Column: Can Genetics Help Explain Political Behavior?

By: Asya Bülbül, ESSGN doctoral candidate at Uppsala university
All views expressed are those of the author.

As political science has matured, it has repeatedly absorbed tools and concepts from neighboring disciplines such as economics, sociology, and psychology. A relatively newer and more controversial frontier is the attempt to incorporate genetics into the study of political behavior.

The basic motivation is straightforward: if political attitudes and behaviors are expressed through brains, bodies, and social interactions, and those biological systems are partly shaped by inherited variation, then political science may gain explanatory traction by treating genetic differences as one input into political outcomes. This does not imply that genes determine ideology or voting decisions. Rather, it suggests that biology may contribute to the psychological traits and cognitive tendencies through which people experience politics.

Levels of Explanation in Political Behavior
One way to make sense of genetics in political science is to think in terms of levels of analysis, analogous to the familiar ladder from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology and then to the social sciences. For political science, a stylized stack might look like this:

• Genetics (inherited variation influencing biological development)
• Neurobiology and physiology (brain and body systems)
• Psychology (traits, emotions, cognition, motivation)
• Political behavior (participation, ideology, partisanship, voting)
• Institutions and environments (electoral rules, media systems, economic shocks, social networks)

The key point is not that “lower” levels replace “higher” levels, but that they may sometimes inform them. Understanding why individuals differ is one of the central questions that genetics may help illuminate. This way of thinking also connects to the philosophical idea of reductionism. In the philosophy of science, reductionism refers to the possibility that higher-level phenomena can sometimes be explained in terms of lower-level processes, or at least linked to them.

Two Anti-Reductionist Warnings
1) Ontological Anti-Reductionism (Mostly a Dead End)
A strong anti-materialist view would say political beliefs are purely social and insulated from biology. That position is difficult to defend if political behavior is produced by organisms with stable biological differences. Political science does not need to deny biology in order to preserve its core insights; it simply needs to recognize that explanations operate at multiple levels.

2) Empirical Anti-Reductionism (The Real Constraint)
Even if genetic linkages exist, they may be:

• too small in effect to matter for prediction at the level of elections or societies,
• or too distant from political concepts to be directly useful.

This is a pragmatic issue. However, a growing body of research suggests that measurable effects do exist. Thus, the challenge is not whether any effect exists, but whether those effects meaningfully improve political theory.

Existing Evidence
Research on genetics and political behavior began with a widely cited twin study by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing (2005), which suggested that identical twins tend to be more similar in their political attitudes than fraternal twins. That basic pattern is consistent with the idea that inherited differences may contribute—to some degree—to how people develop political views.
Since then, scholars have tested this idea using several different research designs. Twin studies remain common (Bates et al. 2016; Dawes et al. 2014; Ojeda 2016; Settle, Dawes, and Fowler 2009), but researchers have also used extended family data (Hatemi et al. 2010), adoption studies that help separate pre-birth influences from the family environment (Cesarini, Johannesson, and Oskarsson 2014; Oskarsson et al. 2022), and more recently genetic approaches that use many genetic markers at once, such as polygenic scores (Dawes et al. 2021; Ahlskog 2024; Ahlskog 2023; Pettersson 2023).

Taken together, these studies do not imply that genes directly “cause” specific political beliefs. Instead, they suggest a more limited claim: genetic differences can be one factor that helps explain why people differ in traits like education, personality, or risk tolerance—and those traits can influence political participation and attitudes. Importantly, the genetic effects that appear in these studies are usually small (although comparable in size to other common environmental predictors), and they often vary depending on context, institutions, and how political outcomes are measured.

The Central Payoff: Theory Revision Through Cross-Level Alignment
The major benefit of importing genetics is not adding a new variable for its own sake. It is forcing political science to improve and refine its own concepts. For instance, chemists and biologists originally thought about the pancreas in different ways. Chemists studied substances like insulin and digestive enzymes and saw them as completely separate chemicals with different properties. Biologists, however, focused on the body and thought of the pancreas as one single organ that performed its functions. Biochemistry helped link these views by changing how biologists defined the pancreas. Instead of treating it as one “unit,” scientists began to describe it as two different systems inside the same organ: acinar cells, which make digestive enzymes, and the islets of Langerhans, which make insulin (Glimcher 2010). This change wasn’t just about better labels. It improved biology (the higher level) itself, because the updated definition made it easier to explain and predict real problems.

In a similar vein, genetics can pressure-test political science claims such as:

• “Preferences are entirely learned” versus “Preferences are partly dispositional,”
• “Political participation is informational” versus “Political participation is partly inherited.”

In other words, genetics is valuable when it helps political science re-categorize or discipline its explanatory objects, especially where existing theories treat important sources of variation as unexplained noise.

Final Thoughts
Politics is shaped by many forces: history, culture, institutions, psychology, and, to some degree, biology. Ignoring any one of these completely can leave our explanations incomplete. The most productive approach is not to argue that politics is “all social” or “all biological,” but to recognize that human behavior reflects an interaction between the two. Scientific progress usually comes from integrating levels of explanation, not replacing one with another. Genetics is unlikely to revolutionize political science overnight. But, used carefully, it may help refine our theories of behavior and deepen our understanding of why individuals respond differently to the same political world.

References

• Ahlskog, Rafael (2023). “Extraversion Probably Does Not Cause Political Participation. Evidence from Two Genetically Informed Designs”. In: Political Psychology 44.6, pp. 1301–1318.
• — (2024). “Class, Genes, and Rationality: A Gene–Environment Interaction Approach to Ideology”. In: Political Psychology, pops.13023.
• Alford, John R., Carolyn L. Funk, and John R. Hibbing (2005). “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?” In: American Political Science Review 99.2, pp. 153–167.
• Bates, Timothy C. et al. (2016). “When Does Socioeconomic Status (SES) Moderate the Heritability of IQ? No Evidence for g × SES Interaction for IQ in a Representative Sample of 1176 Australian Adolescent Twin Pairs”. In: Intelligence 56, pp. 10–15.
• Cesarini, David, Magnus Johannesson, and Sven Oskarsson (2014). “Pre-Birth Factors, Post- Birth Factors, and Voting: Evidence from Swedish Adoption Data”. In: American Political Science Review 108.1, pp. 71–87.
• Dawes, Christopher et al. (2014). “The Relationship between Genes, Psychological Traits, and Political Participation”. In: American Journal of Political Science 58.4, pp. 888– 903.
• Dawes, Christopher T. et al. (2021). “A Polygenic Score for Educational Attainment Partially Predicts Voter Turnout”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.50, e2022715118.
• Glimcher, Paul W. (2010). Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis.
• Hatemi, Peter K. et al. (2010). “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”. In: American Journal of Political Science 54.3, pp. 798–814.
• Ojeda, Christopher (2016). “The Effect of 9/11 on the Heritability of Political Trust”. In: Political Psychology 37.1, pp. 73–88.
• Oskarsson, Sven et al. (2022). “Persistent Inequalities: The Origins of Intergenerational Associations in Voter Turnout”. In: The Journal of Politics 84.3, pp. 1337–1352.
• Pettersson, Oskar (2025). Raising the Floor? Genetic Influences on Educational Attainment Through the Lens of the Evolving Swedish Welfare State. In: Behavior Genetics 55, pp. 199-214.
• Settle, Jaime E., Christopher T. Dawes, and James H. Fowler (2009). “The Heritability of Partisan Attachment”. In: Political Research Quarterly 62.3, pp. 601–613.