Incivility Among Politicians: Driven by Rational Minds or Personal Drives?

There is growing concern about politicians engaging in incivility by mocking and insulting each other. While prior research often explains such discourse through rational choice, emerging work highlights the role of politicians’ individual traits, such as their personality. Yet, a unified theoretical account of how rationality and individual predispositions interact to shape harmful elite discourse is lacking. Drawing on foundational insights from psychology, we argue that politicians’ discourse reflects primarily rational considerations, which are moderated by their individual predispositions, leading to uncivil communication between politicians. We test this notion using elite survey data, unobtrusive measures of their individual traits, and direct observations of politicians’ social media communication in Belgium – a rare integration of psychological and behavioral evidence at the elite level. The results show that politicians’ use of uncivil discourse responds to rational considerations, but that the strength of this response depends on their individual predispositions. These findings demonstrate that individual traits moderate how politicians translate rational incentives into harmful discourse, providing a more nuanced account of the causes of elite incivility.