United We Part

Political gender gap expands when women and men become moms and dads.  

Motherhood and fatherhood intensify political leanings, say researchers from North Carolina State University (NCSU) who studied the link between parenthood and partisanship. Becoming a mother or father, findings state, widens the already existing gender gap between men and women, in which men tend to be conservative and women liberal.  

Dr. Steven Greene, associate professor of political science at NCSU, and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College, compared the voting behaviors of men and women with children at home versus those with no children in the home. Parents who have grown children were not part of the study. The team used data on the 2008 presidential election from the American National Election Studies, and controlled statistically for additional factors.

The study finds that women with children at home hold more liberal views on issues such as social welfare and the Iraq War than women without children in the home. However, men with children are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without children, the research states.

What inspired Greene to examine political partisanship and parenthood? Having studied partisanship and the gender gap for nearly a decade, he was curious to see what would happen if the parenting variable was included in research.

“You can see it as part of the whole sense that women are definitely to more other-oriented than men, including when it comes to government helping others in addition to just them,” Greene tells demo dirt. “Men prefer that help comes to those within their community, and when they become parents there is a real emphasis on men helping their family, because they focus on role of provider.”

That “provider versus nurturer” mindset may be why men may be are prone to conservative viewpoints while women favor a liberal perspective.

“Research has shown for the past couple of decades that women tend to be more liberal than men; they are more democratic and more liberal than men,” Greene explains. “These are solid results, and it seems that parenthood may exaggerate that difference.”

More recently, Sarah Palin and the focus on motherhood and hockey moms sparked greater public interest in the tie between politics and family.   

“We have been studying parenthood and politics for a long time, at least six or seven years, but then there was the recent election and the hockey mom talk, Greene says. “We never heard about Hillary Clinton being a mother, but she is a mother too. We were curious to see if that had any effect for winning over mothers or parents in general.”

The research did not focus on marital relationship quality, but rather on political data and parental involvement, Greene adds. It was also difficult to imply causality and parenthood, he notes.

“We don’t have a before-and-after survey,” Greene explains. “We compared those who are parents versus not parents and controlled the factors statistically.”

Interestingly, despite various subgroups distinguished by race, SES, and age, the effects of parenthood on political leanings are universal, he adds.

Most interesting, Greene says, are consistent data finding that parenthood doesn’t affect men as much as much as it does women.

“To even talk about the political effects of parenthood is misleading,” he maintains. “We should discuss instead the effects of motherhood and fatherhood; to lump together the two can confuse the issue.”

The reason for this, Green says, is that men are less involved in their role as parents than are women. “[For example,] if for a woman, fifty percent of her life is defined as a mom, then for a man thirty percent of his life is about being a dad. Men just aren’t typically affected nearly as much as women.”  

“This was a finding in 2008, but what will it look like in 2010 or 2012, or will it a blip in the data?” he adds.    

Future research, Greene says, will focus on how politicians communicate different issues, how they frame them and how this affects voter decisions.   

“How effective is using family-based language in political appeals?” Greene concludes. “Politicians use it all the time, so they must think it is effective. We have seen shift in the rhetoric. We want to see if we can show how much of an impact that has.”