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The Personality of the Politically Ambitious

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Under our system, politicians are not chosen by “the people” or the “bosses” or the media. They are self-selected… Our politicians are different from you and me.

—Richard Reeves (2011).

Abstract

Until recently, political ambition has largely been considered to be a product of the institutional and political environment. We argue that individual personality plays a significant role in nascent political ambition and progressive ambition. Using a nationally representative survey in the United States and a survey of public officials, we find a strong relationship between personality traits and nascent ambition. We find that individuals with higher levels of extraversion and openness are more likely to consider running for office, while agreeable and conscientious individuals are significantly less interested. We also find that personality traits do not relate to progressive ambition in the same way as they do to nascent ambition. In fact, they are weaker predictors of progressive ambition than they are of nascent ambition. We argue that democratic elections and public service attract certain types of individuals to seek office, which has implications for elite behavior and representation.

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Fig. 1

Source 2015 Survey of US Adults

Fig. 2

Source 2016 American Municipal Officials Survey

Fig. 3

Source 2016 American Municipal Officials Survey

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Notes

  1. Dietrich et al. (2012) report the results of a study of the relationship between personality and ambition (among other things) of a small sample of 90 legislators from Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine. This small sample limits their ability to find relationships between progressive ambition and personality. In addition, the unique public campaign finance laws in these three states at that time which all allowed for the wholesale public financing of state legislative campaigns might change the political environment in a way that changes how personality influences ambition. The public financing of campaigns changes the types of candidates who succeed and how candidates spend their time (Miller 2014), which could seriously impact the attractiveness of seeking higher office to candidates with certain personalities. On top of this, Dietrich and colleagues only examine progressive ambition among this small sample of legislators and do not examine the effect of personality on nascent ambition in the general public. Most relevant in the general population is Clifford et al.’s (forthcoming) examination of the relationship of individual levels of empathy to political ambition.

  2. Replication files available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/1AZYRE.

  3. In addition, Browning and Jacob (1964) note that there also were differences across communities where the balance of power between the business communities and public officials varied. They theorize that the centralization of power in a governing body relative to other community organizations may also affect the type of individuals who choose to run for office.

  4. The Thematic Apperception Test is a projective test based on psychodynamic theory which bases behavior on subconscious underlying factors whose merit (specifically because of its lack of validity and reliability) is now widely questioned in the psychological community (Cramer 1999; Lilienfeld et al. 2000).

  5. See Mondak et al. (2010, Chap. 2) for an extensive literature review on each personality trait.

  6. McCrae and Costa (2008) argue this is why Richard Nixon ran for president.

  7. More than 100 published studies on personality have used this personality scale. A complete list is found at http://www.midus.wisc.edu/findings/pubtopics.php?topic=personality.

  8. Since the dependent variable (political ambition) has three distinct categorical options, we also fit a multinomial logit regression model which can be found in the Online Appendix. The results are identical in their statistically significant effects to those shown here.

  9. Our findings are robust to models with additional controls as seen in the Online Appendix.

  10. Figures with confidence intervals and the predicted probability of each response are in the Online Appendix. Figure 1 is a simplified version of Figure A.3 in the Online Appendix.

  11. An important difference between our samples is that Lawless and Fox (2010) survey adults from the four professions and backgrounds that are most common among political candidates. In addition, the dependent variable from Lawless and Fox (2010) is “whether a respondent ever considered running for” office instead of whether they are open to running. Nonetheless, their results provide a benchmark comparison.

  12. A major concern with self-reported personality tests taken by elected officials is social desirability bias in their responses (Remmel 2016). Elected officials may be reluctant to admit that they “get nervous easily” or are not “kind to almost everyone,” even in a confidential survey. Remmel (2016) examines this concern by conducting a Big Five personality test on Vermont state legislators and then comparing these self-reports to peer-reports of those same state legislators completed by their friends, spouses, and/or adult children. Remmel (2016) finds a strong correlation between the self-reports and peer-reports. Moreover, the results suggest that the self-reports are less prone to social-desirability bias than the peer-reports, as state legislators were more likely to agree with the more negative statements than their peers.

  13. Not all municipal officials are from counties that have county-level elected offices.

  14. Results from a multinomial logistic regression model is in the Online Appendix.

  15. Though the coefficient on the indicator variable for partisan elections is statistically significant at the 0.10 level, the substantive effect is practically zero.

  16. The Online Appendix has figures with the predicted probabilities for each of the options in the multinomial logit model. Figure 2 is a simplified version of Figure A.4 in the Online Appendix.

  17. Some of these people are those who said they had no interest in higher office, but we asked them to indicate what office they would run for if they did.

  18. The full results of these models are Table A.4 in the Online Appendix. To conserve space, only the predicted probabilities are displayed.

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Author notes

  1. Authors names are alphabetical. Each author had an equal contribution to this paper.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Adam M. Dynes

  2. Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Hans J. G. Hassell

  3. Brigham Young University-Idaho, Rexburg, ID, USA

    Matthew R. Miles

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Correspondence to Matthew R. Miles.

Additional information

We are thankful to Don Haider-Markel for making the general population survey possible and to Lior Sheffer, Scott Clifford, Justin Kirkland, Conor Dowling, and Michael Sances for feedback on this project. We also thank those who organized and participated in panels and workshops where earlier versions of this paper were presented. These include the panel on “Elite Personality and Political Institutions” at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the 2017 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, the 2017 Local Political Economy Conference at Vanderbilt University, and a 2017 research workshop at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University.

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Dynes, A.M., Hassell, H.J.G. & Miles, M.R. The Personality of the Politically Ambitious. Polit Behav 41, 309–336 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9452-x

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