The Relationship between Genes, Personality Traits, and Political Interest

Abstract

Political interest is one of the strongest predictors of individual political engagement, but little is known about the origins of this political orientation. The goal of this paper is to clarify the role that biological and psychological factors play in the formation of political interest. A series of recent studies in genetics have illustrated that political interest is heritable, and a series of recent studies in political science and psychology have demonstrated that personality traits, many of which are heritable, are related to political interest. In this paper, we make a number of contributions to the literature: (1) we replicate previous analyses showing that political interest and personality traits are heritable, (2) we demonstrate that personality traits are related to interest, and (3) we estimate the extent to which genetic factors account for the correlation between personality traits and political interest. Using two datasets on twins, we find evidence that genetic factors account for a large amount of the correlation between political interest and personality traits. This study provides a more nuanced picture of the biological and psychological bases of political orientations.

New evidence on the link between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement

“…The only Big Five trait that was an important correlate of political engagement and interest in our study was openness, which has been a fairly consistent predictor of interest in politics and participation across different studies. 14,25,31 Our results regarding the genetic overlap between openness and political interest are nearly identical to previous estimates.…”

“…Finally, we note that while Weinschenk and Dawes 25 found that extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism were moderately correlated with political interest in U.S. samples, we find that among the Big Five traits, only openness shows a moderate correlation with political interest in our sample. Since the correlations for all of the psychological traits besides cognitive ability and openness are small in magnitude (and many of them are not statistically significant), making it difficult to decompose their covariance without an extremely large sample, we exclude them from the bivariate analysis.…”

“…Our political interest heritability estimate of 0.50 is close to the estimates presented in a number of recent studies. 9,23,25,29 The point estimates for common environment are zero for both measures, and neither estimate is significantly different from zero. This is consistent with earlier studies.…”

“…First, we use a new data set, the TwinLife Study, which contains information on a large sample of German twins, to reexamine some of the results that have been reported in the literature to date. 23,25…”

Communication and the Shaping of Human Personality; Deconstructing the Nature/Nurture Debate in Light of the Menace of Street Children in Nigeria

“…Again, the answer is no. The view that genes play a significant role in human personality is held by Weinschenk & Dawes (2017) in their study of the relationship between genes, personality traits, and political interest which affirmed that genetic factors account for substantial correlation between personality traits and interest in politics. The pervasive influence of the human gene on behaviour does not indicate that a single or several genes can make us react in a specific way to an external stimulus or that behaviour can be inherited.…”