Blue eyes or brown? Red hair or blonde? Liberal or conservative?

A team of geneticists and political scientists are claiming genetics play a significant role when deciding what box to check on a ballot.

"There is an inheritable component that political beliefs are partly environmental and partly genetic," said John Hibbing, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, after analyzing identical and non-identical twin studies.

The researchers analyzed data from a study done by Lindon Eaves, professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Eaves used the twin model on 8,000 sets of twins to conclude genetics do play a role in personality and beliefs.

"The logic being identical twins are completely alike genetically, whereas non-identical twins only share, on average, half genetics in common," Eaves said. "Clearly you can see, if you showed the similarity of a trait is a lot bigger in identical twins, then genetic factors play a role, if on the other hand, there is no difference [between identical and non-identical twins], you would tend to conclude social factors play the major role."

Genetics determine attitudes and social behaviors of children despite social behavior like Sunday mass or dinner table conversations, Eaves concluded after additional research.

John Alford, professor of political science at Rice University and Hibbing's fellow researcher, said Eaves' research data established a concept stating there is a genetic connection to political ideology, although it did not reveal how it is connected.

However, some researchers are skeptical about these findings.

Evan Charney, assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, published "Genes and Ideologies," a paper disagreeing with Hibbing and Alford's findings.

Charney said he disagrees with the twin methodology and that Hibbing and Alford did not take into consideration the historical context of political ideology.

If a set of twins are separated and live in two separate environments, researchers assume these environments are "different," Charney said.

"If we don't know what it is in an environment that might influence the development of a trait, then there is no way to be sure if any two environments are different or similar," Charney said.

Charney said he does not agree with the technique Hibbing and Alford used to categorize liberals and conservatives.

"It is inaccurate and a distortion, you can't say all political ideologies are liberal or conservative," Charney said. "Not only does this theory of genetics rest upon the idea that political ideologies are universal but also unchanging."

Charney illustrated that political ideas are constantly changing by stating that present contemporary social conservatism is very different from social conservatism in the seventeenth century.

The researchers gave the same weight to modern art as other topics like abortion and gay rights as a determining factor between liberal or conservative, Charney said.

"My point being what they identify as liberal or conservative does not accurately capture the essence of liberalism or conservatism because the two ideologies are not all defined by a concrete set of attitudes," he said. "It could give you the result that someone could be pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, against capital punishment and still be considered a conservative according to their beliefs in modern art and music."

Charney said the data contradicts the pair's hypothesis.

"Even by their own data and methodology, their data does not obviously support their conclusion," Charney said.

In modern society, conservative and liberal is defined according to beliefs on topics like abortion, gay rights and capital punishment, Charney said.

"When talking about specific beliefs like abortion and gay rights which define political ideology, according to data genes were not shown to succeed environment and environment was shown to succeed gene," Charney said.