Personality Traits and Approaches to Political Representation and Responsiveness: An Experiment in Local Government

The selection process by which individuals are recruited and elected into office creates a population of elected officials with distinct characteristics and personality traits. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between those personality traits and the representational approaches and behaviors of local elected officials. Combining a survey of local municipal officials with an audit study with the same individuals, we examine how variations in the personality traits of local officials affect their preferred representational approaches and responsiveness to constituent policy concerns. We find significant variation by personality traits both in the approaches that local officials take to representation as well as the rate and nature of the responsiveness of these officials to inquiries about policy from constituents with whom they agree and disagree.