John R Alford
Biographic Data
| ID | 1120585 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John R Alford |
| GIVEN NAMES | John R |
| FAMILY NAME | Alford |
| SIGNATURE | ALFORD J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1866-8271 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1239 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Political attitudes vary with detection of androstenone
Building on a growing body of research suggesting that political attitudes are part of broader individual and biological orientations, we test whether the detection of the hormone androstenone is predictive of political attitudes. The particular social chemical analyzed in this study is androstenone, a nonandrogenic steroid found in the sweat and saliva of many mammals, including humans. A primary reason for scholarly interest in odor detection i…
Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology
Originally developed to explain cultural variation in moral judgments, moral foundations theory (MFT) has become widely adopted as a theory of political ideology. MFT posits that political attitudes are rooted in instinctual evaluations generated by innate psychological modules evolved to solve social dilemmas. If this is correct, moral foundations must be relatively stable dispositional traits, changes in moral foundations should systematically …
Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology
Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which a…
Predisposed
Buried in many people and operating largely outside the realm of conscious thought are forces inclining us toward liberal or conservative political convictions. Our biology predisposes us to see and understand the world in different ways, not always reason and the careful consideration of facts. These predispositions are in turn responsible for a significant portion of the political and ideological conflict that marks human history. With verve an…
Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations
This article reports results from the first twin study of adults in the United States that focuses exclusively and comprehensively on political traits. These data allow us to test whether a common set of genetic and environmental influences act upon a broad variety of values, personality traits, and political attitudes. In short, it allows us to empirically investigate whether there are a core set of predispositions that form the basis of our pol…
Biology, Ideology, and Epistemology: How Do We Know Political Attitudes Are Inherited and Why Should We Care
Evidence that political attitudes and behavior are in part biologically and even genetically instantiated is much discussed in political science of late. Yet the classic twin design, a primary source of evidence on this matter, has been criticized for being biased toward finding genetic influence. In this article, we employ a new data source to test empirically the alternative, exclusively environmental, explanations for ideological similarities …
Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations
Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts--including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and esse…
The Politics of Mate Choice
Recent research has found a surprising degree of homogeneity in the personal political communication network of individuals but this work has focused largely on the tendency to sort into likeminded social, workplace, and residential political contexts. We extend this line of research into one of the most fundamental and consequential of political interactions—that between sexual mates. Using data on thousands of spouse pairs in the United States,…
Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology
In this paper, we trace the route by which genetics could ultimately connect to issue attitudes and suggest that central to this connection are chronic dispositional preferences for mass‐scale social rules, order, and conduct—what we label political ideology. The need to resolve bedrock social dilemmas concerning such matters as leadership style, protection from outgroups, and the degree to which norms of conduct are malleable, is present in any …
Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs
Variance components estimates of political and social attitudes suggest a substantial level of genetic influence, but the results have been challenged because they rely on data from twins only. In this analysis, we include responses from parents and nontwin full siblings of twins, account for measurement error by using a panel design, and estimate genetic and environmental variance by maximum‐likelihood structural equation modeling. By doing so, …
Is There a “Party” in Your Genes
Utilizing quantitative genetic models, the authors examine the sources of party identification and the intensity of that identification. The results indicate genes exert little, if any, influence on party identification, directly or indirectly through covariates. However, we find that genes appear to play a pivotal role in shaping the strength of an individual’s party identification. Together with recent examinations of political attitudes and vo…
Twin Studies, Molecular Genetics, Politics, and Tolerance: A Response to Beckwith and Morris
Beckwith and Morris raise concerns about the value of twin studies for understanding the role of genetics in complex human behavior, but virtually all of their concerns have been raised and rebutted before. When it comes to the equal environments assumption (EEA), the best approach is to test for and control possible violations of the EEA on heritability estimates rather than merely rejecting all empirical evidence because of the possibility of E…
Beyond Liberals and Conservatives to Political Genotypes and Phenotypes
In the past, most political scientists have been oblivious to the growing empirical evidence challenging environmental determinism. Professor Charney, apparently as a result of the fact that genes and the environment interact in a complex fashion, advocates that this passive unawareness be replaced by active denial. Science, however, does not advance by avoiding important relationships merely because they are complicated and, fortunately, science…
The New Empirical Biopolitics
Political science traditionally has either ignored biology in favor of purely environmental explanations for political phenomena or merely ruminated about the likely role of biology, leaving data-based research on biopolitics in dangerously short supply. Currently, attention to the apparent genetic basis for political and social orientations holds the greatest promise of advancing empirical biopolitics. Thus, in this essay, we orient behavior gen…
Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments
Are political liberals generous? Are political conservatives conscientious? Are generous people personally agreeable? Research in behavioral genetics and elsewhere increasingly indicates a biological basis for the manner in which people behave in personal, interpersonal, and political situations, but this biological basis does not mean behavior in these three very different contexts is correlated. In this article, using an original data set obtai…
Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted
We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics-specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins-we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicat…
Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators
How might it be accomplished?Our aim in this article is to identify the situations that facilitate people's acceptance of unpalatable binding decisions that have been made by others; in other words, that facilitate acceptance of the type of decisions people commonly perceive to be made by representative government in a complex, heterogeneous society such as the United States.Since it is unrealistic to expect that legitimacy could be bought by mag…
The Origin of Politics: An Evolutionary Theory of Political Behavior
In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part, political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolu…
Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators
Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that sam…
Overdraft: The Political Cost of Congressional Malfeasance
This research focuses on the aggregate effects of the House Banking Scandal on the 1992 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. While many commentators felt the scandal would transform the House of Representatives through massive displacement of members, we argue that the literature on scandals in Congress should have made us more cautious in our prognostications. We focus on three different stages of reelection for incumbents and conclu…
The 1990 Congressional Election Results and the Fallacy That They Embodied an Anti-Incumbent Mood
Given all the hype in 1990 about an “anti-incumbent” mood that was supposed to have swept the electorate, it is not too surprising that immediately after the congressional elections of that year most pundits claimed to see clear evidence of this mood in the results. But it is surprising that now, as we approach the next election day, more relaxed and objective analysis has not corrected this erroneous view of what actually transpired in 1990. Thu…
Constituency Population and Representation in the U. S. Senate
Using data from the 1988 NES Senate Election Study, we address the influence of the size of constituency population on constituents' expectations of, perceptions of, and support for elected officials. The Senate, with its wide variation in constituency population, provides the perfect opportunity to study these effects, and the 1988 Senate Election Study is an appropriate data source. Our analysis indicates that constituents in lightly populated …
Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe
The authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe have played an active role in the fertility regulation of their citizenry. This article examines government attempts to encourage population growth in Eastern Europe with particular attention given to Romania Hungary and the German Democratic Republic. Governments attempting to influence reproductive behavior can utilize 3 types of policies--the moral-propagandistic the economic and the legal-admini…
Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe
Jerome S. Legge, Jr., John R. Alford, Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 709-728
Economic Conditions and Individual Vote in the Federal Republic of Germany
Analyses of the effects of economic perceptions on voting behavior have been mostly confined to the United States. This study utilizes data gathered from the 1972, 1976, and 1980 German national elections in order to investigate the effects of the economy on the vote. The authors find support for the hypothesis that economic voting in the Federal Republic is more accurately described in terms of a "sociotropic" or "national assessments" explanati…
Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted
We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics-specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins-we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicat…
The Electoral Impact of Economic Conditions: Who is Held Responsible
A variety of recent research has dealt with the impact of economic conditions on congressional elections. The underlying assumption of this research has been that the effects of economic fluctuations are distributed evenly across members of the president's party. By focusing on subgroups of congressional candidates, we demonstrate that the importance of economic conditions varies widely. Specifically, we show that the aggregate electoral margins …
The Politics of Mate Choice
Recent research has found a surprising degree of homogeneity in the personal political communication network of individuals but this work has focused largely on the tendency to sort into likeminded social, workplace, and residential political contexts. We extend this line of research into one of the most fundamental and consequential of political interactions—that between sexual mates. Using data on thousands of spouse pairs in the United States,…
Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators
Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that sam…
Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs
Variance components estimates of political and social attitudes suggest a substantial level of genetic influence, but the results have been challenged because they rely on data from twins only. In this analysis, we include responses from parents and nontwin full siblings of twins, account for measurement error by using a panel design, and estimate genetic and environmental variance by maximum‐likelihood structural equation modeling. By doing so, …
Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology
