We investigate the link between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement using a new data set containing information on a large sample of young German twins. The TwinLife Study enables us to examine the predominant model of personality, the Big Five framework, as well as traits that fall outside the Big Five, such as cognitive ability, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the underpinnings of political engagement. Our results support previous work showing genetic overlap between some psychological traits and political engagement. More specifically, we find that cognitive ability and openness to experience are correlated with political engagement and that common genes can explain most of the relationship between these psychological traits and political engagement. Relationships between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement exist even at a fairly young age, which is an important finding given that previous work has relied heavily on older samples to study the link between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement.

This special issue considers the relationship of the life sciences to both public policy and public administration. This makes sense because the bureaucratic process and public administration are deeply involved in the policy process and the development of substantive public policy. The two subjects are intertwined. And a biological perspective can illuminate many aspects of both. That is the focus of this issue.

In an on-demand media environment, the 2016 presidential primary debates provided a ratings and economic boost to host networks surpassing all prior primary debates and even major sporting events in viewership. In turn, millions of viewers were exposed to and subtly influenced by the ways in which these candidates were visually presented. We analyze how the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were presented in their initial two debates (Fox News and CNN; CNN and CBS, respectively). Candidates are considered in terms of visual priming through aggregate camera time and average camera fixation time and how contenders were visually framed through the proportion of different camera shot types used (solo, split screen, side by side, multiple candidate, and audience reaction). Findings suggest that while the front-runners from both political parties benefited from preferential visual coverage, Donald Trump stood out in terms of the visual priming and framing that presented him as a serious contender.

This article proposes equating policies as species to develop a better understanding of how policies emerge, change, and diffuse across policymaking environments. Scholars have long shown an interest in understanding policy change and reinvention, whether incremental or nonincremental. The two subfields of public policy that can answer how and why policies change are not unified, leading to difficulty in comprehensively assessing policy emergence and change. The policy species concept bridges knowledge of the policy process and knowledge in the policy process by creating an operationalized definition of public policy and suggesting a process for classifying policies to observe subsequent behavior. Drawing from the field of biology, the policy species framework outlines how policies possess genotypes and phenotypes, which dictate what a policy is and how it can change. In tracing genotypic and phenetic change over time, policy evolution and change is more easily discernible. In turn, a more precise picture of how policies function is painted.

In this article, we scrutinize a policy area in which the Russian government has had to react to negative publicity in the last few years, namely, the doping scandal surrounding the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. This scandal uncovered important aspects of Russia’s vulnerability in the global sports milieu, yet so far, it has remained almost unnoticed in the literature on mega sports events in Russia. Our analysis is premised on the convergence of two types and techniques of control and regulation: anatomopolitics, which presupposes, in Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the term, measures of control over individual bodies, and biopolitics, which refers to policy practices that target and concern the entire population. Their conflation in the Russian context results in a controversial effect: it strengthens relations of hegemony yet also exposes the sovereign power to the regulations of global sports organizations.

Background. Disinformation, now best known generically as “fake news,” is an old and protean weapon. Prominent in the 1980s was AIDS disinformation, including the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth, for whose propagation some figures ultimately admitted blame while others shamelessly claimed credit. In 2013 we reported a comprehensive analysis of this myth, finding leading roles for the Soviet Union’s state security service, the KGB, and for biologist and independent conspiracy theorist Jakob Segal but not for East Germany’s state security service, the Stasi. We found Stasi involvement had been much less extensive and much less successful than two former Stasi officers had begun claiming following German reunification. In 2014 two historians crediting the two former Stasi officers coauthored a monograph challenging our analysis and portraying the Stasi as having directed Segal, or at least as having used him as a “conscious or unconscious multiplier,” and as having successfully assisted a Soviet bloc AIDS-disinformation conspiracy that they soon inherited and thenceforth led. In 2017 a German appellate court found our 2013 analysis persuasive in a defamation suit brought by a filmmaker whose work the 2014 monograph had depicted as co-funded by the Stasi.

Question and methods. Were our critics right about the Stasi? We asked and answered ten subsidiary questions bearing upon our critics’ arguments, reassessing our own prior work and probing additional sources including archives of East Germany’s Partei- und Staatsführung [party-and-state leadership] and the recollections of living witnesses.

Findings. Jakob Segal transformed and transmitted the myth without direction from the KGB or the Stasi or any element of East Germany’s party-and-state leadership. The Stasi had trouble even tracking Segal’s activities, which some officers feared would disadvantage East Germany scientifically, economically, and politically. Three officers in one Stasi section did show interest in myth propagation, but their efforts were late, limited, inept, and inconsequential.

Conclusion. The HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth, most effectively promoted by Jakob Segal acting independently of any state’s security service, was not, contrary to claims, a Stasi success.

