Weinberg, J. orcid.org/0000-0001-7395-724X (2021) Who wants to be a politician? Basic human values and candidate emergence in the United Kingdom. British Journal of Political Science, 51 (4). pp. 1565-1581. ISSN 0007-1234
Abstract
Public faith in politicians and associated systems of governance is desperately low. At the same time, public opinion of politicians is characterized by a vernacular of psychological accusations pertaining to greed, self-interest and careerism. This article tests the verity of these claims by comparing quantitative data on the Basic Human Values (Schwartz 1992) of 106 UK Members of Parliament (MPs) and 134 unsuccessful parliamentary candidates with data collected from the British public in the seventh wave of the European Social Survey. It explores (a) how politicians differ psychologically from those they govern and (b) how personality characteristics such as basic values inform candidate emergence. The study finds that politics is a profession few ‘ordinary’ people care to enter. MPs attribute significantly more importance to Self-Transcendence values than the comparatively conservative population they govern, but the relative importance they ascribe to Power values seems to have an equally strong predictive effect on candidate emergence.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | political ambition; politicians; basic values; candidate emergence |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 11 May 2020 08:17 |
Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2021 10:42 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press (CUP) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0007123419000814 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:155938 |