No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?
Abstract
hy do people think and act politically in the manner they do? Despite the foundational nature of this question, answers are unfortu- nately incomplete and unnecessarily tentative, largely because political scientists do not take seriously the possibility of nonenvironmental influences. The sug- gestion that people could be born with political pre- dispositions strikes many as far-fetched, odd, even perverse. However, researchers in other disciplines—- notably behavioral genetics—-have uncovered a sub- stantial heritable component for many social attitudes and behaviors and it seems unlikely that political atti- tudes and behaviors are completely immune from such forces. In this article, we combine relevant findings in behavioral genetics with our own analysis of data on a large sample of twins to test the hypothesis that, con- trary to the assumptions embedded in political science research, political attitudes have genetic as well as en- vironmental causes. 1
... Genetics accounts for roughly half of the variation in ideology in the overall index of political conservatism, while shared environment, including parental influence, accounts for only 11%. When it comes to differences in people's proclivity to hold political opinions at all, regardless of ideological orientation, genetics explains one-third of the difference, and the environment explains the rest (Alford et al. 2005). This allows for the study of political attitudes and behavior using interdisciplinary methods such as neuroscience and genetics (Hatemi et al. 2011, Ksiazkiewicz & Friesen 2017. ...
... Clinical, developmental, medical, psychological, and now political research all use genetic approaches. Alford et al. (2005) developed and disseminated to the political science community the existence of genetic influences on social attitudes (Eaves & Eysenck 1974, Eaves et al. 1989. Their articles in the American Political Science Review received widespread praise in the mainstream media as well as the academic literature. ...
... Pinker (2005), on the other hand, refuted the assumption of political emptiness as well as the notion that phobias, choices, and behavior are innate. This can be traced back to the growing body of evidence that political attitudes and behaviors are partially inherited (Alford et al. 2005, Hatemi et al. 2010, as well as other studies reporting correlations between specific genes and political phenotypes , Settle et al. 2010. ...
This study is about the influence of genes on political attitudes and behavior in the subfield of biopolitics. Genopolitics arose as a critique of the political science approach which was deemed insufficient to explain political attitudes and behavior both theoretically and methodologically. To find the origins of political attitudes and behavior, interdisciplinary studies are needed. It is genes that can explain the origin of individual preferences on which all rational choices are based. The method used in this study was a literature review to see the development of genopolitics, debates, and criticisms related to political attitudes and behavior from the point of view of political science and genopolitics. The literature used was derived from books, journals, magazines, and news on the internet. Regarding voter turnout, 32 different social factors can only be explained by 31% by differences in political behavior, while the remaining 69% of differences can be explained by genetic differences. This study concludes that genopolitics as a new approach used to see political attitudes and behavior can be applied in Indonesia to answer and complete the survey-based study of political behavior.
... Nor do we assert that the most ideologically sophisticated individuals ought to share the same understandings of these terms. While the textbook definitions are generally consistent with the conventional understanding of ideology in American politics (e.g., Conover and Feldman, 1981;Ellis and Stimson, 2012), political psychology (e.g., Luttbeg and Gant, 1985;Jost et al., 2003;Alford et al., 2005;Jost et al., 2009;Kinder and Kalmoe, 2017;Kalmoe, 2020;Jost, 2021;van der Linden et al., 2021;Elder and O'Brian, 2022), and other major textbooks in American politics (e.g., Ginsberg et al., 2019;Harrison et al., 2019), some may define "liberal" and "conservative" in other ways. Some scholars, for example, have identified a social dimension in which conservatives prefer government intervention more than liberals do (e.g., Layman and Carsey, 2002;Lee, 2009). ...
... Jost et al. (2022) similarly suggest that "[w]hereas conservative-rightist ideology is associated with valuing tradition, social order and maintenance of the status quo, liberal-leftist ideology is associated with a push for egalitarian social change" (560). Our classification of correct answers is also generally consistent with the understandings of "liberal" and "conservative" implied by prominent studies in American politics and political psychology (see, e.g., Conover and Feldman, 1981;Luttbeg and Gant, 1985;Jost et al., 2003;Alford et al., 2005;Jost et al., 2009;Ellis and Stimson, 2012;Kinder and Kalmoe, 2017;Kalmoe, 2020;Jost, 2021;van der Linden et al., 2021;Elder and O'Brian, 2022). ...
American politics scholarship has relied extensively on self-reported measures of ideology. We evaluate these widely used measures through an original national survey. Descriptively, we show that Americans’ understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” are weakly aligned with conventional definitions of these terms and that such understandings are heterogeneous across social groups, casting doubt on the construct validity and measurement equivalence of ideological self-placements. Experimentally, we randomly assign one of three measures of ideology to each respondent: (1) the standard ANES question, (2) a version that adds definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” and (3) a version that keeps these definitions but removes ideological labels from the question. We find that the third measure, which helps to isolate symbolic ideology from operational ideology, shifts self-reported ideology in important ways: Democrats become more conservative, and Republicans more liberal. These findings offer first-cut experimental evidence on the limitations of self-reported ideology as a measure of operational ideology, and contribute to ongoing debates about the use of ideological self-placements in American politics.
... The application of the twin method to the study of political attitudes has led to accumulating evidence for substantial heritability in ideological preferences amongst adults (Alford et al. 2005;Bouchard and McGue 2003;Dawes and Weinschenk 2020;Hatemi et al. 2014;Jang et al. 1996;Morosoli et al. 2022;Settle et al. 2009). Research is now moving from a focus on political attitudes and left-right voting to the study of the origins of variation in underlying ideological orientations concerning inequality and authority, as measured by SDO (Sidanius and Pratto 1999) and RWA (Altemeyer 1988;Zakrisson 2005), respectively. ...
The attachment and caregiving domains maintain proximity and care-giving behavior between parents and offspring, in a way that has been argued to shape people’s mental models of how relationships work, resulting in secure, anxious or avoidant interpersonal styles in adulthood. Several theorists have suggested that the attachment system is closely connected to orientations and behaviors in social and political domains, which should be grounded in the same set of familial experiences as are the different attachment styles. We use a sample of Norwegian twins (N = 1987) to assess the genetic and environmental relationship between attachment, trust, altruism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO). Results indicate no shared environmental overlap between attachment and ideology, nor even between the attachment styles or between the ideological traits, challenging conventional wisdom in developmental, social, and political psychology. Rather, evidence supports two functionally distinct systems, one for navigating intimate relationships (attachment) and one for navigating social hierarchies (RWA/SDO), with genetic overlap between traits within each system, and two distinct genetic linkages to trust and altruism. This is counter-posed to theoretical perspectives that link attachment, ideology, and interpersonal orientations through early relational experiences.
... Political ideology arises from both innate biological predispositions and environmental factors (Jost et al., 2009). Twin studies suggest that genetics may play a role in the development of political ideology, as identical twins are more likely to share political beliefs than nonidentical twins (Alford et al., 2005;Kandler et al., 2012). ...
Self‐service technologies are widely used in business, and retailers and service firms invest significant resources to obtain and improve their Self‐Service Technology capabilities. To allocate resources efficiently, it is crucial for firms to predict Self‐Service Technology usage by their customers. However, predictors in the extant literature (e.g., customers' perceptions and personality traits) are not easy to objectively measure or obtain secondary data about. This research proposes and examines political ideology, for which fairly accurate and objective data can be obtained, as a novel predictor of customer Self‐Service Technology usage. In four studies in different contexts, the authors consistently find that political ideology is significantly related to customers' intention to use and actual use of Self‐Service Technologies; Liberals, on average, are found to be significantly more likely to use Self‐Service Technologies compared to conservatives. Moreover, process complexity is identified as a moderator of this effect. In addition, two mediators, customers' need for interaction and customers' perceived control, through which political ideology affects intention to use Self‐Service Technologies are uncovered. The manuscript concludes with a discussion of contributions and practical implications for managers and practitioners as well as avenues for future research.
... Those include socioeconomic status, environmental and developmental conditions, hormones, and genes. Twin studies, for example, have found that genes are responsible for over 50% of the variation in both facial features (Richmond et al., 2018) and political orientation (Alford et al., 2005). Furthermore, prenatal exposure to nicotine and alcohol affects facial morphology (Richmond et al., 2018) and cognitive ability, which is associated with political orientation (Onraet et al., 2015). ...
