What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties or outfits such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Germany's Left Party? Populist parties have as a common denominator that they employ an anti‐establishment message, which they combine with some ‘host’ ideology. Building on the congruency model of political preference, it is to be expected that a voter's personality should match with the message and position of his or her party. This article theorises that a low score on the personality trait Agreeableness matches the anti‐establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. Evidence is found for this hypothesis in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The relationship between low Agreeableness and voting for populist parties is robust, controlling for other personality traits, authoritarianism, sociodemographic characteristics and ideology. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account.

A social business responds to social problems usually ignored by institutions, mobilizing resources and generating employment. To gain more knowledge about this type of enterprise, the key factors that may influence social entrepreneurship are studied and compared with nonsocial entrepreneurship. This enables advances in the scientific literature and the design of more effective policies that encourage the creation of social enterprises. To achieve this goal, after delimiting the area of study, a sample of 25,631 entrepreneurs in 59 countries was used; 9792 of these are social entrepreneurs collected by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project in 2015 when a special issue focused on this topic. The results show that the majority of the factors that determine the decision to undertake nonsocial entrepreneurship also condition the individual to undertake social entrepreneurship, although the nature of their relationship or the intensity of the influence changes.

This article examines the link between personality traits, political attitudes and the propensity to vote in elections, using an Internet panel survey conducted in two Canadian provinces at the time of the 2008 federal election and the subsequent provincial elections. It first establishes that the two most proximate attitudes that shape one's propensity to vote are political interest and sense of civic duty. The article then look at specific personality traits (altruism, shyness, efficacy and conflict avoidance) that could affect level of political interest, civic duty and the propensity to vote in elections. In the last part of the analysis, a model is proposed and tested, according to which the impact of personality traits is indirect, being mediated by interest and duty. The article shows that the data are consistent with such an interpretation.

The present study aimed to explore underlying motivational factors of volunteerism at a special sporting event for persons with intellectual disabilities. The volunteer survey (n = 252) assessed sociodemographic characteristics, motives, satisfaction with life, psychological well-being, and affectivity of mainly intrinsically motivated volunteers versus traineeship attendees, doing a compulsory traineeship on occasion of the Innsbruck 2008 Winter Special Olympics. There was no significant variability in the motivation to volunteer scale (MVS) score between the groups. The inventory of approach and avoidance motivation (IAAM) data showed that primarily intrinsically motivated volunteers experienced higher self-gratification through their voluntary engagement. Regression analysis revealed that psychological well-being, satisfaction with life, and positive and negative affectivity was predicted by the IAAM and MVS. Individuals’ personal motives for volunteering appear to correlate with psychological well-being and affectivity and may influence prospective participation.

Social entrepreneurship is an increasingly important concept in the study of voluntary and nonprofit organizations. In spite of the growing recognition of this concept, little is known about what individual characteristics might describe or explain who in society is likely to be (or become) a social entrepreneur. This preliminary study empirically addresses this question using data from a United States online panel. Our results suggest that social entrepreneurs are likely to be female, non-white, younger, and college-educated individuals with some business experience and who live in big cities. Social entrepreneurs also tend to have more social capital, as measured by their activity in clubs and organizations other than work, and they are more likely to be happy, interested in politics, extroverted, giving (to charity), and liberal ideologically. Although exploratory, these findings help describe the social entrepreneur and suggest ways in which this important actor in civil society can be better identified, understood, and perhaps cultivated.

Why do some people stably identify with a party while others do not? This study tests whether and how the direction, stability and strength of party identification are associated with big five personality traits, using panel data from a representative sample of German citizens. First, the study confirms that personality traits are related to identification with different political parties. Second, it moves beyond previous research by showing that personality traits are related to the strength and variation in party identification over time. The implications of the study for the classical perspectives on party identification, as well as the personality and politics literature, are discussed.

Scholars pay increasing attention to the personality of candidates. However, systematic and comparative data across different countries and electoral systems are virtually inexistent. I introduce here a new dataset with information about the personality of 124 candidates having competed 57 elections worldwide. I describe the candidates’ personality in terms of two sets of traits which provide a comprehensive representation of adult personality: the “socially desirable” traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness (“Big Five”), and the “socially malevolent” traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (“Dark Triad”). Beyond introducing these measures, and testing their validity and reliability, I present three sets of analyses suggesting that these variables are also relevant. My findings suggest several trends: (1) concerning the profile of candidates, populists score significantly lower in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, but higher in perceived extraversion, narcissism, and psychopathy than “mainstream” candidates; (2) looking at the content of their campaigns, candidates high in agreeableness and openness tend to be associated with campaigns that are less negative and harsh, but more based on positively valenced appeals. At the same time, extroverted tend to be associated more with character attacks. Finally, (3) looking at electoral success, high conscientiousness and openness seem associated with better results during the election, whereas extraversion could be counterproductive.

This study uses a basket-based choice experiment with 2,010 U.S. adults to analyze alcohol and cannabis preferences in social settings following cannabis legalization. Through descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic modeling, we highlight the heterogeneous preferences consumers have for alcohol and cannabis products. Specifically, we demonstrate that a substantial portion of the survey respondents prefer to consume these substances together in social settings, while others view them as independent markets. Regression analysis then reveals that males and younger consumers are most likely to bundle these substances, while personality traits also correlate with expected simultaneous substance use. These results offer valuable insights to improve public health policy and messaging on the potential short- and long-term risks associated with cosubstance use.

We explore how honesty-humility and the other HEXACO personality traits relate to citizens’ nascent ambition and their recruitment to run for office. We extend previous work on virtue-related personality traits and political recruitment in two important ways: we go beyond North America and conduct a five-country cross-national study with nationally representative samples. More importantly, going beyond individual-level differences in nascent ambition, we also address how honesty-humility predicts the likelihood of being asked to and actually running for office. Based on data from Canada, Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, we demonstrate that citizens with lower levels of honesty-humility are more likely to have considered running, to deem themselves qualified to run, to have been asked to run, and to actually have run for a political office. From a ‘virtue ethics’ perspective, this is highly concerning: low honesty-humility predisposes individuals to engage in unethical behavior and decision-making. We discuss implications for the quality of political representation.

The need to maintain cooperation in social dilemmas is a fundamental challenge. Responses to social dilemmas are affected by dispositions toward exploitativeness (i.e., the maximization of one’s own utility) and distrust (i.e., the fear of being exploited by others). This is because the belief that others are untrustworthy justifies exploitative behaviors. The Dark Factor of Personality (D) is postulated to comprise the conjunction of these dispositions, implying that individuals will assume similarity on D. In this research, we sought to test this implication by examining whether individuals’ self- and observer reports of unacquainted targets on D converge. Across five studies, we found that individuals assume similarity on D when unknown targets are described as ‘typical’ (Study 1) or when shown a photograph (Studies 2–5). These effects were not moderated by the congruency between rater and target sex (Studies 2 and 3); however, we found that higher attractiveness of targets led to greater assumed similarity on D (Studies 4 and 5). These findings are consistent with D reflecting the conjunction of exploitativeness and distrust while also suggesting that assumed similarity on D is moderated by the interpersonal attraction of those being rated.