Welcome to the Machine: A Model of Legislator Personality and Communications Technology Adoption

Gary E. Hollibaugh, Adam J. Ramey and Jonathan D. Klingler

SAGE Open, 2018, vol. 8, issue 3, 2158244018802883

Abstract: 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 communication. We show that when there exists uncertainty over the true state of the world, personality traits have more influence on individual decisions.

Keywords: personality; experimental psychology; psychology; social sciences; computer modeling; computer science; political communication; media & society; mass communication; communication; legislative processes; legal studies; political science; party politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244018802883 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:8:y:2018:i:3:p:2158244018802883

DOI: 10.1177/2158244018802883

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().