Carefully standardized facial images of 591 participants were taken in the laboratory while controlling for self-presentation, facial expression, head orientation, and image properties. They were presented to human raters and a facial recognition algorithm: both humans (r = .21) and the algorithm (r = .22) could predict participants’ scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach’s α = .94) decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity. These effects are on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness. The algorithm’s predictive accuracy was even higher (r = .31) when it leveraged information on participants’ age, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, the associations between facial appearance and political orientation seem to generalize beyond our sample: The predictive model derived from standardized images (while controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity) could predict political orientation (r ≈ .13) from naturalistic images of 3,401 politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The analysis of facial features associated with political orientation revealed that conservatives tended to have larger lower faces. The predictability of political orientation from standardized images has critical implications for privacy, the regulation of facial recognition technology, and understanding the origins and consequences of political orientation.
... They may drive selfish or altruistic behavior with the effect that such innate traits of species influence social evolution and in a wider perspective have implications for politics. This tradition is often labeled "sociobiology" (Wilson 1975;Hatemi and McDermott 2011) and is especially related to genetics and to varying degrees also to neurology as biological subdisciplines (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005), but contributions may use different terminology to characterize 4 Introduction-setting the scene human behavior. This research is primarily interested in the structuring of different forms of behavior, and although evolution is an overall theme, certain issues, such as the differentiation and emergence of new species, are not considered. ...
... More specifically, we deploy a discordant twin design where we compare differences in wealth and participation within identical twin pairs. This design is important because citizens inherit both political behaviours and economic opportunities (Adermon et al. 2018;Alford et al. 2005;Benjamin et al. 2012;Hatemi et al. 2010;Ohlsson et al. 2019). This intergenerational transfer (whether genetic or environmental in origin) implies that the impact of wealth on efficacy and participation must be investigated among individuals who share the same background and similar opportunities. ...
The world has seen a massive increase in wealth and wealth inequality over the last decades. Given the skew in policy making towards the preferences of the wealthy, this raises the question of how individual wealth affects political participation. Approaching this question empirically is complicated by the fact that random variation in wealth is rare, and many factors that can bias the estimation of the relationship between wealth and participation are difficult to measure. We address the question using a Swedish discordant identical twin design with a) register-based wealth data, b) validated election turnout for multiple elections, and c) self-reported civic participation measures. This design allows us to rule out all shared confounders, such as genetics, family background and socialization, and shared networks. We find that even though wealthy individuals descriptively vote more often, the causal effect of wealth is probably zero, and may for civic participation even be negative.
... More specifically, we deploy a discordant twin design where we compare differences in wealth and participation within identical twin pairs. This design is important because citizens inherit both political behaviours and economic opportunities (Adermon et al. 2018;Alford et al. 2005;Benjamin et al. 2012;Hatemi et al. 2010;Ohlsson et al. 2019). This intergenerational transfer (whether genetic or environmental in origin) implies that the impact of wealth on efficacy and participation must be investigated among individuals who share the same background and similar opportunities. ...
The world has seen a massive increase in wealth and wealth inequality over the last decades. Given the skew in policy making towards the preferences of the wealthy, this raises the question of how individual wealth affects political participation. Approaching this question empirically is complicated by the fact that random variation in wealth is rare, and many factors that can bias the estimation of the relationship between wealth and participation are difficult to measure. We address the question using a Swedish discordant identical twin design with a) register-based wealth data, b) validated election turnout for multiple elections, and c) self-reported civic participation measures. This design allows us to rule out all shared confounders, such as genetics, family background and socialization, and shared networks. We find that even though wealthy individuals descriptively vote more often, the causal effect of wealth is probably zero, and may for civic participation even be negative.
... Variation in political ideology is heritable [10][11][12][13][14], remains stable over long periods of time [15], and covaries with several basic physiological traits [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. The two dimensions of ideology are observed across a wide range of cultures [23,24]. ...
Neuroimaging of political ideologies (left-wing vs. right-wing; conservatism vs. liberalism), unveiled brain systems for mediating the cognitive and affective inclinations of partisanship. Brain networks related to deliberation and cognitive control, as well as those processing subjective values and social norms, were mainly involved. Correlational links from normative people were corroborated by brain lesions and focal transcranial stimulation techniques. Neuroimaging studies with extremists ready to endorse violent actions are scarce and do not provide fully concordant maps with those coming from people with strong partisanship allegiances. The present review discusses the advances made in the description of the neural systems that mediate both ordinary partisanship (the “partisan brain”), and radicalized extremism prone to violence (the “extremist brain”), signaling concomitances and differences. Further advances might come from unveiling distinctive interactions between prefrontal cortex areas with other cortical and subcortical regions that may help to outline dedicated maps and modes of operation. Moreover, measuring the hardness of beliefs and the strength of value adscriptions together with cognitive flexibility/rigidity, aggressiveness, ambition, high-risk seeking and other individual traits rooted in psychobiological substrates appear indispensable to distinguish between partisanship alignments and violent extremism proneness.
... research suggest that nearly all human behaviors are, to some extent, heritable, including cigarette smoking (Kendler et al., 2000), divorce (Jocklin et al., 1996), voting behavior (Fowler et al., 2008), and political ideology (Alford et al., 2005). But it is important to keep in mind that the specific genes involved, the precise pathways from genes to outcome, and the particular environmental conditions conducive to genetic expression are complex and not yet well understood. ...
Recent research suggests that contemporary American society is marked by heightened hostile racial rhetoric, alongside increasing salience of White nationalists who justify an ideology of racial hierarchy with claims of biological superiority. Media coverage of such genetics research has often emphasized a deterministic (or causal) narrative by suggesting that specific genes directly increase negative outcomes and highlighting reported genetic differences between racial groups. Across two experimental studies, we examine the effect of the media’s portrayal of scientific findings linking genes with negative health and behavioral outcomes on measures of racism. We find that deterministic genetic attributions for health and behavioral outcomes can lead to more negative racial out-group attitudes. Importantly, we also investigate potential interventions in the presentation of genetic science research. Our research has implications for understanding racial attitudes and racialized ideology in contemporary American politics, as well as for framing scientific communication in intergroup contexts.
... Heritability and the enriched environment hypothesis While the importance of the socialization environment for political development is firmly established, there is also a vast accumulation of evidence on the genetic basis of political traits. Twin studies from different countries show that political ideology and beliefs (e.g., Alford et al., 2005;Hatemi et al., 2014;Ksiazkiewicz et al., 2020) and political interest have a heritable component (Bell et al., 2009;Dawes et al., 2014;Klemmensen et al., 2012;Weinschenk et al., 2019). Different methodologies, such as extended family designs (Hatemi et al., 2010) and the analysis of genome-wide data (Benjamin et al., 2012), have led to similar conclusions. ...
This article uses a behavioral genetics approach to study gender differences in expressed political interest, applying the enriched environment hypothesis to gendered political socialization. As girls are less stimulated to develop an interest in politics than boys, we theorize that these differences in the socialization environment reduce the expression of girls’ genetic predispositions compared to boys’, leading to a gender gap in the heritability of this trait. Analyses using data on German twins (11–25 years) demonstrate relevant differences by gender and age in heritability estimates. While differences in political interest between boys are largely explained by genes, this is less the case for girls, as they have considerably higher shared environment estimates. Our results imply that gender differences in expressed political interest are sustained by both genetic variation and environmental influences (such as socialization), as well as the interaction between the two.
... One possibility is that hereditary factors play an important role in world beliefs, as they do with many other individual differences. This is not only the case for personality traits (e.g., roughly 40% of variation in widely studied personality traits is heritable in U.S. samples-see Vukasović & Bratko, 2015), but also specific social attitudes, such as political views, are substantially heritable (Alford et al., 2005;Kleppestø et al., 2019;Smith et al., 2011;Wajzer & Dragan, 2023;Willoughby et al., 2021). Similarly, of course, nonbiological transmission from parents could also be influential, as could social transmission from peers or celebrities. ...
Objectives:
We tested whether generalized beliefs that the world is safe, abundant, pleasurable, and progressing (termed "primal world beliefs") are associated with several objective measures of privilege.
