The Impact of Household Labor Division on Voting of Children in Primaries

• In Event: How the Past Shapes Our Future: Memories and Intergenerational Socialization

Abstract

The Impact of Household Labor Division on Voting of Children in Primaries

I argue that family socialization theory should be extended from studying how and to what extent parents convince their parents to adopt their partisan identifications through a process of persuasion to how and to what extent parents influence their children to passively develop two characteristic adaptations, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. I operationalize the modes of influence (in one of many different family structures that are expected to create distinct patterns of interaction and conflict resolution) by whether mothers and fathers complete core houseworking tasks in a totally gender traditional manner (women complete all or substantially all housework) or a totally gender egalitarian manner, with children raised in traditional households theorized to develop higher levels of SDO and RWA through a process of social construction/learning. In this paper I explore the real-world impact of this work by presenting the results of a conjoint analysis in which individuals have been asked to choose candidates in a hypothetical primary (with individuals choosing candidates from their own party) where each respondent has been asked to make 20 forced-choice decisions on randomly created composite hypothetical candidates. By using conjoint analyses, I can test the attractiveness of different messages to different people in a way that respondents are not asked to identify *which* aspect of a candidate’s profile appeals to them. As such the appeal of a high SDO message such as “Candidate X promises to continue and expand the Trump family separation policy” can be tested without introducing social desirability bias concerns. The results of this paper are important because it is well-known that in settings pitting members of two parties against one another, outside of extraordinary environmental conditions, that partisan identification tends to drown out psychological makeup. The psychological makeup of the individual is far more important outside of partisan settings. In essence, this scholarship is intended to show how economic factors (the necessitation of two-income households creating the conditions by which parents are forced to make choices about how to complete necessary tasks with time being scarce) force families to make decisions that reveal aspects of gender egalitarianism/traditionalism that might not be reflected in their party affiliations or even their stated attitudes. Democrats, rather than Republicans, are far more likely to express gender egalitarian attitudes that are not reflected in actual completion of household work and this is, in turn, reflected in the types of Democrats that are socialized. Similarly, Republican households that split housework in a more gender egalitarian manner are producing different types of Republicans than those who do not.

Author

• Apurba Kumar Chakraborty, UNC-Chapel Hill