Vaibhav Tyagi and his co-authors Yaniv Hanoch, Becky Choma and Susan L. Denham published an article titled "The right side of creativity: Creative personality predicts political party affiliation" in Creativity Research Journal. This article presents evidence in support of the hypothesis that individuals with a creative personality are more likely to support the Democratic party over the Republican Party in the US. In this research, creativity was measured with two different conceptualizations – ideation (the creative behavior) and creative personality.
Factors that predict political party affiliation are of particular interest since they have a wider impact on the politics and policy making. This article also presents evidence that several other factors such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and social risk taking predict party affiliation. The authors utilized a structural equation modeling approach to test the idea that a creative person is more likely to align his/her views with the democratic party; which has an open and liberal attitude towards most social issues. This hypothesis was based on the notion that creativity requires an open, accepting mindset.
In addition to the findings mentioned above, the article also brings together previous research suggesting a link between creativity, risk taking and socio-political attitudes. The resulting theoretical model was tested on the data collected from a large sample of adults based in the US. The article is an outcome of Project 1: The risky side of creativity and Vaibhav's second research article from his PhD thesis. To read more on Vaibhav's research, visit his PhD project page.