Personality traits and political participation in Taiwan: a mediation approach

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effects of personality traits on political participation in Taiwan in an effort to broaden our understanding of this topic in Asia. In contrast to research on other countries, this study finds that personality traits are not directly associated with individual turnout decisions and protest participation in Taiwan. However, personality traits mediate the effects of attitudinal factors on voter turnout and protest participation. Specifically, political interest mediates the effects of extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness on voter turnout and protest participation, while strength of partisanship also mediates the effect of extraversion and agreeableness on voter turnout. In contrast to other countries, our findings suggest that political efficacy does not play a mediating role in the relationships between personality traits and political participation in Taiwan. This study indicates the importance of mediation mechanisms in understanding the influence of personality traits on political participation and implies heterogeneous effects for personality traits between countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Personality traits
• Big Five
• political participation
• voter turnout
• protest
• mediation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To simplify our models, we do not include control variables for the models for political interest, political efficacy and strength of partisanship. Besides, due to data limitations, we cannot include variables mentioned by past studies as controls in the models for political interest, political efficacy and strength of partisanship. We try to include demographic variables such as education, age and gender as controls in the models for political interest, political efficacy and strength of partisanship and obtain similar results. To save space, we do not report these results which are available upon request.

2. We also created age dummy variables by dividing the respondents into five age groups: 20–29 years, 30–39 years, 40–49 years, 50–59 years, and 60 years and above and re-estimated the models of voter turnout and protest participation. We arrived at the same conclusion that when people get older, they are more likely to vote. However, all coefficients for age dummy variables were not statistically significant, indicating that age is not associated with protest participation. To save space, we do not report the results here. While it might be expected that younger people, especially college students, are more likely to protest in Taiwan, this study shows that it is not the case. This is perhaps because our survey asked the respondents whether they participated in protest activities in the past 2 years, that is, the years of 2015 and 2016. Given that there were no large-scale protests that specifically attracted young people’s participation in Taiwan in 2015 and 2016, it is not surprising that this study finds no significant difference in protest participation among people of different ages.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ching-Hsing Wang

Dr. Ching-Hsing Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His research interests include research methods, political behavior, political psychology, public opinion, and Asian politics. He has published articles in such scholarly journals as Electoral Studies, International Political Science Review, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Party Politics, Social Science Quarterly, Taiwanese Political Science Review, The Social Science Journal, and so on.

Dennis Lu-Chung Weng

Dr. Dennis Lu-Chung Weng is an assistant professor of political science at Sam Houston State University. Dr. Weng serves as the international research fellow of the Transformation Research Unit (TRU) for democracy studies at the Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Dr. Weng’s research interests are in the fields of comparative politics, East and Southeast Asian politics, democratization, political behavior, and survey research. Dr. Weng has published more than 15 scholarly articles in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals.

Chia-hung Tsai

Dr. Chia-hung Tsai is Research Fellow of Election Study Center (ESC) and Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR) at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. His major research fields are public opinion and campaign politics. He has published his research on Electoral Studies, Political Science, Social Science Quarterly, Party Politics and other academic journals. Dr. Tsai holds a Ph.D. degree in political science from the Ohio State University and was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2012-2013).