Talking Heads: Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech

Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psycholo-\ud gists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. In this paper, we apply recent advances in machine learning (Mairesse et al. 2007) to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996–2014. We show that these estimates are robust to concerns about strategic behavior and generally conform with findings in the behavior literature linking ideology with the Big Five (e.g. Gerber et al. 2010). We also provide two examples of the utility of our method, one examining the impact of personality on elite survey non-response and the other showing how the conscientiousness of members of Congress affects the contents of bill proposals

Tentative Decisions

Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psychologists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. Here, we bridge these literatures by offering a framework for modeling how personality influences legislative behavior. Drawing from experimental economics and neuropsychology, we identify core cognitive constraints for the “Big Five” personality model, parameterizing them in ways useful for crafting formal models of legislative behavior. We then show one example of the applicability of this framework by creating a formal decision-theoretic model of constituency communicatio

President Obama placed his most competent appointees in agencies most important to—and most resistant to—his political agenda

One of President Obama’s most important tasks upon entering office in 2008 was the filling of more than 3,000 appointed positions within the federal government. But what governed these appointments, policy expertise or political reasons such as campaign experience? By studying more than 1,300 of Obama’s presidential appointments Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr., Gabriel Horton, and David E. Lewis find that he appointed individuals with policy expertise to agencies responsible for policies on his agenda and those who were more conservative. They write that more liberal agencies tended to have more appointees with campaign experience or political connections rather than policy expertise

(Sympathy for) the Devil You Know: Openness, Psychological Entropy, and the Case of the Incumbency Advantage

Why do some individuals prefer lesser-known, riskier experiences over more well-known options in life? In this paper, we focus on the case of the electoral advantage to incumbency, and the role that psychological entropy reduction can play in undermining that advantage among individuals who lack simplifying heuristics, such as party brand loyalty. We build on recent work in political psychology, applying a more general political psychology framework linking the Big Five personality trait of Openness to a compulsion to gather and process information. Using data from the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, we find more Open respondents are more willing to vote for more uncertain House challengers at higher rates, but only among Independent respondents who are unable to rely on partisan cues to simplify the psychological entropy presented by such challengers. This suggests Openness captures relative preferences for encountering and reducing psychological entropy rather than traditionally defined risk preferences

What Trump and Clinton’s personality traits tell us about how they might govern as president.

During the course of the 2016 presidential election, the topic of candidate temperament and fitness for office has been widely discussed. Adam J. Ramey, Jonathan D. Klingler, and Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr. show how their personality traits can be estimated from their speech, and what these estimates imply for how they might govern from the White House: Clinton is likely to push substantive policies and back them up, while Trump would push for bolder and more costly proposals, without as much follow-through

More than a Feeling: Personality and Congressional Behavior

Political scientists have long considered the primacy of ideology, party affiliation, and constituency preferences in determining how members of the U.S. Congress make decisions. At the same time, psychologists have held that individuals' immutable personality traits play a central role in individual decision-making. In this paper, we seek to bridge these literatures by offering a rational-choice based characterization of how personality informs legislator decision-making, independently of policy preferences. Specifically, we provide an decision-theoretic grounding for the "Big Five'' personality model and identify how different personality traits affect the legislative behavior -- broadly defined -- of members of Congress. We apply recent advances in computer science to estimate personality across each of the "Big Five" dimensions using speeches recorded in the Congressional Record. In particular, we use Support Vector Machines (SVM) models to connect linguistic cues in legislator speech with known personality correlates of those cues. These results in hand, we study how legislators personality traits affect their behavior in Congress. Our results are substantively fascinating and a significant contribution to the discipline, as they show that personality has a strong relationship with legislator behavior -- even after controlling for legislator ideology

Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech

We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior