Abstract
Growing evidence exists about the importance of dark personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in political leaders, broadly leading to heightened political aggressiveness and partisan conflict. Building on this expanding research agenda, we study the possible association between dark personality in politicians and deepened affective polarization – that is, increased affective distance between partisan groups coupled with stronger dislike for out-parties – in the public. We do so by linking a large-scale expert survey (NEGex) and a collection of post-election surveys (CSES), including information for more than 90 leading candidates having competed in 40 elections worldwide. Our results show that the dark personality of top politicians can be associated with upticks in affective polarization in the public – but only when it comes to the personality of in-party candidates (that is, a candidate from voters' preferred party), and only for high levels of ideological proximity between the candidate and the voter.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1575-1588 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | European Journal of Political Research |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 5 Feb 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2025 |
Funding
We are grateful to the EJPR editors and anonymous reviewers for their inputs during the revisions process \u2013 their constructive comments were instrumental to rework our piece and get it to its current form. All remaining mistakes are of course our responsibility alone. A sincere thank you to all NEGex experts for donating their precious time, and to CSES for making the cross\u2010national survey data available to the scientific community. Alex Nai acknowledges the generous financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Ref. P300P1_161163).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung | P300P1_161163 |