“A Polygenic Score for Educational Attainment Partially Predicts Voter Turnout”, 2021-12-14 (; similar):
The strong correlation between education and voting is among the most robust findings in social science. We show that genes associated with the propensity to acquire education are also associated with higher voter turnout. A within-family analysis suggests education-linked genes exert direct effects on voter turnout but also reveals evidence of genetic nurture in second-order elections. Our findings have important implications for the study of political inequality. Scholars have argued that parental education is the main driver of the reproduction of political inequality across generations. By separating the effect of genes from parental nurturing, our findings suggest that the roots of individual-level political inequality run deeper than family background.
Twin and adoption studies have shown that individual differences in political participation can be explained, in part, by genetic variation. However, these research designs cannot identify which genes are related to voting or the pathways through which they exert influence, and their conclusions rely on possibly restrictive assumptions.
In this study, we use 3 different US samples and a Swedish sample to test whether genes that have been identified as associated with educational attainment, one of the strongest correlates of political participation, predict self-reported and validated voter turnout.
We find that a polygenic score capturing individuals’ genetic propensity to acquire education is statistically-significantly related to turnout. The strongest associations we observe are in second-order midterm elections in the United States and European Parliament elections in Sweden, which tend to be viewed as less important by voters, parties, and the media and thus present a more information-poor electoral environment for citizens to navigate. A within-family analysis [n = 10,000 sibling pairs] suggests that individuals’ education-linked genes directly affect their voting behavior..after controlling for the EDU PGS, the effect of education shrinks by 8%–17%, signaling that genes associated with education partially confound the relationship between education and turnout…but, for second-order elections, it also reveals evidence of genetic nurture. Finally, a mediation analysis suggests that educational attainment and cognitive ability combine to account for between 41% and 63% of the relationship between the genetic propensity to acquire education and voter turnout.
[Keywords: education, voting, polygenic score, turnout, cognitive ability]
…Figure 1 illustrates that the polygenic score’s explanatory power is on par with that of personal income, parental income, and parental education and accounts for about half as much variation as years of education…Another possible mediator is personality, given that the EA PGS is correlated with personality traits(34, 35), a growing literature has demonstrated personality traits to be important for turnout(36), and personality and turnout have been shown to be influenced by shared genetic factors(9, 10).