Fieder & Huber 2024 Suggest a Partial Evolutionary/Genetic Basis for Political Attitudes

If this is actually true, the number of kids matters, as does the intergenerational transfer of political stances--hence there may be a scientific basis for the old adage of demography being destiny

This is a much-needed follow-up posting to yesterday’s ‘shock polling’ data from Norway:

'Shock Polling' from Norway shows Massive 'Far-Right™' Shift

Why would I follow-up with a claim of a ‘much-needed’ addition? Well, for starters, it’s because we also know pretty well why this shift is taking place.

While the Left™ might cry foul play, bitch and moan about it, and blame everyone else, reality is a harsh master.

And to do so, we now turn to a recent article by evolutionary biologist Martin Fieder of the U of Vienna who provides a few—quite stunning, peer-reviewed—insights.

Demography is Destiny

The paper in question bears the title ‘Demography leads to more conservative European societies’, was written by Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber, and appeared in Biodemography and Social Biology, 69, no. 4 (2024): 183–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/19485565.2024.2419075.

It is fully available (it seems) for those interested in it, for I’ll be citing but a few choice passages, with emphases [and some snark] added.

Abstract

Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (a total of 66,188 participants from 15 European countries) and the European Gender and Generation Survey (a total of 121,248 participants from 12 countries), we investigated i) whether differences in political attitudes and attitudes toward family values (i.e. attitudes toward homosexual couples, attitudes toward female reproduction) are associated with differences in the average number of children, and ii) whether such an association between fertility and attitudes affects the population share of these attitudes in subsequent generations. We found that in most of the countries analyzed, right-wing (conservative) individuals have, on average, more children and grandchildren than left-wing (liberal) individuals. We also found that the proportion of right-wing individuals increases from generation to generation. Since political attitudes are presumably evolved traits that are socially and genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, these findings may suggest that demographic differences can lead to shifts in prevailing political attitudes. Thus, to some extent, demography may explain longer-term political trends.

Put differently, the issue isn’t but ‘conservatives are outbreeding liberals’, but the former are presumably doing this at an accelerating rate per generation.

From the Introduction

Different attitudes affect fertility through mating, marriage, family formation, and parenthood. Conservative individuals have more traditional attitudes toward sex and marriage (Galland and Lemel Citation2008; Wilcox Citation1991) and are more attached to traditional values and less to individualistic attitudes than left-wing individuals. According to the “higher-order needs hypothesis,” a shift to more individualistic attitudes (reviewed in Haidt Citation2012) eventually leads to disenchantment with institutions, including the family, as traditional behavior requires more subordination of individual needs to those of spouse and children (Lesthaeghe and Surkyn Citation1988)…

Political attitudes are mainly considered to be formed early in life (e.g., Block and Block Citation2006), influenced by the family context and social networks. Social theories of orientation formation suggest a shaping effect in early adulthood, when individuals have mostly internalized the social norms of their family/political/group/environment. Overall, left- and right-wing individuals experiencing the same environment seem to focus on very different environmental aspects of life, and thus these differences are difficult to overcome (Mayhew Citation1991). Furthermore, as political sophistication increases, people seek information that confirms their attitudes (Lodge and Taber Citation2005; Mutz Citation2006). These biases may operate as deeply as part of our neural system (Vigil Citation2010)…

The transfer of political attitudes from parents to children has always been an intensely debated topic (Jennings and Niemi Citation1968), meanwhile, it is now well known that political attitudes are socially transmitted from generation to generation by parents, friends, teachers, and peers (Torney-Purta Citation2017). But not only socially; since Eaves and Eysenck (Citation1974), it has also become increasingly clear that not only physical characteristics, but also attitudes such as ideology, political orientation and the left (liberal) – right (conservative) scheme have a reasonable genetic basis (Hatemi and McDermott Citation2012, Citation2016). The existence of a genetic predisposition to political orientation is in part also supported by the stability of political orientations over the life course (e.g., Campell et al. (Citation1960)). Twin studies suggest that between 30% and 60% of the individual variance in social and political attitudes can be explained by genetic influences (Hatemi and McDermott Citation2012; Hatemi et al. Citation2014).

Did you get that? Political stances appear to have ‘a reasonable genetic basis’, and while I doubt that the results of twin studies can be taken at their face value (twins are quite exceptional), if even but part of the lower bound applies to ‘regular’ (non-twin) siblings, then the political orientation will likely compound over time.

