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ABSTRACT
Despite a long tradition linking individual differences in personality to a variety of different political outlooks and philosophies, little attention has been devoted to the potential relationship between personality and populist attitudes. Drawing on survey data from more than 2,500 Canadians of voting age, this article provides a first look at the relationship between personality (general and dark traits) and populist attitudes. Even when controlling for a variety of factors like age, sex, income, education, labour market situation, and a number of others, the results reveal a consistent role for personality. In terms of general personality, the results reveal a significant relationship between populist attitudes and three traits: honesty-humility, emotionality, and conscientiousness. As for the dark traits, narcissism is significantly and negatively related to populist sentiment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Scott Pruysers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University. His research explores questions related to party and electoral politics.
Notes
1 While not examining individual personality traits per se, Marchlewska et al. (Citation2018) find a strong relationship between ‘collective narcissism’ (the unrealistic belief in the greatness of the national group) and support for populist leaders (i.e., Donald Trump) and policies (i.e., Brexit).
2 It is worth noting that we are talking about sub-clinical levels of these darker traits. Hare (Citation1991), for example, demonstrates that psychopathy can have meaningful variation within normal populations.
3 Note that Fatke (Citation2019) fails to replicate the agreeableness finding in a recent study of British and German voters.
4 While narcissism certainly has negative connotations, the trait can also entail more positive interpersonal qualities. This includes ‘charmingness, self-assuredness, and popularity’ (Fatfouta, Citation2019, p. 1).
5 While online non-probability samples have a number of potential limitations (including concerns about sample representativeness, respondent fatigue, and data quality), a number of recent studies highlight the benefits of online surveys and suggest that some concerns may be overstated (i.e., Stephenson and Crête, Citation2011).
6 Besides altering these items for a Canadian sample (i.e., changing wording from ‘Dutch’ to ‘Canadian’), these eight items are identical to those found in Akkerman et al. (Citation2014).
7 Conducting a Principle Components Analysis on the 60 items reveals six clear factors (accounting for more than 40% of the total variance). While there are other eigenvalues slightly higher than 1, the scree plot of the analysis reveals six primary factors.
8 All personality variables were standardized using the ‘Percent of Maximum Possible (POMP)’ method to allow for easy comparison (see Cohen et al., Citation1999).
9 Some scholars have gone as far as to caution against including all three dark traits in the same analysis (see Miller et al., Citation2019). While we do not go this far, we have adopted an analytical strategy that models the relations separately for general and dark traits. In this sense the perils of partialing are a concern.
10 As Wodak (Citation2015) writes, populist messages often work through the politics of fear: fear of change, of globalization, of loss of welfare, of immigration, of changing gender roles, and so on.
11 Note that the self-placement ideology variable is also significant in the analysis (see and ), indicating that right-wing political ideology is related to populist sentiment.