Who is a dark politician? How do dark politicians perform in the elections and in handling crises? What does being “dark” mean for female politicians? Why some people like it dark?
In this conversation with Kasia Krzyżanowska, Alessandro Nai discusses his newest book “Dark Politics. The Personality of Politicians and the Future of Democracy,” co-authored with Jürgen Maier.
Alessandro Nai – Associate Professor of Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on the dark sides of politics – the use of negativity and incivility in election campaigns in a comparative perspective, the (dark) personality traits of political figures, and radical partisanship in voters.
Kasia Krzyżanowska: Your book focuses on the dark personality traits of leading contemporary politicians, such as Donald Trump or Narendra Modi. You analyse their psychological profiles, their electoral campaigns as well as the policy implications of these. What kind of new insights or perspectives may be gained if we analyse politician through the lens of psychological traits?
Alessandro Nai: This is a fantastic question to start. Perhaps the most important thing to understand when it comes to research on personality is that a focus on the personality traits of individuals – voters but also politicians – equals focusing on who they are deep down.
And because we know that their deep personality disposition – the deeper society traits – are rather strong predictors of the way they think and even the way they behave, knowing more about the deep personality of politicians potentially can unlock new insights into why they do what they do, why they behave the way they behave, and even why they think the way they think. In other terms, this focus on personality allows us to go one step back into the mind of political actors – voters and politicians – and by knowing who they are deep down, potentially having a better understanding of who they are and what they do.
What are dark personality traits? And who qualifies as a dark politician? In a somewhat counter-intuitive way, you include in your analysis not only usual suspects like Donald Trump but also arguably much less dark leaders like Angela Merkel. So what makes up politicians’ “darkness”?
If you take a step back and look at the literature on personality, there are two main inventories, two main approaches to measure the personality of human beings. On the one hand, the most standard one, the so-called big five, focuses on socially desirable traits, such as openness, agreeableness, extroversion, and so forth.
But beyond these standard classic personality traits, more recent research has shown that there is also a dark counterpart of the human personality. These are called the dark traits, or dark triad of traits, which is composed of three key components.
The first one is narcissism, perhaps the easiest to understand. Narcissism is simply a positive self-projection engaging in bombastic or exaggerated behavior and mostly wanting others to admire who we are and what we do. As we all can imagine, this is very prevalent in politics. Very often, people are involved in politics because they want to project a positive image of themselves. And that is what we call narcissism.
The second one, extremely important, as far as I’m concerned, perhaps the most important of the three dark traits, is psychopathy. It sounds bad. But we’re not talking about serial killers here. We are talking about non-clinical psychopathy, which is nothing else than a lack of emotional connection with other human beings, being cold in social interactions, maybe also being a bit impulsive, and not necessarily caring about the consequences of our own acts. This is why we call it subclinical or non-clinical psychopathy.
And then the third is called Machiavellianism, from Machiavelli, of course, an Italian philosopher, which simply implies engaging in behavior that is eminently strategic when you don’t really care how you get from A to B; the only thing that matters is getting to B.
The balance between these three traits – narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism – determines what we call the dark profile of humans, including politicians. It’s true, as you mentioned, that it’s very easy to think of politicians around the world today that are correlatively high on this dark triad. You mentioned Trump – for sure he is a very good example. We can think of other ones, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, but also Berlusconi in Italy, Boris Johnson in the UK, and many, many more.
You also very correctly mentioned that our book does not only cover dark traits. We also include politicians who are low on the dark triad as a way of comparing the importance of these dark traits. More specifically, what we did in the book is that we looked at more than 100 elections across the world, and for each of these elections, we identified the two-three most important politicians – so the top candidates – that competed in presidential elections, major party leaders. We have assessed the personality profiles for them in a standardized way. And, of course, there are politicians that have very dark profiles, but there are also politicians that have very non-dark profiles. For instance, you mentioned Angela Merkel – she scores extremely high on conscientiousness, for instance, or openness, a little bit less high in extraversion. She tends to project an image of being a relatively shy person, but she definitely does not have a dark personality profile. It’s really in the comparison between the dark politicians and the non-dark politicians that we can then assess where dark politics matters.
Let me follow up on the methodology because it’s also an important and long part of your book. How did you assess the dark the dark traits of politicians? How did you obtain your results?
