Father Founders: Did Child Gender Affect Voting at the Constitutional Convention?

Abstract

How did child gender affect deliberations and voting at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention? Though recent scholarship has found profound and far-reaching influence of child gender upon the beliefs and behavior of modern parents, there is no reason to believe that this is only an important consideration in the present. Leveraging the natural experiment of child gender, we test whether the gender of a delegate's children influenced his voting. We hypothesize that fathers of sons would favor creating a strong national government because they could more easily envision their sons holding places in the emergent empire (especially younger sons). Using new data on delegates' children, we find statistically and substantively significant results: having sons indeed predicts delegates' favoring a stronger, centralized national government (with daughters showing an opposite effect). These differences are sufficiently large to have likely affected the Convention's proceedings and therefore the U.S. Constitution.

Unpacking the politics of legislative debates

“…In addition, the religious denomination, family background and sexual orientation of legislators might matter for their speechmaking behaviour and for the position they adopt in the respective speeches, in particular if the legislative debates focus on moral issues where party discipline is low (Baumann et al 2015;Pope & Schmidt 2021). However, it is already complicated to gather such information on personal characteristics of legislators for current parliaments and collecting data for historical legislatures and parliaments would be even more complicated.…”

Daughters Do Not Affect Political Beliefs in a New Democracy

“…Families shape political beliefs (Elder and Greene 2012). The effect of one family feature, the sex of children, has been documented among political elites including US representatives (Washington 2008), US judges (Glynn and Sen 2015), delegates to the US Constitutional Convention (Pope and Schmidt 2021), and in the general public in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the United States (Greenlee et al 2020; Oswald and Powdthavee 2010; Perales et al 2018; Prokos et al 2010; Shafer and Malhotra 2011; Sharrow et al 2018; Warner 1991; Warner and Steel 1999). Table 1 summarizes past empirical work on this topic.…”

“… 4 In their historical analysis of the US case, Pope and Schmidt (2021) make a somewhat similar argument: fathers may react to the anticipated future rights of their daughters. …”