Playing the Dad Card? Parenthood, Gender, Vote Choice in the 2018 Midterms

• In Event: Motherhood, Fatherhood and their Effects on Political Behavior

Abstract

How and when does parental status affect the gendered voting behavior of Americans? In recent decades, scholars have noted the increasing presence of familial appeals in American elections (Elder and Greene 2012, Greenlee 2014). During this same period, the number of women running for political office has increased dramatically. According to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), 2018 saw a record number of women candidates for the U.S. Congress, with 53 women running for the U.S. Senate (up from 40 in 2016) and 476 seeking a position in the U.S. House of Representatives (previous record 298 in 2012). Two facts are clear about the 2018 election outcomes: 1) the presence of a very large number of competitive women candidates rendered a record number of women elected to serve in the 116th Congress, and 2) these numbers nevertheless continue to woefully underrepresent U.S. women compared to their share of the U.S. population.

Scholars point to multiple and complex dynamics as explanations for these gender inequalities (see Lawless 2015). A significant issue is that men exhibit lower levels of support for women candidates than do women voters (Wolbrecht 2000; Sanbonmatsu 2002; Kaufmann 2002; Box-Steffensmeier, Boef, and Lin 2004). Prominent explanations for this pattern include the continuing influence of negative stereotypes about female candidates (Huddy and Terkildsen 1993), as well as the lesser likelihood of men identifying with the Democratic Party, which fields the great majority of women candidates (Sanbonmatsu 2002; Sanbonmatsu and Dolan 2009).

While these studies have expanded our understandings of the factors that predict male opposition to female candidates, to date there has been little scholarly attention to the individual and contextual factors that may lead men to support women candidates. One notable exception is recent research on the 2016 presidential election, which found that fathers of first daughters, more so than fathers of first sons, were more likely to support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton (Greenlee et al. 2018). Little is yet known about the dynamics influencing voters’ choices in 2018.

In this paper, we build off of prior work to understand how familial ties and gender affect the congressional vote choice of male voters. We leverage the record number of women candidates for Congress in 2018 to explore whether fathers of first daughters, relative to fathers with first sons, were more likely to support women congressional candidates. To do this, we employ a cross sectional analysis of congressional vote choice using modules on the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to determine whether fatherhood of first daughters lead men to more strongly support female congressional candidates in 2018.

We couple this observational analysis with survey experiments embedded in the 2016 and 2018 CCES designed to investigate how both the message and the gender identity of the messenger influence the voting behavior of fathers with/without first daughters. In these experiments, we randomly expose respondents to communications in which (1) either a fictitious female candidate or a fictitious male candidate (2) either does or does not highlight the importance of the campaign for the opportunities available to women and girls. We then assess whether exposure to these communications increase support for the congressional candidate in question among fathers of first daughters/fathers of first sons. Taken together, these two experiments allow us to better understand whether the message, the gender of the messenger, or both influence the support of fathers of first daughters/fathers of first sons for candidates who emphasize progressive positions on issues facing women and girls.

Our results not only shed light on the dynamics of the 2018 election cycle, but also advance our understanding of the determinants of male vote choice in electoral contests featuring female candidates. More broadly, we offer insights into how familial appeals, gender, kinship operate in the contemporary American electoral context.

Authors

• Tatishe Mavovosi Nteta, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Jesse H. Rhodes, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Elizabeth A. Sharrow, University of Massachusetts

• Jill S. Greenlee, Brandeis University