From Genes to Politics

Abstract

The 2005 APSR article by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing presented data from the Virginia 30,000 Health & Lifestyle Questionnaire (VA30K), AARP twin studies, and an Australian twin study (ATR) to test their hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors. Political attitudes, they suggested, were expected to be highly heritable and particularly so on issues most correlated with personality. They employed survey responses from the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory to measure political attitudes. To gauge heritability, they utilize the 2:1 genetic ratio between monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. The authors argued that while previous studies in political attitudes had concentrated on measuring the influence of environmental variables, their test added explanatory power by considering heritability (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005).

Citation

Hannagan, R.J. (2011), "From Genes to Politics", Peterson, S.A. and Somit, A. (Ed.) Biology and Politics (Research in Biopolitics, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 139-158. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2042-9940(2011)0000009008