Dark Politics by Alessandro Nai;J?rgen Maier;

Author:Alessandro Nai;J?rgen Maier;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.4 Average country Covid-19 stringency index (July–December 2020) by head-of-state personality

Note: Marginal effects with 95% confidence intervals, based on coefficients in Table D.5.6 (M1, Online Supplementary Materials). All other variables fixed at their mean.

All in all, our models seem to indicate that leaders with darker personality traits enacted somewhat tougher responses to the pandemic. This was the case in general over the first year and was especially so during the second half of 2020 and the second wave of the pandemic. What accounts for this effect? Might it be due to the more callous and uncompromising profile of dark leaders, perhaps more able to navigate through tough circumstances and make hard choices that require “putting their feelings aside” for the greater good? Our data is not granular enough to shed light on the rationales used to justify the different policies implemented, and even less so on whether the personality of leaders was associated with such rationales. These trends do, however, seem to echo the idea that “tougher” leaders “are somewhat more capable of quick responses to clear and present dangers” (Bayerlein et al. 2021, 392; see also Mittiga 2022). For instance, Cepaluni et al. (2022) show that countries with fewer democratic features experienced a significantly lower share of deaths in the early stages of the pandemic than democracies (see also Norrlöf 2020), indirectly echoing the comparative work by Engler et al. (2021) on how the presence of strong democratic principles shaped the “reluctance” of some democracies to implement more restrictive measures.

These results, however, contrast with research at the individual level showing that higher scores on dark personality traits are associated with lower compliance with social norms and efforts intended to reduce the spread of the pandemic (Blagov 2021; Zettler et al. 2022), and with lower preventive behavior (Nowak et al. 2020). Furthermore, a more muscular response to the pandemic is not necessarily more effective per se and could also simply reflect dark leaders’ tendency for greater social dominance (Jones and Figueredo 2013). With this in mind, how successful was the response of world leaders to the pandemic, in terms of its human costs? Good theoretical reasons exist to expect a more negative outcome here. Dark personality has been shown to be a strong predictive factor of risk-taking and recklessness (Crysel et al. 2013), moral disengagement (Jonason et al. 2015), and reduced empathy (Wai and Tiliopoulos 2012). Within the framework of a global pandemic, we could thus expect dark personality traits to be associated with a lower consideration for its human costs. Doerfler et al. (2021) show for instance, in experiments with a sample of American adults, that higher scores on psychopathy were significantly associated with risk-taking in general, and with a predisposition to “gamble with other people’s lives during the Covid-19 crisis” (623) in particular. Is this something we can find at the level of political leaders as well?

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