Personality and Voting for a Right‐Wing Populist Party – Evidence from Switzerland

Abstract

Many established democracies are currently challenged by populist parties and movements. Switzerland is a particularly interesting case because it has an established right-wing populist party that is part of the governmental coalition on a regular basis: the Swiss People's Party (SVP). We study the electoral success of the SVP from a psychological perspective and argue that dispositions captured by the Big Five personality traits are related to voting for the SVP. Analyzing data from the Swiss Electoral Study (Selects) 2015, we find support for a negative relationship between openness to experience and agreeableness and voting for the SVP as well as a positive relationship between conscientiousness and extraversion and voting for this rightwing populist party. Additional analyses indicate that attitudes toward immigration mediate these relationships to some degree. Agreeableness and conscientiousness are, however, still systematically related to voting for the SVP when attitudinal factors are controlled for.

We vote for the person, not the policies: a systematic review on how personality traits influence voting behaviour

“…Voters’ personality traits represent significant predictors of voting decisions [ 32 ]. Most of the reviewed literature used the Big Five framework to study the influences of voters’ traits on voting behaviour, revealing effects and the predominance of determined trait patterns in voters, considering the party they support [ 52 ]. This is consistent with the vast majority of the literature on politics and personality, which frequently use the same framework [ 52 – 55 ].…”

“…Most of the reviewed literature used the Big Five framework to study the influences of voters’ traits on voting behaviour, revealing effects and the predominance of determined trait patterns in voters, considering the party they support [ 52 ]. This is consistent with the vast majority of the literature on politics and personality, which frequently use the same framework [ 52 – 55 ]. According to the studies included for review, high levels of extraversion and conscientousness may have negative mediation effects on vote choice.…”

Personality Approaches to Political Behavior

“…The anti-establishment message should resonate with those lower on Agreeableness who shy away from conflict (Skarlicki, Folger, & Tesluk, 1999), are cynical, uncooperative, and distrusting of others (Costa Jr et al, 1991). Indeed, those lower on Agreeableness are more supportive of populists with nationalist and exclusionist ideology such as Donald Trump (Abe, 2018;Bakker, Schumacher, & Rooduijn, 2021;Fortunato, Hibbing, & Mondak, 2018), the Tea Party (Bakker, Rooduijn, & Schumacher, 2016;Bakker, Schumacher, & Rooduijn, 2021), the Austrian FPO (Aichholzer & Zandonella, 2016), the Swiss SVP (Ackermann, Zampieri, & Freitag, 2018;Bakker, Schumacher, & Rooduijn, 2021), and Marine Le Pen in France (Vasilopoulos & Jost, 2020). 9 But the associations between Agreeableness and voting for populist parties also occurs when populists have a left-wing ideology such as Die Linke (Germany), Podemos (Spain), or Chaves (Venezuela) (Bakker, Rooduijn, & Schumacher, 2016;Bakker, Schumacher, & Rooduijn, 2021).…”

Introduction to the Special Issue “The 2015 Swiss National Elections”

“…Innovative approaches coming from political psychology could also find their way into Selects thanks to the inclusion of some questions on the personality traits of voters (see Ackermann et al. 2018 ) . Selects could also follow recent developments in the literature on populism and integrate questions on the degree to which citizens hold populist attitudes (see Bernhard and Hänggli 2018 ; Storz and Bernauer 2018 ) .…”