John R. Hibbing

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 indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

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 are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.

The Effects of Charges of Corruption on Voting Behavior in Congressional Elections, 1982-1990

Fifteen years ago, Peters and Welch investigated the effects of corruption charges on the outcomes of U.S. House elections. Their evidence from 1968 to 1978 indicated that charges generally produced a decline in vote share of between 6% and 11%, depending upon the nature of the charge. Morals violations were the most consequential for candidates and conflict of interest the least. Continuing changes in American politics and the nature of campaigns have made corruption charges even more common and, indeed, central to many races. In the following research note, we explore whether the changing nature of congressional campaigns has altered the magnitude of the effects of corruption charges on congressional election outcomes.

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 presidents 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 of incumbents are far more responsive to economic conditions than are those for nonincumbents, and that among in-party incumbents, the relationship is stronger among those with higher levels of tenure. Further, we demonstrate that the previous lack of individual-level confirmation of the aggregate relationship has been due to a failure to control for the contextual effects implied by our conditional aggregate analysis. With controls for district incumbency, we find a relationship between retrospective personal financial condition and vote choice that mirrors the aggregate relationship between retrospective performance of the national economy and congressional vote totals.

Financial Conditions, Gender, and Voting in American National Elections

Previous attempts to locate subgroups of people who are particularly likely to engage in economic voting have examined class differences, levels of political awareness, and salience of economic issues. None of these attempts has shown much difference among groups in their economic voting. This paper explores differences between men and women in their levels and types of economic voting. As predicted, women are considerably less likely than men to cast egocentric economic votes, but are as likely, or perhaps more so, to cast sociotropic economic votes. Since these differences do not appear to be a result of socioeconomic differences between men and women, our findings illuminate an aspect of the gender gap rarely described. Not only are men and women different in many political attitudes, but they also have different ways of using these attitudes to provide a basis for political action.

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 essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that peoples physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations.

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 evolutionary theories stress that adaptive behavior is frequently characterized by a guarded sort of cooperation. We describe modern biological theory, offer our own version of it, discuss new and potentially useful interpretations of political attitudes and public policies, and present scientific evidence, drawn from research on autistic individuals and monozygotic and dizygotic twins, of the startlingly important role genetics plays in shaping politically relevant attitudes and behaviors.

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 vote choice, these findings begin to provide a more complete picture of the source of partisanship and the complex nature of the political phenotype.

Legislative careers: Why and how we should study them

Legislative careers can provide extremely useful information on political institutions, but only if used wisely. For example, we cannot assume that the amount of membership turnover in a legislature is an indication of the degree to which it is institutionalized. The real variable of interest is the (unfortunately much more difficult to quantify) consequences of that turnover. And even if we can determine that the consequences of legislative turnover are minimal, we cannot conclude that the legislature is institutionalized since what appears to be legislative institutionalization may actually be the institutionalization of political parties. More accurate indications of institutionalization would be the tendency of members to want to stay in the body (regardless of whether or not they do), and the length of service in the body required before leadership positions become a real possibility.

The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences

We report evidence that individual-level variation in peoples physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political.