The cognitive deterioration of politicians is a critical emerging issue. As professions including law and medicine develop and implement cognitive assessments, their insights may inform the proper strategy within politics. The aging, lifetime-appointed judiciary raises legal and administrative questions of such assessments, while testing of older physicians experiencing cognitive decline provides real-life examples of implementation. In politics, cognitive assessment must contend with the field’s unique challenges, also taking context-dependent interpretations of cognitive-neuropsychological status into account. These perspectives, from legal and medical experts, political scientists, and officeholders, can contribute toward an equitable, functioning, and non-discriminatory system of assessing cognition that educates the public and enables politicians to maintain their public responsibilities. With proper implementation and sufficient public knowledge, we believe cognitive assessments for politicians, particularly political candidates, can be valuable for maintaining properly functioning governance. We offer recommendations on the development, implementation, and execution of such assessments, grappling with their democratic and legal implications.

Intuitive thinking would argue that political or ideological orientation does not correlate with nonpolitical decisions, and certainly not with nonideological cognitive tasks. However, that is what happens in some cases. Previous neuropolitics studies have found that liberals are more adept at dealing with novel information than conservatives. This finding suggests that conservatives and liberals possess different cognitive skills. For the purposes of this article, two studies were executed to test whether this difference remained in alternative environmental settings. To this end, two novel cognitive tasks were designed in which one type of ideology or another was privileged according to the cognitive environment created by the tasks. Experimental findings indicate that liberals committed fewer errors than conservatives in one kind of cognitive environment, while conservatives scored higher in another.

Neuropolitics is the intersection of neuroscience and political science, and it has the interdisciplinary goal of transforming both disciplines. This article reviews the past 20 years of work in the field, identifying its roots, some overarching themes—reactions to political attitudinal questions and candidates faces, identification of political ideology based on brain structure or reactivity to nonpolitical stimuli, and racial attitudes—and obstacles to its progress. I then explore the methodological and analytical advances that point the way forward for the future of neuropolitics. Although the field has been slow to develop compared with neurolaw and neuroeconomics, innovations look ripe for dramatically improving our ability to model political behaviors and attitudes in individuals and predict political choices in mass publics. The coming advancements, however, pose risks to our current norms of democratic deliberation, and academics need to anticipate and mitigate these risks.