Browsing by Subject "ideology"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Do Political Attitudes and Religiosity Share a Genetic Path?
    (Springer, 2014-10) Friesen, Amanda; Ksiazkiewicz, Aleksander
    Social scientists have long recognized and sought to explain a connection between religious and political beliefs. Our research challenges the prevalent view that religion and politics constitute separate but related belief sets with a conceptual model that suggests the correlation between the two may be partially explained by an underlying psychological construct reflecting first principle beliefs on social organization. Moreover, we also push this challenge further by considering whether part of the relationship between political and religious beliefs is the result of shared genetic influences, which would suggest that a shared biological predisposition, or set of biological predispositions, underlies these attitudes. Using a classic twin design on a sample of American adults, we demonstrate that certain religious, political, and first principle beliefs can be explained by genetic and unique environmental components, and that the correlation between these three trait structures is primarily due to a common genetic path. As predicted, this relationship is found to hold for social ideology, but not for economic ideology. These findings provide evidence that the overlap between the religious and the political in the American context may in part be due to underlying principles regarding how to understand and organize society and that these principles may be adopted to satisfy biologically-influenced psychological needs.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Ideology and policy decision-making in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic in the USA
    (Oxford, 2023-03) Prieto-Rodríguez, Juan; Salas, Rafael; Noonan, Douglas; Cabeza-Martinez, Francisco; Ramos-Gutierrez, Javier; School of Public and Environmental Affairs
    The COVID-19 pandemic was a challenge for the health systems of many countries. In the USA, COVID-19 accentuated political polarity. On the one hand, the defenders of more severe public health measures and, on the other, the advocates of individual rights and freedom above any other consideration. In this study, we analyse whether political partisanship and the political ideology of the different states of the USA have influenced the way COVID-19 was handled in the outbreak. Specifically, we analyse whether the ideology of each state affected the decrease in NO2 levels (used as a proxy for local economic activity and traffic) observed after the pandemic outbreak.