Daughters do not affect political beliefs in a new democracy

Abstract

Having a daughter shapes parents' attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways, a finding documented in multiple industrialized democracies. We test whether this travels to a young middle-income democracy where women's rights are tenuous: South Africa. Contrary to prior work we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women's rights or partisan identification. Using a unique dataset of over 7,500 respondents and an equivalence testing approach, we reject the null hypothesis of any effects of 5 percentage points or greater at conventional levels of statistical significance. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women's customary status and de factor opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents' political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.