Personality and Politics: Values and Voting in Germany and the Netherlands

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Personality and Politics: Values and Voting in Germany and the

Netherlands

av

Tore Hofstad

Masteroppgave i Statsvitenskap ved

Det samfunnsvitenskapelige fakultet Institutt for Statsvitenskap UNIVERSITETET I OSLO

V˚ ar 2018

Antall ord: ca 23 000

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“Vi m˚a begynne ˚a interessere oss for velgerne. Det har vi gjort før, det var ganske vellykket.”

Rune Gerhardsen

c 2018 Tore Hofstad

Personality and Politics: Values and Voting in Germany and the Netherlands.

http://duo.uio.no/

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UNIVERSITETET I OSLO

Abstract

Det samfunnsvitenskapelige fakultet Institutt for Statsvitenskap

byTore Hofstad

Why do people develop different political values, despite living and growing up under similar circumstances? By analyzing survey data from Germany and the Netherlands I investigate the impact of personality traits, as measured within the Big Five-framework, on Old and New political values. The New Politics value orientations largely follow the same patterns as the Old Politics dimensions, but the trait Openness to Experience is even more strongly tied to left-wing positions on the new questions, while the converse relationship is found for Conscientious- ness. By extending the investigation to vote choice I show that personality traits improve our predictions of voting, and parts of the effect remain despite heavy controls. A high score on Neuroticism unites people voting for the new parties, increasing the likelihood of voting for both the New Left and the New Right. The analyses reveal a picture of AFD-voters in the first year of the party’s existence as considerably more open and educated than expected based on previous expositions of the New Right.

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Preface & Acknowledgements

After following a course on The Psychological Roots of Political Decision-making it became apparent that Political Psychology was an area I wanted to investigate further. This course was ran by Zolt´an Fazekas, whom I would like to thank for valuable input in the early phases of the project.

I then took an inspiring course on Political Communication, Attitudes, Values &

Cleavages, led by Professor Oddbjørn Knutsen and Professor Bernt Aardal, containing a host of salient issues and thematics overlapping with Political Psychology.

Professor Aardal was willing to become my supervisor, and he has been far more supportive than could be expected, as well as vital in shepherding me the whole way. For that I extend a heartily thanks.

Thanks are also owed to Atle Haugsgjerd, who provided insight and support in troubled times, and Knut Andreas Christophersen who patiently offered his time and help in statistical perplexities.

Finally, a warm thanks to my parents for unconditional support, to my stepson Benjamin for putting up with me in rough times, and especially my wife Mona, for encouraging and backing me the whole way.

Tore Hofstad Oslo, 21.05.18

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List of Figures

4.1 Scree Plot: Netherlands . . . 31 4.2 Scree Plot: Germany . . . 32

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List of Tables

3.1 Economic Indices for Germany & the Netherlands . . . 20

3.2 The Religious Cleavage . . . 23

3.3 The Class Cleavage . . . 24

3.4 Foreign Population . . . 25

4.1 Descriptive Statistics: Germany . . . 28

4.2 Descriptive Statistics: Netherlands . . . 29

4.3 EFA Netherlands: Varimax Rotation . . . 31

4.4 EFA Germany: Varimax Rotation . . . 32

4.5 Correlations - Formative Index: Libertarian/Authoritarian . . . 35

4.6 Correlations - Formative Index: Environment/Growth . . . 38

4.7 Bivariate Correlations: Big Five and Control Variables . . . 40

5.1 Bivariate Correlations: Big Five & Religious/Secular Values . . . . 44

5.2 Bivariate Correlations: Big Five & Left/Right Materialism . . . 45

5.3 Bivariate Correlations: BF & Libertarian/Authoritarian Values . . 46

5.4 Bivariate Correlations: BF & Integration/Demarcation . . . 47

5.5 Bivariate Correlations: BF & Environment/Growth . . . 48

5.6 Summary of Correlations . . . 51

5.7 Bivariate Correlations: Big Five & Left/Right Self-placement . . . . 51

5.8 OLS - Secular/Religious values . . . 54

5.9 OLS - Left-Right Materialism . . . 55

5.10 OLS - Libertarian/Authoritarian Values . . . 57

5.11 OLS - Integration/Demarcation . . . 58

5.12 OLS - Environment/Growth . . . 60

5.13 Summary of Controlled Effects. . . 62

6.1 Comparison of Votes between Election & Survey . . . 64

6.2 Hypotheses Concerning the Effects of the Big Five on Vote Choice . 65 6.3 Simulated Probabilities of Voting for German Parties . . . 67

6.4 Simulated Probabilities of Voting for Dutch Parties . . . 68

6.5 Odds Ratios: Party Choice Germany . . . 72

6.6 Controlled Average Difference in Probabilities: Germany . . . 74

6.7 Odds Ratios: Party Choice Netherlands. . . 75

6.8 Controlled Average Difference in Probabilities: Netherlands. . . 77

6.9 Comparison of Explanatory Power: Pseudo R² . . . 78

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List of Tables ix

A.1 Big Five Inventory-10 (BFI-10) . . . 86

A.2 Ranked Mean Political Values: Germany . . . 87

A.3 Ranked Mean Political Values: Netherlands . . . 87

A.4 Bivariate Odds Ratios, Party Choice: Germany . . . 88

A.5 Bivariate Odds Ratios, Party Choice: Netherlands . . . 88

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Chapter 1 Introduction

In my master’s thesis I will combine perspectives from psychology and political science in an attempt to establish how the psychological conceptpersonality fits into a changing multidimensional political landscape containing old and new political values.

Earlier models for explaining voting behaviour tended to focus on socio-structural elements, like class, employment sector and religiosity, following Stein Rokkan’s pioneering work. Somewhat in opposition to this, Ronald Inglehart considered values to be of primary importance for explaining why people vote, particularly for parties espousing New Politics. Nevertheless the values and attitudes of the electorate were usually understood as resulting from contextual variables in an individual’s upbringing or immediate surroundings, particularly the economic sit- uation, paying less attention to characteristics pertaining to the separate subject.

Consequently, neither the cleavage models or the value based models are able to explain why individuals that grow up and live under equivalent circumstances often develop and maintain opposing values.

One possible explanation for this, which I would like to investigate, is found at the individual level: that variation in personality contributes to shaping people’s reactions to the same stimuli in their surroundings.