Originally developed to explain cultural variation in moral judgments, moral foundations theory (MFT) has become widely adopted as a theory of political ideology. MFT posits that political attitudes are rooted in instinctual evaluations generated by innate psychological modules evolved to solve social dilemmas. If this is correct, moral foundations must be relatively stable dispositional traits, changes in moral foundations should systematically …
Increased Incumbency Advantage in the House
The Origin of Politics: An Evolutionary Theory of Political Behavior
In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part, political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolu…
Is There a “Party” in Your Genes
Utilizing quantitative genetic models, the authors examine the sources of party identification and the intensity of that identification. The results indicate genes exert little, if any, influence on party identification, directly or indirectly through covariates. However, we find that genes appear to play a pivotal role in shaping the strength of an individual’s party identification. Together with recent examinations of political attitudes and vo…
Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology
In this paper, we trace the route by which genetics could ultimately connect to issue attitudes and suggest that central to this connection are chronic dispositional preferences for mass‐scale social rules, order, and conduct—what we label political ideology. The need to resolve bedrock social dilemmas concerning such matters as leadership style, protection from outgroups, and the degree to which norms of conduct are malleable, is present in any …
Can Government Regulate Safety? The Coal Mine Example
With the 1970 passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), federal regulation reached the American workplace. Given the newness of the legislation, any firm conclusion on its effectiveness seems premature. However, there is ample evidence on federal safety regulation of a specific workplace: the coal mine. The federal government has been directly involved in coal mining safety for over 35 years, operating under three major pieces of …
Biology, Ideology, and Epistemology: How Do We Know Political Attitudes Are Inherited and Why Should We Care
Evidence that political attitudes and behavior are in part biologically and even genetically instantiated is much discussed in political science of late. Yet the classic twin design, a primary source of evidence on this matter, has been criticized for being biased toward finding genetic influence. In this article, we employ a new data source to test empirically the alternative, exclusively environmental, explanations for ideological similarities …
Television Markets and Congressional Elections
This research examines the effects of the relative congruence of congressional districts and television markets on congressional elections. We consider propositions concerning the voters' information about and evaluations of the candidates, drawing on data from the U.S. Census, the Nielsen Station Index, and the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The findings indicate that market/district congruence increases voter information about, exposure to, …
Overdraft: The Political Cost of Congressional Malfeasance
This research focuses on the aggregate effects of the House Banking Scandal on the 1992 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. While many commentators felt the scandal would transform the House of Representatives through massive displacement of members, we argue that the literature on scandals in Congress should have made us more cautious in our prognostications. We focus on three different stages of reelection for incumbents and conclu…
Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations
This article reports results from the first twin study of adults in the United States that focuses exclusively and comprehensively on political traits. These data allow us to test whether a common set of genetic and environmental influences act upon a broad variety of values, personality traits, and political attitudes. In short, it allows us to empirically investigate whether there are a core set of predispositions that form the basis of our pol…
Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments
Are political liberals generous? Are political conservatives conscientious? Are generous people personally agreeable? Research in behavioral genetics and elsewhere increasingly indicates a biological basis for the manner in which people behave in personal, interpersonal, and political situations, but this biological basis does not mean behavior in these three very different contexts is correlated. In this article, using an original data set obtai…
Constituency Population and Representation in the U. S. Senate
Using data from the 1988 NES Senate Election Study, we address the influence of the size of constituency population on constituents' expectations of, perceptions of, and support for elected officials. The Senate, with its wide variation in constituency population, provides the perfect opportunity to study these effects, and the 1988 Senate Election Study is an appropriate data source. Our analysis indicates that constituents in lightly populated …
Beyond Liberals and Conservatives to Political Genotypes and Phenotypes
In the past, most political scientists have been oblivious to the growing empirical evidence challenging environmental determinism. Professor Charney, apparently as a result of the fact that genes and the environment interact in a complex fashion, advocates that this passive unawareness be replaced by active denial. Science, however, does not advance by avoiding important relationships merely because they are complicated and, fortunately, science…
The New Empirical Biopolitics
Political science traditionally has either ignored biology in favor of purely environmental explanations for political phenomena or merely ruminated about the likely role of biology, leaving data-based research on biopolitics in dangerously short supply. Currently, attention to the apparent genetic basis for political and social orientations holds the greatest promise of advancing empirical biopolitics. Thus, in this essay, we orient behavior gen…
Economic Conditions and the Forgotten Side of Congress: A Foray into US Senate Elections
The 1980 American national elections produced two highly salient and widely-discussed departures from past tradition. For the first time in forty-eight years, a previously elected incumbent president seeking re-election was defeated. At the same time the Republicans, the traditional minority party, seized control of the upper house. Both events figured heavily in discussions of the American electorate's supposed turn to the right. Much of this em…
