Daughters do not affect political beliefs in a new democracy

Clayton, Amanda, De Kadt, Daniel ORCID: 0000-0003-2151-8020 and Dumas, Natasha (2023) Daughters do not affect political beliefs in a new democracy. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 10 (1). 137 - 147. ISSN 2052-2630

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Abstract

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents' attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women's rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women's rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women's customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents' political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of...
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Authors
Divisions:	Government Methodology
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform J Political Science > JC Political theory
Date Deposited:	28 Apr 2022 12:18
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2024 08:00
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/114994

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