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There is a growing interest in empirically exploring the biological underpinnings of political attitudes and behavior. Heritability studies are a primary vehicle for conducting such investigations and data sets rich in political phenotypes are becoming broadly accessible. A bottleneck exists, however, in exploiting these opportunities because they involve a statistical re-tooling for political scientists and require a conceptual shift that has substantial implications for the field's traditional theoretical models. Methodologically, most twin studies rely on structural equation models unfamiliar to political scientists. We show this methodological bottleneck is easily navigable; it is the lesser discussed shift in theoretical assumptions poses the larger problem to integrating biological elements into the study of political attitudes and behavior. To address these issues we provide a detailed introduction to a regression-based method for analyzing genetic influence on political attitudes and behaviors that will be methodologically intuitive to political scientists with even minimum quantitative training. In doing so, we provide a platform for bridging important conceptual divides between political science and behavioral genetics. Adapted from the source document.

ObjectivesContemporary scholarly debate emphasizes the importance of spouse selection on population stratification, typically focusing on the traits of spouses themselves. In this study spouses and their parents were analyzed to resolve the effects of direct spousal assortment from family background assortment on three social traits that spouses correlate the highest: education, church attendance, and political affiliation.MethodsThe data set is comprised of a core of spousal pairs and their parents assessed by self‐report and a more extensive set of individuals on whom there are only ratings by relatives for educational attainment, church attendance, and political preference. Structural equation models were fitted to the observed polychoric correlations by diagonal weighted least squares.ResultsFor education and church attendance, assortment was based primarily on the traits of the spouses themselves, but models including independent assortment for the traits of parents‐in‐law gave a better fit. For political affiliation, assortment based on social background influenced by the traits of both parents gave a better fit.ConclusionsThe findings demonstrate that in humans, spousal similarity may reflect processes of selection and stratification that are more complex than commonly supposed in most models for family resemblance and social diversity.

As political scientists begin to incorporate biological influences as explanatory factors in political behavior, the need to present a methodological road map for utilizing biometric genetic theory and twin data is apparent. The classical twin design (CTD) remains the most popular design for initial examinations of the source of variance among social and political behaviors, and a vast majority of advanced variance components models as well as some molecular analyses are extensions of the CTD. Thus, it is appropriate to begin a series of works with the CTD and its most common variants. The CTD has strong roots in biometrical genetic theory and provides estimates of the correlations between observed traits of monozygotic and dizygotic twins in terms of underlying genetic and environmental influences. The majority of these analyses utilize SEMs of observed covariances for both twin types to assess the relative importance of these "latent" factors.

In his essay, "Genes and Ideologies," Evan Charney wrangles with the question of the role of genes in the formation of political attitudes via a critique of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing's 2005American Political Science Reviewarticle. Although critical evaluations are necessary, his essay falls short of what is required of a scientific critique on both empirical and theoretical grounds. We offer a comment on his essay and further contend that it is naïve to proceed on the assumption that a barrier exists between the biological and social sciences, such that the biological sciences have nothing to offer the social sciences. If we look beyond our discipline's current theoretical models we may find a more thorough, and not just competing, explanation of political behavior.

Mates appear to assort on political attitudes more than any other social, behavioral, or physical trait, besides religion. Yet the process by which ideologically similar mates end up together remains ambiguous. Mates do not appear to consciously select one another based on ideology, nor does similarity result from convergence. Recently, several lines of inquiry have converged on the finding that olfactory processes have an important role in both political ideology and mate selection. Here we integrate extant studies of attraction, ideology, and olfaction and explore the possibility that assortation on political attitudes may result, in part, from greater attraction to the scent of those with shared ideology. We conduct a study in which individuals evaluated the body odor of unknown others, observing that individuals are more attracted to their ideological concomitants.

American politics has become more polarized. The source of the phenomena is debated. We posit that human mate choice may play a role in the process. Spouses are highly correlated in their political preferences, and research in behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and endocrinology shows that political preferences develop through a complex interaction of social upbringing, life experience, immediate circumstance, and genes and hormones, operating through one's psychological architecture by Hatemi et al. (J Theor Politics, 24:305-327, 2012). Consequently, if people with similar political values produce children, there will be more individuals at the ideological extremes over generations. This said, we are left with a mystery: spousal concordance on political attitudes does not result from convergence over the course of the relationship, nor are spouses initially selecting one another on political preferences. We examine whether positive mate assortation-like seeks like-on non-political factors such as lifestyle and demographics could lead to inadvertent assortation on political preferences. Using a sample of Internet dating profiles we find that both liberals and conservatives seek to date individuals who are like themselves. This result suggests a pathway by which long-term couples come to share political preferences, which in turn could be fueling the widening ideological gap in the United States. Adapted from the source document.