The Political Implications of Personality in Canada

Abstract

Few studies have focused on the Canadian context to examine the political impacts of personality. Even though the Canadian Election Study (CES) has measured the Big Five personality traits since 2011, very few studies have taken advantage of this data to assess personality's political role among the Canadian electorate. Using CES data from the three latest elections (2011, 2015 and 2019), we first explore how reliable the measurement of personality is. Except for agreeableness in 2015, the correlations across the personality items are similar to what is typically found in the literature. We next examine how personality affects ideology and partisan identity in the Canadian context. We show that a two-dimensional measurement of ideology refines our understanding of the impacts of personality on ideology. The findings also suggest that personality plays an essential role in forming ideology in Canada but has a limited impact on partisanship.

Personality, political ideology, and partisanship in Canada.

“…Finally, extraversion was associated with right-wing self-placement in 2015 and 2019, support for the CPC in 2011 and 2015, and support for LPC in 2015 and 2019. Bergeron and Galipeau's (2021) findings are largely consistent with previous findings relating openness to experience and conscientiousness to ideological placement (Fatke, 2017;Joly et al, 2018).…”

“…The largest literature regarding personality and politics examines how personality traits relate to political ideology and partisanship. This research consistently finds that people higher in openness to experience (e.g., curious, artistic, unconventional) are more likely to be on the left of the political spectrum and support liberal parties, while those higher in conscientiousness (e.g., efficient, organized, thorough) tend to be on the right and support conservative parties (Bergeron & Galipeau, 2021; Osborne et al, 2021). The role of personality in explaining political outcomes is not trivial; research has found that personality predicts political ideology with as much strength as demographic correlates like income and education (De Neve, 2015; Gerber et al, 2010).…”

“…Though their study was an important step in examining personality and political ideology in the Canadian context, like many other studies exploring personality and political ideology (Fatke, 2017; Gerber et al, 2010), Bergeron and Galipeau (2021) used a less-than-ideal measure of personality, the TIPI (Ehrhart et al, 2009), which only has two items assessing each of the five personality traits. Short measures like the TIPI trade validity for brevity, and so the relationship between personality and ideology may have been significantly attenuated (Bakker & Lelkes, 2018; Credé et al, 2012).…”

“…Despite consistent evidence for the importance of personality for understanding political ideology, very few of these examinations have focused on the Canadian case. Although a recent study by Bergeron and Galipeau (2021) provided a notable exception, the narrow focus on only a few general personality traits and the use of the short Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI; Ehrhart et al, 2009) likely underestimated the strength of the personality-ideology relationship in Canada. The present study expanded on this work by providing further evidence of this relationship in the Canadian context, increasing the number of personality traits examined, and utilizing more complete and better-validated measures of each personality trait.…”

Privacy and Canadian Political Parties: The Effects of the Data-Driven Campaign on Elector Engagement

“…Each main political party in Canada has developed its own customized database, used to generate call sheets and walk sheets for canvassers, often filtering such sheets strategically to target supporters (Munroe and Munroe, 2018; Judge and Pal, 2021; Patten, 2017). Data can be used to target traditional or online advertisements, decide where and who to canvass, track what issue is important to whom, set targets, measure success, quantify individual campaigners’ performance, and make inferences and predictions about electors (for example, data on individuals’ personality traits could be used to infer political ideology [Bergeron and Galipeau, 2021]). The extent to which these features are used varies by party and by campaign (Munroe and Munroe, 2018; Montigny et al, 2019; Giasson et al, 2019; McKelvey and Piebiak, 2019).…”