Economic Conditions and Individual Vote in the Federal Republic of Germany
Analyses of the effects of economic perceptions on voting behavior have been mostly confined to the United States. This study utilizes data gathered from the 1972, 1976, and 1980 German national elections in order to investigate the effects of the economy on the vote. The authors find support for the hypothesis that economic voting in the Federal Republic is more accurately described in terms of a "sociotropic" or "national assessments" explanati…
Twin Studies, Molecular Genetics, Politics, and Tolerance: A Response to Beckwith and Morris
Beckwith and Morris raise concerns about the value of twin studies for understanding the role of genetics in complex human behavior, but virtually all of their concerns have been raised and rebutted before. When it comes to the equal environments assumption (EEA), the best approach is to test for and control possible violations of the EEA on heritability estimates rather than merely rejecting all empirical evidence because of the possibility of E…
Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe
The authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe have played an active role in the fertility regulation of their citizenry. This article examines government attempts to encourage population growth in Eastern Europe with particular attention given to Romania Hungary and the German Democratic Republic. Governments attempting to influence reproductive behavior can utilize 3 types of policies--the moral-propagandistic the economic and the legal-admini…
Political attitudes vary with detection of androstenone
Building on a growing body of research suggesting that political attitudes are part of broader individual and biological orientations, we test whether the detection of the hormone androstenone is predictive of political attitudes. The particular social chemical analyzed in this study is androstenone, a nonandrogenic steroid found in the sweat and saliva of many mammals, including humans. A primary reason for scholarly interest in odor detection i…
The 1990 Congressional Election Results and the Fallacy That They Embodied an Anti-Incumbent Mood
Given all the hype in 1990 about an “anti-incumbent” mood that was supposed to have swept the electorate, it is not too surprising that immediately after the congressional elections of that year most pundits claimed to see clear evidence of this mood in the results. But it is surprising that now, as we approach the next election day, more relaxed and objective analysis has not corrected this erroneous view of what actually transpired in 1990. Thu…
Can Government Regulate Safety? The Coal Mine Example
With the 1970 passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), federal regulation reached the American workplace. Given the newness of the legislation, any firm conclusion on its effectiveness seems premature. However, there is ample evidence on federal safety regulation of a specific workplace: the coal mine. The federal government has been directly involved in coal mining safety for over 35 years, operating under three major pieces of …
Increased Incumbency Advantage in the House
The Electoral Impact of Economic Conditions: Who is Held Responsible
A variety of recent research has dealt with the impact of economic conditions on congressional elections. The underlying assumption of this research has been that the effects of economic fluctuations are distributed evenly across members of the president's party. By focusing on subgroups of congressional candidates, we demonstrate that the importance of economic conditions varies widely. Specifically, we show that the aggregate electoral margins …
Legislative studies quarterly
Economic Conditions and the Forgotten Side of Congress: A Foray into US Senate Elections
The 1980 American national elections produced two highly salient and widely-discussed departures from past tradition. For the first time in forty-eight years, a previously elected incumbent president seeking re-election was defeated. At the same time the Republicans, the traditional minority party, seized control of the upper house. Both events figured heavily in discussions of the American electorate's supposed turn to the right. Much of this em…
Economic Conditions and Individual Vote in the Federal Republic of Germany
Analyses of the effects of economic perceptions on voting behavior have been mostly confined to the United States. This study utilizes data gathered from the 1972, 1976, and 1980 German national elections in order to investigate the effects of the economy on the vote. The authors find support for the hypothesis that economic voting in the Federal Republic is more accurately described in terms of a "sociotropic" or "national assessments" explanati…
Television Markets and Congressional Elections
This research examines the effects of the relative congruence of congressional districts and television markets on congressional elections. We consider propositions concerning the voters' information about and evaluations of the candidates, drawing on data from the U.S. Census, the Nielsen Station Index, and the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The findings indicate that market/district congruence increases voter information about, exposure to, …
Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe
The authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe have played an active role in the fertility regulation of their citizenry. This article examines government attempts to encourage population growth in Eastern Europe with particular attention given to Romania Hungary and the German Democratic Republic. Governments attempting to influence reproductive behavior can utilize 3 types of policies--the moral-propagandistic the economic and the legal-admini…
Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe
Jerome S. Legge, Jr., John R. Alford, Can Government Regulate Fertility? An Assessment of Pronatalist Policy in Eastern Europe, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 709-728
Constituency Population and Representation in the U. S. Senate
Using data from the 1988 NES Senate Election Study, we address the influence of the size of constituency population on constituents' expectations of, perceptions of, and support for elected officials. The Senate, with its wide variation in constituency population, provides the perfect opportunity to study these effects, and the 1988 Senate Election Study is an appropriate data source. Our analysis indicates that constituents in lightly populated …
