Personalizing Politics and Realizing Democracy

Few people today would challenge the legitimacy of democracy as the form of government most congenial to modern-day citizenship, as it requires its members to treat each other as equals and to cooperate in the shared pursuit of conditions that maximize both the individual's potential and the achievement of a public welfare. However, a number of facts challenge these deeply-rooted ideals: declining political participation, along with skepticism and dissatisfaction with the function of democracy has spread; citizens' increasing capacity to control their own circumstances within their private, economic, and social spheres is at odds with their inability to exert control over their elected representatives; and the shift of opposing radical coalitions towards more pragmatic and ideologically elusive platforms aimed to attract a larger constituency of the electorate has greatly diluted the identity of political parties.

In Personalizing Politics and Realizing Democracy, authors Gian Vittorio Caprara and Michele Vecchione present the ever-growing reciprocal relationship between personality and politics, and assert that politics are not only increasingly dependent on the likes and dislikes of its citizenship, but ultimately on the personalities of political candidates attracting these voters' preferences. In this book, Caprara and Vecchione draw from recent research in personality psychology that offer a decisive role in understanding the major changes that have occurred within politics in the last several decades.

Gian Vittorio Caprara holds a Laurea degree in Political Science and a Specialization degree in Psychology, both from the Catholic University of Milan. He is full professor of Personality Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome, where he served as Chair of Department of Psychology, Dean of Faculty of Psychology and President of Federate Faculties of Arts, Law and Economics and Director of the Inter-University Center for the Research on the origin of prosocial and antisocial motivations. He has been visiting professor at University of Michigan, UCLA, UCI, Stanford University and Santiago University. He has been President of the European Association of Personality and is member of the Academia Europaea. He was NIAS Golestan fellow in 1996-1997 and fellow at SCAS in 2000-2001 and 2013-2014.

Michele Vecchione holds a Laurea degree in Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD in Personality and Social Psychology from the University of Padua. He is associate professor of Psychometrics at the Department of Development and Social Psychology (Sapienza University of Rome) and junior research fellow at Sapienza School for Advanced Studies (SSAS). His main research interests focus on the application of multivariate statistics to diverse areas of psychology, with a special focus on personality assessment across multiple domains.