Does starting a family change your politics? jerclifton argues it does—and here's why.
. We first looked at US samples, but then replicated this finding using data from the World Values Survey—a huge dataset of 426,444 people in 88 countries. We found a positive relationship between parenthood and social conservatism in most countries. This included rich and poor countries and countries with differing cultures and religions .Source: Kerry et al., 2022
Moving beyond just parenthood, we looked at parental care motivation . We found that, in the USA, among both parents and non-parents, more parental care motivation correlated with being more socially conservative. Again, we wondered if this was just a USA thing. So, we collaborated with 11 teams in 10 countries and found the same relationship in every country .Source: Kerry et al., 2022