Personality on the Hill: Expert Evaluations of U.S. Senators’ Psychological Traits

• Author: Jeffery J. Mondak,Megan L. Remmel,Matthew G. Rice
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920928587
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920928587

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(3) 674 –687

© 2020 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920928587

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Article

This study’s objective is to explore a new strategy for

measuring the personality traits of U.S. Senators. With

only one hundred members at a time and a reputation for

seriousness and professionalism, “the world’s greatest

deliberative body” is a context in which individuality can

be especially consequential. With six-year terms, sena-

tors are less constrained by elections than are House

members. Furthermore, individual senators serve on sev-

eral committees simultaneously, a single senator can

block a bill via a Senate hold, norms such as senatorial

courtesy in judicial nominations empower individual sen-

ators, and very few senators toil in obscurity. Hence, one

member’s stubbornness, expertise, hard work, comity, or

malfeasance can shape the future course of policy.

Unfortunately, despite its likely significance, systematic

representation of this individuality is not easily accom-

plished. Past research has made headway via insightful

case studies (e.g., Drew 1978) and large-scale analyses

involving constructs that are easily measured, such as

gender, race, age, and prior political experience. In con-

trast, work that has explored the implications of variation

in senators’ personality traits has been less common.1

In the past decade, attention to the political signifi-

cance of personality has intensified, with particular focus

on the Big Five framework, a well-established psycho-

logical model that highlights the trait dimensions of

openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion,

agreeableness, and emotional stability. Initial progress

was seen in research on mass politics (e.g., Mondak

2010), but subsequent work has explored variation in the

personality traits of state legislators (Dietrich et al. 2012)

and members of the U.S. Congress (Ramey, Hollibaugh,

and Klingler 2017). We build on the latter of these works

in two manners. First, whereas most of Ramey et al.’s

applications are to the U.S. House, we focus on the

Senate. Second, and more centrally, we develop and

implement a human coding of legislator personality, one

that is an alternate to the self-report strategies employed

in research on both mass politics and state legislatures

and also to the machine-coding approach pioneered by

Ramey et al.

This paper’s primary purpose is explication of a new

procedure for the measurement of elite personality, one

based on acquisition of data from expert coders. A sec-

ondary objective is to contribute additional evidence that

systematic attention to elite personality can be fruitful.

Hence, we not only explore the attributes, including the

reliability and validity, of our Big Five measures, but we

also test whether variation in personality among U.S.

senators is related to multiple aspects of legislative

behavior. Furthermore, to facilitate additional research in

928587PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920928587Political Research QuarterlyRice et al.

research-article2020

1University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

2Bradley University, Peoria, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jeffery J. Mondak, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 420

DKH, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

Email: jmondak@illinois.edu

Personality on the Hill: Expert

Evaluations of U.S. Senators’

Psychological Traits

Matthew G. Rice1, Megan L. Remmel2, and Jeffery J. Mondak1

Abstract

Long recognized for the diverse array of personalities it hosts, the U.S. Senate constitutes an institution in which

individual psychological differences among its members carry significant potential consequences. Unfortunately,

studying those individual differences is no easy task. This study introduces a new approach for doing so. Specifically,

the study develops Big Five trait ratings for eighty-seven U.S. senators, with data drawn from assessments provided by

a set of experts, U.S. Senate insiders. The paper explains the rationale for use of expert evaluations, offers evidence

regarding the reliability and validity of the resulting measures, and explores possible relationships between personality

and ten aspects of Senate behavior.

Keywords

elite personality, Big Five, U.S. Senate, measurement