daughters make you more conservative

In 2008, I wrote about a paper by Ebonya Washington which showed that legislators with daughters were more liberal as reflected in their voting records. A new NBER working paper by Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher (NYU) suggest that maybe "elite politicians" are affected differently than the "general citizenry."

They show that "female offspring induce more conservative political identification."

Controlling for gender, religion, age, education, and marital status, the proportion of girls [children] significantly increases Republican Party identification in the United States.

Why would this be? The authors suggest that "daughters may elicit grandparental preferences for a world in which male sexuality is constrained and parental investment in offspring is greater."

Read the paper here.