Methods:
Three studies (N = 16,547) tested multiple relationships between indicators of privilege-including socioeconomic status, health, sex, and neighborhood safety-and relevant world beliefs, as well as researchers and laypeople's expectations of these relationships. Samples were mostly from the USA and included general population samples (Study 2) as well as focused samples of academic researchers (Study 1) and people who had experienced serious illness or trauma (Study 3).
Results:
Studies 1-2 found mostly negligible relationships between world beliefs and indicators of privilege, which were invariably lower than researcher predictions (e.g., instead of the expected r = 0.33, neighborhood affluence correlated with Abundant world belief at r = 0.01). Study 3 found that people who had experienced serious illness (cancer, cystic fibrosis) only showed modest differences in beliefs from controls.
Conclusions:
While results do not preclude that some individuals' beliefs were meaningfully affected by life events, they imply that such changes are smaller or less uniform than widely believed and that knowing a person's demographic background may tell us relatively little about their beliefs (and vice versa).
... The results of their analysis confirmed their assumptions. They showed that conservative and liberal attitudes are heritable, while in most cases, the effect of genetic factors on the variability of analysed attitudes was higher than the effect of upbringing (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005). ...
The past two decades have seen an increase in the use of theories, data, assumptions and methods of the biological sciences in studying political phenomena. One of the approaches that combine biology with political science is genopolitics. The goal of the study was to analyse the basic ontological, methodological and epistemological
assumptions for the reductionism of genopolitics. The results show that genopolitics assumes methodological reductionism but rejects ontological and epistemological reductionism. The key consequences of the findings are the irreducibility of political science to biology and the complementarity of genopolitical explanations and political science explanations based on culturalism. If my findings prove to be correct, they give rise to the formation of a hypothesis regarding the anti-reductionist orientation of the contemporary links between political science and biology. An important step towards confirming or falsifying such a hypothesis will be exploring the reductionism of contemporary biopolitical approaches such as neuropolitics or evolutionary political
psychology.
... For example, research by political scientists shows that at least some of our political attitudes are inherited (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005). Other research using brain imaging techniques found distinct differences in how Democrats and Republicans look at candidates (Tierney 2004). ...
... Like wealth and earning power, political orientations, political engagement and political attitudes are also heritable by way of political socialization or even genetics [28,29]. They can also be structured and reproduced by institutional arrangements and periodic events such as economic downturns or 'rally-round-the-flag' events, such as the assassination attempt of President Reagan [30] and the Persian Gulf War [31]. ...
The extent of economic and political inequality, their change over time, and the forces shaping them have profound implications for the sustainability of a society and the well-being of its members. Here we review the evolution of economic and political inequality broadly, though with particular attention to Europe and the USA. We describe legal/institutional, technological and social forces that have shaped this evolution. We highlight the cumulative effects of inequality across generations as channelled through wealth and inheritance but also through other intergenerational connections. We also review the state of research on the effects of inequality on economic growth, health and societal cohesion.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.
... Indeed, although educational differences in institutional attitudes (e.g., political trust, institutional trust more broadly, satisfaction with democracy, support for populism) are well documented and relate to events such as Brexit and the election of Trump (Hobolt, 2016;Norris & Inglehart, 2019), scholars continue to debate the exact origins of these differences. Traditional explanations often point towards material resources (Verba et al., 1995), the role of political knowledge or cognitive skills (Galston, 2001), one's network position (Nie et al., 1996), or even genetic differences (Alford et al., 2005;Persson, 2014). But it is likely that these attitudes are also driven by concerns related to people's social identity such as social status and their struggle for recognition (Gidron & Hall, 2019;Noordzij et al., 2019;Piketty, 2020). ...
Less educated citizens are both descriptively and substantively outnumbered by higher educated citizens in political and societal institutions. While social science has devoted much time to explain why such education effects exist, it has largely neglected the role of feelings of misrecognition in inducing political alienation among less educated citizens. We argue that education has become so central in processes of economic and social stratification that it is likely that less educated citizens feel misrecognized due to their marginal presence in societal and political institutions, which would then lead to their political alienation. This would in particular be the case in societies that are more 'schooled', that is, societies where schooling is a more dominant and steering institution. We analysed data from 49,261 individuals in 34 European countries and found that feelings of misrecognition were strongly related to political distrust, dissatisfaction with democracy, and vote abstention. These relations explained a significant part of the difference between higher and less educated citizens in political alienation. We also found that this mediation effect was larger in countries that are more schooled.
... The leftist group (liberal) is usually addressed as a political group that supports egalitarian social policies, such as providing free education and healthcare for every member of society, and has more openness to social reforms to protect minorities and discriminated communities (Jost, Federico and Napier, 2009;Morris, 2020). In contrast, the rightist group (conservative) has a greater desire to form and maintain hierarchical social structures, in-group unity and preserve social traditions (Sidanius and Pratto, 2001;Alford, Funk and Hibbing, 2005;Jost, 2006;Morris, 2020). Besides, several recent studies indicated a greater level of political intolerance, attitude bias and feeling out-group threat for people who hold right-wing vs left-wing political beliefs (Lindner and Nosek, 2009;Stewart and Morris, 2021). ...
Several studies in political psychology reported higher levels of empathy among political leftists (i.e., liberals) as compared to political rightists (i.e., conservatives). Yet, all those studies lean on self-reports, which are often limited by subjective bias and conformity to social norms. Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: We recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while fifty-five participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering. The findings revealed a typical rhythmic alpha-band “empathy response” in the temporal-parietal junction. This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group. In addition to this dichotomous division, the neural response was parametrically associated with both self-reported political inclination and with right-wing ideological values. This is the first study to reveal an asymmetry in the neural empathy response as a function of political ideology. The findings reported in this study are in line with the current literature in political psychology and provide a novel, neural perspective to support the ideological asymmetry in empathy. This study opens new vistas for addressing questions in political psychology by using neuroimaging.
... Such differences include such things as genetics, family background, and general cognitive ability. These factors are well-known to influence both unemployment and voting behaviour (Verba, Schlozman and Brady, 1995;Arulampalam, Booth and Taylor, 2000;Alford, Funk and Hibbing, 2005;Lindgren, Oskarsson and Persson, 2019). A common critique of fixed-effect models is that they absorb too much of the variation in the data (Angrist and Pischke, 2009), leading to precision issues and giving more leverage to questionable variation (such as measurement error). ...
How unemployment affects electoral participation is a archetypal question in political sociology and of particular relevance in economic crises; in the 1930s as well as during a pandemic. A frequent argument in the literature is that unemployment leads to political withdrawal as the unemployed have to focus on their economy and other personal matters. Some scholars, on the other hand, reason that unemployment triggers political mobilization through feelings of grievance and a strive to protest against leading politicians. However, existing empirical evidence is mixed and often suffers from limitations in data and research design. To make progress on this difficult empirical question, the present study leverages Swedish register data on turnout, spanning nine elections between 1970 and 2018. This extensive panel dataset enables us to more adequately address the causal status of the relationship by relying on the with-in individual variation in turnout. Our results report significant but modest negative effects of both unemployment in general and of losing a relatively well-paid job (job loss). The effects are driven by the young. We also find that the negative effect is less pronounced for those who have previously worked at a workplace where most colleagues participate, supporting a socialization mechanism.
... Second, there are latent factors shaping both psychological traits and facial appearance (face←factor→mind pathway). Those include socioeconomic status, environmental and developmental conditions, hormones, genes, etc. Twin studies, for example, have found that genes are responsible for over 50% of the variation in both facial features (30) and political orientation (31). Similarly, prenatal and postnatal testosterone affect jaw shape and are linked-to a small degree-with character traits closely related to political orientation, such as conscientiousness (32). ...
A facial recognition algorithm was used to extract face descriptors from carefully standardized images of 591 neutral faces taken in the laboratory setting. Face descriptors were entered into a cross-validated linear regression to predict participants' scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach's alpha=.94) while controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. The model's performance exceeded r=.20: much better than that of human raters and on par with how well job interviews predict job success, alcohol drives aggressiveness, or psychological therapy improves mental health. Moreover, the model derived from standardized images performed well (r=.12) in a sample of naturalistic images of 3,401 politicians from the U.S., UK, and Canada, suggesting that the associations between facial appearance and political orientation generalize beyond our sample. The analysis of facial features associated with political orientation revealed that conservatives had larger lower faces, although political orientation was only weakly associated with body mass index (BMI). The predictability of political orientation from standardized images has critical implications for privacy, regulation of facial recognition technology, as well as the understanding the origins and consequences of political orientation.
