The magnitude of political participation has long puzzled political scientists, given the ratio between the costs of voting and the expected benefits to the individual. The bulk of the models explaining political participation are made up of environmental variables that generally fit poorly the observed behavior. Recent studies in behavior genetics however have found that genes can account for a significant proportion of the variation in turnout and that there is a heritable component to political participation in Western democracies. The present study uses a classical twin design to explore questions of political participation in a post-communist country, namely Hungary. As such, it is the first to use behavior genetic methodology in Central and Eastern Europe for the study of politics. Data was gathered as a pilot study of a small sample of twins (58 pairs). Findings for participation in this post-communist sample are similar to those in Western democracies: high and significant heritability, despite the small sample (72.2% with 95% CI: 41.4%-89.9% and no shared environmental effects within the 95% CI). This is contrasted by no significant effect of heritability for ideology which is unlike prior Western findings.
