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Abstract
Research on the link between education and political ideology is likely affected by biases common in conventional observational methods. A study by Rasmussen et al. (2021) addresses this problem by examining social and economic ideology in a Danish discordant twin design, finding that education shows positive causal effects on economic, but not social, conservatism. In this paper, I provide a set of replications of these results using a dataset of genotyped Swedish twins. I complement this by using random variation within fraternal twin pairs in a polygenic index of education. Results differ markedly from the original study, but are also shown to be sensitive to precise definitions of the ideological dimensions and which sub-dimensions or items are included. Overall, more care may be warranted when empirically defining ideology. Additionally, educational effects on ideology are likely to be sensitive to particular characteristics of the educational experience across time and space.

A substantial literature in political psychology has emphasized the importance of personality traits for understanding differences in political participation. One such trait is extraversion. However, the causal status of this relationship is complicated by a number of issues, not least genetic confounding stemming from the heritability of both personality traits and political participation. This study confirms the well‐established naive relationship between extraversion and participation, but goes on with (a) a discordant MZ twin design and (b) a new approach using measured genetic variation, or a polygenic index, in the given trait (extraversion) to assess the causal nature of this relationship. First, utilizing variation in extraversion and participation within identical twin pairs shows that twins with higher extraversion do not participate more. Second, random variation within fraternal twin pairs in a polygenic index of extraversion does predict trait extraversion, but does not predict political participation. In summary, previously identified associations between extraversion and political participation are not likely to be causal, but instead reflect common underlying familial factors.

Vaccines famously possess positive externalities that make them susceptible to the collective action dilemma: when I get vaccinated, I protect not only myself, but also those who I might otherwise have infected. Thus, some people will have an incentive to free ride on the immunity of others. In a population of rational agents, the critical level of vaccination uptake required for herd immunity will therefore be difficult to attain in the long run, which poses difficulties for disease eradication. In this doctoral dissertation, I explore different implications of the collective action dilemma of vaccination, and different ways of ameliorating it. First: given that coercion or force could solve the dilemma, and democracies may be less likely to engage in policies that violate the physical integrity of citizens, democracies may also be at a disadvantage compared to non-democracies when securing herd immunity. In essay I, I show that this is, empirically, indeed the case. Barring the use of extensive coercion therefore necessitates other solutions. In essay II, I highlight the exception to individual rationality found in other-regarding motivations such as altruism. Our moral psychology has likely evolved to take other's welfare into account, but the extent of our prosocial motivations vary: a wider form of altruism that encompasses not just family or friends, but strangers, is likely to give way to a more narrow form when humans pair-bond and have children. This dynamic is shown to apply to the sentiments underlying vaccination behavior as well: appeals to the welfare of society of getting vaccinated have positive effects on vaccination propensity, but this effect disappears in people with families and children. On this demographic, appeals to the welfare of close loved ones instead appears to have large effects. In essay III, I investigate whether the prosocial motivations underlying vaccination behavior are liable to be affected by motivation crowding - that is, whether they are crowded out when introducing economic incentives to get vaccinated. I find that on average, economic incentives do not have adverse effects, but for a small minority of highly prosocially motivated people, they might.

AbstractA core part of political research is to identify how political preferences are shaped. The nature of these questions is such that robust causal identification is often difficult to achieve, and we are not seldom stuck with observational methods that we know have limited causal validity. The purpose of this paper is to measure the magnitude of bias stemming from both measurable and unmeasurable confounders across three broad domains of individual determinants of political preferences: socio-economic factors, moral values, and psychological constructs. We leverage a unique combination of rich Swedish registry data for a large sample of identical twins, with a comprehensive battery of 34 political preference measures, and build a meta-analytical model comparing our most conservative observational (naive) estimates with discordant twin estimates. This allows us to infer the amount of bias from unobserved genetic and shared environmental factors that remains in the naive models for our predictors, while avoiding precision issues common in family-based designs. The results are sobering: in most cases, substantial bias remains in naive models. A rough heuristic is that about half of the effect size even in conservative observational estimates is composed of confounding.

AbstractThe boom in wealth inequality seen in recent decades has generated a steep rise in scholarly interest in both the drivers and the consequences of the wealth gap. In political science, a pertinent question regards the political behavior across the wealth spectrum. A common argument is that the wealthy practice patrimonial voting, i.e. voting for right-wing parties to maximize returns on their assets. While this pattern is descriptively well documented, it is less certain to what extent this reflects an actual causal relationship between wealth and political preferences. In this study, we provide new evidence by exploiting wealth variation within identical twin pairs. Our findings suggest that while more wealth is descriptively connected to more support for right-wing parties, the causal impact of wealth on policy preferences is likely highly overstated. For several relevant policy areas these effects may not exist at all. Furthermore, the bias in naive observational estimates seems to be mainly driven by environmental familial confounders shared within twin pairs, rather than genetic confounding.

A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is complicated by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a new approach: using within-family differences in the genetic tendency to exhibit the relevant traits as a source of exogenous variation. Genes are fixed over the life cycle and genetic differences between full siblings are random, making it possible to establish the causal effects of within-family variation in genetic tendencies. We link genetic data from individuals in the Swedish Twin Registry to government registry data and find evidence for causal effects of the genetic predispositions towards cognitive skills, personality traits, and economic preferences on professional achievement and educational attainment. Our results also demonstrate that education and labor market outcomes are partially the result of a genetic lottery.