What I think what they mean is "Is being Conservative a mental ailment?" After all, people routinely change their political views with life experience. Anyway, in my view it's a stupid and pointless question.
From The Hunt for Conservative and Liberal Genes:
This biological or psychic determinism -- the peculiar notion that fundamental political differences "don't really have anything in particular to do with politics" -- should explain liberals as well as conservatives. Most of its practitioners, however, seem to assume that liberal values such as fairness and compassion are, for lack of a better term, normal and that it is conservatives' beliefs and values that are different, even deviant, and thus in need of explanation... John Jost, a professor of psychology at NYU, sees conservative "aversion to ambiguity, a sense of threats, and disgust." Scott Eidelman, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, says "conservatives generally crave closure, prefer to act quickly, choose instinctive solutions." Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State, thinks the effort to be fair and balanced is misguided. "I'm not personally convinced that there is an equal balance of bias," he says. "I believe that we see things like authoritarianism, dogmatism, closed-mindedness, to be distributed currently more on the right than on the left
