Every theory of politics smuggles in a theory of human nature. For most of a century, political scientists were never asked to defend theirs. That grace period has ended.
Evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, neuroscience, endocrinology, and population health have turned questions once left to speculation into questions with evidence attached. Why do threat-sensitivity and ideology travel together across societies that share little else? Why does anger make one coercive threat credible and another absurd? Why do leaders who should de-escalate reach instead for humiliation and revenge? Why are aging electorates changing what states are willing to risk?
This panel convenes the scholars taking these questions seriously. We invite work on emotion, threat perception, and credibility in deterrence and coercive diplomacy; coalitional psychology, nationalism, and intergroup violence; dominance and prestige in leadership selection; pathogen stress and outgroup attitudes; genetic and physiological correlates of participation and ideology; and the political consequences of health shocks, pandemics, and demographic decline.
Method is open: experiments, twin and molecular-genetic designs, cross-national surveys, formal models, and historically grounded case work are equally at home. So is subfield — the findings that matter here rarely stay inside comparative politics, international relations, or political theory.
So is dissent. Papers dismantling genetic determinism, revisiting the discipline's entanglement with eugenics and scientific racism, confronting replication and measurement failure, or challenging the governance of genomic and biometric data are not merely tolerated here. They are wanted.
The aim is not to reduce politics to biology. It is to stop guessing. Specify the mechanism. State the scope conditions. Show where the causal arrow runs — and where it stops. Biology constrains political explanation far more often than it determines it, and the distance between those two claims is where this field will be won or lost.
We are looking for the papers that will settle it. Scholars at every career stage and from every region are invited. Bring the argument.
