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The Heritability of Foreign Policy Preferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Skyler J. Cranmer  and
Christopher T. Dawes
Skyler J. Cranmer*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, USA
Christopher T. Dawes
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, New York University, USA
*
Address for Correspondence: Skyler J. Cranmer, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 311 Hamilton Hall, CB#3265, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265, USA. Email: [email protected].

Abstract

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Attitudes towards foreign policy have typically been explained by ideological and demographic factors. We approach this study from a different perspective and ex amine the extent to which foreign policy preferences correspond to genetic variation. Using data from the Minnesota Twin Family Study, we show that a moderate share of individual differences in the degree to which one's foreign policy preferences are hawkish or dovish can be attributed to genetic variation. We also show, based on a bivariate twin model, that foreign policy preferences share a common genetic source of variation with political ideology. This result presents the possibility that ideology may be the causal pathway through which genes affect foreign policy preferences.

Keywords

foreign policy preferencesACEbivariateCholesky
Type
Special Section: The Intersection of Behavioral Genetics and Political Science
Information
Twin Research and Human Genetics , Volume 15 , Issue 1: Special Section: The Intersection of Behavioral Genetics and Political Science , February 2012 , pp. 52 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012