Genopolitics

Genopolitics is the study of the genetic basis of political behavior and attitudes. It combines behavior genetics, psychology, and political science and it is closely related to the emerging fields of neuropolitics (the study of the neural basis of political behavior and attitudes) and political physiology (the study of biophysical correlates of political attitudes and behavior).

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the increase in academicians' recognition of and engagement in genopolitics as a discrete field of study, and New York Times Magazine included genopolitics in its "Eighth Annual Year in Ideas," noting that the term was originally coined by James Fowler.

Psychologists and behavior geneticists began using twin studies in the 1980s to study variation in social attitudes, and these studies suggested that both genes and environment played a role. In particular, Nick Martin and his colleagues published an influential twin study of social attitudes in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986.

However, this early work did not specifically analyze whether or not political orientations were heritable, and political scientists remained mostly unaware of the heritability of social attitudes until 2005. In that year, the American Political Science Review published a reanalysis of political questions on Martin's social attitude survey of twins in that the suggested liberal and conservative ideology is heritable. The article sparked considerable debate between critics, the authors and their defenders.

Initial twin studies suggested that predispositions toward espousal of certain political ideas are heritable, but they said little about political behavior (patterns of voting and/or activism) or predispositions toward it. A 2008 article published in the American Political Science Review matched publicly available voter registration records to a twin registry in Los Angeles, analyzed self-reported voter turnout in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and studied other forms of political participation. In all three cases, both genes and environment contributed significantly to variation in political behavior.

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