Adequate income is a social determinant of health. In the United States, only Social Security beneficiaries receive inflation-protected guaranteed income. Social Security needs another 1983 compromise in which stakeholders accepted “shared pain” to avoid insolvency. We propose indexing the benefit using the chained consumer price index (CPI) for all urban consumers and providing a one-time bonus of 8% to 10% for beneficiaries in their mid-80s, when needs become greater. The chained CPI has little impact when beneficiaries start receiving benefits, but older beneficiaries need protection. The estimated 75-year savings from this restructured benefit amount to 14.2% to 18% of Social Security deficits. Modest increases in payroll taxes and maximum earnings taxed should make up most of the shortfall. Including unearned income with wages and salaries subject to the 6.2% individual tax would produce much more revenue. The discussion explores the proposal’s political feasibility, grounding in current policy and political science literature, and the role of income as a social determinant of health.

The uses of natural selection argument in politics have been constant since Charles Darwin’s times. They have also been varied. The readings of Darwin’s theory range from the most radically individualist views, as in orthodox socio-Darwinism, to the most communitarian, as in Peter Kropotkin’s and other socialist perspectives. This essay argues that such diverse, contradictory, and sometimes even outrageous political derivations from Darwin’s theory may be partially explained by some incompleteness and ambivalences underlying Darwin’s concepts. “Natural selection,” “struggle for existence,” and “survival of the fittest” are open concepts and may suggest some hierarchical and segregationist interpretations. Circumstantially, Darwin accepted social “checks,” such as discouraging marriage of “lower” individuals to prevent them from reproducing, in a vein of Malthusian politics. This makes Darwin’s theory of selection by struggle collide with his theory of social instincts, by which he explains the origins of morality. It also favors reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man from opposite, mostly ideological perspectives. Darwin’s position is ambivalent, although hardly unreasonable. The recognition he makes of social instincts, as well as the use of the concept of artificial selection, entails accepting the role of human consciousness, by which social evolution cannot be reduced to natural evolution, as socio-Darwinians did next and as some neo-Darwinists seem to repeat. On these grounds, this essay argues the inadequacy of the conventional model of natural selection for understanding politics. If we want to describe politics in Darwin’s language, artificial rather than natural selection would be the concept that performs better for explaining the courses of politics in real society.

The study of bureaucratic behavior—focusing on control, decision-making, and institutional arrangements—has historically leaned heavily on theories of rational choice and bounded rationality. Notably absent from this research, however, is attention to the growing literature on biological and especially evolutionary human behavior. This article addresses this gap by closely examining the extant economic and psychological frameworks—which we refer to as “Adam Smith’s bureaucrat” and “Herbert Simon’s bureaucrat”—for their shortcomings in terms of explanatory and predictive theory, and by positing a different framework, which we call “Charles Darwin’s bureaucrat.” This model incorporates new insights from an expanding multidisciplinary research framework and has the potential to address some of the long-noted weaknesses of classic theories of bureaucratic behavior.

Contrary to the claims of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that its torture program was scientific, the program was not based on biology or any other science. Instead, the George W. Bush administration veneered the program’s justification with a patina of pseudoscience, ignoring the actual biology of torturing human brains. We reconstruct the Bush administration’s decision-making process to establish that the policy decision to use torture took place in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks without any investigation into its efficacy. We then present the pseudoscientific model of torture sold to the CIA, show why this ad hoc model amounted to pseudoscience, and then catalog what the actual science of torturing human brains—available in 2001—reveals about the practice. We conclude with a discussion of how a process incorporating countervailing evidence might prevent a policy going forward that is contrary to law, ethics, and evidence.

Members of the public can disagree with scientists in at least two ways: people can reject well-established scientific theories and they can believe fabricated, deceptive claims about science to be true. Scholars examining the reasons for these disagreements find that some individuals are more likely than others to diverge from scientists because of individual factors such as their science literacy, political ideology, and religiosity. This study builds on this literature by examining the role of conspiracy mentality in these two phenomena. Participants were recruited from a national online panel (N = 513) and in person from the first annual Flat Earth International Conference (N = 21). We found that conspiracy mentality and science literacy both play important roles in believing viral and deceptive claims about science, but evidence for the importance of conspiracy mentality in the rejection of science is much more mixed.

We tracked the relative integration and differentiation among life history traits over the period spanning AD 1800–1999 in the Britannic and Gallic biocultural groups. We found that Britannic populations tended toward greater strategic differentiation, while Gallic populations tended toward greater strategic integration. The dynamics of between-group competition between these two erstwhile rival biocultural groups were hypothesized as driving these processes. We constructed a latent factor that specifically sought to measure between-group competition and residualized it for the logarithmic effects of time. We found a significantly asymmetrical impact of between-group competition, where the between-group competition factor appeared to be driving the diachronic integration in Gallic populations but had no significantly corresponding influence on the parallel process of diachronic differentiation in Britannic populations. This suggests that the latter process was attributable to some alternative and unmeasured causes, such as the resource abundance consequent to territorial expansion rather than contraction.