Genetic likelihood to vote
Reason Hit & Run blogger Ronald Bailey recently asked, Are You Genetically Determined to Vote? He discussed a recent political science study from the University of California, San Diego which claims that the answer is yes. Dr. Fowler and Mr. Dawes observed relationships between voter turnout and the genes MAOA and 5HTT, which are already known to be involved in how social (or antisocial) an individual is.
In this article we demonstrate that possessing a particular gene is associated with voting activity. Even after controlling for factors known to influence turnout, having a high MAOA allele raises the likelihood of voting by about 5%. Among people active in their religious organizations, having a long 5HTT allele raises the likelihood of voting by about 10%. We theorize that since low efficiency MAOA and 5HTT alleles limit the degree to which individuals are socially oriented, these alleles inhibit their desire or ability to participate in the political process.
I’m not qualified to dissect their methodology in detail, though I do have a healthy suspicion of political science data analysis. I say “healthy” because I think most political scientists would share it. There are always so many factors in play, and it’s difficult to pin down any mechanisms by which effects happen in society, so it’s difficult to give genuine evidence for something rather than simply suggesting that your hypothesis could be true. (Remember, kids, correlation is not causation.) They did control their results against the effects of gender and ethnicity (at least, white vs. non-white) on voter turnout. I’m not quite sure that changes in likelihood of 5-10% are significant enough to frame as a genetic “determination,” but perhaps given turnout rates and population size, that makes a big enough difference when elections happen to be meaningful in the aggregate.
More research still needs to be done to understand these effects fully, but I think there’s an interesting possibility on the horizon. What if it turns out to be true that genetic makeup predisposes some people to vote, and other people not to vote? I mean, what if elections and referenda are decided by a genetically select few who, as a result of their participation, “matter” to the government more than the rest? If someday we have scientific proof of this, how should we make policy in response?
I think the answer is probably that we shouldn’t be worried too much about it, unless there’s a particular group of people with distinct interests that is consistently missing from the vote count. It’s not a rights violation — no one’s being prevented from voting, no one’s being told not to vote. It’s just a matter of people acting on their individual preferences. Anyone’s allowed to be disinterested in voting. Certainly, anyone’s allowed to be gregarious or to be introverted, and plenty of research has been done into the neurochemistry behind those differences. Even if we weren’t sure which genes were causing different neurochemicals to be released in response to different stimuli, it’s surely differences in genetic information that leads to the creation of different cellular mechanisms. In some sense, all this paper is saying is that people who are more extroverted are more likely to be active civic participants, which seems predictable almost to the point of being unremarkable.
In the event that a specific group was being systematically left out of the voting process, we’d have a bigger issue on our hands. That’s why it was important for Fowler and Dawes to control for gender and ethnicity (qualities that are obviously related to what genes a person has). If it turned out that, hypothetically, people of Asian descent were likely to have the genes that made people less social and less likely to be politically involved, the interests of Asian-Americans might be underrepresented at the polls. Without a voting bloc commensurate with population size, those interests could get unfairly ignored, leading to potentially discriminatory policies being enacted. In that case, in an effort to ensure that the government provided equal protection to all citizens, some people might argue for some kind of statistical compensation in the vote counting, or perhaps for some special offices designated for the protection of the interests of the subgroup in question. Of course, solutions like those come with their own backlash and societal unease. It would definitely be a messy situation.
Even if there aren’t any direct links between genetics and underrepresentation, it’s possible that there are correlations with these genetic traits that lead to practical harms. There are other groups of people who have concurrent interests besides those formed by gender and ethnic divisions — labor unions, for example, or residents of a state — and of course union membership and state residency aren’t genetically determined. It’s definitely true, though, that there are some careers that require one to be extroverted and other careers better suited for the introverted. If how socially inclined a person is really does have a meaningful effect on whether they vote, genetic factors might make teachers and nurses come out in force on election day while truckers and assembly line workers mostly stay home. (I have no idea if those trends actually manifest, and even if they did there could be other factors to explain it — but it’s possible for the social/antisocial genes to account for at least some of it.) The world is getting smaller every day as travel becomes easier and easier, but many people still do live relatively close to their parents, who provided their genetic material, meaning that a genetic tendency to vote or not vote could possibly be correlated with regions of the country or in some cases even neighborhoods. It would take a lot more data analysis, to be sure, but it’s possible that some subgroups of society could be underrepresented and subject to detrimental policies because association with that group is highly correlated with the genes that make one less likely to vote.
I suppose the real question is, what do we use voting for? Is it a way to average out competing interests to arrive at an outcome that’s best for society as a whole? Or, is it intended to measure the societal consensus by finding out what each person believes and summing up over the whole society? If it’s the latter, then it’s fine if people pass up the opportunity to vote when they don’t have strong opinions that they want counted. If it’s the former, though, certain groups not showing up could really cause problems. Obviously we don’t know enough yet for this to be a real issue at the moment, but it’s definitely something to think about.