Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center‐left voters were higher than center‐right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center‐left voters were higher than center‐right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self‐direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.

Abstract. In the present study, the authors proposed a novel self-report 16-item scale for assessing individual differences in adult prosocialness and tested its measurement properties by employing an item response theory (IRT) analysis of data collected from a sample of 2,574 Italian adults. Prior work employing classical psychometric methods of analysis had already established the reliability and validity of the instrument. The present study furthered this scrutiny by examining whether the different prosocialness items were equally effective in discriminating people and equally informative; it also examined gender differences in the functioning of the items. The results of IRT analyses strongly supported the measurement effectiveness and sensitivity of the 16 prosocialness items, and findings are discussed for their implications in behavioral assessment research on prosocialness.

Political efficacy is addressed within the framework of social cognitive theory and a new measure to assess perceived political self-efficacy is presented. Three studies document the validity of the new scale of measurement. The first study (N = 1673) examined the psychometric properties of the scale in accordance with classical test theory. This led to the identification of a unidimensional factor structure, including perceived political self-efficacy in promoting one's own political opinion, in sustaining the political programs of the party to which one belongs, and in monitoring one's own political representatives' commitment. The second study (N = 632)further confirmed the internal and construct validity of the scale; criterion validity was also investigated using several indicators of political interest and participation. The third study (N = 1176) showed that politicians holding offices have higher levels of perceived political self-efficacy than partisans and voters, further corroborating the criterion validity of the scale. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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