That’s a very fundamental question. It’s not easy, and it comes, of course with some methodological challenges. In the literature the way to assess the personality of human beings most of the time goes through a standardized questionnaire – the individuals themselves fill it in, so it’s a self-assessment. For instance, if you want to know the dark personality of voters, you simply submit them a questionnaire. There are a couple of batteries – a famous one is so the so-called “dirty dozen” battery – four-five questions for each of the traits, and then you average them out, and then you have a measure of their personality. This, of course, does not work with political leaders. We cannot send Donald Trump a questionnaire and ask him: ‘Dear Donald Trump, Dear Angela Merkel, would you please be able to fill this questionnaire?’ It just doesn’t work. So, we have to find alternative approaches.
The way we follow in the book is to rely on external observer judgments, most notably scholars, that have expertise on the country, on the political dynamics in the country, on political communication in the country, and asking them a series of standardized specific questions.
We are able to assess, on average how the experts perceive the projected personality of these politicians. It’s not quite the same or not fully the same as assessing their deeper personality, but we just cannot assess their deep personality. So this is our second-best.
I could go into detail, but there are also ways to check more or less whether expert judgments make sense in the first place. For instance, we know from the literature that external observers are pretty good at picking up key personality cues of individuals. So, we can start from the assumption that their assessments are relatively okayish. Of course, it is possible that the ideological profile of experts influences the personality assessment. For instance, if we have a very left-wing expert, there’s a chance that they might be a little bit more critical of Trump. But as we discuss in the book, there are also ways to minimize this ideological bias by filtering it out using regression residuals.
How do you view the links between the dark psychological traits and the practiced political style? How often do we find dark politicians on the conservative side of the spectrum, and why is that the case?
This is a fantastic question, and I would say probably one of the most important ones. Yes, we can discuss the personalities of politicians in a very abstract way, but these are real people who have a clear ideological stance. They run for parties. They have political programs. So, of course, the ideological implications of who they are deep down are extremely important.
It’s not an easy question to answer. There is some evidence that seems to suggest that dark personality traits may be a little bit more prevalent among strong conservative individuals. There are good reasons to think that this may be the case.
I’m caricaturing a little bit. Just to give an idea, we know that strong political conservatism is at times related to a more “muscular” vision of politics: the strongest comes on top, it’s a jungle out there, the survival of the fittest kind of thing. This is voluntarily a caricature, of course, but having this more muscular vision of politics seems to go hand in hand with some dark traits, most notably coldness and psychopathy: when you don’t care about the consequences of your actions, it’s just the results that matter. On paper, at least, we might think that these dark traits are slightly more prevalent towards hardcore conservative individuals. When it comes to leaders and candidates, the situation is more nuanced. Dark traits are prevalent among conservative politicians but also among liberal politicians. So, the ideological nuances are much less important in politicians than they are in voters, for instance.
But if we think about ideology or the ideological placement of politicians of leaders, something that really comes up as strongly correlated with their dark personality profile is not necessarily their ideological stance, left-right, liberal-conservative, but rather whether they are mainstream politicians or populist politicians.
There is a strong correlation between being a populist and having a dark profile. Again, there is no difference if these are left-wing populists or right-wing populists. Populists clearly tend to score much higher on the dark traits, and that makes sense. It is in line with their reputation of being provocative, of being more aggressive, of disrupting politics as usual, of having “bad manners,” as some scholars of populism remind us. So, all these narratives that surround populists – of being particular political animals, being different, of being agents provocateurs – are reflected into a darker personality profile. We find very strong evidence of this in our data.
So we’ve got political ideology, we’ve got populism, but how about other factors? Do such variables like gender or being an incumbent have an impact on a professed political and electoral style? Did you arrive at any surprising findings in this regard?
Let me start by quickly discussing incumbency. I’m fascinated by the dynamics of incumbency when it comes to political style or political personas. Research that we have done with colleagues, not necessarily on personality but on political aggressiveness in rhetoric when it comes to negative campaigning or incivility, clearly shows that incumbents have a strategic advantage of being nicer.
Incumbents need to be nicer because if they are not nice enough, they are clearly punished by voters.
And it makes sense. They already hold a political position. Why would they risk losing it by being too nasty?
When it comes to the rhetoric they employ, it makes it makes much more sense for them to be nicer. When it comes to personality traits, it becomes a little bit trickier. If I remember correctly, the evidence in our book what we find is that having a dark personality profile is risky.
Voters somehow, or at least the average voter, doesn’t really like if politicians are too nasty. But incumbents might be forgiven a little bit. Maybe because voters know that they can deliver – they have been incumbents already, they have “proven” what they can do, and maybe their dark personalities are a little bit forgiven. If I remember correctly, we find that the dark traits are electorally successful among incumbents. So there is some sort of a reward if they are nasty.
