We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political.

Abstract:Political involvement varies markedly across people. Traditional explanations for this variation tend to rely on demographic variables and self-reported, overtly political concepts. In this article, we expand the range of possible explanatory variables by hypothesizing that a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions. We measure physiology by computing the degree to which electrodermal activity changes on average when a participant sequentially views a full range of differentially valenced stimuli. Our findings indicate that individuals with higher electrodermal responsiveness are also more likely to participate actively in politics. This relationship holds even after the effects of traditional demographic variables are This is the author's manuscript of the article published in final edited form as:Gruszczynski, M. W., Balzer, A., Jacobs, C. M., Smith, K. B., & Hibbing, J. R. (2013). The Physiology of Political Participation. Political Behavior, 35(1), 135-152. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9197-x taken into account, suggesting that physiological responsiveness independently contributes to a fuller understanding of the underlying sources of variation in political involvement.The discipline of political science has long viewed the normative standard of rationality as the key to understanding participation in the democratic sphere (see Downs 1957; Aristotle 2010) and an important element of rationality is typically assumed to be conscious awareness.People are presumed to be aware of the "rational" reasons for their political choices. Relatedly, citizens making decisions in a democratic society have traditionally been expected to eschew their base emotional predispositions-fear, anger, happiness, and others-in favor of using the rationality made possible by their frontal cortex (Neblo 2007). For example, it is often assumed that people will participate in politics only when they believe (note the presumption of conscious thought) it is worth their time (Downs 1957). This line of thinking is so prevalent historically that the founders themselves argued for building institutions capable of protecting political society against the foibles of an emotional citizenry (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1788). The conceit seems to be that if people are neither visibly displaying emotion nor consciously feeling the effects of emotion, politics will be the better for it.These normative standards frequently do not correspond to empirical observations, as an ever-increasing body of research demonstrates that the supposed battle between emotion and rationality constitutes a false dichotomy (see Hanoch 2002;McDermott 2004). Spezio and Adolphs (2007) note that the emotional and cognitive portions of the brain, rather than working against one another, cooperate in a system resembling a feedforward network, with emotional appraisal acting as an information processer, passing some information upward for cognitive elaboration while other information is never passed on ...

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