Are you Cong or BJP? One answer lies in your genes

If you are organised, self-disciplined, and more likely to follow rules, you are more likely to be conservative.

If you are organised, self-disciplined, and more likely to follow rules, you are more likely to be conservative. If you are an extrovert, if you are open to experiences, if you focus on change as an opportunity rather than a problem, you are more likely to be liberal. If you are afraid of death, you are probably a conservative.

These are some of the findings of an emerging branch of political science that challenges what pundits tell us about caste and class and the way we vote. It takes cues from biology to say that there is increasing evidence that our political behaviour 8212; whether we are conservative or liberal 8212; could have its roots in genes. A provocative article in the latest issue of New Scientist cites several studies that indicate political positions are 8220;substantially determined by biology and can be stubbornly resistant to reason.8221;

This has implications on campaigns. The magazine quotes John Alford, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas: 8220;Trying to persuade someone not to be a liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes. We have to rethink persuasion.8221;

Next month, Ira Carmen, professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Gene Robinson, professor of entomology, are organising the world8217;s first 8220;Conference on Biology and Politics,8221; underwritten by the National Science Foundation. Carmen has invited 50 geneticists, politics researchers and neuroscientists to the conference.

Carmen8217;s latest book Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of Human Genomics, predicts 8220;the birth of a new political science informed by evolutionary theory and DNA propensity.8221;

The logic behind this new research is simple: many personality traits have been linked to specific genes and people with a particular personality trait are likely to exhibit a particular political inclination. Therefore, it8217;s possible to link genetic composition with political behaviour of an individual.

Says New Scientist: 8220;Some traits are obviously going to be linked to politics, such as xenophobia being connected with the far right. However, John Jost, psychologist at New York University uncovered many more intriguing connections. People who scored highly on a scale measuring fear of death, for example, were almost four times more likely to hold conservative views. Dogmatic types were also more conservative, while those who expressed interest in new experiences tended to be liberals.8221;

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For example, Carmen cited D4DR, a gene that regulates levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. High levels of dopamine can cause obsessive-compulsive disorder. In other words, dopamine might be linked to the need to 8220;impose order on the world.8221; If so, higher levels of dopamine should be found more frequently in conservatives. Carmen plans to study this in 2000 individuals.

According to New Scientist, since liberals are more generally open to conflicting ideas, activity in this area of the brain would be expected to differ between them and conservatives. Last September, David Amodio, a neuroscientist at New York University, showed that it does.

One thing is clear, says Alford. 8220;We spend a lot of energy getting upset with the other side8230;we often think our opponents are misinformed or stubborn. Accepting that people are born with some of their views changes that.8221; So New Scientist has a salutary suggestion: 8220;Come to terms with these differences, and you can spend the energy now wasted on persuasion on figuring out ways of accommodating both points of view.8221;

Coalition politics 8212; and a common minimum programme 8212; couldn8217;t have got a more solid scientific explanation!