TY - JOUR
T1 - It Runs in the Family
T2 - A Study of Political Candidacy Among Swedish Adoptees
AU - Oskarsson, Sven
AU - Dawes, Christopher T.
AU - Lindgren, Karl Oskar
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful for helpful comments from Mikael Persson, the editor, three anonymous reviewers, and participants at the workshop on Political Sociology and Economy at Uppsala University in 2015, the 2015 Hendricks Symposium at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Essex Political Science Seminar in 2015, the Political Psychology Conference at the University of Amsterdam in 2015, the UCLS Conference at the University of Uppsala in 2016. This research was financially supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and the European Research Council (ERC). Replication Materials: In this paper we use individual level information obtained from various administrative registers. The data are stored on an encrypted server at Statistics Sweden and all our analysis have been conducted through a remote desktop application. We are under contractual obligation not to disseminate these data to other individuals. For interested researchers, however, we describe two ways to get access to the administrative data used in this paper for replication purposes in the Online Appendix. Moreover, the Stata code required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/U4ET4D.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We are grateful for helpful comments from Mikael Persson, the editor, three anonymous reviewers, and participants at the workshop on Political Sociology and Economy at Uppsala University in 2015, the 2015 Hendricks Symposium at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Essex Political Science Seminar in 2015, the Political Psychology Conference at the University of Amsterdam in 2015, the UCLS Conference at the University of Uppsala in 2016. This research was financially supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and the European Research Council (ERC). Replication Materials: In this paper we use individual level information obtained from various administrative registers. The data are stored on an encrypted server at Statistics Sweden and all our analysis have been conducted through a remote desktop application. We are under contractual obligation not to disseminate these data to other individuals. For interested researchers, however, we describe two ways to get access to the administrative data used in this paper for replication purposes in the Online Appendix. Moreover, the Stata code required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/U4ET4D.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, The Author(s).
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - What motivates citizens to run for office? Recent work has shown that early life parental socialization is strongly associated with a desire to run for office. However, parents not only shape their children’s political environment, they also pass along their genes to those same children. A growing area of research has shown that individual differences in a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes are linked to genetic differences. As a result, genetic factors may confound the observed political similarities among parents and their children. This study analyzes Swedish register data containing information on all nominated and elected candidates in the ten parliamentary, county council, and municipal elections from 1982 to 2014 for a large sample of adoptees and their adoptive and biological parents. By studying the similarity in political ambition within both adoptive and biological families, our research design allows us to disentangle so-called “pre-birth” factors, such as genes and pre-natal environment, and “post-birth” factors like parental socialization. We find that the likelihood of standing as a political candidate is twice as high if one’s parent has been a candidate. We also find that the effects of pre-birth and post-birth factors are approximately equal in size. In addition, we test a number of potential pre- and post-birth transmission mechanisms. First, disconfirming our expectations, the pre-birth effects do not seem to be mediated by cognitive ability or leadership skills. Second, consistent with a role modeling mechanism, we find evidence of a strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughters.
AB - What motivates citizens to run for office? Recent work has shown that early life parental socialization is strongly associated with a desire to run for office. However, parents not only shape their children’s political environment, they also pass along their genes to those same children. A growing area of research has shown that individual differences in a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes are linked to genetic differences. As a result, genetic factors may confound the observed political similarities among parents and their children. This study analyzes Swedish register data containing information on all nominated and elected candidates in the ten parliamentary, county council, and municipal elections from 1982 to 2014 for a large sample of adoptees and their adoptive and biological parents. By studying the similarity in political ambition within both adoptive and biological families, our research design allows us to disentangle so-called “pre-birth” factors, such as genes and pre-natal environment, and “post-birth” factors like parental socialization. We find that the likelihood of standing as a political candidate is twice as high if one’s parent has been a candidate. We also find that the effects of pre-birth and post-birth factors are approximately equal in size. In addition, we test a number of potential pre- and post-birth transmission mechanisms. First, disconfirming our expectations, the pre-birth effects do not seem to be mediated by cognitive ability or leadership skills. Second, consistent with a role modeling mechanism, we find evidence of a strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughters.
KW - Adoption study
KW - Intergenerational transmission
KW - Political candidacy
KW - Pre- and post-birth effects
KW - Role modeling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029598855&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85029598855&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1
DO - 10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85029598855
SN - 0190-9320
VL - 40
SP - 883
EP - 908
JO - Political Behavior
JF - Political Behavior
IS - 4
ER -