MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4415100410 · doi:10.1017/s1475676525100224

Too honest and humble to run for office? Citizens’ personality traits, nascent ambition, and recruitment

2025· article· en· W4415100410 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Marc van de Wardt, Pirmin Bundi, Peter John Loewen, Anne Rasmussen, Lior Sheffer, Frédéric Varone

Bibliographic record

VenueEuropean Journal of Political Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicPersonality Traits and Psychology
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersUniversiteit AntwerpenNederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
KeywordsPersonalityPoliticsBig Five personality traitsQuality (philosophy)Work (physics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract We explore how honesty-humility and the other HEXACO personality traits relate to citizens’ nascent ambition and their recruitment to run for office. We extend previous work on virtue-related personality traits and political recruitment in two important ways: we go beyond North America and conduct a five-country cross-national study with nationally representative samples. More importantly, going beyond individual-level differences in nascent ambition, we also address how honesty-humility predicts the likelihood of being asked to and actually running for office. Based on data from Canada, Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, we demonstrate that citizens with lower levels of honesty-humility are more likely to have considered running, to deem themselves qualified to run, to have been asked to run, and to actually have run for a political office. From a ‘virtue ethics’ perspective, this is highly concerning: low honesty-humility predisposes individuals to engage in unethical behavior and decision-making. We discuss implications for the quality of political representation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.003
Threshold uncertainty score0.011

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.278
GPT teacher head0.500
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueEuropean Journal of Political ResearchSame topicPersonality Traits and PsychologyFrench-language works237,207