The unusually loyal supporters of Donald Trump are often described as a cult. How can we understand this extreme phenomenon in U.S. politics? We develop theoretical expectations and use the Big Five personality dimensions to investigate whether Trump's most loyal supporters share personality characteristics that might make them inclined to cult-like support. We find that (1) Trump's supporters share high levels of Conscientiousness; (2) this is substantively and statistically distinguishable from the commonly identified association between Conscientiousness and Conservatism; and (3) (...) the association is highly robust to a range of sensitivity tests. Our main findings are robust across two surveys. Study 1 is an online survey conducted in 2021 designed specifically for this project. Study 2 is the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES). (shrink)

Information and communication technologies present new challenges for political theory and philosophy due to its large-scale and scope transformations. Their demands are reflected in institutional needs that cover a “cyber-political” space, i. e., a cluster of problems of the governance of the network of networks –Internet– that results in the formation of new institutions –e. g. ICANN. The question I try to answer here is: What characterizes cyberspace political discourses? The proposed hypothesis is that it is possible to interpret the (...) varied cyber-political positions from their relation with the actors that dispute cyberspace regulation. Taking this relationship as an Archimedean point, I distinguish between extreme positions –cyber-conservatism and cyber-libertarianism– and moderate positions –cyber-liberalism and cyber- socialism. Through the investigation of the works of the main proponents of each position (Goldsmith, Wu, Barlow, Assange, Lessig, Barbrook and Filby) I try to show the modifications in the traditional political positions after the incorporation of the prefix “cyber” and also, to highlight the benefits of the moderate positions over the extreme ones. (shrink)