Voting Your Genes?

Posted by: K.D. Hastings on July 16, 2008 Hot Issues •

Whether you vote or stay home on Election Day is at least in part a function of your genetic makeup. That’s the upshot of a study out of the University of California at San Diego.

According to a report in Scientific American and elsewhere, scientists are suggesting “the desire to vote or abstain from politics might largely be hardwired into our biology.”

Factors such as age, gender, race, education and income, among other socioeconomic indices, had only a tiny impact on the likelihood that person would vote, the investigators said in the review of behavior of identical and fraternal twins.

James Fowler of the California school said this genetic predisposition to interact socially is so strong that even when an individual knows their vote won’t matter, they still vote: “It’s almost like voters are programmed to keep voting, even when their common sense tells them it is probably useless.”

But even if researchers are able to prove that hereditary directs one’s level of political involvement, that doesn’t excuse qualified Americans from exercising their civic responsibilities. It can’t be an excuse or a person permission to say, “I couldn’t vote if I wanted to do. I can’t bring myself to pull that lever.”

The scientists in this study admitted that even if there was a biological connection, environment (one’s surroundings and upbringing, not the climate) plays a key role in one’s voting habits.

Americans seem to concoct enough reasons not to vote without taking their genome into consideration. We have a civic and spiritual obligation to not only vote, but to inject our biblically influenced convictions into the political and public policy process. We need to be focused on voting our God’s values, not our genes.

The study was originally detailed in American Political Science Review.

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