... Rather than contradicting past literature on the origins of political attitudes, we believe this work largely complements that research. Political attitudes are believed to be rooted in: (1) personality and other psychological predispositions (Johnston, Lavine, and Federico 2017;Malka, Lelkes, and Soto 2019;Stenner 2005), (2) genetics (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005), and (3) cue following (Zaller and Feldman 1992). ...
Families are not only the first institution ever created, they are also, for most people, the first institution ever encountered. The preindustrial family structure, which was a function of local ecology and cooperation needs, instilled family members with different values, such as trust in strangers and respect for elders. These values passed through generations and, as we show in three studies, impact today's political attitudes and policies. First, using surveys of second-generation immigrants representing roughly 180 ethnicities living in 32 European countries, we show that the tighter kinship structure of a person's ancestors predicts right-wing cultural attitudes. Among those who are less engaged in politics, tighter ancestral kinship structure also predicts left-wing economic attitudes. In a second study, we control for country-level differences by comparing ethnic groups within countries and find that ancestral kinship strength predicts right-wing cultural attitudes but not left-wing economic attitudes. Finally, in a third study, we examine the policy implications of ancestral kinship. We show that stronger country-level ancestral kinship strength also increases anti-LGBT policies and welfare spending. Finally, we examine whether value systems link preindustrial kinship with modern political attitudes. In total, this work indicates that our political beliefs are rooted in the value systems and familial institutions created by our forebears.
... Twin studies consistently find that political orientation has a heritable component (Martin et al. 1986, Alford et al. 2005. More recent genetic studies show a statistically significant association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene (see Settle et al. 2010). ...
The concept of ideology is central to the understanding of the many political , economic, social, and cultural processes that have occurred in the last two centuries. And yet, what is the nature of the different ideologies remains a vague, open, and much disputed question. Many political, sociological, and ideological studies have been devoted to ideology. Very little, on the other hand, has been done from the philosophical field. And this despite the fact that there are undoubtedly many philosophical questions related to ideology and its role in modern industrialized societies. Just a few examples of ideology-related philosophical questions suffice to prove the point: What objects do ideologies deal with? Are the ideologies testable? Are there true ideologies? Do they evolve? How are ideologies related to societies? Is the existence of ideologies inevitable in modern societies? What is the relation of ideology to science? Is science just another kind of ideology? Are we, as human beings, innately predisposed to believe in ideologies? Or, instead, ideologies proliferate through indoctrination and propaganda? Are ideologies necessarily harm-ful?... and much more. In this article I try to answer some of these questions from a philosophical point of view, taking a materialist approach. I begin by characterizing ideology as a complex, multi-layered concept. Then, I briefly discuss the material systems on which ideological movements operate, that is, societies and concrete human groups. I identify at least 11 different elements that seem to be present in most ideologies, and I compare these characteristics with those of contemporary science and technology. Although some superficial similarities can be identified, there are deep differences that make ideology completely different from science. The similarities , however, are stronger with technology. Ideologies continually evolve with technological advances, social changes, and even with mere fashion. The current fragmentation of ideologies caused by the widespread use of new technologies and social networks has given rise to new phenomena of ideological propagation which, in my opinion, are very dangerous, particularly for open societies. I discuss these processes, within the context of the nature vs nurture debate, along with the question of whether we can get rid of ideologies.
... The focus is not only on what genes you have, but on how things 'around the gene' affect their operation and thereby downstream behaviour. Moreover, in some situations, genes and the environment can be thought of as mutually 9 For a sampling of research attributing dispositions to genetics, see Arvey et al (1989), Bouchard et al (2004) and Alford et al (2005). constitutive, the social environment both cause and consequence of genetically influenced behaviours (McDermott and Hatemi, 2014). ...
... Son numerosas las investigaciones que demuestran empíricamente que los jóvenes tienen unas actitudes y un comportamiento político diferentes a los del resto de la población (Eckstein et al. 2012;Arnett, 2014;Daycan, 2014;Ekström and Shehata, 2018;García-Albacete, 2014;Cammaerts et al. 2014;Benjamin et al. 2012;Alford et al. 2005;Hooghe and Stolle, 2003). En general, la juventud presenta un mayor desconocimiento político, menor interés y preocupación por la política y un nivel de abstención electoral más elevado que la población adulta (Quintelier, 2007;Weiss, 2020). ...
La literatura académica entiende, de forma consensuada, que la participación política debe encontrarse en el centro de la democracia. Pero, en torno al significado del concepto en sí de participación política, aparecen disensos. Si al debate sobre el significado de la participación y las implicaciones posibles de este debate le sumamos como protagonistas a los jóvenes, un grupo considerado especialmente apático y desafecto desde la literatura tradicional, los argumentos se hacen aún más diversos. Es por ello que se hace necesario profundizar en las ideas, creencias y actitudes de nuestros jóvenes, sobre todo, en el conocimiento e interés que presentan por la política. En este trabajo contribuimos al conocimiento sobre la juventud y la participación política centrándonos en cómo es la socialización de los jóvenes en la universidad, qué conocen, qué desconocen y qué les impacta tras acercar la política a las aulas.
... Это было установлено в экспериментах, в которых принимали участие тысячи моно-и дизиготных близнецов [Alford, Hibbing, 2004;Conway, Gornik et al., 2015]. Так, была выявлена позитивная корреляция между приверженностью к консерватизму, меньшей склонностью к участию в акциях общественного протеста, социальным статусом человека и увеличенным объемом правой миндалины мозга и серого вещества [Nam, Jost, 2017, p. 135]; совпадение идеологических оценок у монозиготных близнецов коррелировалось с вероятностью 0,66, а у дизиготных -с вероятностью 0,44 [Alford, Funk, Hibbing, 2005]. Чувство социального доминирования, которое располагает к убеждению, что допустим контроль над окружением, сопровождается повышенной активностью миндалины, гиппокампа и полосатого тела мозга [Watanabe, Yamamoto, 2015]. ...
The article presents the standpoint that naturalistic tendencies in modern science, which are especially expressed in neuroscience, push up social knowledge toward the need to revise its attitudes and norms, which consist in consistent sociocentrism and biophobia, and, hence, a simplified understanding of the phenomenon of “genetic reductionism”. We show that the application of the methods of natural science to social disciplines often marked visible progress and even conceptual breakthroughs in their development. Achievements of modern neuroscience affect a traditional area of social and humanitarian knowledge as political science, which leads to the formation of an independent area of research – political neuroscience. Through the optics of this research, cognitive styles characteristic of individuals and social groups with different value orientations imply the dominance of certain ideological sympathies and antipathies, which attributed to the opposite poles of the ideological scale – liberalism and conservatism. Considerable empirical material allows us to conclude that these ideological positions are exist due to differences in their ontogenetic “foundations”, which allows us to develop I. Kant's ideas about a priorism and transcendentalism in the context of the Kantian research program in contemporary neuroscience. The result of the implementation of this program to the political sphere was the discovery of the genesis of political views, and the demonstration of the peculiarities of their dynamics. They are based on the difference in the activity of certain neural sets, which in their turn are influenced by culture and society, forming an integral system “brain – culture – society”, where each component of which affects other components. Features and changes in the socio-cultural context of the development of an individual or a group of people may have an effect upon the architectonics of the brain and shift, due to its plasticity, of the political views along the scale of ideologies “liberalism – conservatism”. At the same time, carriers of different cognitive styles and, therefore, with a sufficient degree of probability of ideological views, percept the world in which they live in differently, and evaluate its past and possible future in diverse ways.
... Before turning the attention towards directly integrating BPA and BG, there are several results to incorporate into BPA from the neighboring literature of political science, where the methods of BG have already been heavily applied . A burgeoning literature has shown that key political variables such as ideology and party identification are substantially influenced by genetics in studies in different country context (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005;Hatemi et. al., 2014;Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013;Fazekas, & Littvay, 2015;Smith et. ...
