Personality and Politics in the Americas

对政治行为的研究旨在提高我们对公民如何以及如何参与政治世界的理解。学者们研究了政治行为的许多方面，包括公民对政治的了解程度，公民是否参与政治竞技场的决定，人们如何处理和使用政治信息，以及政治态度的性质和一致性。这一集体研究机构的动机是希望确定提高公民能力的手段，从而提高民主治理的质量。简而言之，更好的公民带来更好的政府。在“美洲的人格与政治”中进行的具体研究将通过明确人们的核心人格特征对他们的政治行为模式的可能意义，奋进为我们理解公民和政治做出贡献。实现这一目标的一个关键步骤是在关于政治的全国性调查中列入关于人格特征的问题。在这项研究中，人格项目将被添加到AmericasBarometer调查中，该调查将于2010年在美洲的16个或更多国家进行。当代人格和政治研究建立在人类基因组和人类行为生物学基础的最新科学突破之上。在很大程度上，人格是由生物学决定的。因此，人与人之间的核心差异？人的心理特征，包括与生俱来的差异，可能会影响政治行为的多个方面。认识到这种可能性，为对公民身份进行戏剧性的反思铺平了道路。在过去，研究政治行为的学生通常只关注环境因素来解释公民之间的差异。这些著作错误地假定环境的影响会对所有的个人产生不利的影响。举一个明显的反例，动员公民参与政治的努力肯定会在外向者中比在内向者中更受欢迎，然而，由于未能考虑人格的可能意义，学术界肯定会忽视这些根本差异。在《美洲的人格与政治》一书中，10个人格项目将被用来衡量心理学家称之为“大五”的人格特质：对经验的开放性、主动性、外向性、宜人性和情绪稳定性。这些项目，共同捕捉大部分的人格特质结构，将被添加到AmericasBarometer调查已经定于2010年春季作为范德比尔特大学的拉丁美洲民意项目的一部分。这些调查将由至少16个国家的1,500名受访者完成，其他调查项目涉及广泛的政治现象。因此，由此产生的数据集将非常广泛，并将提供最大的机会，迄今为止的个性和政治研究，无论是在国内和跨国。因为这些数据将在获得后立即发布给学术界，没有禁运期，所以这个项目将为研究政治、人格和跨文化人类行为的学者提供宝贵的资源。

Research on political behavior seeks to improve our understanding of how and how well citizens engage the political world. Scholars examine numerous facets of political behavior, including matters such as the tendency of citizens to be well informed or poorly informed about politics, the citizen's decision regarding whether to participate in the political arena, how people process and use information about politics, and the nature and coherence of political attitudes. This collective body of research is motivated by the desire to identify means to heighten citizen competence, and thus to improve the quality of democratic governance. In short, with better citizens comes better government. The specific research to be conducted in "Personality and Politics in the Americas" will endeavor to contribute to our understanding of citizens and politics by pinpointing the possible significance of people's core personality traits for their patterns in political behavior. A key step in accomplishing this objective is the inclusion of questions about personality traits on national surveys about politics. In this research, personality items will be added to the AmericasBarometer surveys, surveys that will be conducted in sixteen or more nations in the Americas in 2010.Contemporary studies of personality and politics build on recent scientific breakthroughs on the human genome and the biological bases of human behavior. To a substantial extent, personality is biologically determined. Thus, core differences in people?s psychological traits, including differences that are present from birth, may influence multiple aspects of political behavior. Recognition of this possibility paves the way for a dramatic rethinking of citizenship. In the past, students of political behavior typically have looked solely to environmental factors to explain differences across citizens. Such works incorrectly assume that environmental influences will operate comparably on all individuals. To take one obvious counterexample, efforts to mobilize citizens to participate in politics surely will be much better received among extroverts than among introvert, yet failure to contemplate the possible significance of personality ensures that scholarship ignores such fundamental differences.In "Personality and Politics in the Americas," ten personality items will be used to measure what psychologists have dubbed the "Big Five" personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. These items, which collectively capture the bulk of personality trait structure, will be added to AmericasBarometer surveys already set to be fielded in the spring of 2010 as part of Vanderbilt University's Latin American Public Opinion Project. The surveys will be completed by 1,500 respondents in each of at least sixteen nations, and other survey items address a wide array of political phenomena. Consequently, the resulting data set will be extraordinarily extensive, and will offer the greatest opportunity to date for research on personality and politics both within and across nations. Because the data will be released to the scholarly community as soon as they are available, with no embargo period, this project will yield an invaluable resource for scholars studying politics, personality, and cross-cultural human behavior.