evidence from a discretionary grant program," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145509, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    9. Daniel Gray & Harry Pickard & Luke Munford, 2021. "Election Outcomes and Individual Subjective Wellbeing in Great Britain," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 88(351), pages 809-837, July.
    10. Harry Pickard, 2019. "A mailshot in the dark? The impact of the UK government's lea fet on the 2016 EU referendum," Working Papers 2019004, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Big Five personality traits; Party identification; Partisanship; England;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

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