Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Participation and Ideology in a Post-Communist Country. The case study of Hungary∗

Behavior genetic approaches are becoming increasingly popular in political science. Many studies, to date, used a classical twin design to explore both political participation and ideological self-placement in Western democracies but studies in different political contexts, such as post-communist countries, are scarce. This paper is the first to explore the heritability of ideology and political participation in a post-communist country: Hungary. A small sample of twins (from 58 monozygotic families with 38 complete pairs, 19 same sex and 7 opposite sex dizygotic families with 12 complete same sex and 6 complete opposite sex pairs) answered political questions in late January of 2012. Given the small sample extensive assessment of model assumptions is presented and show no cause for concern. Findings on participation match the Western results of high and significant heritability (72.2% with 95% CI: 41.4%-89.9% and no shared environmental effects within the 95% CI). The picture is quite different for the ideological ∗Very preliminary work in progress. Please do not distribute or reference this study without the explicit written permission of the corresponding author. †Corresponding Author: [email protected]. Department of Political Science, Central European University CEU, Budapest, Hungary. ‡Department of Radiology and Oncotherapy, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary