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Personality and Party Identification Types RUNNING HEAD: PERSONALITY AND PARTY IDENTIFICATION TYPES The narcissistic partisan? How narcissism and need for closure relate to positive and negative party identification in Germany Sabrina J Mayer12 1 University of Duisburg-Essen 2 German Center for Integration and Migration Research Version 2.0, June, 15, 2021, prepared for the EPSA General Conference Abstract: Usual studies of the underpinnings of partisan attachments only consider positive party identifications and the Big Five framework. However, negative party identification is an important understudied side of party identification that affects democratic dissatisfaction and political conflict. This article studies how narcissistic admiration and rivalry as well as need for closure affect negative party identification and partisanship types, such as being a negative, open, or closed partisan. I argue that different types of partisan attachments fulfill different psychological needs and the kind of attachments individuals show can thus be traced back to their personality features. Based on a novel online quota survey from Germany conducted in February and May 2021 (N= 1,454), I find narcissistic rivalry and need for closure to be central traits for different types of partisanship. Furthermore, negative partisans against a radical-right party show a different profile from partisans with other system parties. Keywords: Individual differences, Negative partisanship, Party identification, Germany, Grandiose narcissism 1 RUNNING HEAD: PERSONALITY AND PARTY IDENTIFICATION TYPES 1 Introduction Since the seminal work of Campbell and colleagues in the 1960s, positive party identification (PID) has become one of the most used concepts for analyzing political behavior (e.g., Huddy, Mason, & Aarøe, 2015; Johnston, 2006; Thomassen & Rosema, 2009). In contrast, negative party identification has received considerable less attention but gained traction in recent years. It was shown to mobilize electoral behaviour (Abramowitz & Webster, 2016; Bankert, 2020; Caruana, McGregor, & Stephenson, 2015; Maggiotto & Piereson, 1977; Mayer, 2017a; Medeiros & Noel, 2014; Michael McGregor, Caruana, & Stephenson, 2015; Richardson, 1991; Rose & Mishler, 1998) as well as increasing democratic dissatisfaction especially after “lost” elections (Ridge, 2020; Spoon & Kanthak, 2019) and political conflict (Abramowitz & Webster, 2018; Meléndez & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019). Based on different types of partian attachments, Rose and Mishler (1998) provided a typology of partisans that allows to categorize four types: apartisan (no identifications), open (only positive), closed (both types) or negative. Ridge (2020) found especially those only holding negative party identifications to have the highest levels of dissatisfaction thus showing that the combinations of both kinds of partisanship matter. Even though the party one identifies with is often already transmitted in primary socialization (e.g., Kroh & Selb, 2009; Zuckerman, Dasovic, & Fitzgerald, 2007), individual differences such as personality traits also matter as they affect the general kind of attachments we develop (Gerber, Huber, Doherty, & Dowling, 2012; Turner, Oakes, Haslam, & McGarty, 2010). As personality shapes individual responses to stimuli and what they find appealing and not, we can certainly assume that individual differences also affect types of partisan attachments (Mondak, 2010). Previous studies relied on the widely used widely used Big Five framework (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1976) and showed for positive party identification that such an attachment fulfils different individual needs: Openness to new experiences as well as agreeableness were found to relate positively to the likelihood of identifying with a political party in different countries (Bakker, Hopmann, & Persson, 2015; Gerber et al., 2012). However, two important points remain understudies. So far, no study analysed the link between personality and negative party identification even though it is important to understand the general mechanisms of partisanship, regardless of parties’ ideology. Furthermore, previous works used the Big Five framework but did not take more recent coneptualizations of personality such as grandiose narcissism. Even though narcissism has been a stable feature in social psychological and personality research 2 RUNNING HEAD: PERSONALITY AND PARTY IDENTIFICATION TYPES (e.g. see for an overview Paulhus & Williams, 2002; Back et al., 2013), its contribution to political behavior has not been analysed much. First applications of narcissism showed its important role to predict political attitudes (e.g. Hatemi & Fazekas, 2018) as well as electoral behaviour (e.g. Mayer et al., 2020). The two different pathways of narcissism should thus affect the way voters perceive the world in terms of partisan attachments. Furthermore, the need for closure has been identified as another contributor for partisan attachments as a high need for closure fosters certainty and structure which both types of partisan attachments may provide (Luttig, 2018). In this paper, I analyse how individual differences such as personality traits and needs affect the likelihood for different types of partisan attachments. I rely on the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (Back et al., 2013) as well as need for cognitive closure (NCC) (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). I argue that NCC drives positive as well as negative attachments, whereas narcissistic rivalry relates especially to negative partisanship as a way to maintain superiority. As populist radical-rightwing parties have many strong opposers/negative adherents (Meléndez & Kaltwasser, 2021), it is crucial to differentiate between system and anti-system parties in the analyses as we can suppose that negative partisanship with an anti-system party might fulfill a different function than with a system party. I use new data from an online survey with access quotes according to the German microcensus that was conducted in February 2021. Germany offers an ideal case because it is a moderate pluralistic party system. It has also had a long period of stability which is important for analyses of stable concepts such as partisanship, and contains parties from all major party families such as the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Socialists, Liberal Democrats, GREENS, as well as a populist right-wing party. First, I discuss the theoretical framework, based on social identity theory, for the conceptualization of partisan attachements as well as the different personality frameworks I use. After deriving my hypotheses, I provide information on the Data and Measures I use. After showing the results, I discuss the implications of my research. I show that a need for differentiation such as narcissistic rivalry as well as a need for closure drive negative partisanship. Closed partisanship is most likely to occur when individuals are high in narcissistic rivalry and high in need for closure. Furthermore, partisans with/against a radical- right party show a different profile from partisans with other system parties. 3 RUNNING HEAD: PERSONALITY AND PARTY IDENTIFICATION TYPES 2 Theoretical framework 2.1 Definitions of party identification as social identity Party identification1 is one of the most used concepts in electoral research (Thomassen & Rosema, 2009). The classic notion of party identification goes back to the “The Voter Decides” and “The American Voter” (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960). The theoretical foundations of party identification are based on reference-group theory in which the political party serves as the group to which the individual develops “[...] an identification, positive or negative, of some degree of intensity” (Campbell et al., 1960, p. 122). In this sense, party identification is used “to characterize the individual’s affective orientation” (Campbell et al., 1960, p. 121) towards a political party. Positive party identification is thus a long- standing affective attachment with one or several political parties. In the 1970s and 1980s, a revisionist critique focused on the presumed lack of stability of partisanship that is rather seen as a „running tally“ of on-going evaluations of political events (Fiorina, 1981; Popkin, Gorman, Phillips, & Smith, 1976). A third wave of party identification research replied be conceptualizing partisanship coherent within the social identity approach (Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2002; Greene, 1999; Kelly, 1989) that allows to explain deviations from the original stability assumption (e.g. Huddy, Bankert, & Davies, 2018). Building on these different schools of thought, the distinction of instrumental vs. expressive partisanship was used by several authors to name those diverging notions (e.g., Huddy et al., 2015; Huddy et al., 2018). Partisanship from an orthodox or social identity perspective is expressive as it leads to motivated reasoning, defending the party to maintain its status, and goes along with the function of party ID as a perceptual screen that filters information so it sheds positive light on the party and enhances outparty derogation (e.g., Huddy et al., 2018). It is thus an ingroup-based categorization (Leonardelli & Toh, 2015) that is part of an individual’s self-concept and thus affects their intergroup relations. Negative party identification on the other hand has received considerably less interest so far. Even though part of the original definition of party identification, it was mentioned only in passing (Campbell et al., 1960, pp. 121–122): It
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