Abstract
Studies combining psychology and political science have shown that personality traits such as extroversion and openness to experiences are conditioning factors of political activism. However, the mechanisms through which this effect occurs are still poorly understood. Aiming to advance this topic, this article presents the results of an investigation that looked to analyse the mediated effects of personality traits in the Brazilian context, taking as mediating conditioning factors various attitudes and subjective dispositions commonly found in the literature, such as interest in politics and subjective political efficacy. Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project data, the hypothesis was tested that personality influences behaviour, since it favours the development of a number of attitudes that function as basic factors conditioning civic engagement. The results indicate the significant mediated effects of extroversion and openness to experience, especially with regard to political knowledge.
Highlights
Studies combining psychology and political science have shown that personality traits such as extroversion and openness to experiences are conditioning factors of political activism
The first generation of studies on political participation focused its attention on electoral modalities such as voting and party engagement, new forms of activism became absorbed into research agendas after the 1960s, those studies linked to protests (NORRIS, 2007)
For our own regional context, we aimed to contribute to this field by providing an initial exploration of these relations in Ribeiro and Borba (2016), in which we found interesting evidence concerning the effect of some personality traits on involvement in political protests
Summary
Studies combining psychology and political science have shown that personality traits such as extroversion and openness to experiences are conditioning factors of political activism. The findings reported by Galego and Oberski (2012) suggest that we need to consider the moderating or mediating functions of attitudes in the models that aim to associate personality with political behaviour Inspired mainly by this latter work, we present our main hypotheses concerning these indirect effects in the national setting, as well as providing details on the procedures adopted to carry out the tests. Hypotheses, data and methodology In a previous work, Ribeiro and Borba (2016), we tested the direct effects of the five major factors of personality on the involvement in political protest for a broad set of Latin American countries, identifying significant impacts for Openness to Experience, Extraversion and Agreeableness. The pairs of traits and their respective factors are presented below:
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