| Summary: | <p>This thesis makes the case that individual differences in people’s major personality traits can explain natives’ attitudes towards immigrants. While political scientists are increasingly acknowledging the significance of psychological theories and constructs for politics, the role that major personality trait dimensions may play in explaining political behavior surprisingly continues to be a relatively understudied research area in political science. Indeed, this latter statement is especially adequate for this thesis’ major dependent variable, immigration attitudes. However, immigration has turned into an extraordinarily influential topic over the last ten years, markedly shaping Western politics, which makes answers to the question why natives differ in their attitudes about immigrants and immigration increasingly high in demand and pressing.</p>
<p>In this thesis, I adopt a five-pronged approach to examining the potential explanatory power of personality traits for natives’ immigration attitudes. First, I review the existing peer-reviewed academic literature that has so far attempted to link variation in natives’ Big Five personality traits to their immigration attitudes, and embed it into a more comprehensive discussion of the academic literatures on the causes and correlates of immigration attitudes. Second, I build on Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T), an influential causal, integrative theory which has recently been developed in the field of personality psychology, to derive and subsequently empirically test multiple hypotheses linking personality’s major dimensions of covariation on three levels of CB5T’s personality trait hierarchy to natives’ immigration attitudes based on survey data from the United Kingdom and the United States. Third, I demonstrate in an original survey experiment fielded in Germany that the relationship between personality traits and immigration attitudes is context-specific by zooming in on the Big Five personality trait Agreeableness and its two lower-level aspects Compassion and Politeness. Forth, I switch perspectives and show that immigrants’ personalities, operationalized via the ten Big Five personality aspects, strongly shape natives’ preferences for said immigrants in an original conjoint experiment fielded in the United Kingdom. Fifth, and finally, I conclude this thesis by, again, highlighting the importance of personality psychology for studying political behavior more broadly and immigration attitudes more specifically with a special emphasis on both the institutional challenges and pushback from (some) political scientists with regards to this type of research.</p>
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