Personality traits have become the focus of intensified research within political psychology since the Five-Factor Model, or Big Five, achieved hegemony as a theoretical framework. And it has been repeatedly demonstrated that people scoring high on the trait of Openness to experience or Intellect tend to prefer

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Introduction 2 parties and policies of the left, while individuals with a preference for order and structure, displaying Conscientiousness, advocate value positions on the right.

Previous research on the relationship between personality and ideology or political party preference tend to focus on a one dimensional, right/left- or liberal/conservative model (Mondak & Halperin, 2008; Bakker, Hopmann & Persson, 2015).

But few studies have considered the impact of personality on the political value orientations associated with New Politics, and how this relates to voting for the parties that are thought to embody these values, particularly Green, Left Social- ist and parties of the Populist Right. For that reason I would like to examine how personality, as measured within the Big Five framework, fits in a political space containing multiple dimensions that complement and cross-cut the traditional left/right-axis. This includes the old cleavage between religion/secularism, and new value conflicts like libertarian/authoritarian; cultural integration/demarcation and environmental protection/economic growth.

Even though personality has been analyzed with reference to specific value orientations previously, there is a lacuna of work tying these findings together in a more grand scheme of things. Furthermore it remains of continuous relevance to investigate the relationship between personality, political cleavages and value dimensions, since the salience of the latter elements is context dependent, and may thus differ across time and countries. While most research on personality and vote choice has been done in the US, I will analyze data from countries in which these new value dimensions are more central, and consequently, where politics are of a multidimensional character. Specifically I will be looking at Germany and the Netherlands. Furthermore, globalisation has contributed to restructur- ing the political landscapes (Kriesi et al., 2008), which is likely to be manifest in the relatively recent data material I will analyze, from 2012/2013. In the end I aim to arrive at a more complete picture of political divisions, as well as electoral behaviour.

The layout of the thesis is as follows. In chapter two I present the theoretical framework for the subsequent analysis. In chapter three I give a brief overview of the societal and political context in the chosen countries at the time of the study. Chapter four contains a description of the data with operationalization of the theoretical concepts, as well as an explanation for the choice of methods.

In chapter five I investigate the relationships between the personality traits and the different political values, and in chapter six I extend this analysis by showing

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Introduction 3 how the Big Five can be relevant for explaining party choice. The final chapter contains a general discussion of the findings, with possible implications for further theory building and future research, as well as politics.

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Chapter 2 Theory & Concepts

I will begin by giving a brief overview of the study of voting behaviour in political science and how the concept of political values came to prominence. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to personality traits; what they are, how they are studied and why this is of relevance for political science.

2.1 Cleavages - Old Politics

The dominating paradigm within the study of voting behaviour in the 1960s was founded on Seymour Martin Lipset & Stein Rokkan’s cleavage model. Their often quoted thesis of frozen party alignments stated that “the party systems of the 1960s reflect, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s (Lipset & Rokkan,1967, p.50)”. Based on empirical investigation they inductively identified the religious/secular conflict between church and state, and the regional cleavage of center/periphery between urban elites and district plebeians. Both cleavages were rooted in the national revolutions, meaning the formation of the nation-state and the associated institutionalization of liberal democracy.

Although secularization has been on the rise, most prominently due to cognitive mobilization, which refers to the increased accessibility of higher education and information made available by electronic media, religion nevertheless remains an important polarizing issue in Germany and particularly the Netherlands (Knutsen,

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Theory & Concepts 5

1995a). On a side note, the concept of cognitive mobilization has also been employed to account for voter volatility due to the increased political sophistication of the electorate.

The industrial revolution led to urbanization and industrialization, causing the establishment of two “functional” cleavages between the primary and secondary economy, or land/industry, and the economic interest division between work- er/owner. In combination these four cleavages could to a substantial degree account for the emergence of most Western European party systems, as well as electoral behaviour. Today however, these four cleavages can mostly be reduced to two dimensions or value orientations, namely a cultural (religion) and a social- economic one, pertaining to class or left-right materialist orientation (Knutsen, 1995a, Kriesi et al., 2006).

Left-right materialism particularly refers to the role of government in controlling the economy. While right materialism favours the free market, left materialism emphasizes the importance of government imposed regulations as measures for achieving increased equality (Knutsen, 1995b)

2.2 Values - New Politics

From the late 1960s, Socialist Left and Populist Right parties appeared across Western-Europe, and by 1984 Green parties were established in twelve Western European countries (M¨uller-Rommel, 2002). These new political parties did not fit easily into the existing party systems in Western Europe (Dalton, Flanagan &

Beck,1984;Dalton,2014), leading scholars to suggest that a transformation of the political space had occurred (O’Neill,1997; Bornschier, 2010).

Correspondingly there occurred somewhat of a paradigm shift in political science in the late 1970s, with values appearing increasingly important for explaining vote choice. In this context, values are understood as prescriptive beliefs about certain end-states or behaviours being preferable over other end-states or behaviours (Rokeach, 1973).

The pioneering theories put forth by Ronald Inglehart concerning the ongoing value changes in modern and postmodern societies were particularly influential in this regard. First formulated in his seminal work “The Silent Revolution” (1977),

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Theory & Concepts 6 the scarcity hypothesis suggests that postmaterialist values, such as freedom of speech and autonomy, only develop once the more fundamental or basic materialist values, such as economy and security, have been covered.

The socialization hypothesis complements this view by stating that values to a great extent are established on the basis of the presence of particular circumstances during ones early, formative years. Consequently, cohorts raised in poverty would be more inclined to strive for economic needs and safety, while cohorts experiencing relative affluence would care more for personal freedom and humanistic ideals.

Inglehart was later able to account for the reduced saliency of issues related to economic materialism, which occurs as scarcity decreases, by formulating the principle of “diminishing marginal utility of economic determinism and class-based political conflict (Inglehart & Flanagan, 1987)”. The principle implies that once a society reaches a certain level of affluence, any further increase in material safety or income equality fades in importance. This paves way for other issues such as environmentalism, opposition to nuclear energy, disarmament and women’s rights, which have all been tied to parties of the New Left.

This developmental sequence has received empirical support from cross-cultural survey research on individual values, which shows a predictable change over time.

On average, respondents in post-industrialized countries consistently place a decreasing emphasis on materialist or survival values, and an increasing preference for postmaterialist or self-expression values (Inglehart & Welzel,2005). A limita- tion of this theoretical framework however, is that it fails to clarify why individuals living or growing up under structurally similar circumstances nevertheless often abide to different values.

