First, let’s take a look at the study from the left-leaning Pew Research.

Excerpt:

Two sociologists have found that parents who have daughters are more inclined to support the GOP and turn a cold shoulder to Democrats.

In newly published findings that challenge earlier research, Dalton Conley of New York University and Emily Rauscher of the University of Kansas found that having more daughters than sons and having a daughter first “significantly reduces the likelihood of Democratic identification and significantly increases the strength of Republican Party identification.”

Not only is the daughter effect statistically significant, it’s substantively large.  They found that overall, “compared to those with no daughters, parents with all daughters are 14% less likely to identify as a Democrat….[and] 11% more likely to identify as a Republican than parents with no daughters,” they write in the journal Sociological Forum.

The daughters effect is considerably stronger among better educated and wealthier parents, they find. But among those farther down the socioeconomic ladder, it weakens to statistical insignificance.

Their startling conclusions are based on data collected two decades ago from 661 respondents with biological children interviewed for the 1994 General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Even though this national trend study has been administered regularly since 1972, the 1994 survey is the only one that included questions about the sex and birth order of a respondent’s biological children. (Surveys typically measure only whether a respondent has any children, including step-children and adopted children.)

[…]But why would having a daughter cause parents to become more Republican? The authors speculate that men and women might want more socially conservative policies when they have daughters and thus be more attracted to the GOP.

Ross Douthat wrote a column on Sunday in the ultra-leftist New York Times where he took a stab at explaining these findings.

Excerpt:

But let me make a more limited, more personal argument on the subject. The next round of research may “prove” something completely different about daughters and voting behavior. But as a father of girls and a parent whose adult social set still overlaps with the unmarried, I do have a sense of where a daughter-inspired conservatism might come from, whatever political form it takes.

It comes from thinking about their future happiness, and about a young man named Nathaniel P.

This character, Nate to his friends, doesn’t technically exist: He’s the protagonist in Adelle Waldman’s recent novel of young-Brooklynite manners, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.”

But his type does exist, in multitudinous forms, wherever successful young people congregate, socialize, pair off. He’s not the worst sort of guy by any means — not a toxic bachelor or an obnoxious pick-up artist. He’s well intentioned, sensitive, mildly idealistic. Yet he’s also a source of immense misery — both short-term and potentially lifelong — for the young women in his circle.

“Contrary to what these women seemed to think,” Waldman writes of Nathaniel P.’s flings and semi-steady girlfriends, “he was not indifferent to their unhappiness. And yet he seemed, in spite of himself, to provoke it.”

He provokes it by taking advantage of a social landscape in which sex has been decoupled from marriage but biology hasn’t been abolished, which means women still operate on a shorter time horizon for crucial life choices — marriage, kids — than do men. In this landscape, what Nate wants — sex, and the validation that comes with being wanted — he reliably gets. But what his lovers want, increasingly, as their cohort grows older — a more permanent commitment — he can afford to persistently withhold, feeling guilty but not that guilty about doing so.

Waldman’s portrait of Nate’s romantic life is sympathetic enough to have earned her fan mail from young men. But it’s precisely because Nate is sympathetic rather than toxic that the “Nathaniel P.” phenomenon — or what Rebecca Traister has dubbed “the scourge of indecisive men” — is a hard problem to escape. Indeed, it seems like one of the hidden taproots of well-educated women’s work-life-balance angst, and one of the plausible explanations for declining female happiness in a world of expanded female opportunity.

And lurking in Waldman’s novel, as in many portraits of the dating scene (ahem, Lena Dunham, ahem), is a kind of moral traditionalism that dare not speak its name — or that can be spoken of only in half-jest, as when the novelist Benjamin Kunkel told Traister that the solution was “some sort of a sexual strike against just such men.”

Because Kunkel is right: One obvious solution to the Nathaniel P. problem is a romantic culture in which more is required of young men before the women in their lives will sleep with them. 

To the extent that parents tend to see the next generation’s world through their children’s eyes, that’s an insight that’s more immediately available through daughters than through sons.

Does what he says ring true for you?

When I reflect on the women I know today, I find that they many fight against having to do things that are good if they don’t feel like doing them. Even simple things like reading a good book or playing a game together or watching a debate or saving money or paying off their debt is met with skepticism and rebellion. And what ends up happening is that rather than do what I would like them to do (which is often for their own good, and nothing for my benefit), they instead procrastinate and then blow small things out of all proportion as a way of trying to rationalize why they didn’t do it. It’s very difficult, in my experience, to get women to do even good things – like read a Lee Strobel book. They just rebel in most cases, because they don’t want to do anything that isn’t fun, no matter how good it is. It’s so hard to lead them.

So women are really struggling today with letting men lead them, even when the men are leading them in a good direction. I suspect that it’s because most women tend to get involved with men too early and destroy their ability to trust men with these failed relationships with men who are not even close to being ready for marriage. So how does a woman get attention from men if she doesn’t trust men to lead her? Well, she gives him sex. And what does the man learn from getting sex without having to first be seen by her as trustworthy? He learns not to work hard to appear to be worthy of trust. Specifically, he learns not to bother doing well in school, or doing well in work, or saving money, or being conservative on moral issues, or good at apologetics, or good at mentoring others, or giving some of what he earns to charity. There is no need to appear to be a good trustworthy person – he gets the sex without having to be. He’s not being measured for fit with any role, he’s just handed sex on a platter.