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With an Open Mind: A Review of “Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution” by Johnston, Lavine and Federico

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Notes

  1. Johnston et al. (2017, p. 222) are indeed cautious to not give too much weight to occasional null findings. By analyzing each trait separately, they are conducting many statistical tests running the risk of an occasional null-finding just by chance. Moreover, the measures of Openness that Johnston et al. (2017) employ range between large (14 items) and brief (2 item) inventories. Using a 2-item Openness inventory constructed using the abbreviated TIPI inventory, Johnston et al. (2017) do not find “uniform” evidence for their argument. This not surprising, because within the domain of politics, Bakker and Lelkes (2018) have demonstrated that the association between personality and politics is often attenuated once scholars rely upon highly abbreviated measures of personality.

  2. Generally, the associations between Openness and engagement are modest in their size but the presence of the positive association indicates that Openness and engagement are not independent from each other. One might argue that the association between Openness and engagement is not problematic because the strength of the associations between Openness and engagement is weak. However, the association between Openness and ideology is not very strong either. In their meta-analysis Sibley, Osborne, and Duckitt (2012), for instance, document a correlation of − .18 between Openness and conservatism. Given the modest strength of the association between personality and ideology, it would be hard to disregard the association between Openness and engagement.

  3. Panel data that contains measures of Openness, engagement and economic ideology is scarce but with the inclusion of personality inventories in recent panel studies—such as the British and German Election Studies—the possibilities to disentangle the association between Openness and engagement are starting to emerge.

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Funding

The author received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 750443.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1001 NG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Bert N. Bakker

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  1. Bert N. Bakker
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Correspondence to Bert N. Bakker.

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 750443. This essay was written while being a Visiting Research Fellow at the Behavioral Foundations Laboratory of the Department of Political Science at Temple University. The author wants to thank Kevin Arceneaux, John Bullock and Yphtach Lelkes for conversations that inspired various points raised in this essay. The essay was an invited contribution by the book editor and was reviewed before publication.

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Bakker, B.N. With an Open Mind: A Review of “Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution” by Johnston, Lavine and Federico. Soc Just Res 31, 386–399 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-018-0316-7

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