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The Genetic Basics Of Political Cooperation, James H. Fowler, Laura A. Baker, Christopher T. Dawes

Department of Political Science: Hendricks Symposium

Cooperation has been a focus of intense interest in the biological and social sciences. Yet in spite of a tremendous effort to develop evolutionary models and laboratory experiments that explain the existence of cooperation in humans, relatively little effort has been invested in documenting the prevalence of largescale cooperation in well-mixed populations and the extent to which it may be the result of biological or social forces. In this article we study voter behaviour as a form of cooperation that bears close resemblance to theoretical models in which individuals in a large population make anonymous decisions about whether or not …