Why Do Liberals Have Fewer Children?

The always-interesting blog Half Sigma has a link to some interesting analysis by the magazine American Conservative showing the correlation between support for President Bush and family size. It turns out that there is a very predictable relationship there: big families liked Bush. Half Sigma wondered why this is so and gave some possibilities.

My guess is that this is really driven by the preference of women. Women who have the ambition to be the perfect wife and mother are likely to have big families. These women are likely to come from traditionally conservative backgrounds and/or think traditionally conservative themselves. Naturally, if a woman wants to stay at home and be a mother, it shouldn’t surprise people that she would want to have many children, because it is hard to justify staying at home for just one child.

On the other hand, women who want a career might find that having a large family is impractical. They might prefer one of maybe two children, or they might not want children at all. Children of working mothers are very expensive: they require day care and after school care. Children require lots of time, and working women just don’t have lots of time. It makes sense that career-ambitious women will have fewer children than stay-at-home moms. It also makes sense that career-ambitious women might be less likely to be the traditional Christian type that is the bedrock of the Republican Party. These career-ambitious women are probably more likely to be liberal because liberal women are more likely to think of success as having a career.

All of this would suggest that the nation will become more conservative over time. However there is another possibility: there may be a strong correlation between large family size and children that think their mothers are boobs.