Personality traits and public support of minority rights

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how personality relates to citizens’ willingness to extend political, social, and cultural rights for minorities, including voting rights for immigrants, religious rights for Muslims, and affirmative action measures. Moving beyond explanations centred on intergroup relations, we argue that political efficacy (i.e. beliefs about personal political competences and the responsiveness of political elites) operates as a mechanism linking personality and policy preferences on minority rights. We test these arguments using mediation models on data from a large-N survey conducted in Germany in 2016. Results show that high openness, high agreeableness, and low conscientiousness predict permissive views on minority rights. In addition to indirect effects via group-specific attitudes, we find empirical support for substantial links via political efficacy. In particular, people high in conscientiousness or high in neuroticism have lower faith in government responsiveness, which in turn is related to less willingness to approve minority rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Minority rights
• personality traits
• political tolerance
• political behaviour

Acknowledgements

This study was presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Political Science Association 2018, Vienna. We would like to thank Erik Gahner Larsen and Shanto Iyengar for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Previous research suggests that particularly internal political efficacy is related to personality traits such as openness since – to some extent – both reflect, for example, individual cognitive flexibility. At the same time, internal political efficacy is conceptually different from basic personality traits as it refers to the specific object of (perceived) political competence. This is why political efficacy has also been used as a mediator in previous research linking basic personality traits and attitudinal or behavioral outcomes such as political participation (e.g., Mondak and Halperin 2008).

2 The question of whether group rights for minorities facilitate integration or rather hinder integration has been emphasized in debates on multicultural versus assimilationist approaches (Koopmans 2010; Kymlicka 1996).

3 We reran our models with urbanization and church attendance measured as dummy variables, since these items are measured on ordinal scales. The results were virtually identical to those presented below.

Additional information

Funding

The authors want to acknowledge funding for this project by the Research Training Group SOCLIFE at the University of Cologne (GRK 1461/2, German Research Foundation).