Guest Post by Pete Hatemi

November 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I asked Pete Hatemi to write about his article “The Influence of Major Life Events on Economic Attitudes in a World of Gene‐Environment Interplay” which just appeared in the October issue of the American Journal of Political Science.  He writes:

A great deal of research has shown that our DNA (genes) has some role in why people differ on just about everything that matters to why we are human, and to a whole bunch of things we never even thought of (e.g., bacterial microbes in our saliva, yum!).  Over the last few years, a handful of political scientists, including myself, have begun exploring the import of DNA on why we differ politically, and have found that differences in our DNA affect a person’s views of the world, their attitudes and their ideologies, almost as much as his or her circumstances do, and far more than most social scientists are willing to admit. Indeed, in a separate study forthcoming at Behavior Genetics, we relied on samples taken from the US, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, and find that about half of the reason of why people differ in political attitudes within a given society could be attributed to differences in DNA.

But the roles DNA have on multi-faceted human traits, including political attitudes, is supremely complex. Only those totally misinformed about DNA would suggest that there are particular genes, or versions of genes “for” being liberal or conservative or that genetic influences are fixed, unchangeable, and predetermine our values. Rather, differences in our DNA, the thousands upon thousands of genetic markers and the interactions between them (and the world we live in), provide the first step in our “inclinations”; they have a role in forming our psychological processes of thought, and emotion, and preferences, including regulating hormones that change our emotional state. They indirectly help guide which opinions an individual will find most attractive, and which experiences we choose to select.

So far, most of the research that has attempted to link DNA with political values has done so independently of one’s personal experiences. A critical point about this observation is that we know that genes and experience continually interact, and they do not operate independently of our social world. Parenting style, resources, education, friends, weather, and all the things we experience growing up, or in adulthood, have a phenomenal role in why we differ. But everyone reacts slightly different even to the most extreme experiences, and this difference in reaction is partly due to our differences in DNA, partly to how we grew up and partly to our experiences in adult life and the infinite interactions between those forces.

In science, on occasion we progress by great leaps, but most often we progress incrementally.  We are often limited by the tools we have to explain complex behaviors, and by necessity, we take one-step at a time, in developing both theory and method to better understand human behavior. This study provides one of those important next steps, by exploring the interaction of genes and environment. It shows that the life events we experience, such as losing our job, or going bankrupt, effectively abolish the genetic influences on why we differ on attitudes toward immigration, unions, and other attitudes, but increases the import of DNA on other attitudes like taxation.

In this way, it appears our default state is heavily influenced by our genetically informed psychological processes of thought, but life events create a shock to that system and trump the status quo. It appears, those psychological processes more appropriate to survival or self-interest, kick in when faced with life changing circumstances. We cannot yet tell if the same genetic influences are being repressed or elicited or if life events trigger different cognitive and emotive processes from entirely different genetic mechanisms.

 

If there is a single takeaway from the study is that differences in our DNA have an important role of why we differ, but this role does not operate independently of the world we live in or our experiences; they are part of one another. Our genes sometimes respond to the environment, sometimes have a role in the experiences we select into; genetic influence sometimes dissipates when overwhelmed with life events, and sometimes, other genetic processes like those related to survival kick in.

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Guest Post by Yon Lupu

November 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Yon Lupu offers this overview of his article that appeared in the October (2013) issue of AJPS entitled “The Informative Power of Treaty Commitment: Using the Spatial Model to Address Selection Effects.”

