Your Political Personality May Be Inherited!

This short piece discusses the personalities that can shape the way a person thinks about politics. For example, those who inheret traits such as openness to new things and rule bending are more likely to have liberal political leanings. Those who value traditionalism and are cautious in their everyday lives tend to be conservative.

It is said that your personality is influenced by your genes more than you would think - do we vote red or blue because that's what we're born into? It certainly explains why generations upon generations of people in a family usually think the same way. A large part of this is obviously environmental, but it's interesting to think that a person's genes hold them to a particular ideology.

Though this article introduces an interesting idea, I still feel that the environment you grow up in plays a larger role than genetics in shaping political ideology. I am currently reading Hillary Clinton's autobiography, and in it she talked about how when she was young, she was a staunch conservative, supporting Goldwater by volunteering for him and forming clubs. Her father was also a conservative, and as the head of the household, probably influenced her political decisions. When she entered college, however, her ideas began to change - most likely affected by the young liberals of her college and era. It is still hard to say anything conclusively about the genetics v. environment debate through this example, especially since Hillary's mother was a liberal, but her environment does seem to have had a large impact on what she believed at the time.