Christopher T. Dawes

Political commentators have noted a peculiar aspect of present-day political dysfunction in the United States: Americans continue to “revere” the U.S. Constitution, even though the founding document itself is arguably responsible for many of the current political problems Americans so bemoan. On this telling, Americans’ tendency to view the Constitution as sacrosanct has significantly contributed to the precarious political moment by effectively foreclosing much needed constitutional reforms. Using a randomized experiment administered on the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), the present study examines these claims by (a) identifying those most likely to “venerate” the U.S. Constitution and (b) testing the extent to which a sense of constitutional veneration disposes individuals against constitutional change. Our findings suggest that while not everyone can be said to venerate the Constitution, those who do exhibit a higher baseline level of resistance to constitutional amendment. Moreover, our treatment illustrates that a sense of constitutional reverence can be activated and made accessible to individuals as they consider constitutional issues and, in turn, bias them against proposed constitutional reforms. These findings suggest that constitutional veneration, to the extent it is widespread, may contribute to constitutional stasis and the problems associated with it.

Previous research has found that political traits have some degree of genetic basis, but researchers have had less success unpacking the relationship between genes and political behavior. We propose an approach for examining this relationship that can overcome many of the limitations of previous research: polygenic indices (PGIs). PGIs are DNA-based individual-level variables that capture the genetic propensity to exhibit a given trait. We begin by outlining how PGIs are derived, how they can be utilized in conventional regression-based research, and how results should be interpreted. We then provide proof of concept, using data on over 50,000 individuals in four samples from the U.S. and Sweden to show that PGIs for health and psychological traits significantly predict measures of political participation, even within families. We conclude by outlining several ideas and providing empirical examples for researchers who may be interested in building on the PGI approach.

Previous research has found that political traits have some degree of genetic basis, but researchers have had less success unpacking the relationship between genes and political behavior. We propose an approach for examining this relationship that can overcome many of the limitations of previous research: polygenic indices (PGIs). PGIs are DNA-based individual-level variables that capture the genetic propensity to exhibit a given trait. We begin by outlining how PGIs are derived, how they can be utilized in conventional regression-based research, and how results should be interpreted. We then provide proof of concept, using data on over 50,000 individuals in four samples from the U.S. and Sweden to show that PGIs for health and psychological traits significantly predict measures of political participation, even within families. We conclude by outlining several ideas and providing empirical examples for researchers who may be interested in building on the PGI approach.

Significance: 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.

Some constitutional scholars suggest that the US Constitution stands as one of the oldest yet least changed national constitutions in part because Americans’ tendency to “revere” the Constitution has left them unwilling to consider significant changes to the document. Several recent studies support aspects of this claim, but no study establishes a direct link between individuals’ respect for the Constitution and their reluctance to amend it. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Zink and Dawes (2016) across two survey experiments. The key difference in our experiments is we include measures of respondents’ propensity to revere the Constitution, which in turn allows us to more directly test whether constitutional veneration translates into resistance to amendment. Our results build on Zink and Dawes’s findings and show that, in addition to institutional factors, citizens’ veneration of the Constitution can act as a psychological obstacle to constitutional amendment.

We examine the role of moral foundations and system justification in explaining support for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. A number of important findings emerge. First, we find that there are important partisan and ideological differences when it comes to moral foundations and system justification. Second, we find that moral foundations predict support for Trump above and beyond traditional determinants of vote choice such as ideology, partisanship, religiosity, and demographic characteristics. Third, we find that a measure of political system justification is not related to vote choice in our sample. This casts doubt on the idea that support for Trump was mostly about protesting the political system. This paper adds to the growing body of research showing that psychological concepts and theories are important in understanding voter decision-making in the 2016 presidential election and in elections more generally.

What motivates citizens to run for office? Recent work has shown that early life parental socialization is strongly associated with a desire to run for office. However, parents not only shape their children’s political environment, they also pass along their genes to those same children. A growing area of research has shown that individual differences in a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes are linked to genetic differences. As a result, genetic factors may confound the observed political similarities among parents and their children. This study analyzes Swedish register data containing information on all nominated and elected candidates in the ten parliamentary, county council, and municipal elections from 1982 to 2014 for a large sample of adoptees and their adoptive and biological parents. By studying the similarity in political ambition within both adoptive and biological families, our research design allows us to disentangle so-called “pre-birth” factors, such as genes and pre-natal environment, and “post-birth” factors like parental socialization. We find that the likelihood of standing as a political candidate is twice as high if one’s parent has been a candidate. We also find that the effects of pre-birth and post-birth factors are approximately equal in size. In addition, we test a number of potential pre- and post-birth transmission mechanisms. First, disconfirming our expectations, the pre-birth effects do not seem to be mediated by cognitive ability or leadership skills. Second, consistent with a role modeling mechanism, we find evidence of a strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughters.

The propensity of a trait to vary within a population may have evolutionary, ecological, or clinical significance. In the present study we deploy sibling models to offer a novel and unbiased way to ascertain loci associated with the extent to which phenotypes vary (variance-controlling quantitative trait loci, or vQTLs). Previous methods for vQTL-mapping either exclude genetically related individuals or treat genetic relatedness among individuals as a complicating factor addressed by adjusting estimates for non-independence in phenotypes. The present method uses genetic relatedness as a tool to obtain unbiased estimates of variance effects rather than as a nuisance. The family-based approach, which utilizes random variation between siblings in minor allele counts at a locus, also allows controls for parental genotype, mean effects, and non-linear (dominance) effects that may spuriously appear to generate variation. Simulations show that the approach performs equally well as two existing methods (squared Z-score and DGLM) in controlling type I error rates when there is no unobserved confounding, and performs significantly better than these methods in the presence of confounding. Using height and BMI as empirical applications, we investigate SNPs that alter within-family variation in height and BMI, as well as pathways that appear to be enriched. One significant SNP for BMI variability, in the MAST4 gene, replicated. Pathway analysis revealed one gene set, encoding members of several signaling pathways related to gap junction function, which appears significantly enriched for associations with within-family height variation in both datasets (while not enriched in analysis of mean levels). We recommend approximating laboratory random assignment of genotype using family data and more careful attention to the possible conflation of mean and variance effects.