A polygenic score for educational attainment partially predicts voter turnout

Christopher T. Dawes, Aysu Okbay, Sven Oskarsson and Aldo Rustichini
Additional contact information
Christopher T. Dawes: a Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY 10012;
Aysu Okbay: b Department of Economics, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
Sven Oskarsson: c Department of Government, Uppsala Universitet, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden;
Aldo Rustichini: d Department of Economics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0462

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021, vol. 118, issue 50, e2022715118

Abstract: The strong correlation between education and voting is among the most robust findings in social science. We show that genes associated with the propensity to acquire education are also associated with higher voter turnout. A within-family analysis suggests education-linked genes exert direct effects on voter turnout but also reveals evidence of genetic nurture in second-order elections. Our findings have important implications for the study of political inequality. Scholars have argued that parental education is the main driver of the reproduction of political inequality across generations. By separating the effect of genes from parental nurturing, our findings suggest that the roots of individual-level political inequality run deeper than family background.

Keywords: education; voting; polygenic score; turnout; cognitive ability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.pnas.org/content/118/50/e2022715118.full (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:118:y:2021:p:e2022715118

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by PNAS Product Team ().