Behavioral public administration was coined as a term to describe a field focused on the psychologically based study of individual level behavior and attitudes with relevance for the public sector. Although it holds important insights on human behavior, the literature on behavioral genetics has so far largely been missing in this field. In this paper, I propose that behavioral genetics is concurrent with the scope of behavioral public administration and that it complements the popular theory of bounded rationality. Next, I outline the logics of the twin studies that underlie much of behavioral genetics, and synthesize relevant existing results both inside and outside public administration that relies on behavioral genetics. Functionally, I arrange these insights as they relate to citizens, employees, and managers and present examples of how gene-environment interactions allow for integration of behavioral public administration and behavioral genetics. I argue that insights from behavioral genetics are needed to maximize explanatory power and avoid biased estimates of the effects of socialization when examining these three groups. I conclude by presenting points for practitioners.
... Political identity development begins at an early age and is influenced by both biology (Alford et al., 2005;Block and Block, 2006) and socialization (McDevitt, 2006). Political identities begin to stabilize during adolescence (Converse, 1969;Sears, 1983) and teenagers often begin to identify with political parties (Jennings and Markus, 1984). ...
Civic education is often touted as a counterweight to the contentiousness of American politics. Yet, civic education’s relationship to dislike and distrust of opposing partisans (affective polarization) remains largely untested. Simultaneously, there are calls for educators to promote more civic informed action, taking civic education beyond the walls of the classroom. This study utilizes data from a survey of the 2016 election to examine the relationship between individuals’ recalled civic education experiences (classroom pedagogy and community service) and affective polarization. In addition, this study explores two potential moderators of the relationship between civic education and affective polarization, partisan social identity strength and age. Analysis of the sample shows a significant relationship between both types of civic education experience and affective polarization, though the nature of that relationship may depend on respondents’ partisan social identity and age.
Intergenerational political socialization is alive and well in the polarized American polity. But, by what mechanism do parental views transmit to children? We develop a theory ( dyadic social learning theory) which posits the importance of dyadic familial communication in facilitating attitudinal concordance between parents and children. Using original survey data of 1,048 dyadic pairs of American parents and middle school-aged children, we develop a novel measure of political perception that combines the perceptive accuracy of parents with the perceptive accuracy of their children. This measure of parent-child alignment, which we argue signals quality communication in families, is a powerful determinant of parent-child congruence on political views and emotions, particularly polarization. When a dyadic pair accurately perceives each other politically, the likelihood of congruent views and shared polarization increases. This research has implications for how we understand political transference of polarized views, and for broader theories of how children are socialized into the political world. It also suggests that solutions to polarization will have to address the role of parents in initiating polarization.
Political psychologists often examine the influence of psychological dispositions on political attitudes. Central to this field is the ideological asymmetry hypothesis (IAH), which asserts significant psychological differences between conservatives and liberals. According to the IAH, conservatives tend to exhibit greater resistance to change, a stronger inclination to uphold existing social systems, and heightened sensitivity to threats and uncertainty compared with their liberal counterparts. Our review and reanalysis, however, question the empirical strength of the IAH. We expose major concerns regarding the construct validity of the psychological dispositions and political attitudes traditionally measured. Furthermore, our research reveals that the internal validity of these studies is often compromised by endogeneity and selection biases. External and statistical validity issues are also evident, with many findings relying on small effect sizes derived from nonrepresentative student populations. Collectively, these data offer scant support for the IAH, indicating that simply amassing similar data is unlikely to clarify the validity of the hypothesis. We suggest a more intricate causal model that addresses the intricate dynamics between psychological dispositions and political attitudes. This model considers the bidirectional nature of these relationships and the moderating roles of individual and situational variables. In conclusion, we call for developing more sophisticated theories and rigorous research methodologies to enhance our comprehension of the psychological underpinnings of political ideology.
Pearson correlation, partial correlation, and multiple regression strategies determined the degree to which estimates of the level of left-handedness in each of the 48 contiguous American states related to citizen political ideology and to Democratic-Republican presidential popular vote over the past 60 years. Higher state levels of left-handedness were associated significantly with liberal ideology in each of the presidential election years from 1964 to 2016. Comparable ideology data were not available for 2020. Higher state levels of left-handedness also were associated with a greater degree of Democratic candidate popular vote support in each of the presidential election years from 1964 to 2020 except for 1976. The mean size of these 28 significant Pearson correlations involving the two political criteria was .62 (SD = .12) with a range of .38 to .80, indicating handedness alone could account for a mean of 40.1 percent (SD = 14.9) of the variance in the two political preference variables. Corresponding multiple regressions showed that when state-level Big Five personality, White population percent, urbanization, and income variables were given the opportunity to enter the equations, handedness still emerged with a significant regression coefficient in 26 of the 28 equations. The two exceptions occurred for 1968 with either political preference criterion. It is speculated that such relations are grounded in hypothesized but poorly understood genetic links between handedness, personality, and political beliefs and attitudes, and, that a foundational genetic predisposition to left-handedness in a population may have much greater impact on correlates than overt levels of left-handedness.
Much political behavior research highlights the role of post-immigration experiences in framing Latinx immigrants’ preferences in the United States. We contend that immigrants’ pre-migration political socialization also shapes their current views, political engagement, and ideological orientations. Findings from a unique set of 146 interviews on political party choice before and after migration suggest that Latinx immigrants exhibit consistency of political orientations for party choice across borders. In other words, home-country political and ideological orientations help guide choice of U.S. political party. Pre-immigration variables are thus crucial for a more comprehensive assessment of Latinx immigrant political psychology and behavior.
There is perhaps no more important skill to cultivate in today’s students than civic reasoning: the ability to think about social issues in complex ways. Civic reasoning involves the integration of knowledge, epistemological orientations, and ethics, and this integration is influenced by individuals’ perceptions of themselves and others, and by the problems they seek to address in the civic domain. We synthesize research from psychology, learning science, human development, and brain development to identify conditions that maximize opportunities for children, adolescents, and adults to learn to engage in civic reasoning. We argue that a commitment to democratic principles, and the development of the reasoning skills and ethical dispositions that undergird them, results in a more engaged populace that is willing and able to understand multiple perspectives and to make sound decisions for the collective good.
Partisans in the American electorate are affectively polarized, which coincides with the tendency for partisan geographic sorting. Could mate selection pressures contribute to this geographic tendency, and how might they interact with out-party affect? I propose a model in which an individual’s perception of their mate success in a niche is key. I argue that perceived mate success is a function of a niche’s partisanship and one’s out-party affect, which in turn, incentivizes sorting. The model is partially tested with conjoint experiments on multiple U.S. samples. Results show that partisans perceive a lower probability of mate success in niches with greater shares of out-partisans and that mate success interacts with negative out-party affect. I also replicate findings on political mate choice preferences with a more appropriate method. Lastly, this project links instrumentality and affect, which is a departure from past work. In doing so, it contributes to research on the consequences of mate pressures for political behavior.
Biology's increasing applicability to the social sciences can inspire new approaches to public administration research and practice. Drawing on advances in behavioral genetics, genomic public administration may push its frontiers by examining the genetic foundations of administrative behaviors. While public administration scholars have pioneered the use of the twin design to assess the heritability of public‐sector employment and public service motivation, they may also use molecular genetics to explore how specific genes interact with environmental factors to shape administrative attitudes, traits, and behaviors. We highlight how relevant studies in management and political science may serve as models for similar explorations in public administration. We also outline four research agendas for genomic public administration. In addition to complementing traditional public administration theory by examining the genetic roots of administrative behaviors and practices, genomic public administration may enrich genetic inquiries by adding public‐sector applications.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
This study investigates whether the management earnings forecasts of Republican and Democratic CEOs differ due to systematic differences in their information disclosure preferences. We find that Republican CEOs prefer a less asymmetric information environment than Democrat CEOs, and thus make more frequent, timelier, and more accurate disclosures than Democrat CEOs. Results using the propensity score matched sample and difference-in-differences analysis show that our results are unlikely to be driven by potential endogeneity. Our results are robust to controlling for various CEO characteristics and are stronger for firms with higher levels of institutional ownership and litigation risk.
