Local and Geographical Aspects of Political Psychology

Over the course of the PhD, I will work at the intersection of geographical and political psychology. In collaboration with industry partner and political campaigning experts DataPraxis, I will investigate the spatial distribution of psychological phenomena and how that affects political outcomes, particularly in terms of electoral geography.

The first research project will address the replicability of 'conventional wisdom' findings in the political psychology literature. There are well established correlational patterns between the Big Five personality traits and political outcomes, at both the individual and regional level. Similar research concerns the association between Moral Foundations and voting behaviour, though this research is confined to the individual level. However, the bulk of this research is focused on samples from the US and UK - states with strong similarities in political culture, especially in terms of electoral system, economic structure, and salient policy issues. An important contribution, therefore, can be made by testing the hypothesis that these correlational structures exist in other countries with more diverse political landscapes.

A second research area concerns the spatial distribution of these politics-predicting psychological phenomena. Here, the literature is strong for the distribution of Big Five personality traits in the US and UK, but again it lacks international corroboration. Furthermore, there is no substantial literature on the spatial distribution of Moral Foundations. Three features are of interest in mapping spatial distributions: within-unit homogeneity, between-unit heterogeneity, and unit-level correlations with other phenomena (e.g. political, economic, social, and health outcomes). This part of the research will attempt to draw conclusions about the distribution of personality and moral foundations in terms of each of these three measures.