Plan to vote? Thank your lucky DNA

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Whether you choose to vote in November may be determined more by genetic factors than upbringing or education, suggests a new study on political participation.

Researchers at UC San Diego and USC applied a mathematical model to the voting patterns of 396 identical and fraternal (non-identical) twins in Los Angeles County and 806 identical and fraternal twins in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

If voting behavior is inherited, the researchers hypothesized, the identical twins, which were conceived from a single egg, should exhibit more similarity in voting than the fraternal twins, which share about 50% of their genetic coding. If one assumes that both types of twins were raised in comparable environments, a notion that a body of research supports, then it is possible to arrive at numerical values representing the effects of genetics, shared environmental factors, such as living in the same home, and other, unshared environmental factors, such as having different friends.

Based on their model, the researchers determined that 53% of a person’s propensity to vote could be accounted for by genetic factors, 35% could be attributed to environmental factors shared by both twins and 12% could be chalked up to environmental factors not shared by the twins.

Moreover, they found that genetics also appear to influence other political activities, such as donating to a campaign, running for office and attending a rally.

‘We expected to find that genes played some role in political behavior,’ says author and political scientist James Fowler of UC San Diego in a news release, ‘but we were quite surprised by the size of the effect and how widely it applies to all kinds of participation.’

The study appears in the May issue of American Political Science Review.

--Janet Cromley