Hollibaugh, Gary E., Klingler, Jonathan and Ramey, Adam (2015) Talking Heads: Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech. IAST working paper, n. 15-28, Toulouse

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Abstract

Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psycholo-
gists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. In this paper, we apply recent advances in machine learning (Mairesse et al. 2007) to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996–2014. We show that these estimates are robust to concerns about strategic behavior and generally conform with findings in the behavior literature linking ideology with the Big Five (e.g. Gerber et al. 2010). We also provide two examples of the utility of our method, one examining the impact of personality on elite survey non-response and the other showing how the conscientiousness of members of Congress affects the contents of bill proposals.