Within the Limits of Civic Training: Education Moderates the Relationship Between Openness and Political Attitudes

Research demonstrates that the Big‐Five's Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. This literature, however, implicitly assumes that the strength of this relationship is invariant across the electorate. We challenge this assumption by arguing that education—an institution designed to increase civic competence—affects the degree to which personality predicts various political attitudes. Specifically, we posit that education facilitates people's ability to identify issue positions that (theoretically) resonate with their personality. Using a national probability sample of New Zealand voters (n = 6,518), we show that education consistently moderates the relationship between personality and a host of political attitudes. Whereas Openness to Experience is inversely associated with politically conservative issue positions among the highly educated, it is often uncorrelated with the same attitudes among those with low levels of educational attainment. These results identify an important—though often neglected—moderator of the relationship between personality and political attitudes.     

Dark clouds

This essay is in part a response to a cluster of papers from the conference in Norway. Utilising these as a springboard to expand certain ideas, some latent, some more manifest in the papers, regarding the history and the terrain concerning the mental health issues in our culture. Fundamentally, this proposes that there is an unrelenting tension between two polarities: one reactionary and authoritarian, fixated on a concern with outcomes, propped up by closed systems of thought, managerial, habitually linked to adaptation and conformity; the other more romantically seen as revolutionary, unhandcuffing madness from mental illness, facilitating more expansive, freewheeling possibilities within all our lives. Much of this pays tribute to some of the major figures in the history of ‘anti-psychiatry’ (Basaglia, Cooper and Laing), with the costs involved, and goes on to trace out the genesis and consequences of the two predominant ‘clouds’ permeating our world, the paranoid and the digital … all converging on a naturalisation of our culture of surveillance, and an insistence on control. Otherwise known as a culture of fear.