Abstract
There is a growing interest in empirically exploring the biological underpinnings of political attitudes and behavior. Heritability studies are a primary vehicle for conducting such investigations and data sets rich in political phenotypes are becoming broadly accessible. A bottleneck exists, however, in exploiting these opportunities because they involve a statistical re-tooling for political scientists and require a conceptual shift that has substantial implications for the field's traditional theoretical models. Methodologically, most twin studies rely on structural equation models unfamiliar to political scientists. We show this methodological bottleneck is easily navigable; it is the lesser discussed shift in theoretical assumptions poses the larger problem to integrating biological elements into the study of political attitudes and behavior. To address these issues we provide a detailed introduction to a regression-based method for analyzing genetic influence on political attitudes and behaviors that will be methodologically intuitive to political scientists with even minimum quantitative training. In doing so, we provide a platform for bridging important conceptual divides between political science and behavioral genetics.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 383-408 |
Number of pages | 26 |
Journal | Political Behavior |
Volume | 35 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2013 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Sociology and Political Science