Your Republican Uncle: In the Genes

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What does political extremism have in common with religious extremism? Both may have a genetic basis…

You’re an inveterate liberal. You didn’t vote for Obama because he was too namby-pamby — if a candidate wasn’t ready to put Bush and Cheney on trial for war crimes, he or she (or he-she) wasn’t getting your vote. Every Christmas, you dread the yearly visit from your Republican uncle. He’s got a Palin 2012 bumper sticker over his Bush-Cheney ‘04 and ‘00 stickers on the SUV he parks behind your Prius every year without fail.

How did you two end up in the same family? In a word: genetics.

Contrary to the stories you see floating around every once in a while, no one’s pinned down a biological basis for what makes one a Republican versus a Democrat. In fact, according to a new study, there’s no evidence whatsoever of a Republican or a Democratic “gene,” so to speak. What this new study does find, however, is something a bit more nuanced: evidence that there’s a genetic basis for partisan intensity, as opposed to affiliation. Science might not yet be able to tell you why you’re a Republican or a Democrat, but it might be able to tell you a little bit about why you are so much of one.

In the delightfully titled, “Is There a ‘Party’ in Your Genes?,” published in Political Research Quarterly, a team of political scientists and behavioral geneticists used a twin study to explore whether there’s a genetic basis for party identification or partisan intensity. While, as mentioned, they didn’t find a genetic component of party ID, they did find that “genes appear to play a pivotal role in shaping the strength of an individual’s party identification.”

Why might this be? Why would there be a genetic basis for one and not the other? Well, the article is about correlation more than it’s about causation, but let’s start with why the authors theorize they didn’t find a party-ID / genetic correlation:

All social behaviors take place in a social context. In the United States, even our “fallible” twin data confirm that the origin of PID [Party ID] is almost exclusively cultural. PID is a component of group identification and in general more socialized than any individual issue position. PID encompasses a social identity that lies far beyond mere political preference. People are raised to be Democrats or Republicans as much as they are raised to be Catholic or Protestant. Indeed, our results for PID are comparable to those from extensive twin data that show the origins of religious affiliation are entirely social and not in the least genetic.

An apt metaphor, perhaps: Politics is like religion. No one’s born Protestant or Catholic or Muslim. They’re raised those things. And they accept or reject their cultural identity based on any number of factors as they grow older. The same, it would appear, is true of political affiliation.

And, just as the intensity of religious belief has been found to have a genetic component, so the intensity of political belief would appear to have a genetic component as well. Why? Perhaps the answer is rather simple: Genetics has a strong influence on whether we’re intense or apathetic people in general:

With regard to political party affiliation, people appear to be influenced by a biological propensity to be intense or apathetic regardless of how they were raised or which party they were raised to support. It appears clear that neither personality (as measured here) nor religious intensity is genetically, or to a large degree environmentally, related to partisan intensity. Whether there is truly a unique genetic influence on the intensity of partisan support remains to be seen. Future analyses are required to determine if intensity of attachment to a political party is truly different from all other types of intensity or group support.

This paper doesn’t deal with this question, but would anyone be surprised to find that the religiously intense were also likely to be fierce partisans? Or to find that the religiously apathetic (not atheists, they’re intense non-believers) were relatively non-partisan?

There’s a reason religious and political extremism go together: They’re two sides of the same intense coin.

While scientists haven’t isolated any specific genes related to political extremism, it’s certainly plausible that they will in the near future. If we’ve already found one gene potentially linked to risky financial behavior, such as accumulating credit card debt, how long before we find a gene linked to why your uncle is such a crazy, intense, unhinged Palin 2012 booster?

HT: Miller-McCune