Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior

Jeffery J. Mondak is James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Nothing to Read: Newspapers and Elections in a Social Experiment (1995) and co-editor of Fault Lines: Why the Republicans Lost Congress (2009). Professor Mondak's articles appear in outlets including the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Cognitive Brain Research, the Journal of Politics and Public Opinion Quarterly. He has received awards for his research from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the American Political Science Association and the Midwest Political Science Association.

• 1. Personality and politics; 2. The Big Five approach; 3. Measuring the Big Five; 4. Personality and political information; 5. Personality, attitudes, and political predispositions; 6. Personality and political participation; 7. The multiple bases of political behavior.

'When virtually all of his colleagues were still treating individual-level political traits as isolated phenomena, Jeff Mondak realized they were in fact intimately connected to larger life forces such as broad personality traits. This original and remarkably creative book makes it clear that the future of research on personality and politics lies not in shallow, speculative Freudian case studies but in objective, rigorous, large-N analyses. Research at the nexus of personality and politics is starting to gain momentum, thanks largely to Mondak's leadership, and if this book does not significantly enhance that momentum by providing an empirical framework and by stimulating numerous new data-based studies, I will be both surprised and bitterly disappointed.' John R. Hibbing, University of Nebraska, Lincoln