Biological Influences on Political Outcomes

Political science has traditionally assumed the social and political behaviors have social causes.  Discoveries beginning in the late 1970s began to demonstrate genetic influences on political orientations. Work in this area has burgeoned in the last decade, showing biological influences on a wide variety of political behaviors, including voting behavior and political participation. We cannot yet precisely map how genes influence psychological processes and biological mechanisms that interact with our upbringing, social environment and personal experience in ways that come to be expressed as differences on the Liberal-Conservative spectrum. However, we can demonstrate the systematic and predictable top-down effect of political ideology on a wide range of important social and political behaviors.   These differences manifest in domains as diverse as emotional response, physiological reactivity and basic attentional focus across a variety of domains, including those which affect attitudes toward military and defense, immigration and reproductive health policies.