Neuroscience in Political Science: a New Approach to Research into Political Behaviour?

In this paper we present my thesis project, its objectives as well as the main theoretical and methodological obstacles that we have encountered so far as well as the presentation of the tasks and design of the experiment that we have projected. This work fits in with two lines of work that have been developed by the Political Research Team (EIP) of the USC. We will try to analyse the endogenous construction of political preferences and the incorporation of the role of emotions in political behaviour analysis, treating them as cognitive elements. In this regard, we set two objectives: i. to analyse how much emotions weigh in the explanation of vote, and ii. to investigate what neuroscience can contribute to research on the construction of political decisions. The first of the objectives will be approached through Models of Structural Equations (SEM models) analysis. These allow us to study the weight of emotions when making a political decision, and even to identify emotions as possible mediating variables. We will use classical variables in the analysis and add emotions as conditioning variables. The second part of our work will attempt to deepen the functioning of emotions at the brain level using advances in the field of neuroscience that have provided us with images of the different parts of the brain and a relationship between stimulus and emotion and activated brain region. We have opted, for our research, for the use of EEG. Two hypotheses guide this part of the research: the idea of cognitive difference and patterns of brain activation and the difference in neurocognitive sensitivity associated with targets with different emotional weight in the political decision.