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Opting for an open society? Personality traits and attitudes toward the openness of Switzerland

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

The tension between openness and closedness is one of the most important cleavages in Swiss political debates. In the present article, we study the psychological foundations of attitudes regarding this issue. More precisely, we examine the link between personality and attitudes toward the degree of openness of Switzerland as a general stance toward the cultural, economic and political alignment of the country. Personality is understood as a complex and multifaceted concept that forms the basis for consistent patterns of attitudes and behavior. We build on the Five-Factor Theory to explain the link between personality traits, contextual factors and political attitudes. Analyzing survey data from a random sample of Swiss citizens, we find clear evidence that personality traits affect political attitudes. Furthermore, we are able to demonstrate that the relationship between personality and attitudes toward the degree of openness of Switzerland is moderated by perceived ethnic diversity in the neighborhood.

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  1. We add another insight to the study of openness by evaluating the psychological basis of these attitudes. It is, however, by no means a new idea to bring predispositions and political attitudes together. Especially regarding the study of prejudice, there is a long tradition of considering its psychological foundations (Adorno et al, 1950; Altemeyer, 1981; Sidanius and Pratto, 1993; Sibley and Duckitt, 2008). More generally, Zaller (1992, p. 6) states that ‘every opinion is a marriage of information and predisposition’ in his famous model on attitude formation.

  2. Switzerland has experienced a substantial increase of the overall proportion of immigrants in the population in the last decades from a comparatively high percentage of 17.2 per cent in 1970 to 22.5 per cent in 2010 (a relative increase of about one-third) (Brunner and Kuhn, 2014).

  3. Regrettably, although our data is rich regarding the Big Five traits in Switzerland, it does not include specific questions measuring attitudes toward the economic, political or cultural openness of the country. Therefore, to uncover the concrete meaning of our measurement of openness we refer to the ‘Measurement and Observation of Social Attitudes in Switzerland’ (MOSAiCH) 2013 data set. While not containing items of personality, this survey provides the same question regarding the desired general level of openness of Switzerland as well as other questions regarding the desired development of immigration rates (cultural openness), the desired level of the import of goods and services (economic openness), and the attitudes toward the restraining power of international institutions for Swiss politics (political openness). Using factor analytic techniques (maximum likelihood is chosen as method of factor extraction) we find that these four items load on one factor and thus represent one latent concept, with immigration showing the highest factor loadings (detailed results are available on request). These findings support our view that the concept of openness is a rather broad one and comprises political, economic and cultural facets in equal measure.

  4. Genetic influence is assumed to account for about 50 per cent of the variation of the Big Five personality traits (Bouchard, 2004, p. 149; Krueger and Johnson, 2008, p. 288ff.).

  5. Nevertheless, the Big Five model is not undisputed. The main points of critique concern the theoretical basis of the model, the coverage of personality by the five factors and the number of factors (for a detailed discussion see Block (1995) or Boyle (2008)). In spite of this criticism, the Big Five model has established itself within personality psychology and related fields and offers a common frame of reference, which makes research findings comparable (John et al, 2008). Accordingly, we decided to use the Big Five in order to conceptualize personality traits in our theoretical model.

  6. We conceptualize the perceived contextual diversity as the moderating factor, which alters the relationship between personality traits and attitudes toward openness. Dinesen et al (2016), for instance, conceptualize the interaction between personality and situation the other way around. They argue that personality traits moderate the effect of situational factors (skill-level and country of origin of immigrants) on attitudes toward immigrants. By nature, interaction effects are symmetric as they are statistically modeled using multiplicative terms (Berry et al, 2012). That is, the statistical model gives no hint on the direction of the moderation. Therefore, every interaction effect necessitates a thorough theoretical foundation to justify its direction.

  7. Research on the cross-language use of Big Five batteries has found no translation effects across different language regions and cultures (John et al, 2008, p. 121).

  8. Analyses not documented here show the following Cronbach’s α scores for openness to experience (0.59), agreeableness (0.43), conscientiousness (0.55), extraversion (0.56), and emotional stability (0.57). Moreover, a confirmatory factor analysis strengthens our results and shows acceptable fit measures (RMSE = 0.08, SRMR = 0.06). All analyses are available on request. The rather low Chronbach’s α’s are in line with the relevant literature and cause no reason for concern, as the three items cover a ‘substantial bandwidth’ of various facets of one personality dimension and therefore are rather heterogeneous (John et al, 2008, p. 127).

  9. According to Verhulst et al (2012, p. 45), predicting factor scores should be preferred to constructing additive scales or using individual items as a measurement for personality traits. Factor scores are thought to be less prone to measurement error.

  10. Assuming that at least part of the variation in personality is determined by genetic disposition, only a few variables should confound the relationship, that is, influence both the independent and the dependent variable (see Jaccard and Jacoby (2009, p. 141ff.) for a discussion of what relevant control variables should be like).

  11. Although we are interested in the individual level effects, we use multilevel models for these analyses. In doing so, we take into account that the individuals in our sample are nested within cantons and therefore are not independent. Furthermore, we have the opportunity to control for relevant contextual factors (language region and urbanization) that might blur the effect of personality on political attitudes and behavior.

  12. Preferring closedness over openness is described as an attitude of traditionalism in Switzerland (Bolliger, 2007, p. 91).

  13. One could argue that the influence of personality is strongly mediated by political ideology. However, additional analyses expose ideology only as a partial mediator variable (see Table A4 in the online Appendix).

  14. This result is in line with findings regarding the moderating impact of perceived ethnic diversity on the link between conscientiousness and attitudes toward immigrants (Ackermann and Ackermann, 2015).

  15. In order to evaluate the robustness of our results, we conduct a variety of sensitivity analyses. The results are available upon request. First, we measure the Big Five personality traits using additive indices instead of factor scores. The results do not differ substantially except for the interaction between diversity and agreeableness, which is no longer significant. This might be explained by the fact that factor scores are weighted according to the factor loadings, while additive indices are not weighted. Owing to the low internal consistency of the agreeableness items, these two measurement methods might lead to different results. Second, we used cantonal shares of immigrants as a contextual variable instead of perceived neighborhood diversity. By using this aggregate measure, the interaction effects with personality traits are no longer significant. This lends support to recent findings showing that small-scale contexts matter most for people’s attitudes, because they capture the degree of diversity a person is really confronted with in daily life (Dinesen and Sønderskov, 2015).

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Conference of the Swiss Political Science Association (SVPW) 2014 in Bern, Switzerland. The authors are grateful to the participants in the workshop, the three anonymous referees and the editors of Comparative European Politics for their very helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, we would like to thank Jennifer Shore for linguistic assistance and Eros Zampieri for assistance in preparing the manuscript. Errors remain our own.

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Correspondence to Kathrin Ackermann.

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Table A1

Table A1 Personality traits and attitudes toward the openness of Switzerland

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Ackermann, K., Ackermann, M. & Freitag, M. Opting for an open society? Personality traits and attitudes toward the openness of Switzerland. Comp Eur Polit 16, 413–433 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2016.18

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