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"Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior is the first study in more than 30 years to investigate the broad significance of personality traits for mass political behavior. Drawing on the Big Five personality trait framework, Jeffery J. Mondak argues that attention to personality provides a valuable means to integrate biological and environmental influences in rich, nuanced theories and empirical tests of the antecedents of political behavior. Development of such holistic accounts is critical, Mondak contends, if inquiry is to move beyond simple "blank slate" environmental depictions of political engagement. Analyses examining multiple facets of political information, political attitudes, and participation reveal that the Big Five trait dimensions - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability - produce both direct and indirect effects on a wide range of political phenomena"--

Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior is the first study in more than 30 years to investigate the broad significance of personality traits for mass political behavior. Drawing on the Big Five personality trait framework, Jeffery J. Mondak argues that attention to personality provides a valuable means to integrate biological and environmental influences in rich, nuanced theories and empirical tests of the antecedents of political behavior. Development of such holistic accounts is critical, Mondak contends, if inquiry is to move beyond simple 'blank slate' environmental depictions of political engagement. Analyses examining multiple facets of political information, political attitudes and participation reveal that the Big Five trait dimensions - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability - produce both direct and indirect effects on a wide range of political phenomena

Political knowledge is one of the central variables in research on mass political behavior, but insufficient attention has been given to the implications of alternate approaches to the measurement of political knowledge. Two issues are considered here: (1) survey protocol regarding "don't know" responses; & (2) item format. Data from the 1998 NES Pilot & a survey conducted in the Tallahassee metropolitan area are used to assess alternate survey protocols. 5 Tables, 2 Figures, 33 References. Adapted from the source document.

Political knowledge has emerged as one of the central variables in political behavior research, with numerous scholars devoting considerable effort to explaining variance in citizens' levels of knowledge and to understanding the consequences of this variance for representation. Although such substantive matters continue to receive exhaustive study, questions of measurement also warrant attention. I demonstrate that conventional measures of political knowledge—constructed by summing a respondent's correct answers on a battery of factual items—are of uncertain validity. Rather than collapsing incorrect and "don't know" responses into a single absence-of-knowledge category, I introduce estimation procedures that allow these effects to vary. Grouped-data multinomial logistic regression results demonstrate that incorrect answers and don't knows perform dissimilarly, a finding that suggests deficiencies in the construct validity of conventional knowledge measures. The likely cause of the problem is traced to two sources: knowledge may not be discrete, meaning that a simple count of correct answers provides an imprecise measure; and, as demonstrated by the wealth of research conducted in the field of educational testing and psychology since the 1930s, measurement procedures used in political science potentially result in "knowledge" scales contaminated by systematic personality effects.

Argues that term limits would lead to a decline in quality of the House of Representatives.