Daughters and Political Preferences of Politicians: A Preregistered Prospective Study on Swedish Politicians

Abstract Important studies have suggested that politicians become more liberal by having daughters, but more recent work has been unable to replicate this result. It is therefore essential to further clarify how politicians’ family situations affect their policy making in different contexts, and in particular when it comes to gender-related policies. We provide a unique test based on prospective data collection on Swedish politicians based on a pre-analysis plan strictly followed in all analyses and tests. Data is collected in two surveys implemented after the 2022 general parliamentary election in Sweden on members of parliament and candidates in the parliamentary election (n=1,147 complete responders are included in our analyses). In our primary hypotheses, we test whether having daughters is associated with more left-leaning political preferences, a stronger preference for female-favoring policies, and a weaker preference for male-favoring policies. We find no evidence of an effect on left-leaning political preferences or female-favoring policies. These results do not support the original work on this topic but are in line with the more recent null results. We also find suggestive evidence (p<0.05) that having daughters is associated with a weaker preference for male-favoring policies. As the effects of having daughters on male-favoring policies have not been explored earlier, this opens up an interesting avenue to investigate in future studies.