Biology and Politics

Abstract Evidence for the biological origins of politics first emerged as early as the 1970s, and the Politics and the Life Sciences journal was founded in 1982, a testament to nascent interest in the discipline. Recognition of the potential for biological measurement of political attitudes persisted throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but it has only been in the last 15 years that the biology and politics research agenda has emerged as a robust area of inquiry, integrating biological processes into the study of a wide variety of political outcomes. Although certain facets of the research agenda have inspired controversy, there has come to be wide recognition that biological approaches to understanding politics—often rooted in evolutionary perspectives—can be informative and complementary to a broad range of topics within political psychology, such as attitudes, identity, participation, interest, sophistication, and information processing.