Social background shapes politics only through its influence on psychological predispositions

Evidence

Variation according to historical context and change over time are so important in determining how personality becomes linked with politics that the map around which this article is organized needs to be expanded, as it is in Fig. 5.3, which encompasses the time dimension and differentiates the immediate and remote features of the political environment. Figure 5.3 suggests that the fourth reservation about the utility of studying personality and politics—the claim that social backgrounds are more important than psychological characteristics—is grounded in a confusion which can be readily dissolved. The social backgrounds of political actors (panel 2 of Fig. 5.3) influence their actions but only as mediated by the individual’s developing predispositions (panel 3) and the different levels of personality they shape (panels 4, 5, and 6). Thus, to take a final example from the literature on student protest in the 1960s, it was (as Block et al., 1969, pointed out at the time) fallacious for Lipset (1968) to argue that because so many student activists were young, middle-class Jews, personality was not an important determinant of activism. To the extent that Jewish background was connected with activism, it had to be part of a causal sequence in which developmental experiences specific to Jews contributed to their psychological orientations. The latter, not Jewish background per se, would have been the mediator of behavior. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1159

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Merton’s mediation analysis and the classic ‘background vs. psyche’ debate in personality psychology. — connects to: A psychology of privilege cannot alone determine concrete political allegiances.; Political power takes its shape from a distinct rationality, not from social structures — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 92