« Une bombe dans la discipline » : l’émergence du mouvement génopolitique en science politique

Abstract

Mobilizing scientometric analyses and semi-structured interviews, this article investigates the emergence of ‘genopolitics’ and the scientific and academic stakes surrounding the study of genetic factors of political behavior. While the first paper on genopolitics was published in 2005, it was not until 2012 that we could observe the stabilization of this scientific movement. Though genopolitics is a relatively homogenous movement, it is nonetheless affected by internal struggles relating to the construction of a scientific programme that would be regarded as legitimate by all of its members, as well as by political scientists and the rest of the scientific field as a whole. Beyond these disagreements concerning the best appellation for, and main goal of, their programme, genopoliticians advocate for the emergence of a new paradigm in political science that would resolve the anomalies observed within empirical research resorting to the dominant rational choice and socio-psychological theories. Paradoxically, one consequence of this attempt at advancing political science is to threaten its epistemological independence, as illustrated by the use of methodological standards borrowed from behavior genetics. At the individual level, genopolitics provides an opportunity for political scientists to contribute to a controversial, but innovative area of research, and thus to ameliorate their position within the scientific field.

Genopolitics: introductory remarks

“…Genopolitical research is conducted mainly by political scientists, psychologists, geneticists and economists working in multidisciplinary research teams. Between 2005 and 2016, 79 articles were published, mainly in such journals as Political Psychology , Twin Research and Human Genetics , American Journal of Political Science , American Political Science Review , Political Behavior , Journal of Politics (data from Larregue 2018, 164, 169–170). The number of publications indicates that genopolitics is a small academic sub-field.…”

“…Thus, genopolitics is a far cry from a holistic theoretical orientation such as, for example, Wilson's sociobiology (Wilson 1975) or memetics 4 (Dawkins 1976). Rather, it represents a new approach in political science research or, as some researchers suggest, a political science paradigm in statu nascendi (Larregue 2018, 180–184). For the sake of comprehensive representation, we should also note the scepticism of some scholars of genopolitics towards the attempts to distinguish a new field of research in political science.…”

On the institutional and intellectual division of labor in epigenetics research: A scientometric analysis

“…Moreover, the emergence since the 2000s of an array of biosocial movements within the social sciences, from neuroeconomics (Monneau & Lebaron, 2011) to neuromarketing (Wannyn, 2017), to biosocial criminology (Larregue, 2018a) and genopolitics (Larregue, 2018b), demonstrate the growing appeal of biology to social scientists and the need expressed by some of them to rethink the relationship between natural, psychological and social processes. The rise of interest in environmental epigenetics contributes to this movement, at the same time that it might challenge certain genetic, deterministic visions of human behavior that have been paradoxically instrumentalized by scholars from the social and human sciences with the aim of challenging dominant environmental theories (Bliss, 2018;Larregue, 2018a;Panofsky, 2014).…”