One of the most fascinating chapters in John Jeffries’s brilliant biography of Lewis Powell is his analysis of Powell’s decision to vote with the majority in Roe v. Wade. Among the factors that Jeffries identifies (few of them having anything whatsoever to do with law or the constitution) was the influence of Powell’s three daughters browbeating him (for want of a better word) to vote with the majority.
In that vein, I thought the findings of this new paper on the voting of legislators on abortion issues is interesting (I make no claims one way or the other for the methodology of the paper):
“
Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator
Fathers’ Voting on Women’s Issues”
Yale Economic Applications and Policy Discussion Paper
No. 15Contact: EBONYA L. WASHINGTON
Yale University – Department of
Political Science, National Bureau of Economic
Research (NBER)Auth-Page: http://ssrn.com/author=93830
Full Text: http://ssrn.com/abstract=904001
ABSTRACT: Economists have long concerned themselves with
environmental influences, such as neighborhood, peers and family
on individuals’ beliefs and behaviors. However, the impact of
children on parents’ behavior has been little studied. Parenting
daughters, psychologists have shown, increases feminist
sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like
neighbors or peers, can influence adult behavior. I demonstrate
that the propensity to vote liberally on reproductive rights is
significantly increasing in a congress person’s proportion of
daughters. The result demonstrates not only the relevance of
child to parent behavioral influence, but also the importance of
personal ideology in a legislator’s voting decisions as it is not
explained away by voter preferences.