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New research suggests a portrait of political man that includes not only social influences but also genetic, physiological, neural, and very early developmental influences on adults' attitudes toward and participation in democratic governance. To this point, empirical investigations have been hindered by a dearth of data on the biological concepts that potentially link to the variables of central interest to most political scientists. The present study helps to address this problem by highlighting a new twin study of adults in the U.S. that permits direct tests of the genetic and environmental sources of a wide range of political concepts. Most past findings in the area pertain only to genetic influences on the direction of attitudes or on voter turnout. Here, we test the degree to which genetic and environmental factors influence a much broader array of political variables, including specific types of political involvement, political knowledge, interest in politics, efficacy, political participation, and the extremity and intensity of attitudes on a wide array of issues. These analyses make it possible to look more deeply at the wellsprings of people's connection to their political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political orientations are now known to be heavily influenced by genetic inheritance. Studies on adoptees as well as twins indicate that parent-child correlations long assumed to be the product of active socialization are in actuality more attributable to heritability. This fact being established, the issue becomes the mechanism by which genes help to shape social and especially political views. A logical assumption is that this mechanism involves core personality traits that are connected to political views, but no known core personality trait, including agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, and openness, is consistently related to political views. Both political orientation and personality are heritable but apparently not because one is connected to the other, so the mechanism by which political attitudes are heritable remains a mystery. In this paper, we review the arguments and evidence surrounding these matters and suggest that in addition to the core personality traits documented by psychologists, people also possess a social personality. This social personality entails perceptions of the appropriate way for groups to be organized and for other people to be treated. As such, this social personality is quite distinct from traditional personality and could be the explanation for the heritability of political attitudes. We conclude with suggestions for measuring and applying the concept of social personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Original empirical research conducted by political scientists has not considered the possibility that people?s attitudes and behaviors are in any part affected by their genes. In fact, previously employed research designs are intended to test only for the possible effects of factors in the social environment such as parental socialization. In this paper, we make the case that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both genetics and the environment. We do so by describing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics; specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins. We then conduct and report our own analysis of data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia and Great Britain. This evidence indicates that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes but a more modest role in the formation of party identification. These findings shed new light on the political socialization literature and call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences and, better yet, interactions between social environment and genetic heritability into models of political attitude formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]