Individual Differences and Political Contexts –The Role of Personality Traits and Direct Democracy in Explaining Political Protest

Building on a growing literature concerned with the link between psychological dispositions and political protest behavior, we argue that this relationship is not universal, but rather depends on contextual factors. Political context factors are able to alter the meaning and understanding of participatory repertoires. This, in turn, leads to differential effects of personality on participation. We argue that direct democracy constitutes such a political context that can act as moderating factor with regard to protest participation. In order to test this interaction between person and situation empirically, we conduct a subnational comparative analysis of the Swiss cantons. Hierarchical regression models reveal that the personality traits openness to experience and extraversion affect protest behavior directly. Most importantly, however, the link between openness to experience and protest participation is significantly moderated by direct democracy. This provides evidence for variance in the situational expression of personality traits.     

Contextualizing sentencing disparities: using conjunctive analysis of case configurations to identify patterns of variability

Using national data from felony cases processed in state courts (n = 48,006), the current study investigates the nature and magnitude of contextual variability associated with sentencing outcomes. Multivariate models are first estimated to identify the main effects of various offender and offense variables on sentencing decisions. Conjunctive analysis is then used to evaluate the contextual variability of each of these main effects across all observed combinations of offender and offense attributes. Separate analyses are also conducted among states with and without mandatory sentencing guidelines to explore whether these guidelines reduce this variability across different contexts. Findings from this study and its comparative methods are discussed in terms of implications for future research on criminal sentencing and assessing the contextual variability of the main effects of particular legal and extralegal factors.