In a series of articles, Scott Flanagan (1979; 1982;1987) criticizes Inglehart’s theory and operationalization by showing that the shift in values actually occurs along two separate dimensions which are confounded in Inglehart’s model. Flanagan labels the two dimensions authoritarian to libertarian, and materialist to nonac- quisitive or nonmaterialist. The first move towards libertarian values follow the suggested intergenerational pattern, whereas nonmaterialist issue priorities appear to change along a life cycle pattern. Furthermore, the first change is related to age and education, while the latter is associated with societal affluence (Flanagan,

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Theory & Concepts 7

1982). Flanagan also argues that constrained choice in the post-materialism indexes causes methodological effects that artificially inflate the correlation between materialist and authoritarian values (Inglehart & Flanagan,1987).

The Libertarian-Authoritarian dimension has later become the focus of important work by Herbert Kitschelt (1988; 1994; 1995). Kitschelt theorizes that the ultimate values from the french revolution, “liberty, equality, fraternity”, still underlie the political space in advanced industrialized countries, wherein both voters and parties could meaningfully be fitted. Liberty is represented by the market economy of liberal capitalism, which is complemented by equality, as espoused by socialism, favouring “central political mechanism for allocating (redistributing) scarce resources (Kitschelt, 1994, p.9)”. Together, they constitute the traditional axis of left-right materialism. In contrast, the ultimate value of fraternity is thought to cross-cut the “distributive” axis, and makes up the Libertarian/Authoritarian- dimension. According to Kitschelt, libertarians advocate a community wherein liberty and equality are fully realized, whereas authoritarians envision a community that rejects equality and liberty. His analyses revealed that authoritarian values were overrepresented among men, members of the working class and the petite bourgeoisie, while libertarians were more likely to be found among the highly educated, women, and those working with symbols and client processing.

Another influential theory of Western-European politics focuses on globalisation, by analyzing the consequences of the changing economic and cultural circumstances that increasingly occurred through the 1990s. According to Hanspeter Kriesi et al. (2006) this has caused the formation of a new structural divide that separates the “winners” from the “losers” in this new global context, which is characterized by the opening up of national borders and de-nationalization. The winners benefit from the changes, while the losers are people whose “life chances and action spaces” have been reduced following the weakening of national bound- aries (ibid., p.5). This division has been labelled a conflict between integration and demarcation, and constitutes both economic and cultural aspects.

Economically a neoliberal free trade stance contrasts a protectionistic position, while in the cultural domain a universalistic or cosmopolitan standpoint opposes a nationalistic preference. This is particularly visible in relation to the immigration issue, on which parties of the New Right have come to consolidate issue- ownership. But this division also includes another particularly salient topic in the

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Theory & Concepts 8 era of “Brexit”, namely transnational governance, where one side favours Euro- pean integration, while the other emphasizes national self-determination.

Arguably, Kriesi et al. subsume elements from the Libertarian/Authoritarian- dimension under their wider umbrella, and suggest that authoritarians tend to favour demarcation, while libertarians favour integration. However, there are a variety of ways in which these dimensions can meaningfully be conceptualized, and in the end the question whether the dimensions really represent several or one underlying latent variable is empirical, and one which we will investigate later through the aid of factor analysis.

Finally, the division between environmental protection and economic growth constitutes the last of the New Politics value orientations on which the voters’ preferences diverge. Changes to our environment, such as loss of biodiversity, air pollution and climate change have a detrimental impact on the lives of millions of people, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century (Stocker et. al,2013, p.17)”. Yet, not every- one confides in this narrative, making the dilemma of nature preservation in the face of a desire for economic growth a dividing line which particularly separates Left Libertarian and New Right parties (Inglehart,1995; Achterberg, 2006).

Several scholars have argued that all these contentious issues have become more salient over time and are increasingly relevant for mobilizing voters. By analyzing the impact of values and cleavages, Knutsen & Scarbrough found that “value orientations are more important than structural variables for explaining party choice (Knutsen & Scarbrough, 1995, p.519)”. Still a holistic approach is often favoured, and indeed, the prevailing models for explaining vote choice, found in election studies world-wide, typically underline a combination of structural variables and opinions, with an increasing emphasis on the short-term effects of cam- paigns and media exposure (de Vreese,2010;H¨ausermann & Kriesi,2015). But at the same time a growing amount of research on the personality of voters suggests that political psychology may have several pieces to add to the puzzle. This implies that individual differences among voters systematically correlate with vote behaviour, but in ways that may be unrelated to demographics.

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Theory & Concepts 9

2.3 Why Study the Personality of Voters?

There are a variety of reasons why studying the psychological makeup of voters will enhance our understanding of their electoral behaviour, as well as the values and attitudes that they hold. Firstly, it appears that the political preferences of voters today are increasingly related to their liking or disliking of political candidates. This causes the influence of personality on vote choice to magnify (Caprara

& Vecchione, 2013). Sketching what they call a congruency model, Caprara and Zimbardo (2004) argue that voters apply cognitive heuristics, or mental short- cuts, in their decision-making, and that they prefer political candidates with a personality profile matching their own, as well as matching the ideology of the party. Consequently, politicians attempt to communicate the language of personality, “by identifying and conveying those individual characteristics that are most appealing at a certain time to a particular constituency (ibid., p. 584)”.

A concept from sociology which suggests that personality becomes increasingly important is individualization (Caprara, Schwartz, Capanna, Vecchione & Bar- baranelli, 2006). This relates to the fact that individuals in modern societies are considered free and equal, consequently the choices made by each individual have a larger impact compared to traditional societies. This process of individualization is intensified in late modern societies, where group membership becomes less obvi- ous and less important for identification than previously. Within this new context the individual is expected to assume responsibility and become the “author of his self and his biography (Beck, Bonss & Lau, 2003, p.25)”. This is in contrast to more traditional societies, where people can rely on the community for providing clues on how one “ought” to behave. In the words of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan:

“In traditional cultures or subcultures there exists a more homoge- neous fabric of value and belief, a shared sense of how the world works and how we should live in it. When we live in communities of mind as well as geography, the number of original decisions we have to make about how we conduct our lives is dramatically smaller (Kegan, 1995, p.103)”.

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Theory & Concepts 10 In Inglehart’s words we see a transformation of values towards self-expression, reinforcing the impression that in post-industrial societies subjects play a more vital role.

Finally it has been suggested that personality has an anchoring effect on attitudes and behaviours (Bloeser, Canache, Mitchell, Mondak & Poore, 2015). This would suggest that the effect of other predictors on voting behaviour would be even stronger than previously imagined, since people’s political attitudes and behaviours tend to change despite the enduring nature of personality traits.

