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taw comments on Typical Mind and Politics - Less Wrong
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Considering how vast are differences in political views, how tiny are differences in underlying biology, I'm extremely skeptical to any biological explanations.
Political distance between American left 2009 and American right 2009 is far smaller than political distance between average American 2009 and average American 1809, or than political distance between average North Korean 2009 and average Somalian 2009.
If those tiny American differences corresponded to big differences in biology, then people from different countries and times would have to be pretty much a different species. That's obviously not true, so I find such explanations extremely unlikely.
Your observation does not rule out a model in which cultural context predicts mean political behavior/views (within that culture) and individual biological differences predict individual variations in political behavior/views around the cultural mean.
Existence of such effect sounds plausible, but even within a single culture political views correlate extremely strongly with many other things like socioeconomic status, and presence of other meme complexes (religion, national identity etc.), so there's very little variance left for individual biological differences.
Razib's regression analysis on religion and abortion attitudes across countries is pretty illuminating in this regard.
The hypothesis here isn't that personal characteristics determine policy preferences directly, but that they predispose a person to be more receptive to (e.g.) left vs. right arguments within their society. Context is everything, though: leaning conservative in Sweden means endorsing policies that would be radically left in the USA.
Wrong (with all due respect). Genes (a subset of biological differences) affect politics a lot. To give just one source of evidence, my first hit googling "genes politics" is this New York Times coverage. Not only does "socioeconomic status, and presence of other meme complexes (religion, national identity etc) leave a great deal of variance unexplained, they are also affected by genes.
Once we're into correlations with socioeconomic status, etc., we need Judea-Pearl-style causal analysis to suss out how determinative biological differences are. (Genotypes are presumably occasionally causes and never effects, but that won't apply to phenotypes.)
Even a slight innate difference is likely to be exaggerated by other effects; in-group loyalty, halo effects, evaporative cooling, &c.
I'd file it under "sensitive dependence on initial conditions". Memetic attractors form around certain political views, and small innate differences send people spiralling to one or another.
Small differences can account for large effects.