Elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol could be linked with lower rates of participation in elections, says a new study published in the journal Physiology and Behavior.

As witnessed by recent voter turnout in primary elections, participation in U.S. national elections is low, relative to other western democracies. In fact, voter turnout in biennial national elections ranges includes only 40 to 60 percent of eligible voters.

While participation in electoral politics is affected by a host of social and demographic variables, there are also biological factors that may play a role, as well.

The new study demonstrated that lower salivary cortisol in the late afternoon was significantly associated with increased actual voting frequency in U.S. national elections.

“Politics and political participation is an inherently stressful activity. It would logically follow that those individuals with low thresholds for stress might avoid engaging in that activity and our study confirmed that hypothesis,” said study’s lead author Prof Jeffrey French from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

The study is part of a larger body of research exploring connections between biology and political orientation.

Previous studies have involved twins, eye-tracking equipment and skin conductance in their efforts to identify physical and genetic links to political beliefs.

“It’s one more piece of solid evidence that there are biological markers for political attitudes and behavior. It’s long been known that cortisol levels are associated with your willingness to interact socially – that’s something fairly well established in the research literature. The big contribution here is that nobody really looked at politics and voting behaviors before,” said co-author Dr Kevin Smith from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“This research shows that cortisol is related to a willingness to participate in politics.”

In their study, the researchers collected the saliva of over 100 participants who identified themselves as highly conservative, highly liberal or disinterested in politics altogether and analyzed the levels of cortisol found.

Cortisol was measured in saliva collected from the participants before and during activities designed to raise and lower stress.

These data were then compared against the participants’ earlier responses regarding involvement in political activities (voting and nonvoting) and religious participation.

“Not only did the study show, expectedly, that high-stress activities led to higher levels of cortisol production, but that political participation was significantly correlated with low baseline levels of cortisol,” Prof French said.

“Participation in another group-oriented activity, specifically religious participation, was not as strongly associated with cortisol levels. Involvement in nonvoting political activities, such as volunteering for a campaign, financial political contributions, or correspondence with elected officials, was not predicted by levels of stress hormones.”

According to the study, the only other factor that was predictive of voting behavior was age; older adults were likely to have voted more often than younger adults.

Research from other groups has also pointed to education, income, and race as important predictors of voting behavior.

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Jeffrey A. French et al. 2014. Cortisol and politics: Variance in voting behavior is predicted by baseline cortisol levels. Physiology & Behavior, vol. 133, pp. 61–67; doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2014.05.004