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，包括公民对政治了解得多或少的倾向，公民关于是否参与政治舞台的决定，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找出提高公民能力的方法，从而提高民主治理的质量。简而言之，有更好的公民就有更好的政府。在“美洲的人格与政治”中进行的具体研究将努力通过指出人们的核心人格特征对他们的政治行为模式的可能意义来促进我们对公民和政治的理解。实现这一目标的关键一步是在全国政治调查中纳入关于人格特征的问题。在这项研究中，性格项目将被添加到美国晴雨表调查中，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，性格是由生物学决定的。因此，人与人之间的核心差异是什么？美国人的心理特征，包括出生时就存在的差异，可能会影响政治行为的多个方面。认识到这种可能性为重新思考公民身份铺平了道路。过去，研究政治行为的学生通常只考虑环境因素来解释公民之间的差异。这些作品错误地假设环境对所有个体的影响都是相同的。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的人中比在内向的人中更受欢迎，然而，没有考虑到个性可能的重要性，学术就会忽视这种根本的差异。在“美洲的人格与政治”中，十个人格项目将被用来衡量心理学家所称的“五大”人格特征：开放性、严谨性、外向性、宜人性和情绪稳定性。作为范德比尔特大学拉丁美洲民意调查项目的一部分，这些项目将被添加到美国民意调查中，这些调查已定于2010年春季进行。这些调查将由至少16个国家的1500名受访者完成，其他调查项目涉及一系列广泛的政治现象。因此，由此产生的数据集将非常广泛，并将为研究国家内部和国家之间的个性和政治提供迄今为止最大的机会。由于这些数据一旦可用，就会立即发布给学术界，没有封锁期，因此该项目将为研究政治、个性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.