In other words: the right-left political divide will only get more tilted towards the former from generation to generation:

Regardless of whether political attitudes are socially and/or genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, if different political attitudes are associated with differences in fertility, the proportion of attitudes in successive generations is expected to shift toward the attitude associated with higher fertility. For example, if right/conservative individuals have more children on average than left/liberal individuals, the intergenerational transfer of political attitudes would increase the proportion of right-wing individuals in successive generations. Demography per se would thus lead to a shift in the balance of political attitudes…

Overall, including global data, Fieder and Huber (Citation2018) found that both the more extreme left and the more extreme right have more children on average than moderate individuals, leading them to conclude that political attitudes may represent an evolved [!!!] trait and that long-term political trends may be influenced by differential fertility, particularly whenever this fitness advantage is greater for only one side of the political spectrum.

The aim of this paper is therefore to examine whether changing fertility patterns along the political spectrum can have an impact on overall political attitudes in subsequent generations.

Oh well, let’s see—but I’d add one caveat here: I think it’s reasonable to presume that people on ‘the more extreme right’ might provide a more stable home/environment for their offspring compared to those found typically ‘on the more extreme left’.

Briefly, on the Methods and Sample

To analyze left–right political attitudes, we used wave 5 of the SHARE – Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (http://www.share-project.org/home0.html), conducted in 2013. Our sample included 29,179 men and 37,009 women aged 22–104 yr (more than 96% were older than 50 yr) from 5 European countries, as well as Israel. The number of cases for each country is shown in the Supplementary Appendix (Table S1).

There’s a bit more here, but I’ll spare you that; Fieder and Huber use these data to analyse changes across three generations with the following parameters:

age at the time of the survey, sex (coded as 1 = male and 2 = female), years of education, country code, and political orientation coded on an 11-item Likert scale (question: are you politically left or right?) ranging from 0 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right).We recoded the 11-item Likert scale into i) a binary variable: 0 = left (including scores 0,1,2,3,4) and 1 = right (including scores 6,7,8,9,10), omitting “middle ground 5,” and ii) into a 3-item variable 0 = left (0,1,2,3,,4), 1 = middle (5), and 2 = right (6,7,8,9,10) in order to address, to some extent, the problem that the Left-Right Attitude Scale collapses economic and social attitudes into a one-dimensional scale (de Vries and Marks 2012)…

We computed the following separate multivariate general linear models: regression of i) number of living siblings, ii) number of children, and iii) number of grandchildren on sex, age, political orientation and years of education, based on a Poisson error structure with country as a fixed factor with clustered standard errors for countries: we calculated these models using political orientation either i) as a binary left-right indicator or ii) a 3-item left-middle-right indicator. Further, we calculated for each country a separate model, with the same explaining variables as described above…

We used Wave 1 of the European Gender and Generation Survey (conducted between 2002 and 2013) from the following countries: Bulgaria, Russia (both surveyed 2004), Georgia (surveyed 2006), Germany, France, Romania, Estonia, CZ Republic (all surveyed 2005), Belgium (surveyed 2008/2009/2010), Lithuania (surveyed 2006), Poland (surveyed 2010/2011) and Sweden (surveyed 2012/2013).

Educational attainment plus cross-relations of age, number of children, and political attitudes are all included.

I think we’re all set now—are you ready for the results?

Findings

We find a significant positive association between F0 participants’ right-wing political attitudes and their number of children and grandchildren (Tables 1 and 2) both on basis of the binary and the 3–items indicator of political orientation. For the 3-item indicator, no reproductive benefit is found for the middle category. The association between F0 participants’ right-wing attitudes and their number of living siblings is also positive, but not significant for both the binary as well as 3-item indicator of political attitude (Tables 1 and 2). In addition, years of education of F0 participants is significantly negatively associated with their number of living siblings, number of children, and - only for the 3-item indicator- number of grandchildren. Age is significantly negatively associated with the number of living siblings and positively associated with the number of children (only if using the binary indicator of political attitude) and grand-children. The negative association of age with the number of living siblings may indicate that some siblings have died among older participants. We also find a significant negative association between being female and number of living siblings and – only for the 3-items indicator – a significant positive association between being female and the number of grand-children (Tables 1 and 2).

Tables 1 and 2 are available in the article, as is Table 3 mentioned below.

