The Effect of Daughters on Partisanship and Social Attitudes Toward Women

Abstract

Washington (2008) finds that daughters promote liberal voting (at least with respect to women's issues) among U.S. Congress members and attributes this finding to socialization. However, daughters' influence could manifest differently for elite politicians and the general citizenry either due to self-selection or the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, which suggests that parents invest differently in male and female children depending on their social status. Using nationally representative data from the General Social Survey, this study asks whether biological daughters affect political party identification, traditional views of women, or opinions about abortion and teen sex. We find that female offspring promote identification with the more conservative Republican Party, but this effect depends on social status. There is no evidence that daughters promote liberal views of women and less consistent evidence that they influence views of abortion or teen sex. Overall, evidence supports the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, but with a more complex interaction by social status.

Does the Gender of Offspring Affect Parental Political Orientation?

“…3 Likewise, Shafer and Malhotra (2011) found that having a daughter reduced men's support for traditional gender roles (but not women's) based on analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY 97). However, these results were contradicted by other research: in the United States, Conley and Rauscher (2013) found that daughters were related to more Republican (rightist) party identification and more conservative views on teen sexuality; likewise, Healy and Malhotra (2013) found that having sisters caused men (but not women) to be more likely to identify as Republicans. Conley and Rauscher (2013) suggest this effect may be an evolutionarily rational reaction, while Healy and Malhotra (2013) emphasize the gender stereotyping of the childhood environment as a putative casual mechanism.…”

“…Even these studies that focus on non-select populations suffer from limitations. For instance, with the exception of Conley and Rauscher (2013) and Oswald and Powdthavee (2010) each of them considers the number of all children to be female. Thus, they introduce the possibility that liberal or conservative individuals may have different parity progression biases when it comes to the sex of offspring.…”

“…(In fact, Oswald and Powdthavee [2010] obtain insignificant results when they confine themselves to an examination of the first born child only, which provides a solution to this problem.) Likewise, except for Conley and Rauscher (2013) and Oswald and Powdthavee (2010), they do not distinguish between biological offspring and step or adopted children. Marrying into a family with pre-existing boys or girls or choosing to adopt a boy or girl oneself is certainly not an event that is plausibly exogenous to one's political ideology or partisan alignment.…”

Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues?

“…In other fields, having daughters has been shown to increase the probability that parents will divorce (Bolzendahl and Myers ), that male investors will shift their money into stocks as opposed to bonds (Bogan ), and that fathers will work longer and earn more wages but not as much as they would have if they had had sons (Lundberg and Rose ). The exception to this literature is Conley and Rauscher (), which uses public opinion data and finds that a higher proportion of female children leads to more Republican identification. Although their explanation does not reconcile the differences between their finding and that of Oswald and Powdthavee (), they do posit that a difference between the public and political elites is that members of the public respond to having daughters by becoming more conservative, whereas political actors are selected on the basis of their families, with liberal politicians being elected in part because they have girls…”

Helping to Break the Glass Ceiling? Fathers, First Daughters, and Presidential Vote Choice in 2016

“…In the growing number of studies that explore the impact of fathering daughters on men's political attitudes and behaviors, scholars have employed varied items to best measure fatherhood of a daughter, including whether the respondent has a daughter (Prokos et al 2010), whether a man has a daughter first (Shafer and Malhotra 2011;Sharrow et al 2018), and the proportion of all children that are daughters (Conley and Rauscher 2013;Washington 2008). In addition to the theoretical reasons 13 All of our cross-sectional results are similar with Stein voters included in the 0 category.…”