The genetics of political participation, civic duty, and political efficacy across cultures: Denmark and the United States

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that variation in political attitudes and participation can be attributed to both genes and the environment. This finding raises the question of why genes matter to participation, and by which pathways. Two hypotheses suggest that feelings of civic duty and sense of political efficacy intermediate the relationship between genes and political participation and, thus, that these traits have a common heritable component. If so, how robust are the relationships across cultural contexts? Utilizing two new twin studies on political traits, one in Denmark and one in the United States, we show that the heritability of political participation and political efficacy is remarkably similar across cultures. Moreover, most of the covariation between efficacy and political participation is accounted for by a common underlying genetic component.

Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement

“…Fowler et al [5] found that about half of the variation in turnout over six California primary and general elections could be attributed to genetic factors. Subsequent studies based on European and American samples have examined an even wider variety of non-voting acts of political participation, such as contributing time and money to a political party or candidate, contacting officials regarding issues of concern, running for public office and attending rallies or marches [6,7]. These studies find that between 36 and 60% of the variation in overall participation could be attributed to genetic factors [5][6][7].…”

“…Importantly, many of these antecedents have been demonstrated to have a genetic basis [6,7,39,40]. Based on how these previous findings might differentially affect various forms of engagement according to the typology developed above, we have several expectations regarding the genetic basis of the behaviours we study.…”

“…Our theoretical development of the constituent components of various acts of civic engagement, combined with findings from behavioural genetics that personality traits and cognitive ability are heritable [48] and recent work establishing the heritability of political participation and predispositions [5,6,49], suggest that genetic factors may be related to political participation indirectly though psychological traits. The exact nature of this relationship has not been fully understood, though Verhulst and colleagues find that the phenotypic variables they study explain much more of the additive genetic variance than they do of the environmental variance in a composite index of political attitudes, further supporting the idea of a shared genetic relationship between predispositions and participation [49][50][51].…”

“…Accordingly, greater constraint may predict both greater voting (where senses of duty and norm compliance are central [43]) and greater volunteering (where instrumental social benefits are higher). 6 Likewise, there is growing empirical evidence that cognitive ability is related to political participation [4,[45][46][47]. Thus, given the greater cognitive requirements of voting, we expect measures of genetic variation in cognitive ability to be most strongly related to voting.…”

“…Most recently, the literature has turned towards studying the cognitive and personality factors that contribute towards participation, and the genetic factors underlying those traits. In the past 10 years, there have been several studies examining the contribution of genetics to political participation broadly construed [5][6][7].…”