The second part of your question was about gender, and I’m absolutely fascinated by gender dynamics. I also have to say that with a couple of colleagues we are starting right now a research project on gender and personality to really try to go deeper into this. We only have very partial evidence so far. But on paper, at least, gender should come into play when it comes to the dynamics of dark politics, especially if we think in terms of gender stereotypes and sexism that are still so prevalent even in 2024.
Most notably, the way in which I believe gender comes into play when it comes to dark politics is related to the different directions that women politicians are sort of pulled towards when it comes to the leadership position that they have to succeed in. On one hand, they are expected to showcase and promote more feminine qualities. From a gender stereotype perspective, this is the qualitative care and kindness. And if they violate this expectation, they’re punished.
At the same time, they are also expected to be stronger and to take a tough role because politics is a tough game, and if they are not, they are punished.
Female politicians do not have solutions in terms of whether or not they have to behave in a kinder or in an aggressive way. Whatever they do, they will be penalized.
And, of course, this is also related to the type of persona and personality they project. In other terms, I believe that women are more likely to be punished electorally if they showcase a dark personality profile, but it’s just my intuition. As I said, we are starting a project on this, and I hope to have more data soon.
So, we’ve got what they are doing once they are pursuing their electoral campaigns. But what do they do when they are already in power? How successful are dark politicians in terms of economic results? What characterized their policy performance in handling the Covid crisis?
This is, by the way a chapter that we added last, and I really have to thank the anonymous reviewers of the book that encouraged us to also think beyond simply electoral dynamics to what are the deep consequences from a societal standpoint. I believe it is an important chapter. The title of our book says “…and the ‘future of democracy’”, so we have to add something about that.
The data that we use in this book includes more than 200 different politicians top politicians like Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Macron and all these people across more than 80 countries for the past 4-5 years. This data allows us, for the first time, to do some comparative research on the role of personality. There are already some fantastic studies out there, but most of the time they tend to be limited to a handful of cases, sometimes zooming in into the personality of US presidents. But large-scale comparative research on the role of personality of top politicians or leaders is relatively rare, and because we have this data, we can indeed start answering questions in terms of the systemic consequences of electing a leader with dark personality traits. We can do sophisticated empirical analysis showing the real-world consequences and we did that in the last empirical chapter.
This is, of course, preliminary evidence, and we should go much more further. But this disclaimer being put forward, we find the following: perhaps unsurprisingly,
electing dark leaders is associated – in the year after the election or in the year after they take executive power – with a slightly better economic performance in the country which we measure with higher GDP and higher growth of GDP.
This might be surprising or not: one component of a dark personality leader is both coming from psychopathy and Machiavellianism. It’s the idea that you are much more focused towards the outcome; you don’t care about the process, you just want to succeed, no matter the consequences. You are driven towards success, so to speak, and if the only indicator that we have is economic well-being of the country, then it’s not surprising that dark leaders are slightly more successful from an economic standpoint. I think the evidence that we show is relatively convincing in this sense.
There is a price to pay, though. If, on the one hand, electing a dark leader seems to be associated with a better economic performance in the country the year after the election, there are two other consequences that we have identified in our analysis that are much less let’s say desirable from a societal and even ethical standpoint.
First, we used this fantastic dataset collected by Oxford on the evolution of cases and mortality of COVID. We have matched the COVID tracker dataset with the personality of our leaders.
What we have found is that countries that elected dark leaders at the executive before the start of the pandemic, during the first six months of the pandemic faced a much higher mortality due to the COVID pandemic.
This goes hand in hand with what we’re saying before – yes, maybe dark leaders are better to achieve ultimate results from an economic standpoint, but they don’t really care about the consequences that are directly involved in reaching this outcome. The consequences, in this case, can be human lives.
So, we do find a relatively significant higher mortality rate due to the COVID pandemic in the first months in countries that elected dark leaders, all the things being kept constant. This is not a simple correlation between the two; our model is controlled by what the country is, the severity of the pandemic, whether the leader was left or right, whether they are populist – in other words, controlling by other important phenomena. What comes out is dark leader associated with great immortality.
There is even a second potential dramatic consequence that we have identified. I would like to say again that this is preliminary, but the trends are pretty clear:
countries that elect dark leaders tend to know that, in the subsequent year, there will be a decline in democratic quality, or what some scholars call a democratic deconsolidation.
We use aggregator indicators that also come from the economist scores of political rights and how extended political rights in the country are. What we find is that these scores of political rights or effective deliberation tend to decrease a little bit on average in countries that elect leaders with a darker personality profile. In other terms, yes, dark leaders might be more effective from an economic standpoint, but the consequences from a social standpoint to pay might be severe.
