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Tyler Cowen notes a study showing that the tendency to switch parties leftward is positively correlated with the number of daughters in a family. Andrew Gelman points out a potential flaw ...suppose (hypothetically) that politically conservative parents are more likely to want sons, and if they have two daughters, they are (hypothetically) more likely to try for a third kid. In comparison, liberals are more likely to stop at two daughters. In this case, if you look at data on families with 2 daughters, the conservatives will be underrepresented, and the data could show a correlation of daughters with political liberalism--even if having the daughters has no effect at all!On the anecdotal evidence side, my father in law had four daughters and no sons and would probably be described as a cantankerous small government libertarian leaning anti-taxation Republican (they say women marry men like their fathers, you know). I wonder if party-switchers represent a subset of the population with interesting properties and whether that influenced the offspring gender bias somehow. It seems to me that switchers are almost by definition less likely to vote based on long-held deeply thought out political philosophies (they don't have time to think about these things, with all those kids!). Shouldn't switchers be enriched for those who adopt the political views of their surroundings? If so, perhaps the stronger apparent bias in the switchers reflects a group that is sensitive to and amplifies the weaker bias toward daughters in the nonswitchers. The Times Online article also has this odd statement: But we still need to explain why parents would vote for something that benefits their offspring rather than themselves. Here Professor Oswald invokes Darwinian theory, which is that people make decisions that are likely to benefit their children.I wonder. A Darwinian view based on benefits to offspring would expect parents of sons to support social welfare programs as much, if not more than parents of daughters, since this should raise the survival of genes spread via sons impregnating but not marrying the daughters of others. In other words, policies that favor male promiscuity benefit males (suprise!). By contrast, parents with daughters are more likely to have to support the next generation as well, especially if there are high rates of young single motherhood. This would make those with daughters more favorable to state subsidies to reproductive services and progams that provide day care, child health, food aid, and so on. This is direct benefit to the parents of daughters, since the alternative source of support is them. The direct benefit allows these parents to potentially have more offspring themselves. So you have a direct benefit to the parents of daughters and an indirect benefit to the parents of sons. What does this predict? The article notes this, from the British Household Survey. Of those parents with three sons and no daughters, 67 per cent voted Left. In households with three daughters and no sons, the figure was 77 per cent.So even those with no daughters voted Left 2/3 of the time. During the study period, there were three general elections in the UK:
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