The Gendered Effect of Parenthood on Voting Behaviour in the 2021 German Federal Election

ABSTRACT

The effect of parenthood on voting behaviour has so far been largely neglected in electoral research or is assumed to have a negligible effect. However, the 2021 German federal election campaign faced the politicisation of two main family- and children-related issues (i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change). Based on a comparison of data in the 2017 and 2021 German Longitudinal Election Study, we investigate the gendered effect of parenthood on voting behaviour. Our multinomial logistic regression analysis points to a significant parenthood effect for women during the 2021 election: women with at least one child under the age of 11 have an 8-percentage point higher probability of voting for the Greens than women without children in that age group (controlling among other things for education, age, religiosity and left-right identity). We do not find a similar effect for men. Further analyses suggest that this effect is partly due to a larger importance of climate change issues among mothers of young children. We conclude by highlighting the potential relevance of parents as an electorate force when family- and children-related issues are politicised during electoral campaigns.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability

The data used for this analysis can be downloaded by researchers from the GESIS data centre webpage after registration. Data for 2021 are from the pre-released post and pre-election GLES data set (doi:10.4232/1.13864). Data for 2017 are from the cumulative GLES data set 2009–2017 (DOI: 10.4232/1.13648). Stata code will be made is available on Stephan Dochow–Sondershaus' Open Science Framework page.

Notes

1 We are thankful to the reviewers of German Politics for pointing out sector and left-right ideology as two relevant variables to consider in our models.

2 This is akin to calculating so-called average marginal effects, where we calculate the predicted probabilities for each individual based on their values on all covariates and then average over those predicted probabilities within the categories of children.

3 However, the question remains why mothers of young children did not increase their SPD voting probability parallel to women without underaged children from 2017 to 2021. This could still be due to an effect of children.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by German Research Foundation [grant number TE1165/5_1].

Notes on contributors

Céline Teney

Céline Teney is professor of macrosociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests encompass political sociology, migration and integration sociology and the sociology of the European Union.

Stephan Dochow-Sondershaus

Stephan Dochow-Sondershaus is a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the empirical analysis and measurement of societal opinion polarisation, the interplay between local ethnic diversity and social cohesion, and educational sociology.

Forrest Lovette

Forrest Lovette is a graduate research assistant at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include cross-national comparative analysis, sociology of religion, political sociology, and the sociology of morality.