The Personality Basis of Political Preferences

In this chapter, I review current research on the relationship between personality and political preferences, with an eye to its complexities and the ways in which it is conditioned on other variables—including the contextual factors mentioned at the outset. To provide context, I briefly review research on the structure of political preferences. Next, I summarize a now-substantial body of work suggesting a relationship between rigidity in personality and right-wing political preferences, and then describe moderators of and boundary conditions to this relationship. Finally, in an effort to reconcile increasingly-varied findings on political differences in cognition and motivation, I offer an integrative perspective on when the relationship between rigidity and political differences will be ideologically asymmetric and when it will be symmetric.