You also analyse the reactions of voters to dark politicians in your book. What do you mean by your phrase that “some like it dark”? Why do you think some people tend to vote for dark politicians? Is it primarily because of the ideological preferences: that right-wing voters prefer right-wing politicians who happen to be “dark” more often? Or does it have to do rather with their perceived successful performance?
This is a fantastic question and also a very important one. It really touches the heart of the concrete electoral dynamics of dark politics. Someone is voting for these people, they are not simply accessing political power randomly. I should say it that our analysis concerns only democracies with fair elections. So, if someone is voting for these people, we know that, on average, people tend to dislike when politics is too aggressive, at least if you ask them.
We know this from research on negativity and instability; if you ask the average voter: “do you like negativity and civility?” They tend to say “no, we don’t.” So, on average these dark traits should not be fully successful, but sometimes they are which means that there is at least an important chunk of the electorate that do like these dark traits.
Who are they? Who are these voters that really like dark traits? There are three main types of voters that that may like dark traits.
The first one you mentioned, and this is related to what I was saying before. Hardcore conservative voters may have a preference for more dark candidates. Before strong conservatism can be associated with the vision of politics that puts forward a more direct approach, what matters is the results. I’m simplifying once again: it is the law of the jungle, whether the strongest comes first. This is exemplified by a certain type of a dark politician so there could be something there.
But I believe that there are potentially two other factors that are likely even more important; the first one it’s really simply aggressive voters like dark politics. What does it mean? We entered here the realm of social and political attitudes beyond ideology. There is this relatively newish research in political psychology that tries to assess the deep foundations of the human attitudes. One, for instance, is aggressiveness: so, how passive or aggressive human beings are and there might be some reasons to believe that more aggressive people – for instance, people that have a hot temper that don’t like compromise, that tend to be more confrontational in their social interactions –prefer dark personalities.
What we were saying before about the conservatism (but not from an ideological standpoint) it’s really deeper than that more aggressive individuals prefer more aggressive politicians. One confirmation of this we might have indirectly from evidence showing that populist voters like dark candidates.
We know that populist voters tend to see politics in a more confrontational way, they are less likely to appreciate consensus, they are more likely to think that politics is a struggle between the good and the bad.
There is a more aggressive stance among populist voters and we know there is clear evidence that populist voters really like dark politicians.
There is a third very interesting avenue which looks at the match between the personality of the candidate and the personality of the voter. This goes beyond the dark traits. There is some fascinating research from Italian political scientists that discusses the so-called homophily effect, where voters tend to like politicians that have their own personality traits, and it makes sense. If we see someone that has the same character as we do, we will likely estimate what they will do once in power, they will go in the direction that we like. If they are like us, what they will do will be good for us.
So, we tend to reward people in positions of power that have the same personality as us.
This is, of course the case also for dark traits. Voters with hard, dark personality profiles, let’s say voters that scored high in psychopathy tend to like candidates that are high in psychopathy regardless of ideology, and that’s a very fascinating result.
I was truly amazed by how you managed to combine the voters profiles with the dark personality of the politicians. But how to deal with that? What are the possibilities of effectively countering populist practices manifested through individual politicians? In other words, is it possible to design institutions that are dark-traits proof?
That is a fantastic question and extremely important from a normative standpoint. I might be a little bit pessimistic here. However, I would like to be more optimistic, but the reason why I am somehow sceptical that there is much that can be done, at least in the short term, is related to what personalities are in the first place.
Personality, most of the time, is not something that you can really intervene on. Let’s think of something different; let’s think for instance, conspiracy theories. There is research that shows that, yes, it is very hard to change the mind of someone that is deep into conspiracy theories, but you can do that. It’s not easy; you need to approach it the right way but there are “interventions” that you can do from a social standpoint but also from a policy standpoint to reduce the share of people that hold conspiracy beliefs. Personality is a little bit different. Personality is really deep characteristics and not something that we believe in. It is related to who we are deep down.
One of the clearest trends that we see in the personality literature is that personality tends to be relatively stable over a lifetime. It changes a little bit, but let’s take, for instance, extraversion. This is one of the socially desirable personality traits. It’s not like “I’m an extrovert on Fridays, and I’m shy during weekends.” Either I’m extraverted, or I am not, and it’s not very easy to change. Dark personality is the same (which we should not exaggerate but there is still a non-negligible minority of people that have these dark personality traits). Given the prevalence of these dark traits, we cannot simply try to change them, we cannot intervene at the individual level, try to curb the issue. Instead, what needs to be done is better understanding of the dynamics of dark politics.
