Liberalizing Daughters: Do Daughters Cause MCs to be Slightly More Liberal on Women’s Issues?

25 Dec

Two papers estimate the impact of having a daughter on Members of Congress’ (MC’s) position on women’s issues. Washington (2008) finds that each additional daughter (conditional on the number of children) causes about a 2 point increase in liberalism on women’s issues using data from the 105th to 108th Congress. Costa et. al 2019 use data from 110th to 114th Congress to find there is a noisily estimated small effect that cannot be distinguished from zero.

Same Number, Different Interpretation

Washington (2008) argues that a 2 point effect is substantive. But Costa et al. argue that a 2–3 point change is not substantively meaningful.

“In all five specifications, the score increases by about two points with each additional daughter parented. For all but the 106th Congress, the number of female children coefficient is significantly different from zero at conventional levels. While that two point increase may seem small relative to the standard deviations of these scores, note that the female legislators, on average, score a significant seven to ten points higher on these rating scores. In other words, an additional daughter has about 25% of the impact on women’s issues that one’s own gender has.”

From Washington 2008

“The lower bound of the confidence interval for the first coefficient in Model
1, the effect of having a daughter on AAUW rating, is −3.07 and the upper
bound is 2.01, meaning that the increase on the 100-point AAUW scale for
fathers of daughters could be as high as 2.01 at the 90% level, but that AAUW
score could also decrease by as much as 3.07 points for fathers of daughters,
which is in the opposite direction than previous literature and theory would
have us expect. In both directions, neither the increase nor the decrease is
substantively very meaningful.

From Costa et. al 2019

Different Numbers

The two papers—Washington’s and Costa et al.—come to different conclusions. But why? Besides different data, there are fair many other differences in modeling choices including (p.s. this is not a comprehensive list):

  1. How the number of children are controlled for. Washington uses fixed effects for the number of children. This makes sense if you conceive the number of daughters as a random variable within people with the same number of children. Another way to think of it is as a block randomized experiment. Costa et al. write, “Following Washington (2008), we also include a control variable for the total number of children a legislator has.” But control for it linearly.
  2. Dummy Vs. Number of Daughters. Costa et al. have a ‘has daughter’ dummy that codes as 1 any MC with 1 or more daughter while Washington uses the number of daughters as the ‘treatment’ variable.

Common Issues

The primary dependent variable is votes chosen by an interest group. Doing so causes multiple issues. The first is incommensurability across time. The chosen votes are different because not only is the selection process in choosing the votes is likely different but also the selection process that goes into what things come to vote. So it could be the case that the effect hasn’t changed but the measurement instrument has. The second issue is that interest groups are incredibly strategic in choosing the votes. And that means they choose votes that don’t always have a strong, direct, unique, and obvious relationship to women’s welfare. For instance, AAUW chose the vote to confirm Neil Gorsuch as one of the votes. There are likely numerous considerations that go into voting for Neil Gorsuch, including conflicting considerations about women’s welfare. For instance, a senator who supports the women’s right to choose may vote for Neil Gorsuch even if there is concern that the judge will vote against it because they may think Gorsuch would support liberalizing the economy further which will have a beneficial impact on women’s economic status, which the senator may view as more important. Third, the number of votes chosen is tiny. For the 115th Congress, for the Senate, there are only 7 votes and only 6 for the House of Representatives. Fourth, it seems the papers treat the House of Representatives and Senate interchangeably when the votes are different. Fifth, one of the issues with imputing ideology from congressional votes is that the issues over which people get to express preferences is limited. So the implied differences are generally smaller than actual ideological differences. The point affects how we interpret the results.