Yes, the Twins Day Festival in … yes …. Twinsburg, Ohio. Political scientists Jamie Settle, Christopher Dawes, and James Fowler have posted “The Heritability of Partisan Attachment” on SSRN. This is a very interesting take on the old nature/nurture controversy regarding political behavior and employs data from identical and non-identical twins who attended the festival. The abstract is available below the fold.
ABSTRACT: One of the strongest regularities in the empirical political science literature is the well-known correlation in parent and child partisan behavior. Until recently this phenomenon was thought to result solely from parental socialization, but new evidence on genetic sources of behavior suggests it might also be due to heritability. In this article we hypothesize that genes contribute to variation in a general tendency toward strength of partisanship. Using data collected at the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio in 2006 and 2007, we compare the similarity of partisan strength in identical twins (who share all of their genes) to the similarity of partisan strength in non-identical twins (who share only half). The results show that heritability accounts for almost half of the variance in strength of partisan attachment, and they suggest that we should pay closer attention to the role of biology in the expression of important political behaviors.
Voir Dire 