Extraversion, Gender, and the Perceived Pleasantness of Politics

ABSTRACT Objectives Politics can be a social enterprise, with many of its activities taking place in public, and online engagement often involving others. As such, personality traits, such as extraversion, that define sociability may impact levels of socially related political involvement. While various works have examined the relationship between extraversion and political engagement, most have overlooked a key mechanism—the perceived pleasantness of political activities. This paper draws on research in political science and psychology to answer two questions: (1) Do extraverts find political activities more pleasant than non‐extraverts? (2) Does gender impact the relationship between extraversion and the pleasantness of political activities? Methods With several preregistered hypotheses, we test the links between extraversion, gender, pleasantness, and political activities. We collected novel survey data during the 2020 U.S. election cycle, measuring respondents' extraversion and the perceived pleasantness of social and nonsocial activities that either relate to politics or not. Ordinary least squares regression is used to model the relationship between extraversion and the perceived happiness felt during these activities. We split the sample and analysis by the political, social, and conflictual nature of these activities. We finally estimate the interaction between gender and extraversion. Results Our data suggest that individuals who score high on extraversion tend to rate nearly all political activities as more pleasant, but that this is driven neither by the social nor the conflictual character of political activities. We further find indications that extraverted men find political activities, and conflictual political activities in particular, more pleasant than equally extraverted women. Conclusion We show that extraverts are more likely than introverts to enjoy political activities. However, in contrast to the often‐hypothesized mechanism, this is not driven by the social (or conflictual) character of political acts. This might suggest that politics may be perceived as social regardless of the activity itself or that other mechanisms link extraversion to political engagement. While extraversion predicts the pleasantness of politics similarly for men and women, a gender gap emerges at high levels of extraversion, which could help further illuminate the hidden mechanisms behind the gender gap in political engagement.