In contention it could be argued that focusing on individual variation among voters ignores the broader contextual elements, historical implications and path depen- dencies that influence voting behaviour. And there is certainly no reason to suggest that personality is the most important factor for explaining electoral behaviour.

On the other hand, including a measure of the individual level basis for vote choice does not necessarily reduce the importance of other explanatory variables, but it may well provide us with a novel piece of explanation to add to our arsenal. And from an integral perspective, a model of voting behaviour thatincludes personality is patently more complete than one which does not (Wilber,2001).

While previous research on personality in political science has most often employed a unidimensional measure of ideology or values, I will examine if personality relates differently to the various value dimension we have considered.¹

Taken together there is ample reason to believe that we will find systematic differences between the personalities of individuals embracing opposing positions on the various new and old politics divisions. And including personality traits as independent variables may thus very well improve our models of voting behaviour, albeit at the cost of parsimony. But what exactly is this phenomena of which we are talking?

1 Noteworthy exceptions are Van Hiel & Mervielde (2000), Carney, Jost, Gosling & Potter (2008), Gerber, Huber, Doherty, Dowling & Ha (2010) and Bakker (2014) who differentiate between social/cultural, and economic attitudes. And from a convenience sample Riemann, Grubich, Hempel, Mergl & Richter (1993) examined the relationship between Big Five and various political topics, but they did not extend this to voting behaviour.

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Theory & Concepts 11

2.4 Personality in Political Science

Various definitions abound, but for the current purpose I will follow Caprara &

Vecchione who refer to the concept of personality as “habitual and distinct patterns of physical and mental activity that distinguish one individual from another (2013, p.1)”.

The study of personality has a long history in political science, with Harold Lass- well (1930) pioneering a Freudian approach to analyzing political leaders. The breakthrough, however, came with Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson & San- ford’s work on “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950). Motivated by a desire to explain prejudice and anti-Semitism in the wake of the second world war, the

“Berkeley group” argued that authoritarianism was an expression of various personality traits that could be traced back to a strict and punishing upbringing.

Immensely influential initially, the book, and the F-scale that was developed to measure “fascist receptivity at the personality level (ibid., p. 279)”, were later dev- astatingly criticized for a variety of reasons like sampling bias; wording the indicators in the same direction which yielded high degrees of acquiescence; as well as the application of psychoanalytic concepts that eluded possible falsification (Christie

& Jahoda,1954;Martin,2001). Furthermore Rokeach (1956) pointed out that the characteristics of dogmatism and authoritarianism were not confined to extremists on the political right, as the F-scale would suggest, but could readily be observed in individuals across the entire left-right continuum.

Published in American Political Science Review, Herbert McCloskey’s article on

“Conservatism and Personality” (1958) painted a bleak picture of individuals supportive of a conservative ideology, by claiming that conservatives had lower social- responsibility and self-confidence, were less intelligent and educated, and tended to be more hostile, rigid and paranoid, compared to their liberal counterparts.

Seymour Martin Lipset saw personality and authoritarianism in conjuncture with belonging to the working class, due to “low education, low participation in political organizations or in voluntary organizations of any type, little reading, isolated occupations, economic insecurity, and authoritarian family patterns (Lipset,1959, p. 489).” In combination, this predisposed people in the lower strata to view politics in an unsophisticated manner according to Lipset.

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Theory & Concepts 12 Moving on to the 1960s and 70s, personality fell out of fashion for a variety of reasons. Social psychology became a leading force within psychology, through a series of influential experiments which predominantly emphasized contextual factors, suggesting that the individual characteristics of the persons partaking in the experiments were of less significance. Within the study of voting behaviour, the dominating paradigm focused on social structures, such as the cleavage models of Lipset and Rokkan, which were able to account for an impressive amount of the variation. And with the publication of Inglehart’s “The Silent Revolution” (1977), values were seen as increasingly important for explaining voting behaviour. But again the focus was more on the collective manifestation of changing values in cultures, rather than on the individuals that were constitutive of the societies.

Hence, personality appeared less relevant.

Through the 1980s and 90s, the Five-Factor Model was established as a unifying framework for studying traits within psychology, but it took time for political science to catch up to this development. Today personality has re-emerged on the stage within academia and the popular culture at large, and appears more important than ever for understanding both ideology and electoral behavior.

2.4.1 Personality Traits

Although the concept of personality sometimes include elements such as needs, self- beliefs, social attitudes and values (Caprara & Vecchione,2013), the predominant focus in later years has been on psychological traits. This refers to enduring elements of an individual’s character that are constitutive of how that person responds to her surroundings, which in turn affects attitudes and behaviours across different contexts (Gerber, Huber, Doherty & Dowling, 2011).

For decades researchers within psychology independently approached the measure- ment and modelling of personality traits from different theoretical angles. With the development of the Five-Factor Model (FFM), popularly termed the Big Five, scholars were provided with a comprehensive, unifying model for the study of traits. By asking respondents to rate how well a variety of adjectives were suited to describe themselves or others, it was later shown through factor analysis that the descriptions assemble to form five underlying factors. This approach is based on lexical theory, which postulates that important individual differences will manifest itself in language. The same factor structure emerges when researchers have

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Theory & Concepts 13 combined questionnaires intended to measure various elements of personality, further substantiating the results. These factors are purportedly broad psychological continuums along which people differ, common to humans in all cultures and rep- resenting the “highest hierarchical level of trait description (McCrae & John,1992, p. 190)”.

Commonly abbreviated by the acronym OCEAN, the five traits are Openness to experience, which includes creativeness, curiosity and intellect; Conscientious- ness measuring degree of orderliness, conformity and sense of duty; Extraversion characterized by energy and an outgoing style; Agreeableness signifying warmth, empathy or compassion; and finally Neuroticism, which is also referred to by its opposite, Emotional Stability, covering anxiety, hostility and depression. This empirically based theoretical framework has spawned a considerable amount of research, and has been pivotal in renewing the interest for personality in political science (Mondak & Halperin,2008).

2.5 Personality and Political Behaviour

If researchers within this field model causality, they commonly suggest a causal link from personality to behaviour, and not the other way around. Since temperament and personality seem to develop early in life, prior to political values and attitudes, and remain fairly stable throughout, it is assumed that personality causes attitudes and behaviour across differing contexts, by shaping how a person responds to stimuli in the surroundings (Gerber et al., 2011).

