Personality traits and the propensity to protest: a cross-national analysis

This study examines the effects of the Big Five personality traits on individual protest behaviour in cross-national context. Past studies on the relationships between personality traits and political participation have mainly focused on a single country and found inconsistent results. Using the most recent wave of the World Values Survey, this study investigates the impact of personality on individual protest participation in 20 countries using the multilevel modelling. This study provides evidence that higher levels of agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to experience are significantly associated with a decreased likelihood of protest participation. More importantly, this study demonstrates that contextual factors can interact with personality traits to influence individual protest participation. This study suggests that the effects of personality traits on individual protest participation disparate from country to country and each country may attribute the differing results to its particular political context.