The First Daughter Effect: The Impact of Fathering First Daughters on Men's Preferences for on Gender Equality Issues

In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the role of parents and parenthood in political discourse, policy advocacy, and voter behavior, exploring the impact of fatherhood and child gender on fathers’ political attitudes and behavior. The mechanisms that may lead child gender and parental status to produce particular political attitudes among men remain under-specified. Our paper accomplishes two things: 1) we test the hypothesis that child gender (specifically, having a daughter as the first born child) contributes to more egalitarian views on gender-linked policy and priorities among fathers (relative to fathers with first born sons), and 2) we use high quality data to explore some of the possible mechanisms that drive this difference. We report the results of a study of the political consequences of fatherhood based on a 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) module designed to examine these matters among a nationally-representative sample of ~600 fathers. Paired with the CCES battery of attitudinal and behavioral variables, our research design also permits us to examine whether key intervening variables – specifically parental identity, parental involvement, and feelings of linked fate between daughters/sons and men/women in general – mediate the political effects of fatherhood. Our survey offers an unprecedented look at whether and how fatherhood and child gender influence fathers’ political engagement.