Daughters Do Not Affect Political Beliefs in a New Democracy

Abstract

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents’ attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women’s rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women’s rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women’s customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents’ political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.

The “First daughter” effect: Human rights advocacy and attitudes toward gender equality in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan

“…Within the literature on the first father effect, for example, ours is only the fourth to analyze a non-Western country context (see [ 23 ] re. Turkey, [ 22 ] re. South Africa and [ 21 ] re.…”

“…Moreover, with few exceptions [ 21 , 22 ] the first daughters hypothesis has not yet been replicated widely outside Western cultural contexts. Research on fathers of first-born daughters in Turkey showed a significant effect on marital domestic violence against women but did not analyze attitudes [ 23 ].…”

“…Research on fathers of first-born daughters in Turkey showed a significant effect on marital domestic violence against women but did not analyze attitudes [ 23 ]. Research on South African fathers did focus on attitudes but found no significant effect of having a daughter overall or having a daughter first on a father’s gender views [ 22 ]. A study in Japan also found the results did not hold the same significance as in the US, highlighting the importance of considering how structural characteristics within a society affect gender attitudes [ 24 ].…”