Disentangling the Importance of Psychological Predispositions and Social Constructions in the Organization of American Political Ideology
- 11 April 2012
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Political Psychology
- Vol. 33 (3), 375-393
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00882.x
Abstract
Ideological preferences within the American electorate are contingent on both the environmental conditions that provide the content of the contemporary political debate and internal predispositions that motivate people to hold liberal or conservative policy preferences. In this article we apply Jost, Federico, and Napier's top‐down/bottom‐up theory of political attitude formation to a genetically informative population sample. In doing so, we further develop the theory by operationalizing the top‐down pathway to be a function of the social environment and the bottom‐up pathway as a latent set of genetic factors. By merging insights from psychology, behavioral genetics, and political science, we find strong support for the top‐down/bottom‐up framework that segregates the two independent pathways in the formation of political attitudes and identifies a different pattern of relationships between political attitudes at each level of analysis.Keywords
This publication has 48 references indexed in Scilit:
- OpenMx: An Open Source Extended Structural Equation Modeling FrameworkPsychometrika, 2011
- A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political AttitudesThe Journal of Politics, 2011
- Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocationProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009
- Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatismNature Neuroscience, 2007
- Estimating the Extent of Parameter Bias in the Classical Twin Design: A Comparison of Parameter Estimates From Extended Twin-Family and Classical Twin DesignsTwin Research and Human Genetics, 2005
- The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political SciencePerspectives on Politics, 2004
- The psychological bases of ideology and prejudice: Testing a dual process model.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002
- Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite PolarizationAmerican Political Science Review, 2001
- Comparing the biological and cultural inheritance of personality and social attitudes in the Virginia 30 000 study of twins and their relativesTwin Research, 1999
- A model system for analysis of family resemblance in extended kinships of twinsBehavior Genetics, 1994