We examined associations between childlessness and voting in Europe. We used cross-sectional European Social Survey data from 20 countries (n = 37,623). Our results suggest that there is a "childless vote" in Europe. Supporting our pre-registered hypothesis, childless individuals voted for parties that had visibly positioned themselves at the Green-Alternative-Libertarian (GAL) pole of the GAL-TAN (GAL vs. Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist) ideological dimension. The pre-registered explorative analyses of associations between childlessness and economic left-right ideology or other policy positions of the party for which the individual had voted did not yield results. Explorative analyses suggested in the review process showed that self-rated religiosity was independently associated with childlessness, but ideological left-right self-placement or self-ratings of political attitudes were not. Our results suggest a new demographic prognostic of vote choice, thus adding to the literature on demographic processes associated with political dynamics.
We study opinion formation games based on the famous model proposed by Friedkin and Johsen (FJ model). In today’s huge social networks the assumption that in each round agents update their opinions by taking into account the opinions of all their friends is unrealistic. So, we are interested in the convergence properties of simple and natural variants of the FJ model that use limited information exchange in each round and converge to the same stable point. As in the FJ model, we assume that each agent i has an intrinsic opinion si∈[0,1]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$s_i \in [0,1]$$\end{document} and maintains an expressed opinion xi(t)∈[0,1]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$x_i(t) \in [0,1]$$\end{document} in each round t. To model limited information exchange, we consider an opinion formation process where each agent i meets with one random friend j at each round t and learns only her current opinion xj(t)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$x_j(t)$$\end{document}. The amount of influence j imposes on i is reflected by the probability pij\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$p_{ij}$$\end{document} with which i meets j. Then, agent i suffers a disagreement cost that is a convex combination of (xi(t)-si)2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$(x_i(t) - s_i)^2$$\end{document} and (xi(t)-xj(t))2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$(x_i(t) - x_j(t))^2$$\end{document}. An important class of dynamics in this setting are no regret dynamics, i.e. dynamics that ensure vanishing regret against the experienced disagreement cost to the agents. We show an exponential gap between the convergence rate of no regret dynamics and of more general dynamics that do not ensure no regret. We prove that no regret dynamics require roughly Ω(1/ε)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varOmega (1/\varepsilon )$$\end{document} rounds to be within distance ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varepsilon $$\end{document} from the stable point of the FJ model. On the other hand, we provide an opinion update rule that does not ensure no regret and converges to x∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$x^*$$\end{document} in O~(log2(1/ε))\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\tilde{O}(\log ^2(1/\varepsilon ))$$\end{document} rounds. Finally, in our variant of the FJ model, we show that the agents can adopt a simple opinion update rule that ensures no regret to the experienced disagreement cost and results in an opinion vector that converges to the stable point x∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$x^*$$\end{document} of the FJ model within distance ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varepsilon $$\end{document} in poly(1/ε)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\textrm{poly}(1/\varepsilon )$$\end{document} rounds. In view of our lower bound for no regret dynamics this rate of convergence is close to best possible.
Political choice has huge importance, either expressed in the balloting place or in the exit poll, in bringing a political party to power and thus impacting the economy and society's welfare. Research in leadership and decision‐making suggests that the physical characteristics and traits of an individual influence the consumer's trustworthiness. Despite being a less explored research area, studying the impact of specific verbal and non‐verbal cues of a political leader through a technological lens, such as eye‐tracking has been sparsely talked about. Three sets of experiments were conducted to study voters' visual attention and reactions to gage their willingness to vote. First, an eye‐tracking tool was used to record the visual attention and regions of interest (ROI) of voters. Subsequently, a short survey was used to analyze the “willingness to vote”, followed by a pilot study on their attention to non‐verbal cues from the candidate. Also, a sentiment analysis of the voters was gathered from social media platforms. The present study analyzed the non‐verbal aspects of a political leader with regard to voting intention and found that even a few of the non‐verbal cues have an influence on the willingness to vote for a candidate. The findings contribute to the literature of neuro‐politics and decision‐making by analyzing voters' experiences of two political leaders, Narendra Modi (NaMo) and Rahul Gandhi (RaGa) based on non‐verbal cues. Political parties and candidates should focus on non‐verbal cues to increase their chances of winning elections. In addition, practitioners from the industry should incorporate appropriate non‐verbal cues while designing ad campaigns, personal branding, PR campaigns, and CEO addresses.
This article studies the impact of the 2012 British austerity policies on youth political attitudes using a difference-in-differences. The study achieves this by combining longitudinal survey data from “Understanding Society” with a district-level estimate of the austerity shock that each individual faced between the years 2013 and 2015. The findings indicate that the welfare cuts had a negative impact on the political efficacy of young people, as they were more inclined to believe that public officials did not care about them and that they had no say in the actions of the government. Additionally, their satisfaction with politics, as determined by their perceived level of political influence, also decreased. Overall, the results suggest that the implementation of austerity measures increased the likelihood of political disenfranchisement among young people in Britain.
Many studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between education and political knowledge. However, some scholars have recently challenged this idea, arguing that the positive correlation between education and knowledge may disappear once confounding variables are considered. In this paper, we replicate a recent study that used the discordant twin design to examine the association between education and political knowledge. More specifically, we analyze the relationship between education and political knowledge within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs, which enables us to bypass sources of confounding of the relationship (i.e. genes and socialization) because MZ twins reared together share both. Using data from a 2019 survey of twins from the Danish Twin Registry, we find that, consistent with earlier work, after accounting for familial factors, the relationship between education on political knowledge is small and not statistically significant.
Two studies were performed to determine whether political orientations were related to loci-of-hope, which are where one acquires or sustains one's hope that one's goals may be achieved. Study 1 employed a nationally representative sample of Canadian English-speaking adults (N = 866), who completed the Locus-of-Hope Scale (Bernardo, 2010) that measures the extent to which trait hope comes from four different sources: from oneself as an individual; from one's family; from peers; and from one's sense of spirituality or religious faith. The results indicate that the peer locus-of-hope was associated with liberalism, while the spiritual and family loci were related to conservatism. The participants in Study 2 were Canadian university students (N = 555) who completed the Locus-of-Hope Scale as well as a related measure that treats hope as an emotional state rather than a trait. In this sample, there were again significant associations between political orientations and loci-of-hope at the peer and family loci such that greater reliance on peers predicted more liberal orientations, and greater dependence on family was associated with more conservative outlooks. The implications of these findings for three established theoretical paradigms that purport to explain the acquisition of political orientations are explored.
Chinese citizens lived under a state socialist regime with heavy state intervention from 1957 to 1978, after which time China began its market oriented economic reforms. This paper investigates whether personal experiences, particularly economic and political experiences are related to Chinese citizens’ preference for state intervention during the transition period. Based on the World Value Survey data collected between 2017 and 2018, I found that Chinese people who have experienced negative economic shocks since market reform are more likely to support government redistribution as opposed to economic liberalization. Individual attitudes toward the role of the state are also associated with experiences of affiliation with the state sector, and an instrumental variable analysis shows that state sector affiliation has a causal effect on redistribution preference. The findings contribute to studies of redistribution preference formation in a country where market forces and Communist Party rule coexist, as well as revealing how the primary political goal shapes the redistribution preference of individuals under an authoritarian regime.
The liberal/conservative divide and the continental/analytic divide may reflect similar cognitive categories connected to brain laterality. Yet this obviously doesn’t mean that conservatives must be analysts and liberals must be continentalists. These preferences may be the result of other factors that tilt the individual to different cognitive styles in each case. I also discuss the phenomenon of “hybrid” hemisphericity, that is, the case where analytic philosophers may prefer liberal political stances, and continental philosophers more conservative positions. The formal categories of analysis and holism, taken in the context of epistemological bilaterality, may provide a way to understand and integrate these divisions in the context of a principled metaphilosophical framework.
Religious attendance has been shown to correlate negatively with alcohol use. We investigated whether this relationship is driven by genetic or environmental factors. Data on frequency of church attendance and frequency of alcohol use were obtained from twins and their families in the Virginia 30 000 study. A comprehensive bivariate model of family resemblance was fitted to the data using Mx. This model is described in detail. Results indicate that genetic factors primarily account for the relationship between alcohol and church attendance in males, whilst shared environmental factors, including cultural transmission and genotype-environment covariance, are stronger determinants of this association in females.
We describe and test two process models of candidate evaluation. The memory-based model holds that evaluations are dependent on the mix of pro and con information retrieved from memory. The impression-driven model holds that evaluations are formed and updated “on-line” as information is encountered. The results provide evidence for the existence of stereotyping and projection biases that render the mix of evidence available in memory a nonveridical representation of the information to which subjects were exposed. People do not rely on the specific candidate information available in memory. Rather, consistent with the logic of the impression-driven processing model, an “on-line” judgment formed when the information was encountered best predicts candidate evaluation. The results raise both methodological and substantive challenges to how political scientists measure and model the candidate evaluation process.
