Definition
The study of personality and political affiliation centers around the question whether and how personality accounts for individuals’ affiliation with political parties or ideas. A growing body of evidence indicates that political beliefs and attitudes are related to individual differences in broad personality dispositions, linked to genetic structures and neuropsychological functioning and driven by motivated cognition.
Introduction
Political affiliation is generally used as an umbrella term that subsumes different forms of individuals’ affiliation with political ideas, principles, or groups. We can distinguish between research on party affiliation or partisan identification and research on political attitudes or beliefs. There are different reasons to expect that personality is linked to the strength of identification with a political party or group (Gerber et al. 2012). First, affiliating with a political party provides a simplified cognitive framework for understanding...
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Rothmund, T. (2020). Personality and Political Affiliation. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_716
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_716
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