Wiley: Social Science Quarterly: Table of Contents

Extraversion, Gender, and the Perceived Pleasantness of Politics

Amanda Friesen, Isabella Rebasso, Jamie Hong Chow, Paul A. Djupe — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:50:39 -0700

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.

Speaking the State: Linguistic Displacement and Political Support

Haofeng Ma, Jeongho Choi — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:25:10 -0700

ABSTRACT

Objective

We examine how the misalignment between ethnic-language schooling and the adult linguistic environment—a condition we term linguistic displacement—shapes ethnic minorities’ political support for the central state in China.

Methods

Using the China Family Panel Studies (2012–2018), we link childhood school records to adult political attitudes for 210 ethnic minority respondents across 10 ethnolinguistic groups. We estimate an interaction model in which the effect of ethnic-school attendance on central-state evaluations is conditioned on adult Mandarin fluency as an indicator of the adult linguistic environment, with ethnicity fixed effects and a Heckman-type selection correction to address endogeneity in school choice.

Results

Ethnic schooling has no measurable political cost for respondents whose adult lives remain in an ethnic-language environment but is associated with more critical evaluations of the central state among those who have moved into a Mandarin-dominant one. The pattern appears for central-state evaluations but not for local-cadre trust, consistent with hierarchical trust theory.

Conclusions

The findings reframe a long-standing debate by showing that the political consequences of ethnic-language education are not fixed but conditional on the post-schooling linguistic environment. States that protect minority languages in schools while promoting a national lingua franca elsewhere predictably generate the conditions for linguistic displacement—and its political costs.

Issue information

Sat, 30 May 2026 06:19:33 -0700

Social Science Quarterly, Volume 107, Issue 4, July 2026.