Personality and Political Behavior

If you remember your psychology, you know all about the Big Five personality traits.  These are those five broad organizing traits under which all other psychological predispositions and actions are thought to emerge from.  What are the Big Five?

• Openness to Experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Emotional Stability

We don't see a lot of studies that touch on media or political communication that make use of these big traits.  Instead, we often focus on smaller, more distinct, traits (need for cognition, as an example).  And yet, some folks take on the challenge, like this study.

The only reason I mention it is that, on Table 3, political knowledge gets tossed into the mix.  This is basically an examination of civic engagement (participation) as a function of the big personality traits.  Table 3, for example, looks at openness to experience and various political activities.  Political knowledge and internal efficacy (the belief of one's own competence in understanding politics) do a better job, it seems to me, than openness to experience when it comes to predicting participation.  The study is much broader than this, far more complex, but I'm keeping just to the bit that touches on knowledge.

Cognitive Mobilization and Party ID

The theory is straightforward. The more cognitively mobilized the electorate (more knowledgeable, better educated, more exposure to news media), the more likely citizens will abandon habitual party voting. In other words, less party identification or voting a straight party ticket.

At least that's the theory.

In a new study, the theory falls apart. The telling graph comes near the end:

The data examined in this paper, however, are not consistent with the theory's predictions. CM clearly increases the probability that a respondent expresses an attachment to a specific party, and this positive relationship does not change across cohorts. In fact, there is some evidence that the positive effect of CM on party attachments is growing even stronger over time. In sum, neither the micro- nor the macro-level components of the theory are corroborated by the data.

Data yet again get in the way of theory.

Direct and Indirect Info

Are there differences in how people evaluate and learn from politicians directly versus mediated versions of what a politician said through journalists?

Kinda. Sometimes. In certain ways.

Direct accounts from politicians are more convincing and inspire greater optimism about the political process, according to a spanking new study in American Politics Research. No doubt those pesky journalists create problems and conflicts, raise difficult questions, or simply quote the other side. The end result is rather obvious, I think. Instead of one side, one clear message, journalists try to round out the story and even raise criticism of the message. Can't say I'm overly surprised by this, but still it verifies what we all suspected.

While subjects in the experiment found arguments by a politician more convincing in the unmediated version, little overall persuasion was seen. I find this fascinating in and of itself, because you'd expect more.

Also little difference was seen in learning from the two messages.

But let's look at this last one more carefully. It's a self-report of learning, not an objective measure of what they took away from the stories. Below is the info drawn from the study methodology:

From reading this article, would you say that you have learned anything new about (the policy) controversy? That is to say, have you encountered novel or interesting ideas and facts? A good number of new ideas and facts, A few new ideas and facts, Not much new here.

As I've discussed before, this is more a measure of self efficacy or perceived knowledge than one of actual learning from a stimulus, so I don't think we learn a great deal here and we certainly can't say there is a difference in what people know about these issues depending on whether journalists mediated the message or a politician got to provide the message without dealing with those annoying journalists.

The study by Brian J. Fogarty and Jennifer Wolak is interesting and seeing an experimental approach is always welcome. At the end they say:

We expected that balance and objectivity connected to journalistic accounts would promote learning in a way political accounts would not. However, we do not find such normative benefits. Instead, the unique effects of media interpretation tend to be negative, boosting cynicism and weakening the perceived persuasiveness of claims.

They seem to act like this is a bad thing. Obviously I disagree, and "promote learning" is a huge leap given the way they measured learning. If there is a flaw in an otherwise good, solid study, it's this.

Electing Obama

A weird little polling tempest is at play based on a survey with results critical of those who voted for Barack Obama. The Zogby International site includes details of a survey and a defense of its questions as not being a push poll.

Lemme lay it out. You got this guy doing a documentary that essentially argues that journalists fawning over Obama practiced "media malpractice" and elected him. Here's a quote from our budding documentarian, John Ziegler:

"After I interviewed Obama voters on Election Day for my documentary, I had a pretty low opinion of what most of them had picked up from the media coverage of the campaign, but this poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace," said Ziegler.

And the weird part is a defense on the same page by the Zogby folks swearing this was not a push poll designed to influence opinion rather than merely measure it.



The results of the poll make Obama supporters seem, well, less than informed. Well, not exactly. A bunch of them knew about all the bad stuff on Palin or McCain but curiously were unable to answer similar questions about Obama and Biden.

A pdf of the questionnaire and marginals is here. I'll revisit this tomorrow in more detail after I get through meetings and can sit down, think it through.

Favorite Wrong Answer

Was looking through some stuff today and came up with my favorite wrong answer to a political knowledge survey. Respondents were asked who is the prime minister of Great Britain? Just over a quarter of them got it right and over half didn't know. A couple of other names popped up.

And then this -- five percent said Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News, et al) is prime minister.

Gotta love it, an Australian-turned-American media mogul, prime minister.

What Happened in 1066?

Begin Gushing

The best book-length treatment of political knowledge is probably What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters by Delli Carpini & Keeter. The thing is full of information, statistics, and analysis of why political knowledge matters in a democracy. A brilliant book.

End Gushing

So I'm looking at a 2-page table (Table 2.7, for those who care) and it has all these questions and the percent who answered them correctly over many many years, over many many surveys. They have two categories on this table: geography and social & political history. The highest percent correct for geography was locating Texas on a map (91 percent). The lowest? Where is Belize (4 percent). On social and political history, the greatest accuracy was on identifying the first president of the U.S. (93 percent), and the lowest asked what happened in 1066 (10 percent). Oh, the answer to the blog title -- Battle of Hastings.

I think it's kinda neat that at least 10 percent got the last one right. Honestly, it could have been a lot lower.

For those of you fascinated by political knowledge and what people know, I cannot recommend this book high enough. It ranges from what we mean by political knowledge to why it matters. I'll blog about it some more between debates, polls, and other presidential stuff. Hell, you could blog the appendices for a week and not run out of material.