Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: A Genome-Wide Association Study of Voter Turnout

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The act of voting is a fundamentally important exercise in all democracies but explaining why individuals cooperate on a large scale when it is individually costly to do so has proven to be a challenging theoretical and empirical puzzle. The limited explanatory power of extant explanations of turnout has prompted political scientists to look at non-traditional predictors of turnout. The recent finding that more than half of the variation in voter turnout could be attributed to genetic factors (Fowler, Baker & Dawes 2008) holds the potential of profoundly changing the way one views voting behavior. However, the specific genes associated with voter turnout or the precise causal pathway linking genes to voting behavior remains unknown. This research project investigates hundreds of thousands of variants across the entire human genome to look for which ones are related to voter turnout. Identifying these variants provides a better understanding of how genes influence voter turnout and will ultimately help to develop and improve theories of political behavior.The specific questions this research addresses are: 1) which specific genetic variants are associated with voter turnout; and 2) what is the causal pathway linking these genes to voting behavior? In order to answer the first question, the investigator will perform a genome-wide association study of voter turnout. This specifically entails looking for significant associations between each of 592,652 distinct genetic variants spread across the human genome and validated as well as self-reported voter turnout. The analysis will be based on a sample of approximately 3,700 subjects. To answer to the second question, the data set also contains information on several individual attributes known to be highly predictive of turnout such as income, education, personality traits and cognitive ability. Therefore, the investigator formally tests whether specific genetic variants indirectly influence turnout via one of these attributes. Many genetic variants have been found to be associated with traits related to voter turnout giving us an idea of which pathways to investigate. For example, several genetic variants are known to be associated with personality traits and recent research in political science has shown personality traits influence turnout (Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson & Anderson 2010, Gerber, Huber, Raso & Ha 2008, Gerber, Huber, Doherty & Dowling 2009, Mondak & Halperin 2008). Researching the functional role of genetic variants found to be associated with turnout helps uncover causal pathways.The discovered link between genes and politics presents the possibility of fundamentally changing how we view voting behavior. However, until one better understands the mechanism linking genes and voting behavior one cannot suggest what types of policies the government could put in place to promote higher turnout or the strategies political actors should adopt in order to mobilize their supporters. This research is necessary to move this nascent research into something useful for policy makers and political actors much in the way genome-wide association studies have aided researchers in better detecting, treating, and preventing diseases.