Correspondingly there has been a surge of interest in research on the neurobiolog- ical basis of personality (Alford, Funk & Hibbing, 2005; Hatemi & McDermott, 2012). It appears that all personality traits are heritable, and that biology can account for a substantial degree of the trait variance (Mondak, 2010). Somewhat surprisingly, it has been documented in a variety of studies that a shared rear- ing environment, like growing up under the same roof, has virtually no effect on personality (Clark & Watson,2008).

Both theory and empirical results seem to suggest that the effect of personality on vote choice is to a great extent mediated by variables that are “more proximate causes of behaviour (Gallego & Oberski,2012, p. 428)” in the funnel of causality, such as political values or attitudes (Mondak, 2010; Schoen & Schumann, 2007;

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Wang,2016). This would suggest that personality primarily influences vote choice indirectly. However, this is an ongoing debate, with several scholars arguing that personality traits may also have a direct effect on electoral choice (Osborne, Woot- ton & Sibley, 2013; Bakker, Rooduijn & Schumacher, 2016).

Verhulst, Eaves & Hatemi (2012) criticize the idea that personality traits cause political behaviour, claiming that political attitudes develop earlier in life than previously assumed, and that the emergence of personality traits and political attitudes are both caused by a confounding, common genetic factor. Consequently the relationship between trait and attitude is in fact spurious. An alternative explanation according to these scholars, is that personality co-develops with political attitudes through a process labeled pleiotropy, which is the case when the same gene sequence affects two unrelated attributes.

In this light, personality traits can be compared to an individual’s gender, which indeed has a biological basis - but that same basis may also separately influence attitudes and behaviour. Still, we do not refrain from including gender as a variable in our models for explaining political behaviour (Fowler & Dawes,2013).

For the current thesis I will follow the pragmatic standpoint summated by Ksi- azkiewicz, Ludeke & Krueger: “Regardless of whether the genetic relationship between personality and ideology is one of mediation or pleiotropy, shared genetic factors lead personality traits and political ideologies to co-occur (Ksiazkiewicz, Ludeke & Krueger,2016, p. 762).”

Concerning the durability of the traits, personality could profitably be considered through a developmental lens. As individuals mature through the life cycle, the average trait score within different age segments show a pattern of change, suggesting that traits are not entirely fixed (Srivastava, John, Gosling & Potter, 2003;Roberts, Walton & Viechtbauer,2006). In particular, people generally grow more emotionally stable and conscientious over the years. However, the rank order tends to remain, so that the more conscientious youth is also likely to be more conscientious than her friend as they both mature (Specht, Egloff & Schmukle, 2011).

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2.6 The Personality of Voters

In this subchapter I expound on the Big Five and consider why it would make sense that personality traits contribute to shaping how individual’s react to their surroundings, causing them to adopt different value positions and support different political parties. At this stage of theorizing we need to go beyond the Big Five, and include elements of the lower-order facets that compound the traits (John &

Srivastava,1999).

While conventional demographic variables such as age, gender, education and income rarely account for more than 10% of variation on ideological self-placement, the Big Five traits generally account for 5-20% (Caprara & Vecchione, 2013).

2.6.1 Openness to Experience

Openness to experience refers to intellect and creativity, as well as fantasy and appreciation of aesthetics. Although the correlations are of small to moderate strength, Openness is the trait that is the most consistent predictor of political behaviour, with high scores on Openness correlating with a preference for left- wing/liberal parties and ideology (Capara, Barbaranelli & Zimbardo,1999;Schoen

& Schumann, 2007; Gerber et al., 2010), and a negative correlation with various measures of right-wing ideology such as Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation (Van Hiel et al.,2000;Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, 2003).

Openness has also been tied to voting for green parties (Schoen & Schumann, 2007), and the value of environmentalism (Hirsh & Dolderman, 2007), which theoretically can be related to the increased aesthetic sensitivity displayed by the open individual.

Individuals scoring high on Openness are more willing to experiment with new impulses and embrace new ideas, and would consequently be more likely to adopt an integrative approach in the context of globalisation. A recent meta-analysis by Parks-Leduc, Feldman & Bardi (2015), reviewing 60 studies considering the relationship between the Big Five and Shalom Schwartz’s values scale found a weak link between Openness and universalism, and a negative correlation with tradition.

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2.6.2 Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness refers to a well-organized, dutiful and achievement-oriented personality, as opposed to a more laid-back, impulsive or lazy style. Conscientiousness has repeatedly been linked to a preference for conservative or right-wing parties and ideology (Carney et al., 2008; Gerber et al., 2010), but the correlations tend to be somewhat weaker than for Openness. Theoretically the preference for stability and structure displayed by the conscientious individual can be tied to the conservative’s need for avoidance of uncertainty (Jost et al.,2003).

High scorers on Conscientiousness prefer order and cautiousness, and often show a strong sense of duty, which presumably could manifest as a desire to leave the environment intact for future generations, following the precautionary principle.

Research from environmental psychology has found a weak correlation between conscientiousness and environmental concern (Hirsh, DeYoung, Xu & Peterson, 2010) and environmental engagement (Milfont & Sibley, 2012).

Conscientiousness has been shown to correlate negatively with pro-immigration attitudes (Gallego & Pardos-Prado, 2014) and positively with religion (Saroglou, 2002), as well as Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Sibley & Duckitt, 2008).

2.6.3 Agreeableness

Altruism, sympathy, trust and warmheartedness exemplifies Agreeableness, while the opposite end of the dimension refers to self-centeredness, hostility and jealousy.

Gerber et. al (2010) report a link between Agreeableness and economic liberalism, and to their surprise, also with social conservatism. Among Italian voters in 1994, Caprara et. al (1999) found a preference for the center-left coalition amongst respondents scoring high on Agreeableness.

The compassionate and altruistic tendencies of high scorers on Agreeableness could theoretically be linked to caring for the environment, and empirically Agreeable- ness has been correlated with Environmentalism (Hirsh & Dolderman,2007). Sim- ilarly, we find an overrepresentation of agreeable individuals displaying religiosity (Saroglou,2002) and it is the trait which is most strongly associated with pro- immigration attitudes (Gallego & Pardos-Prado,2014). Correspondingly there is a

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Theory & Concepts 17 negative relationship between Agreeableness and prejudice and Social Dominance Orientation (Sibley & Duckitt, 2008).

