Parents of daughters support Hillary Clinton more than parents of sons [View all]

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Parents of daughters support Hillary Clinton more than parents of sons

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/05/parents-of-daughters-support-hillary-clinton-more-than-parents-of-sons/



By Michael Tesler January 5 at 8:00 AM

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Hillary Clinton has strongly embraced the historic nature of her bid to become the first woman president. Unlike her 2008 campaign, she has already made several gender-based appeals in the months leading up to the primaries.

Clinton even began the first Democratic presidential debate back in October by using her introductory remarks to remind Americans that with her in the White House, “finally fathers will be able to say to their daughters, ‘You, too, can grow up to be president.’”

Clinton’s message about shattering the highest and hardest glass ceiling for all of the daughters in the country should have resonated with their parents. After all, a number of social science studies show that parents of daughters are more supportive of feminist positions than parents of only sons.

This effect of having daughters on political beliefs extends, remarkably, all the way up to the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Adam Glynn and Maya Sen have found that “conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons.”

In light of those findings, we might also expect parents of daughters to be especially supportive of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the first female presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

That’s exactly what these results show:

Graph by Michael Tesler

The analyses above combine the five biweekly YouGov/Economist surveys conducted since Joe Biden announced he would not run for president. Taken together, these data reveal a large effect of child’s sex on support for Hillary Clinton.