The Effects of Parental Leave on Public Opinion

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

Abstract

The gender gap in public opinion has received considerable media and scholarly attention because of its defining role in the outcomes of recent elections in the Western world. Most of this research comes from the United States and documents gender differences in attitudes toward force, compassion, and traditionalism (Shapiro and Mahajan 1986). In particular, women are consistently more supportive of the government helping the less fortunate and providing for the general welfare with a gap hovering around 10 percentage points (Howell and Day 2000; Huddy, Cassese, and Lizotte 2008b; Norrander 2008). This project focuses on a comparatively novel explanation for the gender gap in policy preferences: how the social roles of men and women, in particular their approach to parenthood, influence their opinions about political topics. Using data from Sweden, we examine how parental leave affects political attitudes and preferences depending on respondent gender and their relationship with the role of parenthood.

Social Role theorists posits that gender differences emerge as the result of the division of labor produced by the physical characteristics of men and women (Eagly, Diekman, Johannesen - Schmidt, and Koenig, 2004; Diekman and Schneider, 2010). From this division of labor, men and women adopt disparate roles for which they develop the traits necessary to succeed in those roles. To preserve the order of this labor division, gender expectations are socialized with the anticipation that men will possess traits signifying agency, such as assertive and aggressive, whereas women will adopt communal traits, such as caring and nurturing. Both diffuse (e.g., a woman; a man) and specific (e.g., a mother, a nurse, or a schoolteacher; a father, a soldier, or a police officer) social roles of men and women interact to produce meaningful and varied interests, personality traits, and political preferences (Diekman and Schneider, 2010).

Observed sex differences provide support that political attitudes will be consistent with the interests of and personality traits required of these socialized gender roles. In particular, women with children, because they inhabit both a gender role and a specific role which require compassion traits, are more likely than men with children to support increased spending on government services, child care, and public schools (Lizotte 2017). Motherhood predicts more liberal positions on social welfare attitudes including aid to the poor, healthcare, and the provision of government services (Elder and Greene 2006; 2007; 2012). Mothers are, at times, more liberal on childcare spending, school spending, and food stamps spending, when compared to women without children (Greenlee 2014).

We focus on the experience of parental leave, which we argue has the unique potential to transform men because, by inhabiting a caregiving role they are not typically socialized to assume, they will, by necessity, adopt caring traits essential for success in that role. These traits have been shown to underlie women’s tendency to prefer government intervention in helping the less fortunate and to reject using military force. The Swedish situation, where there is substantial variation in parental leave among both women and men, provides us with the opportunity to study the parental role changes of the individual, rather than just the biological experience of being a mother and/or father. By examining how parenthood and parental leave affect women’s and men’s attitudes in the Swedish case, this project will provide a direct test of Social Role Theory and give significant insight into gender differences in political behavior and public opinion.

In particular, we use the Swedish Level -of -Living Survey data, a nationally representative Swedish data set, to compare mothers and fathers who vary in taking leave, with non-parents on their political participation and policy preferences. We expect to find that gender differences on policy preferences will be larger among non-parents than parents, when controlling for relevant factors, because of changes in attitudes among fathers who take parental leave. Such a conclusion has the potential to unlock research examining how social roles influence political preferences and give considerable insight into the transformative experience of parenthood on political attitudes.

Authors

• Elin Naurin, University of Gothenburg

• Mary Kate Lizotte, Augusta University

• Monica C. Schneider, Miami University

• Elias Markstedt, University of Gothenburg

• Dietlind Stolle, McGill