2.6.4 Extraversion

High scorers on Extraversion are described as warm, sociable, outgoing and en- ergetic. On the opposite pole, a low Extraversion score typifies a shy, quiet and reserved personality. A high score on Extraversion has been shown to predict various forms of political participation (Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson &

Anderson,2010), which makes intuitively sense since extroverts are more inclined to partake in social activities in general, such as a political rally or meeting. How- ever, the association between Extraversion and ideology appears very weak (Gerber et al., 2010), or inconsistent (Carney et al., 2008; Gerber et al., 2011), and the linkage between Extraversion and voting is not so easily envisioned, corroborating the lack of empirical connection as demonstrated by mostly small and statistically insignificant correlations.

Extraversion has been linked to religiosity (Saroglou,2002), but is negatively associated with the personal values universalism and benevolence (Parks-Leduc et al., 2015). The latter seems somewhat surprising, considering the friendliness attributed to the extravert.

2.6.5 Neuroticism

Neuroticism pertains to negative affect such as feelings of guilt, depression and anxiety, which are common among high scorers. Those scoring low on Neuroticism are described as calm and even-tempered. Findings tying this trait to political behaviour have been mixed, though several American studies report a link between high Neuroticism and liberal ideology (Mondak & Halperin, 2008; Mondak, 2010;

McCann,2018). Schoen & Schumann concluded that a high score on Neuroticism made people more inclined to favour parties that “offer shelter against material or cultural challenges (2007, p. 492)”.

If people believe that a change in government is likely to affect their anxiety level, we can assume that a high score on Neuroticism can be predictive of voting behaviour. This could incline high scorers on Neuroticism to favour the incumbent

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Theory & Concepts 18 party in order to maintain status quo, avoiding the uncertainty of a change in government.

Prejudice and negative attitudes towards immigrants are often tied to the per- ception of out-groups as a threat in a competition over scarce resources, such as jobs, culture or welfare resources. Since persons scoring high on Neuroticism tend to be more driven by fear, a negative association with pro-immigration attitudes makes sense (Gallego & Pardos-Prado, 2014). However other studies report no relationship between Neuroticism and prejudice (Ekehammar, Akrami, Gylje &

Zakrisson, 2004).

In Germany a high score on Neuroticism was found to correlate with voting for the Green party, possibly related to “emotionalism” which was attributed to the Greens by many Germans (Schoen & Schumann,2007), and the trait is negatively associated with religious fundamentalism (Saroglou, 2002), but not significantly related to any of Schwartz’s values (Parks-Leduc et al., 2015).

2.7 Research Questions

As this exposition has shown, personality has frequently been tied to a unidimensional ideological left-right axis. There is however an ongoing discussion regarding the nature and content of this axis, and it has been suggested that people place less emphasis on questions of materialism such as the traditional division between state and private ownership, when positioning themselves along the Left-right continuum, and that they include other elements pertaining to post-materialism in this consideration (Inglehart & Flanagan,1987; Kitschelt & Hellemans, 1990).

The question remains what personality means in connection with the specific value dimensions associated with New politics, and whether personality can contribute to explaining why people vote for the new parties. The remainder of the thesis will thus be guided by the following research questions:

How and to what extent can personality explain the values of Old and New politics?

And in what way does this translate to vote choice?

In the end I hope to answer several sub-questions which may shed further light on the relationship between personality and voting behavior. Is the personality of

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Theory & Concepts 19 people voting for new parties different from those voting for old parties? Is the personality profile of people voting for New Right different from those voting for Old Right? And similarly for New Left vs Old Left? Is there a difference between the personality of those voting for New Left vs Green parties?

If we compare values and attitudes among those voting for the New Left and the New Right, we find that they often fall on opposite sides of the continuums.

This applies particularly to the New Politics dimensions of Integration/Demarca- tion (Kriesi et al.,2006) and Environmental Protection/Economic Growth (Knut- sen, 1995a). Consequently it would not be surprising if we find the same inverse positions relating to the Big Five personality traits.

In the next chapter we are provided with some context information, to help account for any differences in results we might find between the two countries.

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Chapter 3 The Societal & Political Context

The Socio-cultural Motives Perspective suggests that the effect of personality on various outcomes may be dependent on contextual factors such as the saliency of cleavages or other characteristics pertaining to the society in study (Gebauer et al., 2014). Although similar on a number of issues, the countries in focus nevertheless diverge on certain indicators, such as Germany being Europe’s largest democracy, while the Dutch make out one fifth of the population in comparison.

Unemployment was low in both countries at the time of the study, as compared to the average unemployment rate for the European Union. Both countries rank high on indices of development, and have a comparatively high degree of affluence and public social spending, as seen in table 3.1. In comparison the average social expenditure for the OECD was 21,1% in 2013. The Dutch economy is traditionally open to the world, and as is natural for a small country, it is heavily reliant on

Table 3.1: Economic Indices for Germany & the Netherlands

Germany 2013

Netherlands 2012

EU 2012

Unemployment Rate¹ 5.2 5.8 10.4

Population Size(millions)¹ 80.61 16.76 Human Development Index² .920 .922

GNI per Capita(PPP, Current US$)³ 46 250 47 670 35 268 Import & Export (% of GDP)³ 84.84 154.27 82.49 Globalisation Index(rank 2011)⁴ 16 3

Social Expenditure (% of GDP)¹ 24.8 22.5

1:OECD, 2:UNDP, 3:World Bank, 4:KOF.

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The Societal & Political Context 21 trade. This is evidenced by the high degree of import/export, which places the Netherlands near the world top in the KOF Globalisation rank.¹

3.1 Germany

Germany is a federal, bicameral parliamentary republic with an additional member proportional representation electoral system. Following World War II the centripetal 2 ¹/2 party system in West-Germany was characterized by “hypersta- bility”, with the combined forces of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) alternating in power opposite the Social Democratic Party (SPD), while the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) almost continuously acted as “majority-maker” (Jeffery, 1999).

1983 saw the breakthrough of the Green party in the federal election, and following the reunification in 1990, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) entered the Bundestag, increasing the presence of “New Left” politics. In this period the party system can more fittingly be described as a “fluid five-party system” (Kropp,2010).

During the elections in September 2013, CDU/CSU totaled 41,5% of the votes, but were required to form a grand coalition with the SPD in order to acquire a majority in the Bundestag. The reformed socialist left party (Die Linke) and the green party (B¨undnis 90/Die Gr¨unen) rounded out the final seats in the Bun- destag, since the former government coalition member, FDP failed to cross the 5% threshold. Although the newly created far-right party (AFD) narrowly missed the threshold at 4,7%, their presence was felt during the campaign, as they were the only eurosceptic party. The most salient issue in 2013 was the euro crisis, but this topic was not contested as the parties were in agreement on how to handle it (Faas, 2015).

