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The Higher Power of Religiosity Over Personality on Political Ideology

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Abstract

Two streams of research, culture war and system justification, have proposed that religious orientations and personality, respectively, play critical roles in political orientations. There has been only limited work integrating these two streams. This integration is now of increased importance given the introduction of behavior-genetic frameworks into our understanding of why people differ politically. Extant research has largely considered the influence of personality as heritable and religiosity as social, but this view needs reconsideration as religiosity is also genetically influenced. Here we integrate these domains and conduct multivariate analyses on twin samples in the U.S. and Australia to identify the relative importance of genetic, environmental, and cultural influences. First, we find that religiosity’s role on political attitudes is more heritable than social. Second, religiosity accounts for more genetic influence on political attitudes than personality. When including religiosity, personality’s influence is greatly reduced. Our results suggest religion scholars and political psychologists are partially correct in their assessment of the “culture wars”—religiosity and ideology are closely linked, but their connection is grounded in genetic predispositions.

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Notes

  1. Data from the World Values Survey and reported by The Association of Religious Data Archives: http://www.thearda.com/internationalData/MultiCompare.asp?c=234,%2014. Accessed November 29, 2016.

  2. The substantive results in the Australian sample are unchanged if we instead only combine the importance and attendance items. This approach accounts for more of the genetic component of social ideology and less of the unique environment component. Nonetheless, by extracting the common factor that underlies all four of these variables, we get closer to a general trait of religiosity and abstract away from the factors that contribute uniquely to each of these four constructs.

  3. To maximize the sample size, we rely on Wave 1 data where available and supplement Wave 2 scores only for respondents who did not complete Wave 1. See the discussion section for the limitations this creates.

  4. At a reviewer’s request, we also examined the univariate results separately by religious tradition, focusing on the two largest groups in each sample (i.e., Catholics and Protestants). Model fit is presented in Tables S10A and S11; the results are in Tables S12 and S13. In general, we find a pattern of genetic and unique environmental effects similar to those from the full sample. The one exception is religiosity in the sample of Catholic Australians, where the shared environment comes out as significant component. We approach all of these results cautiously, as our statistical power is too limited to draw strong conclusions about differences between religious traditions; we did not estimate the more complex bivariate and trivariate models on these subsamples due to these same power limitations. Nonetheless, future research should examine how the components of these traits vary not just across countries, but also across religious traditions. In particular, these future efforts would benefit from including questions regarding childhood religious socialization and adult religious conversion or estrangement, which would ensure that subgroup analyses can capture the range of adult religiosity and potentially provide some insights into the recent increase of “nones” (those with no religious affiliation).

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Funding

The U.S. data employed in this project were collected with the financial support of the National Science Foundation in the form of SES-0721378, PI: John R. Hibbing; Co-PIs: John R. Alford, Lindon J. Eaves, Carolyn L. Funk, Peter K. Hatemi, and Kevin B. Smith, and with the cooperation of the Minnesota Twin Registry at the University of Minnesota, Robert Krueger and Matthew McGue, Directors. The Australian data employed in this project were collected with the financial support of the National Science Foundation (SES-0729493 and SES-0721707). PIs: John R. Alford, Peter K. Hatemi, John R. Hibbing, Nicholas Martin and Kevin B. Smith. The analyses in this paper were made possible in part by training received at workshops held at the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder and funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-0921008 and SES-1259678). All analysis scripts are available on Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YBCZHI). We would like to thank Peter Hatemi and Claire Gothreau for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this project.

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA

    Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz

  2. IUPUI, Indianapolis, USA

    Amanda Friesen

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  1. Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz
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  2. Amanda Friesen
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Correspondence to Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz.

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Ksiazkiewicz, A., Friesen, A. The Higher Power of Religiosity Over Personality on Political Ideology. Polit Behav 43, 637–661 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09566-5

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