Personality and Ideology: Compared to What?

This jives with my personal experience. I'm very libertarian because I've noticed that when other people try to make decisions for me, they do an absolutely terrible job of it.

This may be a better topic for OB, but maybe we should be skeptical of the truthfulness of beliefs which highly correlate with our personality?

I've found zip code (or other residence info) to be a great predictor of ideology. I think most people are using ideology to gain or maintain peer acceptance rather than analyzing the issues.

Maybe I'm confused. It sounds like the argument is as follows: X has an almost negligible effect. Y has a more negligible effect than X. Hence: X is awesome.

Call them for what they are: Noise.

You need a cleaner study where the effects of class, ethnicity, region, religion, parental views, etc. on ideology are out of the picture.

You should look for studies of brother pairs raised in the same household, and see how much effect personality has on ideology then. That would give you a pretty good "all else being equal" approach to the question.