3.2 The Netherlands

The bicameral Dutch Parliament consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate, while the Government consists of the King and the cabinet members,

1 The KOF Globalisation Index measures the economic, social and political dimensions of globalisation.

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The Societal & Political Context 22 according to the constitution, but the Monarch’s role is limited to government formation. The Netherlands has been described as a consociational democracy which signifies a stable multiparty system, despite major cultural fragmentation along religious and ethnic lines (Lijphart, 1969). However, it is unclear whether this description still fits the bill, since a total of five governments ended early during the period 2002-2012.

The term “pillarization” has been used about the Dutch society to describe seg- mentation in a multitude of minorities; neither of which constituted a majority (Kriesi et al., 2008). Since the mid-1960s though, there has been a “depillar- ization”, or a weakening of traditional cleavages.

The Dutch electoral system consists of one single constituency without any threshold, making it one of the most proportional systems in the world. Consequently, in 2008 they had the highest number of effective parties in Europe, at 7.75, as measured by the Laakso & Taagepera quotient (Knutsen, 2017), however according to the 2006 Chapel Hill Expert Survey the party system is not particularly polarized, with a Taylor & Herman measure of 4.87 (Ibid.).

In September 2012 an early general election took place following the resignation of the first government led by Mark Rutte, leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). The VVD secured a plurality of the votes, forming a coalition with the Labour party (PvdA). Lacking a majority, the cabinet needed support from the Democrats 66 (D66), the Christian Union (CU) and the Reformed Political Party (SGP) in the Senate.

3.3 Strength of Traditional Cleavages 2012/2013

In general it has been claimed that traditional social cleavages are weakening and that the parties’ ties to the electorate have become looser (Dalton, 2014). But religious cleavages played a decisive role in establishing the party systems of West Germany and the Netherlands (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). Previously the religious cleavage in Netherlands was a conflict between Protestant and Catholic elites, but today the conflict is more generally between religious forces and the anti- or non-religious; a transformation which has occurred in Germany as well (Fuchs

& Klingemann, 1990). Secularization in the Netherlands amounts to a “cultural

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The Societal & Political Context 23 revolution” and it is now one of Europe’s most secular countries (Kriesi et al., 2008; Knutsen, 2017).

3.3.1 The Religious Cleavage

Religion continues to play a role in Germany, as evidenced by the remarkable pro- longed electoral success of the CDU/CSU, with Angela Merkel acting as chancellor since 2005.

Table 3.2 signals a marginally higher degree of religiosity in Germany than the Netherlands. Compared to the European average, it seems the religious cleavage is not particularly strong in either of the countries in the study, nevertheless Kriesi et al. 2008 argue that it remains a salient dimension in both countries.

Table 3.2: The Religious Cleavage

Germany Netherlands ^Average

in Europe

Church attendance (in %)^a 9.9 10.6 18.0^b Unaffiliated to any church (in %)^c 30.7 63.6 35.1^b Importance of God (means)^d 4.41 4.37 5.9^e Active membership

in religious organizations (in %)^f 14.1 10.9 13.2^b

a Source: WVS 6.0 V145: % attending church once a week or more.

bSource: European Social Survey 5.0, (reported inKriesi et al. (2008)).

c Source: WVS 6.0 V144: % not considering themselves as belonging to any particular religion or denomination.

dSource: WVS 6.0 V152: average scale value, 0 (=not at all important), 10(=very important).

e Source: WVS 5.0 (2005-2009) V192: Country average Andorra, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slove- nia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

f Source: WVS 6.0 V25: Membership in a Church or religious organization (active member).

3.3.2 The Class Cleavage

The cleavage between labour and capital is the most recent of the traditional cleavages and remains important throughout Western Europe. This is the cleavage most people associate with the ideological left-right schema, however the class cleavage appears linked to the religious cleavage in the Netherlands, with many people associating “Christian” with the right (Fuchs & Klingemann,1990, p. 108).

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The Societal & Political Context 24 Table 3.3: The Class Cleavage

Germany Netherlands ^Average

in Europe

Trade union membership^a 18.1 20.0 23.0

(in % of adult population)

Employment in the industrial sector^b 26.3 14.6 21.6

(as % of labour force)

Size of the working class^c 40.4 19.0 30.5

(in %)

Income inequality^d 29.7 25.4 30.5

(measured by the Gini index)

a CBS

b OECD

c EVS 2008 (reported in Knutsen2017)

d Eurostat

Following a trend found in most European countries, trade union membership is decreasing in both Germany and the Netherlands (Demetriades & Pedersini,2008).

The declining percentage of the labour force working in the industrial sector is a

“major structural trait of the transformation from industrial to post-industrial society (Knutsen, 2008, p. 131)”, and this appears to be an indicator on which the two countries in our study differ with the Netherlands being comparatively more post-industrialized.

Theories of class voting suggest that the decreasing share of the labour force working in manual professions in post-industrialized countries, is likely to cause a reduction in traditional class voting (Knutsen, 2008), and table 3.3 shows that the amount of blue-collar workers in the Netherlands is particularly low, while the share in Germany is comparatively high.

The Gini coefficient is a standardized measure ranging from 0 to 1, where low values indicate a low degree of income inequality, while high values indicate the opposite.

As class voting tends to be higher in countries with higher income inequality, we would expect a lower degree of class voting in the Netherlands compared to Germany. It is unclear however, whether this is likely to interact with the effect of personality on values or vote choice.

3.4 Immigration

The Netherlands used to be a prime example of an open multi-cultural society, but following the assassination of Pim Fortuyn nine days prior to the 2002 national

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The Societal & Political Context 25 Table 3.4: Foreign Population

Germany Netherlands Foreign born population(in %)^a 12.8 11.5 Population share of muslims (2010)^b 5.0 5.5 Naturalization rate (% of foreign pop. 2005)^c 1.7 4.1

a International Migration Database

b(Koopmans,2013)

c (Ersanilli & Koopmans, 2010)

election, politics have for several reasons shifted towards a tougher stance towards immigration and less cultural liberalism (Kriesi et al., 2008). Fortuyn’s critical posture towards Islam has been carried on by Geert Wilders and the populist right Party for Freedom (PVV), who tallied 10% of the vote in the 2012 election, gaining the third largest share of the votes.