For the country-specific models (Table 3), the right-wing attitude is significantly positively associated with the number of living siblings (F0) in two countries, with the number of children (F1) in four countries, and the number of grandchildren (F2) in ten countries. The other associations are non-significant with the exceptions of Sweden (right-wing attitude significantly negatively associated with number of living siblings) and Israel, where right-wing attitude is significantly negatively associated with the number of living siblings, the number of children and the number of grandchildren. We found a similar pattern using the 3-items scale (see supplement Table S8).

There’s a bit more on country-specific features and attitudes towards homosexuality, which I’ll skip over here.

Discussion

The answer to our first question: Do conservative individuals in European countries have more children on average can be answered overall with “yes.” Our data show that right-wing (conservative) individuals have, on average, more children and grandchildren than individuals with left-wing (liberal) attitudes. This finding is in line with the “higher-order needs hypothesis” mentioned in the introduction, suggesting that placing importance on personal freedom and individual autonomy, an attitude which is more common among left-wing individuals, eventually leads to disenchantment with institutions, including marriage and family (Galland and Lemel Citation2008; Lesthaeghe and Surkyn Citation1988; Wilcox Citation1991).

The answer to our second question: Do fertility differences have implications for the demography of future populations in European countries can be answered with “probably yes.” Despite a few exceptions, our results suggest that in most, though not all, countries the surplus of children and grandchildren of right-wing individuals may lead to a shift in political orientation in the F1 and F2 generations toward a higher proportion of right-wing attitudes. This conclusion is based on the understanding that political attitudes are both socially and genetically transmitted…This probability is further increased by assortative mating, which means that spouses have an above-average probability of having similar attitudes (Alford et al. Citation2011; Bisin and Verdier Citation2001; Eaves and Hatemi Citation2008).

Translated from the academese (although I’ve read way worse), this means that people are typically looking for a partner who shares ± many, if not most, values, i.e., conservatives would look for equally conservative mates, as liberals/leftists would also do for equally liberal/leftist partners.

A positive association between parents’ and children’s social attitudes has been observed as early as 1942 (Hirschberg and Gilliland Citation1942; Hyman Citation1959). Maccoby et al. (Citation1954) further found that children follow their parents’ partisanship in at least three-quarters of cases where both parents belong to the same party (reviewed in Torney-Purta Citation2017). Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the frequency of both parents having the same political attitude is high as political attitudes show interspousal correlations that are among the strongest of all social and biometric traits (Alford et al. Citation2011)…

Although our results exhibit considerable variation across countries in the share of right-wing individuals, presumably reflecting differences in the political system, the share of right-wing individuals increases across generations in most countries, regardless of the country-specific share of political attitudes…

It is particularly interesting that liberals are now at a reproductive disadvantage, since liberals are also known to have more open and relaxed attitudes toward sex (Hatemi, Crabtree, and McDermott Citation2017), so one would expect them to have at least the same number of children on average as conservatives. Presumably, due to modern contraceptives, a more open attitude toward sex may not lead to more children these days, and thus liberal individuals may be losing “reproductive ground”…

Overall, our findings suggest that demographic differentiation can lead to a shift in prevailing political attitudes. Our results suggest that many, though not all, of the societies we studied are becoming more conservative…However, the “reproductive advantage” of right-wing individuals is quite recent, as it was not evident in the F0 generation. We conclude that the contribution of demography to political change is currently underestimated. Demography may lead to slow but long-lasting changes in prevailing social and political attitudes and thus play a more important role in the “design” of political systems than is generally assumed. For example, the presumably evolved trait of political attitudes may also shape political trends in Europe through a differential fertility of left vs. right wingers.

Bottom Lines

Well, that was quite…interesting. We’ll probably find out one way or another, but I do buy the argument that parents transmit intergenerational opinions, and if conservatives have more kids, then the likelihood of subsequent generations becoming ‘more conservative’ (relative to the presumed smaller number of children of left parents) makes a lot of sense.

Despite some relevant limitations (the data do not differentiate between biological and non-biological children, not all European countries were included), I don’t think that, if the hypothesis holds, that this would make a significant difference.

Perhaps we’re living through the peak of left/liberal politicking, and, if we are, perhaps the lunacy derives, at least in part, from the left/liberal realisation that this is their last chance to get close to a political majority. That is, absent another Bolshevik/Maoist revolution.