Bravo! I read this piece and agree. Quite exciting. I think the new discipline of political biology should be called poly-bi.

Nice post and nice paper. This new wave of research deserves more attention though I am afraid much of it will go unrecognized. I fear that mainstream political scientists won't find it that useful while biologists at the same time may deem it silly.

I think this new field of political biology needs a new name.

Perhaps Poly-Bi? :)

. I anticipate that Fowler and his partners in crime will continue to leave a trail of evidence from which we can build an even stronger case for a political science which does not make assumptions that are at odds with stylized facts from behavior genetics.

sir,

the term "stylized facts" gives away your academic background!

also, i talked about heritability & politics a while back. new readers might be interested....

I theorized a connection between the verbal-visuospatial dimension of IQ and left-right divide here.

If you've only got twin studies, and don't know the mechanism, some caution is in order.

For example, supposing African-Americans were more likely to vote for Obama, then you'ld expect that twins separated at birth (both of whom were African-American) would be more likely to vote for him. As political parties often try to appeal to particular demographic groups (including ethnic groups), you'ld expect to see this kind of "heritability" without needing to postulate a gene for voting democrat.

It's also interesting that the main results in the cited paper are about whether you vote for/join a political party, not which party you join.

Compare, for example, supporting a football[*] team. I think you've got a better chance of finding a genetic link with "being a football supporter" than for supporting one team over another.

In a way, this is encouraging for multi-ethnic democracies. If peoples's preferences over the actual policy issues had a strong genetic component, it'd be a bigger problem. Imagine some future in which the Scots Nationalist Party is able to point to some biochemical pathway and a map of the geographical distribution of the corresponding alleles, and say that Scotland should have independent government because the Scots are genetically wired to think differently.

[*] I'm British[**].... for football, substitute baseball if you wish :-)

[**] Well, Welsh :-)

The most important question is how people come to change their minds. Because they do. If they didn't - ever - democracy would be impossible. An election would merely be a census.

Americans clearly changed their minds about Prohibition between 1920 and 1933. People's attitudes to homosexuality have clearly changed in many countries. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher thought there were votes in anti-gay laws like "Section 28" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28). Now the UK has legal gay marriage.

In this blog (http://www.juliangough.com/journal/2008/11/4/ election-day-usa-2008.html) Julian Gough shows that very large numbers of Americans changed their minds after the 15th of September 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection. Before then, McCain was ahead in many of the crucial battleground states. After that, he never reversed the switch to Obama.

georgesdelatour, Prohibition ended for different reasons than you think.

Hi TGGP

Thank for that. It's true that the arguments politicians have to deploy to change a law can seem tangential to the main issue. In the UK the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalized male homosexual acts. In Parliament, the decisive argument was NOT that the state had no business criminalizing consensual acts between adults; but that criminalization led to blackmail, and this could compromise national security in the Cold War.

I think my main point still stands. Once Prohibition was repealed, the majority for reintroducing it could not be recreated, even after America got back to work. Many supporters of Prohibition, such as John D. Rockefeller Jr, changed their minds:

"When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before."

(quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro..._United_States)