While Germany remains a popular migratory destination, rivalled only by USA in terms of the absolute size of the foreign-born population (UN,2015), elite attitudes towards multi-culturalism have become less liberal here as well (Koopmans,2013).

Germany post-WWII has displayed an aversion to extremism as demonstrated by the constitutional right to ban anti-democratic parties, as well as a tendency for centripetal non-ideological “politics of centrality”(Jeffery, 1999). There has however been heated speculation over whether the relative success of the right- wing AFD represents a break with this tradition. Following the migration crisis of 2015 the AFD became more explicitly anti-immigration, though it has been argued that the party did not fit the description as neither populist nor radical by the time of this study (Arzheimer, 2015).

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Chapter 4 Data & Method

For the analysis I will use survey data from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) from 2010-2014 for Germany and the Netherlands.

The respondents from WVS are selected randomly and constitute a representative selection of the population in Germany and the Netherlands that are eligible for voting. In Germany the survey was conducted in 2013, with a response rate of 36%¹ and N = 2046. The fairly low response rate appears related to a flood that occurred in Central-Europe at the time. Consequently there is a certain risk of non-response bias, although weighting has been employed in order to redress any demographical skew.

In the Netherlands the survey was performed in 2012, and respondents were drawn from the LISS-panel², yielding a response rate of 76% and N = 1902. Panelists are expected to participate over several years, yielding risk of panel attrition, which occurs when people lose interest, or for any other reason decide to drop out of the study. Studies suggest however that panelists who drop off have similar values and attitudes as those who remain (Dennis & Li, 2003).

The choice of cases is practical and reasonable: these are the only WEIRD³ countries in the wave to include the personality questionnaire. Most theories on New Politics pertain to Western Europe, and additionally there appears to be issues

1 Response rates vary considerably in the WVS from 29% in Australia to 91% in Cyprus.

2 The Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences-Panel consists of 7000 individuals “based on a true probability sample of households drawn from the population register by Statistics Netherlands.” (https://www.lissdata.nl/about-panel)

3 Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

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Data & Method 27 with the relevant personality measures in non-WEIRD countries (Ludeke & Larsen, 2017).

4.1 Preparing the Data

All analyses are performed using R version 3.4.3 for Windows.

4.1.1 Scaling the Indicators

Prior to analysis I have rescaled all indicators to range from 0 to 1. As elabo- rated by Welzel (Welzel, 2013, p. 64) this “normalization” has several desirable properties. 0 represents the “natural” nonappearance of a phenomenon, while 1.0 represents complete presence of a property. In this way of coding, fractions are easily interpretable, for instance a score of 0.50 would indicate that a property is half-way present. This also eases interpretation of unstandardized regression coefficients as well as the interpretation of interaction terms.

4.1.2 Investigating the Data

Table 4.1and 4.2show the descriptive statistics for the various variables I will use for creating indexes. All indicators range from 0 to 1, except age which ranges from 18 to 90 in Netherlands and 18 to 95 in Germany. The skewness and kurtosis is high for a couple of indicators in each country, but these indicators are dichotomous, consequently transforming them will not make any sense. Furthermore, they will form part of indexes, which can be transformed at a later stage if necessary.

4.1.3 Missing Variables

There are 3% missing variables in the Dutch data and 1.3% missing in the German.

It appears that respondents with low education and younger respondents are overrepresented among missing responses to some of the value questions, and on some of the questions there are more responses missing from females. This could bias the parameter estimates if using listwise deletion. In order to maximize the available

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Data & Method 28 Table 4.1: Descriptive Statistics: Germany

Statistic N Mean St. Dev. Skew Kurtosis Unique %Miss

Sex 2,046 0.50 0.50 0.0 1.0 2 0

Age 2,044 49.48 18.00 0.1 2.1 78 0.1

Education 2,032 0.53 0.28 0.4 2.1 9 0.7

Importance of God 2,009 0.38 0.37 0.4 1.6 10 1.8

Believe in God 1,979 0.52 0.50 0.1 1.0 2 3.3

Religious Person 1,998 0.42 0.49 0.3 1.1 2 2.4

LR-Income Equality 2,022 0.31 0.25 0.6 2.7 10 1.2

LR-Responsibility 2,037 0.40 0.29 0.3 2.2 10 0.4

Obedience 2,044 0.85 0.36 -1.9 4.7 2 0

Imagination 2,044 0.31 0.46 0.8 1.6 2 0

Independence 2,044 0.74 0.44 -1.1 2. 2 2 0

Environment Member 2,044 0.06 0.23 3.9 15.8 2 0.1

Money to ECO-org. 2,039 0.19 0.39 1.6 3.6 2 0.3

Environment Priority 1,996 0.52 0.47 -0.1 1.1 3 2.4

Immigrant Neighbour 2,040 0.79 0.41 -1.4 3.0 2 0.3

Trust Dif. Nationality 1,902 0.50 0.23 -0.3 2.7 4 7.0

Dif. Race Neighbour 2,042 0.86 0.35 -2.0 5.1 2 0.2

Party Choice 1,567 - - - - 6 23

Openness 1,996 0.60 0.23 0.2 2.5 9 2.4

Agreeableness 2,011 0.70 0.19 -0.4 2.8 9 1.7

Conscientiousness 2,016 0.68 0.21 -0.4 2.9 9 1.5

Extraversion 2,023 0.59 0.25 -0.1 2.3 9 1.1

Neuroticism 2,004 0.40 0.22 0.4 2.7 9 2.1

information and limit the amount of bias due to missingness I will apply pairwise deletion for the analyses. As a measure of robustness I have also created a dataset with imputed data for the missing variables, with the aid of the mice-package in R, which uses multivariate imputation by chained equations. I will not report the results from the analyses based on imputation, since the differences are negligible and do not affect substantial interpretation.

4.1.4 Weighting the Data

Due to the sampling procedure employed in the World Values Survey, which includes stratification, the data can be weighted in order to become more similar to the distribution in the population. In my case however, the object is not to ob- tain the most precise descriptive statistics of the population in Germany and the Netherlands. Rather, the focus is on the effects of personality traits on political values and vote choice. In this case, weighting will not necessarily produce more correct estimates (Solon, Haider & Wooldridge, 2015). When comparing coefficients for the regression models with and without weights, the largest difference

Personality and Politics: Values and Voting in Germany and the Netherlands