March 2025
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30 Reads
Political psychologists examine individual differences and human universals in their understanding of psychological processes in political orientations, attitudes, and behaviors. Whether they study emotion, cognition, or personality, scholars assume states and traits have some basis in individual dispositions. The origin, formation, and development of these dispositions may come from genetic or environmental sources but much fewer political psychologists undertake these foundational studies. While most areas of political psychology have proliferated across our discipline, genetic studies have lagged behind. Access to genetic data and genetically-informed samples is limited, costly, and often proprietary, creating natural barriers for advancing this study. In addition, scholars may need to learn new methodologies in order to integrate genetic data into their own work. But as we argue below, genetic influences and understandings of politics are more than just twin studies and vital pieces of the puzzle to understanding the psychological underpinnings of political behavior. In this chapter, we explore five topics. First, we discuss the value of genetics for political science and how political science has contributed to understanding public attitudes regarding heritability. Second, we examine in more detail the use of twin and family models in political science, highlighting methods beyond estimating heritability for political traits, such as techniques that focus on covariation with other traits, longitudinal direction of causation models, and co-twin control designs. Third, we review the use of genome wide association studies in political science and examine the potential uses of polygenic indices in future studies. Fourth, we discuss how the regulation of genetic influences by epigenetic factors has been studied elsewhere in the social sciences and could be applied to political science research. Fifth, we explore how political psychologists could contribute to the study of public attitudes towards developments in the field of human genomics, such as genetic security and privacy attitudes, public opinion on personalized medicine and other use cases for genetics, and public responses to genetic ancestry testing.