The 1990 Congressional Election Results and the Fallacy That They Embodied an Anti-Incumbent Mood
Given all the hype in 1990 about an “anti-incumbent” mood that was supposed to have swept the electorate, it is not too surprising that immediately after the congressional elections of that year most pundits claimed to see clear evidence of this mood in the results. But it is surprising that now, as we approach the next election day, more relaxed and objective analysis has not corrected this erroneous view of what actually transpired in 1990. Thu…
Overdraft: The Political Cost of Congressional Malfeasance
This research focuses on the aggregate effects of the House Banking Scandal on the 1992 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. While many commentators felt the scandal would transform the House of Representatives through massive displacement of members, we argue that the literature on scandals in Congress should have made us more cautious in our prognostications. We focus on three different stages of reelection for incumbents and conclu…
Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators
How might it be accomplished?Our aim in this article is to identify the situations that facilitate people's acceptance of unpalatable binding decisions that have been made by others; in other words, that facilitate acceptance of the type of decisions people commonly perceive to be made by representative government in a complex, heterogeneous society such as the United States.Since it is unrealistic to expect that legitimacy could be bought by mag…
The Origin of Politics: An Evolutionary Theory of Political Behavior
In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part, political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolu…
Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators
Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that sam…
Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted
We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics-specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins-we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicat…
Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments
Are political liberals generous? Are political conservatives conscientious? Are generous people personally agreeable? Research in behavioral genetics and elsewhere increasingly indicates a biological basis for the manner in which people behave in personal, interpersonal, and political situations, but this biological basis does not mean behavior in these three very different contexts is correlated. In this article, using an original data set obtai…
Twin Studies, Molecular Genetics, Politics, and Tolerance: A Response to Beckwith and Morris
Beckwith and Morris raise concerns about the value of twin studies for understanding the role of genetics in complex human behavior, but virtually all of their concerns have been raised and rebutted before. When it comes to the equal environments assumption (EEA), the best approach is to test for and control possible violations of the EEA on heritability estimates rather than merely rejecting all empirical evidence because of the possibility of E…
Beyond Liberals and Conservatives to Political Genotypes and Phenotypes
In the past, most political scientists have been oblivious to the growing empirical evidence challenging environmental determinism. Professor Charney, apparently as a result of the fact that genes and the environment interact in a complex fashion, advocates that this passive unawareness be replaced by active denial. Science, however, does not advance by avoiding important relationships merely because they are complicated and, fortunately, science…
The New Empirical Biopolitics
Political science traditionally has either ignored biology in favor of purely environmental explanations for political phenomena or merely ruminated about the likely role of biology, leaving data-based research on biopolitics in dangerously short supply. Currently, attention to the apparent genetic basis for political and social orientations holds the greatest promise of advancing empirical biopolitics. Thus, in this essay, we orient behavior gen…
Is There a “Party” in Your Genes
Utilizing quantitative genetic models, the authors examine the sources of party identification and the intensity of that identification. The results indicate genes exert little, if any, influence on party identification, directly or indirectly through covariates. However, we find that genes appear to play a pivotal role in shaping the strength of an individual’s party identification. Together with recent examinations of political attitudes and vo…
Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs
Variance components estimates of political and social attitudes suggest a substantial level of genetic influence, but the results have been challenged because they rely on data from twins only. In this analysis, we include responses from parents and nontwin full siblings of twins, account for measurement error by using a panel design, and estimate genetic and environmental variance by maximum‐likelihood structural equation modeling. By doing so, …
Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations
Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts--including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and esse…
The Politics of Mate Choice
Recent research has found a surprising degree of homogeneity in the personal political communication network of individuals but this work has focused largely on the tendency to sort into likeminded social, workplace, and residential political contexts. We extend this line of research into one of the most fundamental and consequential of political interactions—that between sexual mates. Using data on thousands of spouse pairs in the United States,…
Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology
In this paper, we trace the route by which genetics could ultimately connect to issue attitudes and suggest that central to this connection are chronic dispositional preferences for mass‐scale social rules, order, and conduct—what we label political ideology. The need to resolve bedrock social dilemmas concerning such matters as leadership style, protection from outgroups, and the degree to which norms of conduct are malleable, is present in any …
Political science (29 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (11 works) · Sociology (11 works)