Motherhood can depress political participation in ways that fatherhood does not. Resource constraints (i.e. leisure time, material resources) play an important role in creating structural barriers to mothers’ participation but so can social and/or cognitive barriers such as internalized gender role stereotypes and cultural expectations of the “good mother”. The mechanism that I examine is competence in parenthood as a role congruent social role. Motherhood is an especially role-congruent social role as women’s success is often tied to their ability to be “good” mothers (the “mommy or motherhood” myth). I aim to address the question, “Can competence in motherhood increase mothers’ self-reported political and community participation?” using two studies. In Study 1, I use survey data on parenthood status, number of children in the home, gender, political and community participation from the Canadian Election Study (CES) to look at whether there are differences between how parents versus non-parents, and mothers versus fathers participate in Canada. I then test whether mothers’ self-reported political and community participation can be increased in Study 2 using a novel treatment. In Study 2, I recruit a sample of 500 Canadian mothers, 500 Canadian fathers, and 500 nonparent Canadians to participate in a survey experiment. Parents are randomly assigned into treatment and control groups while all nonparents are assigned to the control group. The treatment is an open-ended question, “Describe a time when you felt confident as a parent”, while the control condition is, “Describe your favourite genre of music.” All participants are then asked to respond to the same political participation measures and similar community participation measures to participants in Study 1. This project builds on existing knowledge that looks at gender differences in parenthood and political participation but proposes that the mechanism is competence in motherhood as a role-congruent social role, rather than the pursuit of communal related goals, the presence of children in the home, or leading by example to encourage their own children’s social participation. The aim of this research is to see whether when parenting is framed as acts of competence, this can increase self-reported political and community participation.
