What are the best writings about politics, partisanship and personality types? To what degree can large-scale political formations – ideologies, partisan outlooks, temperaments – be credibly treated as a partial function of variation in personality at the individual level; variation we have reason to believe is measurable, moderately stable, independent and prior? (The Big Five and all that, I expect.) I can see why it’s going to be hard to tease it apart empirically. You are going to be chasing your tail, cause and effect-wise. If you find that members of Party X score relatively high for trait Y, which causes which? I have read a bit in this area but not a lot, and nothing that really seemed terribly convincing. (I am aware that Adorno and co. wrote a book called The Authoritarian Personality, for example.) If you don’t like the way I just framed the issue – fine, fine. It isn’t that I’m necessarily evil, as you were perhaps about to type, angrily. It might be that I’m just unsure how best to frame the issue. I’m interested in general discussions – popular explainers, such as there may be – and recent more technical research papers. I can well believe that a lot of bad, or highly speculative stuff has probably been written about this area of political psychology. I have a preference for good over bad, if available.