  • Louis Henkin famously observed that “Almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.”  But do countries adhere to international law because they would have followed its requirements anyway or does the establishment of international law cause countries to change their policies and behaviors?
  • Disentangling the correlation between treaty commitment and treaty compliance from possible causal effects of treaty commitment has long been a goal of international relations scholarship.  This article proposes a statistical procedure designed to improve causal inference in this context.  In other words, the procedure will hopefully allow us to better test the causal effects of international law.
  • Building on work by Beth Simmons, Dan Hopkins, and Daniel Hill, I proposed to test the effects of treaty commitment by first estimating how likely countries are to join treaties.  We do not observe these probabilities directly, but through their histories of treaty commitment decisions, states reveal significant information regarding which types of treaties they prefer to join and which types of treaties they prefer not to join.  This is analogous to roll-call voting in a legislature: information about the voting preferences of members of Congress is revealed in their voting records.  This information can be analyzed using the W-NOMINATE algorithm created by Poole and Rosenthal in order to estimate the treaty commitment preferences of countries and, in turn, estimate how likely they are to join individual treaties.
  •  I applied this procedure to test the effects of three important human rights treaties: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention against Torture (CAT), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).  Many argue that human rights treaties “don’t matter” and note that any compliance we observe with these agreements is simply the result of leaders refraining from abusing human rights for other reasons.  My results indicate that some of these treaties may result in improvements to human rights practices while others may not.
  •  Ratification of CEDAW appears to have led to significant improvements in the political, economic and social rights of women.  By contrast, ratifications of the ICCPR and CAT do not appear to have a significant effect on the extent to which countries engage in violent practices like torture or extrajudicial killings.
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Guest Post by Cesar Zucco

November 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I asked Cesar Zucco to write a blog post about his new article in AJPS entitled “When Payouts Pay Off: Conditional Cash Transfers and Voting Behavior in Brazil 2002–10.”  He notes:

  • Governments around the world often implement policies that transfer money directly to citizens. Although in many cases these policies are not intended to buy votes, and even though governments do not necessarily monitor how citizens vote, direct transfers can affect voting behavior.
  • Our study examines data from large scale Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) implemented in Brazil. CCTs are social programs that make monthly monetary payments to poor families and require beneficiaries to meet conditions related to the education and health of their children.  CCT programs were introduced in Brazil in the late 1990’s and currently benefit more than 13 million families in the country.
  •  We took a look at whether beneficiaries of government largesse vote disproportionally for the incumbent government, and whether it matters if the current government introduced the transfer program or simply continued an ongoing policy.
  •  We found strong evidence that CCT beneficiaries supported the incumbent presidential candidate at higher rates than non-beneficiaries in all three presidential elections held in the period. However, the fact that incumbents from different parties benefited from the same program in different years suggests a relatively short memory on the part of voters. Voters seem to reward the current incumbent, whomever he or she may be.
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Guest Post by Cindy Kam and Liz Zechmeister

November 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I asked Cindy Kam to write a brief post on her article with Elizabeth Zechmeister entitled “Name Recognition and Candidate Support” that appears in the October 2013 issue of AJPS.  She writes:

  • Does mere name recognition breed contempt or affection for a political candidate?  Politicians and campaign teams often devote significant efforts to increasing a candidate’s name recognition through buttons, bumper stickers, and yard signs.  Among campaign workers as well as political scientists, there is real debate over whether these strategies are effective. Our paper offers compelling evidence that, in low-information races – races in which people have very little to go on when casting their ballots – name recognition positively affects political support.  Moreover, it appears that a key mechanism behind this effect is inferences about candidate viability; that is, individuals perceive a more familiar candidate as more viable and, consequently, they bandwagon around that candidate.
  • We demonstrate both the effects and limits of name recognition in a series of novel laboratory experiments.  We exposed a treatment group of research subjects to a fictitious candidate’s name through subliminal priming. We found people who were exposed to a candidate’s name in the “blink of an eye” were more supportive of that candidate compared to people who were not exposed to the name. Thus, mere name recognition alone induces greater levels of candidate support. This effect holds only in low-information races, but these low-information races constitute the majority of decisions over which voters cast ballots.
  • In addition, we ventured out of the lab and carried out a field study, in which we placed yard signs in a neighborhood in the midst of a city council election. The yard signs contained only a fictitious name.  In a later survey of the community, we found that the yard signs increased support for the fictitious candidate among those who were exposed to the signs (compared to a group that was not exposed to the signs).  In short, our studies suggest that the name recognition effect works, in the lab and in the field, in low-information elections.
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The American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) is the flagship journal of the Midwest Political Science Association and is published by Wiley.