Few studies have focused on the Canadian context to examine the political impacts of personality. Even though the Canadian Election Study (CES) has measured the Big Five personality traits since 2011, very few studies have taken advantage of this data to assess personality's political role among the Canadian electorate. Using CES data from the three latest elections (2011, 2015 and 2019), we first explore how reliable the measurement of personality is. Except for agreeableness in 2015, the correlations across the personality items are similar to what is typically found in the literature. We next examine how personality affects ideology and partisan identity in the Canadian context. We show that a two-dimensional measurement of ideology refines our understanding of the impacts of personality on ideology. The findings also suggest that personality plays an essential role in forming ideology in Canada but has a limited impact on partisanship.

The 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES) consists of two separate surveys with campaign-period rolling cross-sections and post-election follow-ups. The parallel studies were conducted online and through a random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone survey. Both continue the long tradition of gathering information about the attitudes, opinions, preferences and behaviours of the Canadian public. The online survey, in particular, introduces some important innovations that open up the potential for exciting new research on subgroups in the electorate.