And Those With No Kids Become Anarchists

The latest issue of Foreign Policy reports the findings of two British economists that a person's politics change according to the sex of their children.

According to Andrew Oswald, a professor at Warwick University, and Nattavudh Powdthavee, of the University of London, having daughters pushes people to become more left-wing, while sons make people more likely to vote in a right-wing way.

The report says that they found that British parents who have three daughters are 12 percent more likely to support a left-wing party than those with three sons, and, in Germany, a father's likelihood of voting Left increases by 2.5 percent with every daughter he has. Oswald and Powdthavee reckon that men who have daughters start to subconsciously represent the female point of view in the way they vote—they do not like the idea that their daughters may one day receive lower wages than their male colleagues, for instance—whereas parents with boys may value lower taxes, because many believe that such changes in the tax code usually favor men.