Both implicit democratic norms and the reconstructions provided by theorists of rational choice suggest that issue voters are more sophisticated--educated, informed, and active in politics--than other voters. But some issues are clearly more difficult than others, and the voters who respond to @'hard@' and @`easy@' issues, respectively, are assumed to differ in kind. We propose the hypothesis that @'`easy-issue@' voters are no more sophisticated than non-issue voters, and this is found to be the case. The findings suggest a reevaluation of the import of rising and falling levels of issue voting and suggest a prominent role for @`easy@' issues in electoral realignments.
"In our attempt to extend a behavioristically oriented approach to the engineering control of animal behavior by operant conditioning techniques, we have fought a running battle with the seditious notion of instinct." Several instances of persistent nonreinforced behavior which interfere with learning "represent a clear and utter failure of conditioning theory." Persistent "behaviors to which… animals drift are clear-cut examples of instinctive behaviors… . It seems obvious that these animals are trapped by strong instinctive behaviors, and clearly we have here a demonstration of the prepotency of such behavior patterns over those which have been conditioned." In recent years "ethological facts and attitudes… have done more to advance our practical control of animal behavior than recent reports from American 'learning labs." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
What was noted by E. J. Langer (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did Langer, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and behavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulation are identified: an automatic effect of perception on action, automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evaluation of one's experience. From the accumulating evidence, the authors conclude that these various nonconscious mental systems perform the lion's share of the self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual grounded in his or her current environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new
information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind
interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications
for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact
on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its
importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or
ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion
can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political
choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making
that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality. a
Americans often complain about the current operation of their government, but scholars have never developed a complete picture of people's preferred type of government. In this provocative and timely book, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, employing an original national survey and focus groups, report the specific governmental procedures Americans desire. Their results are surprising. Contrary to the prevailing view that people want greater involvement in politics, most citizens do not care about most policies and therefore are content to turn over decision-making authority to someone else. People's most intense desire for the political system is that decision makers be empathetic and, especially, non-self-interested, not that they be responsive and accountable to the people's largely nonexistent policy preferences or, even worse, that the people be obligated to participate directly in decision making. In light of these findings, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude by cautioning communitarians, direct democrats, social capitalists, deliberation theorists, and all those who think that greater citizen involvement is the solution to society's problems.
Society's training of the young, including formal and informal citizenship instruction, character training, and the processes which lead to the development of different personality types, has been seen as an important determinant of adult political behavior by theorists since Plato. In addition, much of our traditional folklore, not to mention much twentieth century literature on personality development, national character, authoritarianism, and electoral preference, points to the utility of examining the individual's early years as one means of illuminating his mature actions.
The present paper considers one aspect of the child's political development—the genesis of his attitudes toward political leaders and the possible ways that this developmental process may affect his adult responses to the formal wielders of power. Citizens' orientations to political authority have a complex and imperfectly understood, but obviously important, bearing on the equilibrium of a body politic.
Two classes of data will be considered: survey literature giving some indication of how adults respond to political leaders, and results of a study of 659 New Haven public and private school children of widely varying socio-economic status, ranging from fourth- through eighth-graders (about nine to thirteen years of age). Paper-and-pencil questionnaires were administered to this sample between January and March of 1958. Findings from these sources are supplemented by a smaller collection of prolonged interviews with individual children and many informal encounters with groups of school children and teachers over a period of about two years.
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism.
Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality.
Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
In understanding the political development of the pre-adult one of the central questions hinges on the relative and differentiated contributions of various socializing agents. The question undoubtedly proves more difficult as one traverses a range of polities from those where life and learning are almost completely wrapped up in the immediate and extended family to those which are highly complex social organisms and in which the socialization agents are extremely varied. To gain some purchase on the role of one socializing agent in our own complex society, this paper will take up the specific question of the transmission of certain values from parent to child as observed in late adolescence. After noting parent-child relationships for a variety of political values, attention will be turned to some aspects of family structure which conceivably affect the transmission flows.
I. Assessing the Family's Impact: “Foremost among agencies of socialization into politics is the family.” So begins Herbert Hyman's discussion of the sources of political learning. ¹ Hyman explicitly recognized the importance of other agents, but he was neither the first nor the last observer to stress the preeminent position of the family. This viewpoint relies heavily on both the direct and indirect role of the family in shaping the basic orientations of offspring. Whether the child is conscious or unaware of the impact, whether the process is role-modelling or overt transmission, whether the values are political and directly usable or “nonpolitical” but transferable, and whether what is passed on lies in the cognitive or affective realm, it has been argued that the family is of paramount importance.
What was noted by E. J. Langer (1978) remains true today; that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. Langer, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and behavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulation are identified: an automatic effect of perception on action, automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evaluation of one's experience. From the accumulating evidence, the authors conclude that these various nonconscious mental systems perform the lion's share of the self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual grounded in his or her current environment.
This paper assesses the theoretical significance of data on childhood political learning. Two socialization models are involved. Each confers relevance on childhood learning by linking it with political outcomes. The first is an allocative politics model, which seeks a linkage with policy outputs. The other is a system persistence model, looking toward the stability and continued existence of political systems. Each model incorporates the following assumptions: (a) the primacy principle: childhood learning is relatively enduring throughout life; (b) the structuring principle: basic orientations acquired during childhood structure the later learning of specific issue beliefs.
It is this structuring principle which we examined and tested in the present paper. The data show no or little association between childhood orientations and the later learning of specific beliefs about the most important political issues of the day. Our evidence suggests a need to carefully reexamine the basic assumptions and directions of current political socialization research.
Cognitive development theory provides a dynamic framework for studying the political learning process. This article argues that cognitive development may be a link between biology and political socialization. First, it seems clear that the developmental perspective has considerable promise for helping to understand political learning. Second, biological components of the process have been posited. Noted here are possible evolutionary, ontogenetic, and physiological bases of cognitive development. To the extent that there are, in fact, biological elements present, it follows that biology is one feature which must be acknowledged in studying political socialization.
Not so long ago, political scientists were enthusiastically proclaiming that political socialization was a growth stock. But interest in the subfield has slackened, and the bull market has turned bearish. This article argues that a central cause of this recent scholarly neglect is a lack of theoretical confidence. Political socialization has been branded as less worthy of study largely because it is difficult to study and to understand in the absence of an explicit psychological model of learning. A strong theoretical rationale must be developed to return the subfield to its deserved place of priority. Such an endeavor is also justified by the new popularity of the Piagetian model, which is inappropriate for understanding political learning because it emphasizes the foremost growth of logical operations and the individual as the prime motivating force. Another model, that of L. S. Vygotsky, is more useful, incorporating many of Piaget's insights without his unrealistic expectations. I outline Vygotsky's cognitive-developmental model, indicate its applicability to the small body of defensible research on the process of political learning, and conclude with a research agenda suggested by the model.
Movement of party identification, both within and across generations, is increasingly seen as responsive to current policy preferences. We explore cross-generational change using three-wave parent-offspring data. The results strongly support the revised view of a more malleable partisanship influenced by offspring issue preferences. Nonetheless, parents play a major role in determining the initial political direction of their offspring and continue to play a significant though reduced role in the over-time development of their adult children. The results are similar for presidential preferences, though parental influence is entirely channeled through offspring partisanship.
If justification were needed for taking notice once again of the liberal-conservative distinction, it would be sufficient, I suppose, merely to observe that this division has been injected into the politics of Western nations for at least two centuries and, depending on the nature of one's criteria, perhaps longer.
The distinction between the two camps has not always been sharply drawn, of course, for both have been compelled, as a condition for survival, to hold important beliefs in common. Moreover, each has reversed itself on certain issues, such as government regulation of the economy, casting off old views in favor of beliefs previously cherished by the other. Competing for popular support in elections, and succeeding one another in office, the two camps have, of necessity, taken on many values in common, tempering their programs and adjusting their courses to the practical requirements of political contest. In a system like ours, where the parties have functioned less as ideological movements than as brokerage organizations hoping to attract majority support from almost every segment of the electorate, the distinction has tended to be dulled even further, until, at the actual scenes of daily political struggle, it has often faded entirely.
