A new study on the genetics of political participation suggests that polygenic scores—genetic propensities for health and psychological traits—can help predict whether people vote or engage in political life. Analysing genetic data from more than 50,000 individuals in the United States and Sweden, researchers found that higher genetic predispositions for cognitive performance and subjective well-being are linked to greater voter turnout, with sibling comparisons indicating some effects may be causal.
Political scientists have traditionally emphasised environmental factors such as education, income, and family background to explain turnout. In recent years, however, research using twins, adoptions and molecular genetics has shown that political orientation and civic participation are partly heritable, though earlier attempts to pin these traits to a few genes proved inconclusive due to their polygenic nature.
The study team, comprising Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson of Uppsala University, Christopher Dawes of New York University, and Aaron Weinschenk of the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, proposed using polygenic indices. These indices provide a single score summarising an individual’s genetic propensity for a given trait by weighing hundreds of thousands of DNA variations.
A polygenic index is built by analysing vast genome-wide association studies, which relate DNA variations to particular outcomes in very large samples. By combining these weighted variants, researchers generate a score that estimates the genetic likelihood of traits such as extraversion, depression or high cognitive performance.
Data for the analysis came from four large samples: the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, the Minnesota Twin Family Study in the United States, and the Swedish Twin Registry. The combined datasets included more than 50,000 individuals, all of European ancestry, with information on self-reported turnout, turnout validated in official records across high-profile and lower-profile elections, and participation in non-voting political activities such as rallies or contacting politicians.
Researchers calculated polygenic indices for ten health and psychological traits, alongside a score for educational attainment used as a benchmark. The traits included cognitive performance, adventurousness, extraversion, being a morning person, neuroticism, risk tolerance, self-rated health, depression, subjective well-being, and physical activity, with analyses preregistered in advance.
Across families, the study controlled for genetic ancestry, birth year and sex to isolate associations. Several genetic scores were linked to higher voter turnout: cognitive performance, self-rated health, subjective well-being, and physical activity were all associated with greater likelihood of voting, while higher scores for neuroticism and depression predicted lower turnout.
In high-profile elections, being genetically predisposed to be a morning person was associated with higher turnout, while adventurousness predicted higher turnout for lower-profile elections. Risk tolerance showed a mixed pattern: higher scores correlated with lower turnout in high-profile elections but higher turnout in lower-profile ones.
The effects were modest but meaningful. A one standard deviation increase in the cognitive performance or self-rated health scores corresponded to roughly a four-percentage-point rise in turnout in lower-profile elections, with each score explaining about 1% of the variation in turnout for those elections.
When looking at non-voting political participation, the researchers observed that genetic predispositions for extraversion, risk tolerance and adventurousness were positively linked to activities such as contacting a politician or attending rallies, aligning with prior work suggesting outgoing and novelty-seeking individuals are drawn to political activism.
Additional analyses indicated that, on average, about 30% of the associations between the genetic scores and participation were mediated through the traits the scores were designed to predict. In particular, cognitive performance accounted for nearly all of its link to participation, whereas measured physical activity explained little of its score’s association.
As with many genetic studies, the authors caution that cross-family comparisons may be biased by population structure and genetic nurture, where parental genes influence a child’s environment. To address this, they performed analyses restricted to pairs of full siblings, who share a family environment but differ in their own genetic makeup.
Within-sibling analyses retained many of the associations for high-profile elections, suggesting a causal component to the link between the genetic scores and voting. For lower-profile elections, the sibling estimates were smaller, implying that earlier results might reflect environmental or population-level confounds rather than pure genetic effects. Results for self-reported voting and non-voting participation were less precise in these within-family tests.
The authors interpret the within-sibling results as supportive of a causal connection between the genetic variants captured by these scores and voting, though they emphasise that this does not necessarily operate through the traits the scores were designed to measure.
Several limitations are acknowledged. A genetic effect does not mean political behaviour is biologically fixed; genetics often influence environmental pathways, and pleiotropy means a single genetic score can capture links to multiple traits that collectively shape political participation. Moreover, polygenic scores currently reflect only a portion of the total genetic influence and include statistical noise, making the findings a lower bound rather than a definitive measure.
A major caveat is that polygenic indices rely on genetic databases with a predominance of individuals of European ancestry. Consequently, the scores are less accurate for people of other ancestral backgrounds, which is why the research was restricted to European descent in this study.
Looking ahead, the researchers suggest applying these scores to explore how parents socialise their children politically, by comparing parental and offspring scores to disentangle inherited biology from shared environment. They also note that environments might amplify or dampen genetic predispositions, pointing to an exploratory finding that education can buffer the negative link between depression-related genes and turnout—an effect seemingly driven by those with lower educational attainment.
The study, titled The Genetics of Political Participation: Leveraging Polygenic Indices to Advance Political Behavior Research, was authored by Rafael Ahlskog, Christopher Dawes, Sven Oskarsson, and Aaron Weinschenk.
