A small band of scholars tries to reshape political science
Five years ago, John R. Alford was chafing under the limitations of political science. Despite more than two decades of work in that area, he and his colleagues were failing to make much progress in explaining basic political inclinations, such as why some people trust government while others do not.
Alford vented his frustration to John R. Hibbing, a friend from graduate school, and the two shared their concerns that traditional approaches in political science could not answer important questions. They also had something else in common. Both were reading Steven Pinker’s new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
The book made them wonder whether political science had been wearing blinders for the past half-century. “That was the inspiration for both of us to look at our discipline and say: To what degree are we guilty of implicitly assuming that for politics, the human brain is a blank slate?” says Alford. They wondered whether ideology in fact has roots in biology, whether people’s genes could predict how they might vote.
The two didn’t realize it at the time, but they would soon reinvent themselves and help found the new field of genopolitics. To do that, they had to learn genetics and brain anatomy, forge ties with neuroscientists and molecular biologists, and do battle against skeptical colleagues.
The work is starting to pay off. In September, the two political scientists published a paper in Science, the top scientific journal in the United States. In it, they described the first potential link between people’s political leanings and their basic physiology. That finding dovetails with work by other researchers, who recently reported finding connections between people’s voting patterns and their specific genes.
The discoveries are threatening to topple a longstanding assumption of political science: that civic attitudes are defined by experience. “There are really a lot of explanations for political behaviors and attitudes that we’ve just missed,” says James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who made the recent gene discoveries. Without looking at genetics, he says, “we’ve been missing part of the story.”
But some other political scientists say the new studies are inherently flawed. “I’m dumbfounded by this,” says Evan Charney, an assistant professor of public policy studies and political science at Duke University, in reaction to the Science study. “I don’t think you can conclude anything from this, anything whatsoever.”
To get a sense of where political science may be heading, consider the source of the work that earned a spot in Science. The new study came out of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s political physiology laboratory, which is possibly the only such lab in the world. The work was led by Hibbing, a professor of political science there, and Alford, an associate professor at Rice University, along with their colleagues.
Although housed in a political-science department, Hibbing’s work space is filled with equipment more commonly seen in a psychology laboratory or a physician’s office. The group uses electrocardiograms, or ECG’s, to eavesdrop on the electrical signals controlling the heart. Other tests read the electrical signals going to facial muscles and gauge the electrical conductivity of skin. The researchers collaborate with colleagues who measure voltage changes in the brain and take pictures of it in action through MRI scans.
In the recent experiment, Hibbing brought 46 volunteers into his lab. All the people had strong political views and were nearly divided between the liberal and conservative ends of the ideological spectrum.
The participants completed a survey to assess their support for policies such as foreign aid, pacifism, gun control, defense spending, patriotism, capital punishment, and the Iraq War. Then the researchers monitored the conductivity of the subject’s skin — essentially a gauge of how much they were sweating — while they watched a series of images. Some showed innocuous subjects, like a bowl of fruit, while others portrayed a large spider on a person’s face, a maggot-infested wound, and similarly arresting pictures.
In a second test, Hibbing’s group measured how strongly the subjects blinked when they heard loud bursts of static played at unexpected intervals over headphones.
In both of the experiments, the volunteers who reacted most strongly to the negative stimuli were more likely to support policies on the conservative end of the spectrum, such as warrantless searches, school prayer, and the USA Patriot Act, according to the researchers.
Hibbing says the test results do not say anything about what level of reaction is healthy. “We’re not out to convert people to one ideology or to cast aspersions,” he says. “We don’t think that conservatives are scaredy-cats or that liberals are naïve and don’t understand the world.”
Instead, the tests suggest that ideology is inbred to a certain degree, the researchers contend. “A portion of our political beliefs maybe run deeper than people have realized,” says Hibbing.
