Outside nominations to the Legislative Council: Personality traits.

In my earlier blogs on nominations of outsider to the Legislative Council I focussed, respectively, on profession, public service, and Manxness and regionality. A fair criticism is that these categories are only indicators that the nominee possesses traits which make them suitable to be an MLC – that is, that their personality and experience shows they are the right person for the job.

Experience is, I think, entirely subsumed in the earlier discussions – a nominee whose profession is referred to is not being nominated because they are an advocate, for instance, but because of the experience that has given them, and the skills they have developed. Personality, however, is more complex.

Personality is an area of increasing academic study, and within that a thriving subfield is the personality (and perceived personality) of politicians. Scholars have argued that personality – as opposed to ideology – is becoming more important even countries with an entrenched system of party politics. Aicholzer and Willman, for instance, suggest in their open access journal article that:

“Just as ideology represents the long-term and stable underpinnings of parties, personality traits are long-term and stable psychological characteristics that govern individuals’ and politicians’ consistent patterns of values, attitudes, and ultimately behavior (Caprara & Vecchione, 2017). A candidate’s personality traits can therefore be used as a short-cut by voters to assess what candidates are going to do during their term in office (i.e., ideological leanings) and how they are going to do it (i.e., conduct in office)”

If personality, or rather voters’ perception of personality, is becoming more important in large democracies, it has always been central to small democracies such as the Isle of Man. In a very useful comparative study of four such democracies, Veenendaal, again in an open journal access article, concludes that even in the three case-study countries which have an established party system, they “appear[ed] to exist as vehicles in support of individual politicians”. He argues that “the existence of parties conceals and misrepresents the genuine nature of political contestation in microstates, which is essentially based on personal instead of ideological premises”. So, personality is well worth looking at.

Aicholzer and Willman use six categories of personality traits in their analysis – what are commonly referred to as the Big Five (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), supplemented by a trait from an alternative taxonomy, that of “honesty-humility”. They find that, at least in the groups they studied, voters preferred candidates with high levels of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and honesty, but low levels of agreeableness and neuroticism.

We can take these six traits as categories for nominations to the Legislative Council, and map onto them every explicit reference to a personality trait (as opposing to subtler messages about personality traits that a nominator may be putting forward by referring to say a career in the police). Not every nomination makes reference to such a trait, but the majority do (only 8 not referring to a personality trait of some kind).

The most common traits identified fell within “extraversion”, which we can very roughly describe as pronounced engagement with the external world, which can involve enjoying interacting with people, having a breadth of interests, high group visibility, and enthusiasm. 26 nominations referred to this in one way or another.

The next most common traits identified fell within conscientiousness, with exactly that word frequently being adopted. 23 nominations referred to this.

The next most common traits identified fell within honesty-humility, frequently being described as integrity. 22 nominations referred to this.

The last category I want to talk about using Aicholzer and Willman’s six traits is agreeableness. Broadly speaking, agreeable individuals value getting along with others, while low agreeableness individuals are often competitive or challenging people. 26 nominations described the nominee in ways consistent with high agreeableness, while 11 described the nominee in ways consistent with low agreeableness. At times the nominating MHK described the same nominee in both ways – for instance the nomination of Paul Beckett. What is going on?

I think the best explanation is that nominations reflect the complexity of the role of MLC. If I may steal a phrase, being part of “Team Tynwald” requires an ability to work constructively as part of a team for common goals; and being a member of the national legislature requires an ability to recognise the importance of the nation, and of society. At the same time, being an MLC – particular when the emphasis is on the Legislative Council as a scrutiny body at times challenging an established point of view – requires scepticism, a willingness to challenge, and at times a willingness to challenge without substantial support from others. Nominations seek to portray the candidate as agreeable, but not too agreeable; as disagreeable, but not too disagreeable. If agreeableness is rated more highly by MHKs than by the voters in elections studied by Aicholzer and Willman, this could be seen as a pragmatic response to members of “Team Tynwald” appointing new members to their team; members with whom they will have to work.

Using this established set of traits is interesting. I was a little surprised to find honesty-humility was not even more broadly deployed in nominations.  Perhaps, like lack of neuroticism (no mentions), it was something that was often taken as read. We should, however, recognise that any attempt to map the range of human personality traits onto a small number of discrete categories is going to lose something – perhaps much – in translation. Gorbaniuk and his colleagues question the value of the Big Five, and instead argue that “research on the structure of politicians’ perceived personality traits should be conducted for each country separately. The specificity of a particular country, its culture, and its political scence may plan an important role in this respect”. The psycholexical method they use for their study of the Ukraine is extremely impressive, and could work well in the unique context of the Manx MLC process, but is not something for a lone scholar to attempt. Nonetheless, their scepticism about their general, and their interest in the particular, led me to keep an eye open for traits which were commonly mentioned, but which did not necessarily fit easily or transparently into a six trait model. Two additional traits are worth mentioning.

Firstly, intelligence (24) and the ability to be critical (19) were frequently mentioned by nominators. Given the emphasis on the Legislative Council as a scrutiny chamber preceded the move towards appointing outsiders as MLCs, this is unsurprising.

Secondly, and something more of a surprise, passion was a recurring theme in a minority of nominations, appearing 18 times. Sometimes this was in the abstract, at other times it was associated with passion for the role, or as passion for a particular agenda (for instance preservation of the Manx environment, or equality, or human rights).

In the next blog, I will bring the different threads in these blogs together to identify the paradigm nominee for the Legislative Council and – more of a reach – the paradigm successful nominee.