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Study: Having daughters makes parents more Republican

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Breanna Deutsch Contributor
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Having more pink around the house could lead parents to vote red at the ballot box.

The Pew Research Center reports that a new study finds that parents of girls are more likely to support Republicans.

Dalton Conley of New York University and Emily Rauscher of the University of Kansas concluded that having more daughters than sons and having a daughter first “significantly reduces the likelihood of Democratic identification and significantly increases the strength of Republican Party identification.”

They wrote in the journal Sociological Forum, “compared to those with no daughters, parents with all daughters are 14% less likely to identify as a Democrat….[and] 11% more likely to identify as a Republican than parents with no daughters.”

Daughters don’t always swing their mothers and fathers to the right. Having daughters did not sway party identification among lower income parents.

A 2008 voting analysis found that members of Congress with more daughters voted more liberally.  A 2010 study in Great Britain found that voters who had daughters were more likely to support the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties instead of the Conservative Party.

Conley and Rauscher note that although some past research contests their findings, their conclusions align with another recent study that found boys who grew up with sisters in the house were more likely to be a Republican as they grew into adulthood.

“The sex mix of a variety of other groups (such as the [gender makeup of siblings] with whom the respondent was reared during his/her formative years) may have important implications for party identification as well, but this study is limited to children,” they explained.

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Breanna Deutsch