The Effects of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Parenthood on Political Knowledge (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Gender & Public Opinion

Abstract

This paper investigates how the earliest stages of parenthood - the pregnancy and the time spent with the newborn baby - impact the mother's and father's respective knowledge about society and current political events. It is a well-known fact that women generally show lower knowledge about politics than men in political science studies (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1995; Fraile 2014). It has been suggested that parenthood is an important driver of this gap (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, p. 204). Recent work from, for example, Ferrin et al. (2019) have shown that parenthood affects political knowledge so that the gender gap is greater between parents than non-parents. So far, however, the details of when and how parenthood affects the way individuals acquire political information is not known. Very few studies have followed the development of the earliest stages - pregnancy and childbirth - to identify if and when behaviors and insights change for the individual. We use a unique and original five-wave detailed longitudinal data collection of parents (N = 6,940), which allows us to follow expecting parents from early pregnancy until the child is one year old (the Swedish Pregnancy Panel). For six months, we recruited pregnant woman and their partners in a waiting area of the largest hospital in the second largest city of Sweden. The hospital provides care to 96 percent of all pregnant women in the city area, thus providing unique coverage of parents from different backgrounds. Participants received five surveys each (three during pregnancy and two after the birth of the child). Each survey included knowledge questions about political events. We changed our measures every third week so that each participant received items on recent events, depending on when they were recruited and when they answered their survey. Measurement continued over 18 months and included surveillance and static type of political knowledge items (Barabas et al. 2014). Surveillance items are thought to change over time with important life events and the static items should be stable and independent of the stage and type of pregnancy and parenthood. We asked about current political events of the country and region (ranging from areas such as business, defense, economy, culture, environment, etc.), as well as events pertaining to areas of specific interest to the studied population (welfare state, child-related issues, healthcare issues, gender polices, etc.). Moderating variables include parental identity, time constraints, pregnancy and childbirth-related complications (attained from medical records of the women), and the partner's knowledge level.
The results provide detailed explanations of when and how knowledge of society and current events change among women and men. Preliminary conclusions are that knowledge about political events decreases already during pregnancy and continues to decrease when the baby is born. We see a greater drop for fathers, closing the gender gap somewhat temporarily. For some topics, most significantly for welfare topics, both mothers and fathers learn more. Furthermore, the hypothesized mechanisms are confirmed where a higher level of parental identity results in a larger gap. Time constraints are also partially confirmed, but mostly for women. We end the paper by engaging in a discussion about a lifelong process of socialization with adult experiences.

Authors

• Elias Markstedt, University of Gothenburg

• Elin Naurin, University of Gothenburg