Why Your Congressman's Children Matter to You

Understanding how legislators, and government officials more broadly, form opinions and make decisions is crucial for understanding the broader political climate and predicting policy change. A recent paper in the American Economic Review by Yale economist and political scientist Ebonya Washington addresses this issue with an interesting angle and some startling results:

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congressperson's propensity to vote liberally, particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child-to-parent behavioral influence.

The crucial assumption in this paper is that the sex composition of the legislator's children is random or, at the very least, unrelated to other factors that might determine voting behavior. Washington addresses this by noting that 1) the time period covered in the study predated the wide-spread diffusion of fetal sex-determining technologies and 2) legislator's do not appear to follow different stopping rules conditional on the sex of birth's children. To address (2) the author utilizes information on the sex of the legislator's first birth (painstakingly recovered from newspaper announcements) and assess whether the total number of children varies with the first kid's gender (she finds that it does not).

A recent working paper by Dalton Conley and Brian McCabe utilizes Washington's finding to study the link between legislator voting behavior and campaign contributions. Noting that recovering causal estimates of this relationship is difficult, the authors use the sex composition of children to predict voting behavior, and then assess the relationship between predicted voting behavior and campaign contributions. The key assumption is that the gender mix of the kids doesn't have a direct, or indirect (via some unobserved factor), influence on campaign contributions.