John Hibbing had studied for decades but still felt he didn't have the key to unlock the mystery of political behavior.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor's research showed Americans didn't know or care all that much about the issues.

Why, then, would one group  despise Bill Clinton and another group scorn George W. Bush, hatred that went well beyond taxes, gun control or health care reform?

Hibbing wondered why so many people called themselves Republicans or Democrats and then professed views contradictory to the platforms of their political parties.

Then the 2004 election mesmerized him as he watched the two candidates and the entire country  spew red or blue vitriol, increasingly unable to understand where the other side was coming from.

"I kept thinking, ‘Why?'" Hibbing says from his cramped, fifth-floor Oldfather Hall office.

"Why would people be that way?" 

The answer, Hibbing now thinks, has more in common with  eye color or ear size than scholars have ever believed.

A new report co-authored by the  UNL professor asserts many political tendencies are buried deep within our genetic codes, causing us to react to leaders and issues in a way that sometimes has little to do with how our parents raised us or where we went to college.

The report's June appearance in a prestigious journal sent ripples through the political science community, ruffled some virtual feathers in the blogosphere and received more attention courtesy of the New York Times.

All of the attention and any controversy stem from the fact that decades of political science research has largely been based on one premise: A person's environment and then free will determines  whether he or she is conservative, liberal or moderate.

"It's a new way of thinking about this stuff," Hibbing says. "A certain political correctness out there says genetics can't play a part, because it opens up the possibility that things aren't as changeable as we'd like."

After  analyzing a pre-existing survey of 8,000 sets of identical and fraternal twins, Hibbing, Rice University Professor John Alford and Carolyn Funk, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth, conclude that genetics do matter.

The twins answered "yes" "no" or "indifferent" to more than two dozen hot-button political issues like school prayer, the death penalty and property taxes.

Identical twins, who share an entire genetic code, tended to answer the same more often than the fraternal twins, who are no more genetically related than siblings.

That difference suggests genetic makeup plays a role, although Hibbing says that doesn't necessarily mean there's a gene forcing you to support or oppose the death penalty.

Rather, he believes the genetic code helps determine whether you are an absolutist — a person who has a  strong perception of right and wrong and prefers similarly unbending leadership — or a contextualist, who sees more nuance in life and likes it in leaders.

In turn, being a contextualist or absolutist helps determine where you fall on the political spectrum.

The 2004 presidential race was a showdown between absolutist George W. Bush and contextualist John Kerry, Hibbing says, which may explain why the election divided the country like few have.

It also may help to explain hatred for the absolutist Bush and the contextualist Clinton that goes beyond their stances on even the touchiest topics.

"It's not just issues and it's not exactly morals," Hibbing says. "It's really a different orientation to politics and life."

The study also found that while political ideology may be largely heritable, political party affiliation is not.

A child may inherit conservative  genes from ancestors but join the Democratic Party because his or her parents are Democrats.

That child is likely to veer toward conservative viewpoints later in life but won't necessarily change his or her political party, Hibbing says.

"People like to think that political views make sense and fit together," Hibbing says. "There's not as much correlation as you might imagine. There's a lot of slop."

Rice University's Alford compares this to parents who raise a son in the Baptist church.

The son is likely to identify himself as Baptist for the rest of his life, but far less likely to identify himself as religious.

"(Parents) can give you the us-versus-them mentality; we're University of Nebraska fans, we're Americans, we're Baptists, we're Republicans.

"What they can't give us necessarily is the strong emotional bond about what it means to be a Baptist."

The report has generated the most prolonged publicity of Hibbing's long career, particularly after the New York Times picked up the story last month.

That story became the Times' second-most e-mailed story the day of its release, and interviews with other media giants have kept the research in the news.  

The publicity hasn't avoided criticism, much of it online and much of it from partisans on both sides who believe the researchers are biased toward one genetic viewpoint or the other.

But the political science community has responded with less outrage than Hibbing braced for, leading him and Alford to believe their colleagues may be ready to move into a more biologically-driven era of research.

Hibbing has started taking UNL science courses to prepare for what he hopes will be more genetics-driven research, including a new twins survey, in the future.

Alford hopes to one day identify the genes that influence political ideology, and use brain imaging to learn more about how the brain processes political information.

The Rice University professor is confident he and his UNL counterpart are onto something.

To illustrate, he asked the audience at a recent lecture how many openly gay Floridians voted for George Bush in 2004.

The crowd guessed 5 or 10 percent.

Alford told them that one quarter of the group voted for Bush, a man opposed to gay marriage and perceived as less accepting of homosexuality than Kerry.

"I find it very difficult to reconcile that without believing there's a genetic basis for ideology."

Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.

On the Web

To read the entire report, go to: www.apsanet.org/section_327.cfm