Mapping Political Trust and Involvement in the Personality Space – A Systematic Review and Analysis

Individual differences in political trust and involvement in politics have been linked to Big Five personality dispositions. However, inconsistent correlational patterns have been reported. As a systematic review is still missing, the present paper provides an overview of the current state of the empirical literature. A systematic review of 43 publications (N = 215,323 participants) confirmed substantial inconsistency in the correlational patterns and corroborated a suspicion that the frequent use of low-bandwidth personality short scales might be responsible, among other reasons. In a second step, we conducted two empirical studies (N1 = 988 and N2 = 795), estimating latent correlations between the Big Five and political trust and involvement at different hierarchical levels. We found that personality relations were consistent across different subdimensions of trust (e.g., trust in politicians, institutional trust) and involvement (e.g., political interest, political self-efficacy, participation propensity) and are therefore best estimated at aggregated levels (i.e., general political trust and involvement). Meanwhile, correlational patterns differed substantially between Big Five facets, confirming that previous inconsistencies can be partly attributed to a misbalanced representation of facets in Big Five short scales and indicating that associations should be estimated at lower levels of the personality hierarchy.