Piecing Together the American Voting Puzzle: How Voters’ Personalities and Judgments of Issue Importance Mattered in the 2016 Presidential Election

Abstract

In the wake of the 2016 election, which surprised pundits and voters on both the left and the right, there has been renewed interest in understanding what predicts American voters’ choices. In this article, we investigate the roles of personality and issue importance in how people voted in the 2016 U.S. election. In this longitudinal study of 403 MTurk workers who voted in the election, we assessed the relations between personality (openness, social dominance orientation, and national identity importance) and issue importance (group rights and social justice, economic rights, and individual and national rights), and voting for Clinton or Trump. Our results indicate that both individual differences and issue importance as measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November. We also found that the links between personality and voting were mediated by issue importance. Implications for political psychology and the study of personality, campaign issues, and voting behavior are discussed.

It’s security, stupid! Voters’ perceptions of immigrants as a security risk predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election

“…Mturk samples allow for valid measurement of constructs, which are generally lacking among nationally representative samples (e.g., Strother, Piston, & Ogorzalek, 2017). Mturk offers diverse samples (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011;Huff & Tingley, 2015), is a valid recruitment tool for political research (Clifford, Jewell, & Waggoner, 2015), and has been widely used for political research (e.g., Choma & Hanoch, 2017, Hayward, Hornsey, Tropp, & Barlow, 2017, including research on support for Donald Trump specifically (Blankenship, Savas, Frederick, & Stewart, 2018;Choma & Hanoch, 2017;. It provides far greater heterogeneity for testing political hypotheses regarding support for Donald Trump than student samples (e.g., Cohen, Solomon, & Kaplin, 2017) or other nonrepresentative sampling methods (Crowson & Brandes, 2017).…”

Should people get what they deserve?: Belief in a Just World and Voting Preference in the 2020 Presidential Election

“…Moreover, in the context of the competing political interests that have riven present day American politics, researchers have found that the ideological cleavages represented by the political left and right divide continuum does indeed capture several major dimensions of political and psychological phenomena, and that ideological self-placement meaningfully covaries with psychological differences in personality (Caprara& Zimbardo, 2004;Caprara et al, 2009). Yet predicting voting behavior by personality has only recently caught research attention, as traditionally, social and cultural issues, as well as the personality traits of voters that underpin them, have not been given the same consideration or emphasis in political forecasting as have been those individual attitudes that pertain exclusively to economic and foreign policy issues (Blankenship et al, 2018).…”

“…However, as more research on the effects of personality, attitudes, and values in a political context has accumulated, and the two-term presidency of Barrack Obama, who emphasized social justice issues throughout his campaigns and presidency, recedes into the past, researchers have had to reconsider the "culture war" and culture war issues as being of primary importance in reflecting the U.S.'s true political divide (Abramowitz, 2013;Blankenship et al, 2018;Hunter, 1991).The article by Abramowitz attempts to explain how these cultural issues signal a need to understand the dynamism and nuance of personality and its interrelationship with the ideological narratives that give context to personality and social identity. Moreover, the study described in this article attempts to examine and provide information pertinent to the growing research that shows that there are consistent constellations of personality variables, constituted by constructs of the most decontextualized and essential kind, such as basic personality traits, as well as those of the most subjective kind, such as ideological endorsements of an active ideological group, to more fully understand which of these constructs are best able to effectively define how individual members of politically discrete social groups differ from one another.…”

“…Moreover, researchers assessing issue preferences have shown that these reliably predict voting behavior . Thus, issues and issue responses amongst individual voters matter (Blankenship et al, 2018).The problem, then, is to distinguish which attitudes matter most in boundary-setting and issue resonance amongst voters.…”

“…Traditional political scholarship has posited the U.S. electorate as spanning a continuum of political values and attitudes, ranging from liberal and progressive at the leftmost pole, to traditionalist and conservative at the other (Blankenship et al, 2018). Further serving to emphasize the importance of personality for the modern political scientist and psychologist, scholarship and media discussions on the 2016 Presidential election have revolved around what are perceived to be irreconcilable cultural attitudes, pertaining mostly to social issues, and serving as the essential distinguishing elements of the modern American political division.…”