It is a well-established fact, from decades of research on political socialization, that the children of politically active parents are more likely to become politically active themselves. This poses a challenge for democracy, as it means that inequalities in political influence are reproduced across generations. The present study argues that this problem may be more severe than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reason for this is that previous research on the topic has focused almost exclusively on political transmission between parents and their children, whereas the role played by more distant forebears, such as grandparents, has been largely neglected. In this study, we use Swedish register data to analyze multigenerational associations in electoral participation. The empirical results clearly indicate that the traditional two-generation approach to the study of political transmission tends to underestimate intergenerational persistence in voting behavior and that this excess persistence has both genetic and social roots.

The absence of a gendered analysis of the effect of marriage on voting is surprising given researchers’ cognizance of the heterogeneous effects of marriage on a range of other social outcomes. In this paper, we shed new light on spousal dependency by studying the gendered effect of marital disruption, in the form of divorce, on voter turnout. First, drawing on Swedish populationwide data, we use the differential timing of divorces in relation to general elections to generate more credible estimates of the causal effect of divorce on turnout. Second, although we find that both sexes are adversely affected by divorce, we show that the effect is much more pronounced for men. Specifically, the long-term effect is almost twice as large for men. Finally, we use these data to show that the gendered effect of divorce is mainly driven by asymmetrical spousal mobilization due to higher levels of turnout among women.

A core part of political research is to identify how political preferences are shaped. The nature of these questions is such that robust causal identification is often difficult to achieve, and we are not seldom stuck with observational methods that we know have limited causal validity. The purpose of this paper is to measure the magnitude of bias stemming from both measurable and unmeasurable confounders across three broad domains of individual determinants of political preferences: socio-economic factors, moral values, and psychological constructs. We leverage a unique combination of rich Swedish registry data for a large sample of identical twins, with a comprehensive battery of 34 political preference measures, and build a meta-analytical model comparing our most conservative observational (naive) estimates with discordant twin estimates. This allows us to infer the amount of bias from unobserved genetic and shared environmental factors that remains in the naive models for our predictors, while avoiding precision issues common in family-based designs. The results are sobering: in most cases, substantial bias remains in naive models. A rough heuristic is that about half of the effect size even in conservative observational estimates is composed of confounding.

This study leverages population registry data from Sweden to examine whether immigrants who live in areas with a high concentration of ethnic minorities are more or less likely to be nominated for political office. It exploits a refugee placement program in place in Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s that restricted refugees' opportunities to freely choose their place of residence. The article presents evidence that immigrants who live in areas with a high ethnic density are less likely to be nominated for political office. The findings have important implications for local integration policies as well as refugee placement policies, as many countries consider local context when resettling refugees.

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have different experiences depending on their birth order. First-borns spend their first years of life without having to compete over their parents' attention and resources, while their younger siblings are born into potential rivalry. We examine differences in turnout depending on birth order, using unique population-wide individual level register data from Sweden and Norway that enables precise within-family estimates. We consistently find that higher birth order entails lower turnout, and that the turnout differential with respect to birth order is stronger when turnout is lower. The link between birth order and turnout holds when we use data from four other, non-Nordic countries. This birth order effect appears to be partly mediated by socio-economic position and attitudinal predispositions.

It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between individuals living in different municipalities or born in different years. Similar to recent studies employing credible identification strategies, we fail to find a statistically significant average effect of education on political participation. We move past previous studies, however, and show that the reform nevertheless contributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals of different social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from low socioeconomic status households. The results thus square well with other recent studies arguing that education is particularly important for uplifting politically marginalized groups.

Widespread and persistent political underrepresentation of immigrant-origin minorities poses deep challenges to democratic practice and norms. What accounts for this underrepresentation? Two types of competing explanations are prevalent in the literature: accounts that base minority underrepresentation on individual-level resources and accounts that emphasize political opportunity structures. However, due to the lack of data suitable for testing these explanations, existing research has not been able to adjudicate between these theories. Using registry-based microdata covering the entire Swedish adult population between 1991 and 2010 our study is the first to empirically evaluate these alternative explanations. We examine election outcomes to municipal councils over the course of six elections and find that variation in individual-level resources cannot explain immigrants’ underrepresentation. Further, when comparing immigrants and natives who face comparable political opportunity structures a large representation gap remains. Instead, we argue that discrimination by party gatekeepers plays a more significant role in perpetuating the underrepresentation of immigrants than do individual resources or structural variables.

This article analyzes a rich Swedish data set with information on the electoral turnout of a large sample of adoptees, their siblings, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. We use a simple regression framework to decompose the parent-child resemblance in voting into pre-birth factors, measured by biological parents’ voting, and post-birth factors, measured by adoptive parents’ voting. Adoptees are more likely to vote if their biological parents were voters and if they were assigned to families in which the adoptive parents vote. We find evidence of interactions between the pre- and post-birth factors: the effect of the post-birth environment on turnout is greater amongst adoptees whose biological mothers are nonvoters. We also show that the relationships between parental characteristics, such as education, and child turnout, persist even in the absence of a genetic link between parent and child. The regression-based framework we utilize provides a basis for the integration of behavior-genetic research into mainstream political science.

Recent studies have shown that trusting attitudes and behavior are biologically influenced. Focusing on the classic trust game, it has been demonstrated that oxytocin increases trust and that humans are endowed with genetic variation that influences their behavior in the game. Moreover, several studies have shown that a large share of the variation in survey responses to trust items is accounted for by an additive genetic component. Against this backdrop, this article makes two important contributions. First, utilizing a unique sample of more than 2,000 complete Swedish twin pairs, we provide further evidence of the heritability of social trust. Our estimates of the additive genetic component in social trust were consistent across the sexes – .33 for males and .39 for females – and are similar to the results reported in earlier studies. Secondly, we show that social trust is phenotypically related to three psychological traits – extraversion, personal control, and intelligence – and that genetic factors account for most of these correlations. Jointly, these psychological factors share around 30% of the genetic influence on social trust both for males and females. Future studies should further explore the possible causal pathways between genes and trust using panel data on both psychological traits and social trust.

Diversity has powerful advantages, but may also generate internal tensions and low interpersonal trust. Despite extensive attention to these questions, the relationship between diversity and trust is often misunderstood and findings methodologically flawed. In this article, we specify two different mechanisms and adherent hypotheses. An individual might base her decision to trust on her perceived social similarity in relation to others in the community, that is, a similarity hypothesis. However, in a homogenous context, she might expect trustworthy behavior irrespective of her own social position due to signals of low degrees of social conflict and dense social networks, that is, a homogeneity hypothesis. Prior research has pinpointed only one of these mechanisms. The homogeneity hypothesis has not been explicated, and when the intention has been to test the similarity hypothesis, the homogeneity hypothesis has unintentionally been tested instead. The results are straightforward. While the homogeneity hypothesis is strongly supported, the findings speak against the similarity hypothesis.