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The Physiology of Political Participation

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Abstract

Political involvement varies markedly across people. Traditional explanations for this variation tend to rely on demographic variables and self-reported, overtly political concepts. In this article, we expand the range of possible explanatory variables by hypothesizing that a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions. We measure physiology by computing the degree to which electrodermal activity changes on average when a participant sequentially views a full range of differentially valenced stimuli. Our findings indicate that individuals with higher electrodermal responsiveness are also more likely to participate actively in politics. This relationship holds even after the effects of traditional demographic variables are taken into account, suggesting that physiological responsiveness independently contributes to a fuller understanding of the underlying sources of variation in political involvement.

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Notes

  1. Evolutionary psychology offers sensible reasons that portions of human response should register outside of conscious thought. For example, some needed responses may be quicker and more direct without the involvement of consciousness (e.g., pulling one’s hand from a fire prior to realizing that the hand is burning) and sometimes keeping information out of conscious awareness prevents overloading.

  2. We used a 1-factor solution from the principal-components factor analysis to create the overall participation index. The factor loadings for each of the individual participation measures were as follows: register to vote (.468), vote (.639), frequency of political discussion (.759), feel strongly about an issue (.819), issue voted (.824), campaigned for a candidate (.599), contributed money (.651), contacted elected officials (.658), attempted to persuade others (.817), joined a political organization (.736), and attended meetings on an issue (.583).

  3. As a check we also created a version of the participation index by standardizing and summing the individual items without weighting. This measure correlated very highly with the principal-components-derived measure of participation (r = .974, p < .001) and, as might be expected given the high correlation coefficient, did not produce substantively different results than those produced by the factor-derived measure of participation.

  4. The measure of EDA responsiveness was divided by 1,000 to make the size of the coefficient closer to that for the other variables.

  5. Because tests of increment to R 2 favor the partitioning of variance to variables entered into the model first, this is a conservative test of whether physiological variable contributes meaningfully to our understanding of political participation.

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Acknowledgment

Financial support for latter portions of this project was provided by the National Science Foundation (BCS 08-26828).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Michael W. Gruszczynski, Amanda Balzer, Carly M. Jacobs, Kevin B. Smith & John R. Hibbing

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  1. Michael W. Gruszczynski
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  2. Amanda Balzer
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  3. Carly M. Jacobs
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Correspondence to John R. Hibbing.

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Gruszczynski, M.W., Balzer, A., Jacobs, C.M. et al. The Physiology of Political Participation. Polit Behav 35, 135–152 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9197-x

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