Faculty note: Weinschenk publishes research on the genetics of politics

Assistant Prof. Aaron Weinschenk (Political Science and Psychology), recently had a peer-reviewed journal article accepted for publication in Political Research Quarterly, a top general-interest journal in political science. The article, co-authored with Professor Christopher Dawes (New York University) — a pioneer in the field of biopolitics, uses data on identical and fraternal twins to estimate the heritability of personality traits and political orientations, and also to examine the amount of genetic overlap between personality and political orientations. In the past several years, political scientists have devoted more attention to the ways in which basic biological and psychological predispositions influence political behavior. This paper is just one piece in a series of studies that Weinschenk and Dawes are conducting on this topic.