Link to the article (archived): Ripping the public apart? Politicians’ dark personality and affective polarization -- [February 2025]
New research shows that dark traits of a political leader have an effect when voters feel ideologically close to the politician in question, while the personality traits of political opponents have little to no effect on the degree of polarisation.
In a new study published in the 'European Journal of Political Research,' scientists from University of Amsterdam (UvA), the University of Lausanne and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, linked the personality profiles of over 90 prominent politicians worldwide with voter attitudes in 40 national elections. The results reveal striking patterns. Politicians who score high on the so-called Dark Triad – narcissism (excessive self-focus), psychopathy (emotional coldness and lack of empathy), and Machiavellianism (a tendency toward manipulation and deception) – are associated with greater hostility toward political opponents among their followers.
[The] results suggest that the dark personality of top politicians can be associated with heightened affective polarization in the public – but only for candidates of voters’ in-party (that is, their preferred party), and only for high levels of ideological proximity between the candidate and the voter. The other personality traits have weaker effects, and the personality of out-group candidates (that is, candidates of voters’ most disliked party) seems overall rather marginal. In other terms, what our results suggest is a proximity effect for dark personality in elites.
According to the study, this is somewhat at odds with the popular idea that people might become cynical and radicalized due to how much they dislike the character of their political opponents:
What [...] results suggest is that dark traits in elites have an ‘in-house’ effect. It is ‘our’ candidate, in particular if we feel close to them, that drives our partisan animosity the most – specifically, their dark traits. In other terms, our models predict that it is in particular among very close supporters of dark candidates that we find the highest levels of affective polarization.
The trends shown in our analysis come with some notable limitations, the study says:
Allthough they stem from a large-scale analysis and should thus be more resistant towards critiques of low external validity, they nonetheless build on evidence that is essentially observational in nature, with the inherent risk of endogeneity. Specifically, our data and results cannot exclude the fact that voters self-select into being close to darker candidates because they are affectively polarized – and not the other way around. That is, we cannot prove that it is the dark personality of politicians that cause affective polarization to move upwards.
Democratic risks
The findings cast a critical light on the global rise of ‘dark’ leaders. According to the researchers, the confrontational and uncompromising personality traits of such leaders pose clear risks to democratic processes. ‘When the personal traits of leaders poison public discourse, the public’s willingness to cooperate weakens, social cohesion suffers, and ultimately democratic norms erode,’ says co-author Katjana Gattermann of the UvA.
The researchers call for greater awareness of the role (dark) personality plays in political leadership, in particular when these traits appear in strongmen. Nai concludes: ‘We have shown in previous research that dark personality traits are particularly frequent in authoritarian leaders and populists; the evidence seems thus to be piling up that narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism are important phenomena if we want to understand why politics, today, seems so confrontational.’
These limitations notwithstanding [...] the findings discussed in our article are furthermore worrisome in light of dynamics of democratic backsliding [...]. Dark traits seem to be particularly prevalent among autocrats and populist [...], suggesting a potentially nefarious intersection between uncompromising leaders, democratic deconsolidation and affective polarization. Further research should investigate these dynamics more in detail, including regarding the intervening role of (dark) communication strategies linking elites and voters directly.