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This article develops and tests a new theoretical framework, gendered political socialization, which offers important insights into how children perceive gender in politics and the consequences of these perceptions on sex differences in political interest and ambition. Based on data from 1,604 children who live in four different regions across the United States, we find that children not only perceive politics to be a male-dominated space, but with age, girls increasingly see political leadership as a “man’s world.” Simultaneously, as children grow older, they internalize gendered expectations, which direct their interests toward professions that embody the gendered traits that fit with their own sex. One result of this mismatch between women and politics is that girls express lower levels of interest and ambition in politics than do boys.

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Abstract What do children think about political leaders? In classic political socialization studies of the late 1950s, children tended to hold idealized views of political leaders. In spite of enormous changes in the political landscape, we know little about how these attitudes have changed in the last 60 years. To assess the views of children today, we surveyed over 500 elementary school children (grades 1–6) in the United States. Children no longer possess favorable views of the president. However, the institution of the presidency continues to be held in high esteem.

From Dwight Eisenhower to John McCain, presidential candidates have appealed to female voters by highlighting motherhood in their campaigns. The most recent example of this has been the "hockey mom" trope introduced by the first hockey mom to earn a slot on the GOP presidential ticket, Governor Sarah Palin. These appeals, while motivated by political gamesmanship, imply that mothers see the political world a bit differently from other women. They suggest that women with children have different political priorities and concerns and, at times, different positions on political issues. This article takes this proposition seriously, and asks the question: Does becoming a mother have a transformative effect on women's political attitudes? Using longitudinal data from the four-wave 1965-97 Political Socialization Panel Study, I track the movement of women's political attitudes on partisan identification, ideological identification, and policy issues. I find that the effects of motherhood on women's political attitudes, while not uniform in nature, do push some women to adopt more conservative political attitudes. Thus, these results suggest that while motherhood does not transform women's political attitudes, for some women motherhood does promote interesting attitudinal shifts.

The election of President Barack Obama offers a unique opportunity to test the impressionable‐years hypothesis—the theory of political socialization that predicts that widely experienced political events can have a lasting impact on the political attitudes of individuals who experience that event in their youth, thereby creating a generational distinction. Using data from an original survey embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we examine the racial attitudes of White youth who came of age during Barack Obama's presidential campaign and election to see if those individuals are significantly more liberal on racial attitudes than older generations of Whites. In other words, we look for early evidence that an “Obama generation” has emerged. We find there are indeed early signs of a generational distinction. Members of the “Obama generation” are more strongly opposed to racial resentment, but they exhibit similar levels of opposition to old‐fashioned racism as older cohorts. Additionally, we uncover that the factors that traditionally structure racial attitudes among Whites, most notably contact, education, and residential proximity, work quite differently for members of this generation. We take these findings as initial evidence that Barack Obama's presidency will have a lasting impact on the racial views of a generation of Americans.

Throughout her 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton crafted messages intended to appeal to fathers of daughters and to highlight the implications of her historic nomination for American girls and women. Clinton reminded voters that her election could mean that "fathers will be able to say to their daughters, you, too, can grow up to be president" (Frizell, Time, http://time. com/39203 32/trans cript-full-text-hilla ry-clint on-campa ign-launc h/, 2015). But did these appeals succeed in mobilizing fathers of daughters to support Clinton? Using original cross sectional and experimental survey data from the 2016 CCES, we ask two questions. First, were men who fathered daughters (a life event which we operationalize, for important methodological and theoretical reasons detailed herein, as men who fathered a daughter as their first child) more likely to support, and vote for, Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election than were those who fathered sons as their first child? Second, were Clinton's direct appeals to fathers of daughters effective in increasing her electoral support? We find that fathers who have daughters as their first child are more likely to prefer and vote for Clinton, and are more likely to support a fictional female congressional candidate using a "Clintonesque" appeal that emphasizes expanding opportunities for "our daughters." These results suggest that entry into fatherhood with a daughter (as opposed to with a son) is a formative experience for men that has consequences for their political choices in later life. Our conclusions inform the growing literature on the implications of fathering daughters on men's political behavior.