How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the paradigm, which develops the idea that our brains have evolved, in substantial part, for capturing adaptive advantage from within-group competition. We use simulation to address the evolutionary relationship between basic Machiavellian capacities and cooperative dispositions. Results show that selection on such capacities can (1) permit the spread of cooperative dispositions even in cooperation-unfriendly worlds and (2) support transitions to populations with high mean cooperative dispositions. We distinguish between and —the adaptive fit between a design attribute of an animal and its environment. The combination of well-developed Machiavellian intelligence, modest mistrust, and high cooperative dispositions appears to be a rational design for the brains of highly political animals such as ourselves.
In understanding the political development of the pre-adult one of the central questions hinges on the relative and differentiated contributions of various socializing agents. The question undoubtedly proves more difficult as one traverses a range of polities from those where life and learning are almost completely wrapped up in the immediate and extended family to those which are highly complex social organisms and in which the socialization agents are extremely varied. To gain some purchase on the role of one socializing agent in our own complex society, this paper will take up the specific question of the transmission of certain values from parent to child as observed in late adolescence. After noting parent-child relationships for a variety of political values, attention will be turned to some aspects of family structure which conceivably affect the transmission flows.
I. Assessing the Family's Impact: “Foremost among agencies of socialization into politics is the family.” So begins Herbert Hyman's discussion of the sources of political learning. ¹ Hyman explicitly recognized the importance of other agents, but he was neither the first nor the last observer to stress the preeminent position of the family. This viewpoint relies heavily on both the direct and indirect role of the family in shaping the basic orientations of offspring. Whether the child is conscious or unaware of the impact, whether the process is role-modelling or overt transmission, whether the values are political and directly usable or “nonpolitical” but transferable, and whether what is passed on lies in the cognitive or affective realm, it has been argued that the family is of paramount importance.
Society's training of the young, including formal and informal citizenship instruction, character training, and the processes which lead to the development of different personality types, has been seen as an important determinant of adult political behavior by theorists since Plato. In addition, much of our traditional folklore, not to mention much twentieth century literature on personality development, national character, authoritarianism, and electoral preference, points to the utility of examining the individual's early years as one means of illuminating his mature actions.
The present paper considers one aspect of the child's political development—the genesis of his attitudes toward political leaders and the possible ways that this developmental process may affect his adult responses to the formal wielders of power. Citizens' orientations to political authority have a complex and imperfectly understood, but obviously important, bearing on the equilibrium of a body politic.
Two classes of data will be considered: survey literature giving some indication of how adults respond to political leaders, and results of a study of 659 New Haven public and private school children of widely varying socio-economic status, ranging from fourth- through eighth-graders (about nine to thirteen years of age). Paper-and-pencil questionnaires were administered to this sample between January and March of 1958. Findings from these sources are supplemented by a smaller collection of prolonged interviews with individual children and many informal encounters with groups of school children and teachers over a period of about two years.
Past studies have offered diverse estimates of the role of policy preferences, party loyalties, candidate personalities and other factors in voting decisions. Most have postulated recursive (that is, one-way) causal relationships among the central variables.
This study specifies a non-recursive simultaneous equation model and estimates its parameters for the 1972 and 1976 elections using CPS data. The estimates differ markedly from those of simple recursive models. Policy preferences appear to have much more influence on voting decisions, and party attachments much less, than was previously thought. Candidate evaluations strongly affect voters' perceptions of closeness to candidates on policy issues. Party identification may be influenced by short-term factors. Differences between 1972 and 1976 reflect the issue-oriented McGovern candidacy.
Simultaneous equation models offer no cure-all; in the absence of accepted theory many specifications are open to controversy. But future research must take account of reciprocal causal paths.
Corruption is modeled as a game-theoretic micro-level interaction, using an agent-based computer model with heterogeneous agents. Emergent macro-level behaviors differ from traditional literature on the subject, and suggest an endogenous social transition from a high-corruption state to a low-corruption state is possible. The paper explores the conditions necessary for such a transition, as well as related dynamics in the model.
Children increasingly resemble their parents in cognitive abilities from infancy through adolescence. Results obtained from a 20-year longitudinal adoption study of 245 adopted children and their biological and adoptive parents, as well as 245 matched nonadoptive (control) parents and offspring, show that this increasing resemblance is due to genetic factors. Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle childhood or adolescence. In contrast, during childhood and adolescence, adopted children become more like their biological parents, and to the same degree as children and parents in control families. Although these results were strongest for general cognitive ability and verbal ability, similar results were found for other specific cognitive abilities - spatial ability, speed of processing, and recognition memory. These findings indicate that, within this population, genes that stably affect cognitive abilities in adulthood do not all come into play until adolescence and that environmental factors that contribute to cognitive development are not correlated with parents' cognitive ability.
The purpose of this paper is to specify the conditions in which parents influence the party identification and certain issue attitudes of their adolescent children (recent high school graduates). The nature and extent of the parent-adolescent attitude correspondence is first established. Next, parental as opposed to environmental explanations for this correspondence are considered. Finally, the effects on parental influence of family interaction, political interest, issue salience to the parent, and accuracy of the adolescent's perception of the parental attitude are analyzed. Issue salience and perceptual accuracy are found to have strong effects; the other variables have lesser or no effect. When issue salience and perceptual accuracy are held constant in a multivariate equation, the beta weights indicating the influence of the parent attitude on the attitude of the adolescent are very similar for all issues and party identification. It is concluded that idiosyncratic variations in successful parent-child attitude transmission can be explained by a general equation.
the recent resurgence of interest in the 5-factor model of personality characteristics appears to reflect a "working consensus" among a substantial number of investigators on the primary importance of the dimensions of (I) Surgency/Extraversion, (II) Agreeableness, (III) Conscientiousness, (IV) Neuroticism, and (V) Openness to Experience/Intellect / focus on earlier writers who have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the 5-factor tradition and on current writers who have been associated with distinctive theoretical perspectives on the 5-factor model
theoretical perspectives on the Big Five (an enduring dispositional view of the Big Five: P. T. Costa and R. R. McCrae, the dyadic interactional view of the Big Five: J. S. Wiggins, the competency view of the Big Five: R. Hogan, the lexical view of the Big Five: L. R. Goldberg) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Although most people are reasonably happy most of the time, some people manage to bounce along above their inherited happiness set points, or capacity for joy. The author, Dr. Lykken, shows how nature
and nurture work to affect our sense of well-being and how, within wide limits, people
can determine their own happiness. Many of the things we suppose will make us happy are illusory, while the things that really work turn out to be simple and accessible to nearly everyone. He shows that people with high IQs are no happier than the rest of us, nor are the rich, the famous, or the social elites. Winning the lottery may make us happier for a month or 2, but soon we're back at the level of contentment where we were before the big event. Dr. Lykken suggests that one way to extract the most enjoyment from life is to become an epicure of experience, by learning to think about and savor each pleasurable occurrence. He also offers practical ideas on how to be happy at work and in retirement; how to have happy babies, children, and families; and, especially, how to be happy in marriage. Finally, he explains how to forestall the depredations of those
happiness thieves: depression, fear, and irritability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Subjects with some religious affiliation are more prejudiced than those without affiliation, but no significant difference between Protestants and Catholics. There is a low but significant negative relation of intelligence and education to ethnocentrism. Interviews threw light on parental relations, childhood, conception of self, and dynamics and organization of personality. Projective techniques are described and results analyzed. 63 interviews are analyzed qualitatively for prejudice, political and economic ideas, religious ideology and syndromes among high and low scorers. The development of two contrasting cases is given. Criminality and antidemocratic trends in prison inmates and a study of clinic patients complete the investigation of the authoritarian personality pattern. 121 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply
political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human
preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part,
political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of
evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being
genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that
all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolutionary theories stress
that adaptive behavior is frequently characterized by a guarded sort of
cooperation. We describe modern biological theory, offer our own
version of it, discuss new and potentially useful interpretations of
political attitudes and public policies, and present scientific
evidence, drawn from research on autistic individuals and monozygotic
and dizygotic twins, of the startlingly important role genetics plays
in shaping politically relevant attitudes and behaviors. a