Liberal or conservative, it's all in the genes
The phrases "Once a Democrat, always a Democrat" or Once a Republican, always a Republican" may be truer than we realize: our identification with a political party, which we acquire from early childhood socialization often does last a lifetime. According to a Rice political scientist, Americans' political orientation -- liberal or conservative -- is a genetic trait almost as unlikely to change as our eye color.
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It has long been established that our identification with a particular religious denomination is a result of our upbringing, but perhaps less known is that the strength of our religious convictions is almost entirely genetically determined.According to Rice University's John Alford, the same is true regarding our choice of political parties and our political ideology.
In a study to be reported in the May issue of The American Political Science Review, Alford and political science colleagues Carolyn L. Funk, associate professor with Virginia Commonwealth University, and John R. Hibbing, professor at the University of Nebraska, challenge the long-held assumption that our political orientations are shaped by our parents and upbringing. In reality, they argue, our political ideology is determined by our genes.
"Our analysis indicates that our political ideologies are not formed by our parents and family at an early age," Alford says. "The degree to which we are conservative or liberal is largely a function of our genes."
What_is_ determined by parental socialization and individual experiences later in life is a person's political party identification.And because this influence occurs at such an early age in the form of a group identification, it usually lasts a lifetime.
"The chance of someone who is a strong Democrat or Republican changing parties in their lifetime is about six percent," says Alford.
" It does happen, though, with people who are raised to identify with one party, but whose political orientation does not correspond to that party's view on issues.
While contrary to assumptions embedded in traditional political science research, the study's findings help to explain why scholars have discerned little if any impact on the match or mismatch between the political attitudes of parents and their children on a wide variety of issues.
Whether parents are highly autocratic or highly permissive has little effect on their children's political attitudes. The same is true regarding the frequency with which a family discusses politics or the extent to which politics is important to parents. In the current study, Alford and his colleagues found that genetics accounts for approximately half of the difference in political attitudes between parents and offspring. Only eleven percent of the variance is due to early childhood socialization, including parental influence.
"In the case of people's tendencies to possess any political opinions regardless of their ideology," Alford claims, "genetics explains over one third of the variance and their upbringing or parental influence was inconsequential.
To test their assertions about genetics' influence on a person's political ideology, Alford and his colleague borrowed data from standard twin studies pertaining to social attitudes and behaviors.Because social attitudes tested to date have shown a strong heritable component, the researchers hypothesized that political attitudes also would be heavily heritable.
"In standard studies on twins, if a trait is purely genetic, you would expect the similarity between identical twins to be twice the similarity you'd see on average between fraternal twins," Alford explains.
"So, if a trait is produced purely by the environment, such as parental socialization, the likelihood of both identical twins having that same trait is exactly the same for fraternal twins."
The researchers utilized data collected from thousands of respondents in the U.S. and from published results of an Australian study. They compared their responses to the Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory, a survey gauging respondents' level of conservatism based on whether they agree, disagree or are uncertain about a host of items such as property tax, death penalty and disarmament.
Of the 50 items included in the broadest version of the W-P inventory, Alford and his colleagues examined those that had more political than social content. For this set of political attitudes, the researchers found that genetics and early childhood influences accounted for about half of the differences in political attitudes. And, within that half, genetics was approximately twice as influential.
In future studies, the political scientists will attempt to determine whether conservative or liberal political orientations are rooted in specific personality types. "Such a correlation," Alford says, "might further explain why the two sides disagree so fundamentally."
In addition to his analysis of twin studies, Alford's research has focused on small group experiments designed to probe evolutionary explanations of behaviors and predispositions and brain imaging studies of specific brain function in political decision-making.
An associate professor of political science, Alford is a graduate of the University of Houston, where he received an undergraduate degree in political science and a master's in public administration. Alford earned a second master's degree and Ph.D., both in political science, at the University of Iowa.
To learn more about this research, contact Alford at jra@rice.edu or B.J. Almond in the Office of News and Media Relations at balmond@rice.edu .
Research @Rice 2005 |
