Does Children’s Sex Cause Partisanship?

26 May

More women identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans. The disparity is yet greater among single women. It is possible (perhaps even likely) that this difference in partisan identification is due to (perceived) policy positions of Republicans and Democrats.

Now let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine a couple about to have a kid. Also, assume that the couple doesn’t engage in sex-selection. Two things can happen – the couple can have a son or a daughter. It is possible that having a daughter persuades the parent to change his or her policy preferences towards a direction that is perceived as more congenial to women. It is also possible that having a son has the opposite impact — persuading parents to adopt more male congenial political preferences. Overall, it is possible that gender of the child makes a difference to parents’ policy preferences. With panel data, one can identify both movements. With cross-sectional data, one can only identify the difference between those who had a son, and those who had a daughter.

Let’s test this using cross-sectional data from Jennings and Stoker’s “Study of Political Socialization: Parent-Child Pairs Based on Survey of Youth Panel and Their Offspring, 1997.”

Let’s assume that a couple’s partisan affiliation doesn’t impact the gender of their kid.

The number of kids, however, is determined by personal choice, which in turn may be impacted by ideology, income, etc. For example, it is likely that conservatives have more kids as they are less likely to believe in contraception, etc. This is also supported by the data. (Ideology is a post-treatment variable. This may not matter if the impact of having a daughter is same in magnitude as the impact of having a son, and if there are similar numbers of each across people.)

Hence, one may conceptualize “treatment” as the gender of the kids, conditional on the number of kids.

Understandably, we only study people who have one or more kids.

Conditional on number of kids, the more daughters respondent has, the less likely respondent is to identify herself as a Republican (b = -.342, p < .01) (when dependent variable is curtailed to Republican/Democrat dichotomous variable; the relationship holds—indeed becomes stronger—if the dependent variable is coded as an ordinal trichotomous variable: Republican, Independent, and Democrat, and an ordered multinomial estimated)

Future:

If what we observe is true then we should also see that as party stances evolve, the impact of gender on policy preference of a parent should vary. One should also be able to do this cross-nationally.

Some other findings:

  1. Probability of having a son (limiting to live births in the U.S.) is about .51. This natural rate varies slightly by income. Daughters are more likely to be born among people with lower incomes. However, the effect of income is extremely modest in the U.S. The live birth ratio is marginally rebalanced by the higher child mortality rate among males. As a result, among 0–21, the ratio between men and women is about equal in U.S.

    In the sample, there are significantly more daughters than sons. The female/male ratio is 1.16. This is ‘significantly’ unusual.

  2. If families are less likely to have kids after the birth of a boy, the number of kids will be negatively correlated with proportion sons. Among people with just one kid, the number of sons is indeed greater than number of daughters, though the difference is insignificant. Overall correlation between proportion sons and number of kids is also very low (corr. = -.041).