Authors
Summary
Political behavior of citizens includes political participation and preferences. We show with UK data that political behavior is affected by individual characteristics that are also determining educational attainment, including cognitive abilities and intelligence. Our analysis reconciles the rational choice assumption with the acquisition of costly political information, which would otherwise give only negligible benefts. We disentangle the causal pathways by identifying effects operating directly and those operating indirectly, in particular through education and income. We address the issue of endogeneity of cognitive skills using polygenic scores, and show that an important component of the causal factors is genetic.