DNA of Politics

This is an interesting study, although I'm not sure I buy the conclusion. Nonetheless, if it's true perhaps someday the exact gene will be identified and there will be an inoculation against right-wing conservatism.

From the City Journal, which ironically is a conservative publication...

Now we know that much of our personality, too, is inherited and that many social attitudes have some degree of genetic basis, including politics.

Three political science professors have studied political attitudes among a large number of twins in America and Australia. They measured the attitudes with something called the Wilson-Patterson Scale, which asks whether a respondent agrees or disagrees with 28 words or phrases, such as “death penalty,” “school prayer,” “pacifism,” or “gay rights.” They then compared the similarity of the responses among identical twins with the similarity among fraternal twins. They found that, for all 28 taken together, the identical twins did indeed agree with each other more often than the fraternal ones did—and that genes accounted for about 40 percent of the difference between the two groups.

Genes also influence how frequently we vote. Voting has always puzzled scholars: How is it rational to wait in line on a cold November afternoon when there is almost no chance that your ballot will make any difference?

Researchers studied political participation in Los Angeles by comparing voting among identical and fraternal twins. Their conclusion: among registered voters, genetic factors explain about 60 percent of the difference between those who vote and those who do not.