Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently showed in two independent studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we investigate two specific genes that may contribute to variation in voting behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA gene are significantly more likely to have vote...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the president’s standing with the public affects his success in Congress. Electoral self-interest is the primary reason to expect a relationship between presidential popularity and the behavior of members of Congress. Although numerous studies have analyzed the effects of presidential popularity, the lack of presidential approval data at the congressional const...

Prediction markets serve as popular devices to aggregate beliefs and to assess market estimated probabilities. By looking at the interaction between realand play-money prediction markets, this paper shows that traded volume has a significant positive effect on the probability of realand play-money market cointegration. This indicates that the information aggregation process, eliminating individ...

In two large samples (combined N 1⁄4 31,045), we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism. This relationship held when controlling for a number of demographic variables as well as the ‘‘Big Five’’ personality traits. Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Study 2, we replicated ...

Gender is playing an important role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, especially with Hillary Clinton becoming the first female presidential nominee and Donald Trump being frequently accused of sexism. In this paper, we introduce computer vision to the study of gender politics and present an image-driven method that can measure the effects of gender in an accurate and timely manner. We fi...

While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the polls as an accurate election predictor? Polls from several news outlet and sentiment analysis on Twitter data were used, in conjunction with the results of...

We investigate the influence of fake and traditional, fact-based, news outlets on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election. Using a comprehensive dataset of 171 million tweets covering the five months preceding election day, we identify 30 million tweets, sent by 2.2 million users, which are classified as spreading fake and extremely biased news, based on a list of news outlets curated ...

Motivated by the two paradoxical facts that the marginal cost of following one extra candidate is close to zero and that the majority of Twitter users choose to follow only one or two candidates, we study the Twitter follow behaviors observed in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Specifically, we complete the following tasks: (1) analyze Twitter follow patterns of the presidential election on...

Drawing on network theory, this study considers the content of U.S. presidential debates and how candidates’ language differentiates them. Semantic network analyses of all U.S. presidential debates (1960–2004) were conducted. Results reveal that regardless of party affiliation, election winners were more central in their semantic networks than losers. Although the study does not argue causation...