Are Political Attributes Genetic, Independent or Psychological?

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

February 11, 2008

With the race for the US Presidential Election in full swing, politics is once again at the forefront of the minds of the popular masses. But where does one desire to vote liberal or conservative come from? A recent article in New Scientist takes a look at just where they might originate.

The article was inspired by an emerging idea positing that political positions are predominantly determined by ones biology, and not one’s own mind. “These views are deep-seated and built into our brains. Trying to persuade someone not to be liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes. We have to rethink persuasion,” says John Alford, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

But when you look closer at the evidence, it begins to support a slightly different idea.

Right away we can look at studies that opinions from a long list including religion in schools, nuclear power and gay rights, all hale from a genetic background. Whether to vote or stay at home is also believed to be another fault laid on our genes, and most interesting is the fact that liberals and conservatives have different patterns of brain activity.

But again, as Frank Sulloway, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, “there’s no such thing as a gene for disliking hippies.”

Alford first made an impact with this idea when in 2005 he analyzed two decades worth of data garnered from behavioral genetics. Included in this database was a massive database containing the political opinions of 30,000 twins from Virginia (published in American Political Science Reviews).

Within this database of opinions, Alford found that identical twins were more likely than non-identical twins to provide the same answer to a political question. One example is when asked whether property should be taxed, four fifths of the identical twins provided the same answer, while only two thirds of non-identical twins gave the same answer.

From this, Alford drew the assumption that, because identicals have the same genes and non-identicals only share half their genes, that the fact that the identical twins gave the same answer more often than not, there must be a genetic influence.

But referring back to Sulloway again, the point is not that we have political genes, but rather that our politics are influenced by our personalities.

For example, back in 2003, John Jost, a psychologist at New York University, and colleagues surveyed 88 studies, involving more than 20,000 people in 12 countries. Naturally, there are some personality traits which will be linked to politics, but Jost found a lot more connections than expected.

Those who scored highly in the surveys on a scale measuring fear of death were more likely to be conservatives, along with those who were dogmatic. However those who showed an interest in new experiences tended to be liberals. Strangely enough, Jost also found that conservatives prefer simple and unambiguous paintings, poems and songs; maybe that’s why the Idol competitions are always won by the same time of … never mind!

However Jost didn’t attempt to pin this on a political gene, but on existing models of personality. Much of the psychological profession categorize people in to five classes; conscientiousness, openness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. While the latter two had very little to do with political opinions, the first three did showcase a trend towards such links. For example, those classified as conscientiousness often voted Republican (obvious in the US) while those with openness and extroversion often voted Democratic.

All of the major personality traits listed above are indeed inheritable and several studies suggest that the levels of openness in someone’s life are thanks to genetic differences. It is also known that some traits such as being sociable are influenced by the neurotransmitters in the brain. Reasoning then, with knowledge that levels of neurotransmitters are controlled in part by genes, suggests that there is at least a certain level of openness controlled by the genes, and thus, political motivation.

Research such as this that tries to link political leanings to genetic traits will always come under criticism. Studies have been taken to task by scientists and the popular media alike, as in the case of a recent brain-scan study published in the New York Times as an opinion piece. Furthermore, with Jost’s finding, republicans and conservatives begin to come across as stodgy and boring; “I keep expecting Jost to show that conservatism is negatively correlated with penis size,” jokes Evan Charney, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He feels that inherent biases in the make-up of academia, which is dominated by liberals, leads to the “pathologising of conservatism”.

Several commenters’ on the New Scientist article continue the reproach of this research. ‘Joe C’ writes that “If this were true, it would mean that I had all my DNA replaced, as I was a hardcore liberal until I switched and became a true-blue conservative. You’d think having all my genes replaced would leave a mark or something.”

However this expresses the naivety of many people, who believe that they were “hardcore” anything.

The simple fact is that people’s opinions change as they mature and acquire more information. It doesn’t reflect this evidence, rather than focusing us on the reality behind it; that it is down to personality traits.

Regardless, one would question the wisdom of continually attacking the other side. That being said, I am a liberal pinko commi and dislike much of what the conservatives stand for; so maybe there is something I missed in there that I should have learnt from.

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