Favourable Neighbourhoods Decrease the Effects of Genetic Resources on Voting

• In Event: Social and Environmental Influences on Behavior

Abstract

Influences of individual-level genetic factors on adult-life political participation have been illustrated in recent twin studies and genomic studies, suggesting that individuals may carry with them various genetic resources that are consequential for electoral participation. However, the potential for the environment to moderate genetic influences remains unexplored. Combining a large sample of Swedish dizygotic twins (born 1965-2001) with various sources of national register data, including register data covering the full Swedish population, this paper tests whether neighbourhood-level political engagement and SES during adolescence moderates the effects of individual-level genetic resources on adult-life political participation, as measured by a polygenic index for educational attainment (EA PGI). This polygenic predictor of educational attainment has previously been found to have a causal influence on voting behaviour. The results provide lower-bound evidence of a negative interaction between genetic propensity for education, and neighbourhood political engagement and SES, when it comes to voting in both first-order and second-order elections. In other words, genetic effects on voting are lower for twins whose adolescence neighbourhood was high in political participation and in SES, suggesting that such environments may provide substitutes for genetic factors which would otherwise predict voting. Apart from neighbourhood factors, parental voting behaviour is also found to strongly moderate these genetic effects. In sum, this paper illustrates that one source of variation (or inqeuality) in electoral participation may be genetic factors (in this case genetic factors that are associated with education), but also, and importantly so, how this inequality in participation that stems from the genome may very well be higher in societal groups who do not benefit from civic or socioeconomic advantage during formative periods of the life course. This highlights a more general point as well: genetic effects are seldom deterministic, but may be modified by the environment - as is shown in this paper.

Author

• Oskar Pettersson, Uppsala University