So, when it comes to design institutions that are dark traits-proof, as you very well put, there is no intervention that could change the way people think.
The only thing that can be designed are institutional policies to expose the consequences of dark politics and quite simply start talking about it.
For many years, research on personality was seen with a little bit of scorn. Baceause what can you know about the character of people? We don’t know who these people are; why would we even say something about them? We are not psychologists. Today, we are starting to understand that, yes, actually, there is quite a bit that we can say and know about personality, so we should start taking it into account. The more we talk about it, the more there is awareness about it – I would say that’s probably the only way to go.
How much do the media enable the electoral successes of dark politicians? What would you suggest to journalists covering the upcoming US elections or the European Parliament elections, what might they want to pay extra attention to?
I think it’s a very good question to conclude in terms of normative consequences and policy recommendations. It is true that what we have found is that media has a fundamental role to play. More specifically, media has a super strong intervening role in the dynamics of dark politics.
Broadly, we have found two mechanisms; the first one, which is unsurprising, is the so-called coverage effect. We have found that news media in Western countries, but I’m pretty sure it can be generalised even beyond the Western countries, tend to provide the so-called preferential coverage to dark politicians.
Dark politicians tend to be featured more in articles; they are more likely to appear on the front page.
This is the mechanism that we know also from others as we know that, for instance, politicians that use negative campaigning and incivility are much more likely to be featured. This, of course, comes from this so-called negativity bias that media have, which in turn comes from the negativity bias that we human beings have.
I would say it’s also a little bit our fault, the consumers of news. If we go on the website of the New York Times: there are two main headlines. First one is that ‘Biden passes resolution 12 b-27’ and the other article is ‘This is the last horrible thing that Trump said’ – which of the two articles we click? Of course, we click on the article about Trump, that’s the way it goes, that’s the way our mind goes, and the media knows this. This is why they provide preferential coverage, but it’s not the full story because there is a consequence of this preferential coverage of dark politicians; this is what we call the ‘amplifying effect’.
What we find is that dark personality traits are not necessarily electorally successful for candidates. As we said before, they are potentially risky, and not everyone likes them; some people vote for them, but not everybody. We do find a very strong mediating effect of the media and the media coverage.
In other terms, dark candidates are much more likely to win the election if the media covers them a lot. There is almost a symbiotic relationship between the darkness of candidates and media coverage.
I’m not entirely sure that this will be easy to curb because, this preferential coverage of the media comes from also our own biases as human beings, as consumers of the news. It’s also our fault that we keep clicking on this nasty stuff. I really talk about myself as well. I’m clearly also a subject to this negativity bias myself, and so because it comes from the imperative to cater to this bias in the human mind, it is not easy for the media to simply say, okay, we are going to stop publishing stories about nasty candidates.
The media has a moral imperative to cover this type of nasty candidate. I’m simplifying here. I would even say the nastier the candidates, the higher the moral imperative for the media to cover them, but then we know that the more they covered them, the more they are successful, so the media are not in an easy position. The more they do what they should do from a moral standpoint, the more they will help these candidates by providing them a platform and diffusing their ideas.
So, what can we do here? I am not sure, to be honest. This is a bit simplistic, but I really don’t see any other option here. Perhaps the way for the media to go is not to simply cover this candidate in an objective way but to add an interpretive layer and say okay, this is the reason we are covering these candidates; these are the positive consequences of electing the dark candidates, and these are potentially negative consequences. They are voters; you do whatever you want, but you should know this. So, not simply covering but critically covering. I know this might sound a little simplistic and maybe a bit wishful thinking, but I don’t see any other way out.
Some of the dark politicians have the tendency to employ the aesthetics of entertainment styles, so they obviously are teasing the media to cover them.
This is very well said. This shows this symbiotic interplay that because the media tend to provide the preferential coverage, this gives further incentives to candidate to showcase their nasty persona. There is research on negative campaigning about this. You are a candidate; let’s say that you are not very much in the media, and you would like to have the spotlight on you. What do you do? You can say something positive, and the media will ignore it, or you can say something nasty, and you know that will attract media attention. It’s a self-reinforcing mechanism that is almost a spiral of negativity. Both benefit when the other one focuses or goes in a more nasty direction, and it’s very hard to curb this type of self-reinforcing mechanism.
In collaboration with Aman Mehta.
The readers can purchase a book at the publisher’s website; they can receive a 30% discount if they use the following code: ASFLYQ6.