The new results might help explain an earlier study that Alford and Hibbing conducted, along with Carolyn L. Funk, an associate professor of public policy at Virginia Commonwealth University. In that work, they analyzed data from twin studies and found that identical twins shared more political beliefs than did fraternal twins. That paper, published in American Political Science Review in 2005, marked the first time political scientists had reported evidence that people’s political attitudes might be inherited. (A group of psychologists and genetics researchers had reported similar findings in 1986, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
Since then, Alford and Hibbing have been seeking to establish the different steps that might connect DNA to, say, GOP ideals. In a simple formulation of what must be a complex pathway, they suggest that genes govern the production of proteins, which influence how the brain is wired, which controls the way people feel and act.
The recent study focuses on the last part of that pathway. The researchers suggest it might involve the amygdala, a brain region particularly important in processing negative emotions and responding to threats. It could be that certain genetic variations predispose people to having strong amygdala responses, which makes them react more to threats. The revved-up amygdala could also lead them to adopt attitudes that emphasize defending the social order, according to this hypothesis.
“We’re not arguing that biology is in any sense the whole story,” regarding political attitudes, says Alford. “We’re just arguing that biology is a piece of that story, and it’s a completely ignored piece of that story.”
Fowler, of UC-San Diego, calls the new work “a landmark study.” He says he hopes “a lot of political scientists read it because I think we have to do a lot more work on the biology of politics.”
The physiology measurements mesh well with research that Fowler has recently conducted showing connections between particular genes and political behavior. In The Journal of Politics in July, he and Christopher T. Dawes, a graduate student, reported that genes involved in the metabolism of serotonin, a key brain chemical, help influence whether people vote. They found that young adults were more likely to have voted in the 2004 presidential election if they had particular variants of a gene called MAOA, which helps recycle the serotonin molecules that brain cells use to communicate with one another.
In the case of another serotonin-related gene called 5HTT, the findings were a bit more complex. Voting percentages were higher for people who had particular variations of the 5HTT gene, but only if they also frequently attended religious services.
Serotonin plays many roles in the brain and helps regulate mood; hence the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, to treat depression. Animal studies show that serotonin is also involved in influencing social behavior. Because past research has shown that the decision to vote is influenced by social characteristics, it makes sense that serotonin would affect whether people vote, say the researchers.
In an unpublished paper, Dawes, Fowler, and several colleagues push the genetic investigations even further, into the realm of ideology. They looked at a gene called DRD4, which helps govern the actions of dopamine, another important neurochemical. The results of this study suggest that people with one variation of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal — but only if they also had many friends in adolescence.
Those findings reinforce the point that genes and environment interact in complex ways to shape people’s actions, Fowler says. “I wouldn’t say genes determine anything,” he says. “What they do is constrain behavior. They determine how we react to particular environmental stimuli.”
So far, only a handful of political scientists have started conducting research in this area. But interest is growing, say the proponents. At the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston in August, Mr. Hibbing spent an afternoon teaching a course called “Genetics for Political Scientists.”
The movement has drawn sharp criticism from some political scientists, such as Duke’s Charney, who has an undergraduate degree in genetics. He argues that each study is flawed by fatal methodological problems and that the acolytes of genopolitics are guilty of science envy. “A lot of people have embraced this area because they think: ‘At last, political science can be a true science,’” he says.
Charney does not rule out the possibility that genes might help influence people’s political behaviors. But those actions are so complicated, “they would involve the interactions of hundreds of genes, interacting with the environment in enormously complex ways,” he says. “You’re never going to find one particular set of genes correlate with one particular political belief.”
Jonathan Beckwith, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard University, says the links between genes and behavior are turning out to be more complex than previously thought. Some previous associations that focused on single genes have fallen apart because researchers could not replicate the original studies that claimed a connection. Even in the case of diseases, scientists are finding out that sometimes dozens or a hundred different genes might interact with environmental factors to cause particular conditions, he says. Despite those criticisms, the appeal of genopolitics is drawing increasing attention from political scientists, neuroscientists, and social psychologists. In some sense, the new work harks back to the philosophy of the earliest known political scientist, says Fowler. Aristotle wrote that “man is by nature a political animal.”
“It’s not new,” says Fowler. “We just forgot about it.”
Richard Monastersky is a senior writer at The Chronicle.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 6, Page B13