Narcissism and Political Left-Right Orientation in View of Basic Human Values: A Sample of Faculty of Management Students From Turkey

Abstract

A growing number of studies investigate the relationship between narcissism and political orientation. This study uses an undergraduate sample from Turkey to explore this relation for a relatively understudied population. Given findings that link basic human values to narcissism and to political orientation, we also investigate the possibility of a mediating role for human values in this relation. Leftwing orientation is weakly and negatively correlated with narcissism and with narcissism’s self-sufficiency dimension. In multinomial logistic regression, we find that the odds of placing oneself in the extreme right position verses moderate left position increases as narcissism increases. The effect of narcissism on political orientation appears fragile, however, when this relation is controlled for self-esteem, sex, and human values. Among Schwartz’s basic human values, tradition turns out to be a stronger predictor of political orientation than narcissism and mediation is supported only for the values tradition and universalism. We find a positive indirect effect of narcissism on leftwing orientation through the value tradition and a negative indirect effect on leftwing orientation through the value universalism.