Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt

      Introduction

      A few years ago, the Journal of Theoretical Politics featured a startling announcement: The results of a new analysis of genetic and attitudinal data heralded “the end of ideology as we know it.” The philosophers, the implication went, having only interpreted ideology, had been missing the point. Science was finally poised to offer a rigorous, empirical account of its wellsprings. Our ideologies were in our genes.

      Specifically, an interdisciplinary team from political science and behavioral genetics claimed to have shown that most conventionally understood sources of ideology were instead a “cultural veneer” overlaid on a “potentially divergent underlying structure of genetic differences.”¹ Put simply, the idea was that in important instances our genes determine which of the available political preferences we are likely to choose. Even more simply, certain kinds of bodies are predisposed to certain kinds of politics.

      The article (the title was, in fact, “It’s the End of Ideology as We Know It”) was part of a special issue dedicated to research on “genes and politics,” or what practitioners call “new empirical biopolitics.”² This vein of political science research goes back to the 1970s but has only recently achieved greater visibility.³ A high point came when a 2005 article on the heritability of political attitudes made the cover of the American Political Science Review (APSR), the discipline’s flagship journal, and attracted a respectable amount of media attention.⁴ Since then, a small but prolific group of researchers has been claiming to identify genetic bases for our attraction to liberalism or conservatism; levels of social dominance; likelihood to join political parties, vote, or employ particular decision strategies; gender differences in political behavior; feelings of political efficacy; receptiveness to populism; negative attitudes toward out-groups; and even “Machiavellianism.”⁵

      Much of this work is ambitious, calling on us to radically revise our understanding of political life. For one writer, the “shopworn,” “competing … paradigms of behavioralism and rational choice are in their last throes,” to be replaced by a new, “sociogenomic” synthesis.⁶ The APSR’s editor was particularly struck by the popular media attention accorded the 2005 cover article, musing that it might someday “emerge among the most important articles the APSR has ever published.”⁷ And while few political scientists have rushed to retrain in genetics, the continued appearance of work on the biology of politically relevant differences in respected political science journals suggests that other editors and peer reviewers remain interested in this approach.⁸

      The 2005 study and others that followed have of course come in for criticism. Critics such as the geneticist Jon Beckwith and the political scientist Evan Charney fault “empirical biopolitics” for often reifying political categories in ways that do violence to the historical record. They also note that its claims often require us to resort to tortured logic to accommodate previously intelligible phenomena, such as the emergence within a generation of a solid, small-government Republican bloc in the American South (where support for the New Deal had been strong). Finally, critics point to methodological issues, including that these claims seem to rely on an outdated, genes-as-blueprint paradigm, rather than on newer understandings in which DNA is part of a dynamic, epigenetic system.⁹

      Moreover, while genes and politics researchers distance themselves from the suggestion of racial implications, the deeply racialized dynamics of American political life make racial implications hard to avoid. If preference for liberal policies is significantly genetic, the pervasive