Via Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who has paid access to academic papers, the concluding paragraph of a new paper by economics researchers Dalton Conley, Emily Rauscher claims that not only does having more daughters tend to make politicians more conservative (despite prior research saying the contrary) there’s an sociobiology/evolutionary-biology angle that explains the whole thing! (Emphasis mine.)

Using nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey, we find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.

...

The conservative emphasis on family, traditional values and gender roles, and prolife anti-abortion sentiments all stress investment in children – for both men and women. Conservative policies mirror the genetic interests of women, writ large. They attempt to promote paternal investment in offspring. Further, they stress investment in conceived offspring – “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” In short, Conservative policies support the genetic fitness of women by capitalizing on each pregnancy, reducing male promiscuity, and increasing paternal investment in children. Such policies may impinge on the freedom of parents’ immediate offspring, but they increase the expected number of grandchildren via daughters.

You’ll have to pay to confirm it but they allegedly say it if you begin reading here.

Got that girls? Keeping you at home, in the kitchen, with the children, while government policy rains Hell on the kind of hussies that “ask for it” from men, and scowling and sternly tapping it’s foot at the men who give it to them, is all in your own best genetic interest.

Maybe not your individual, personal, mental and psychological or even corporeal interest, sure. But your genes? Oh yeah, you mousey little baby-maker, your genes know better than you. They know you want it.

It’s an even more cellular-level version of the same old worth-of-a-woman-is-her-offspring argument.

Otherwise, whereas it’s entirely possible that the researcher’s data supports their contention that politicians who have (proportionately) more daughters tend to be more conservative, I’m extremely skeptical of their implications that

a) politicians with daughters become more conservative in order to maximize their own 2nd- and 3rd-generation offspring
b) that conservatism even maximizes the reproductive potential of those women under their dominion
and, especially,
c) that very many conservative politicians are going to be that thrilled that they’re either the products or the beneficiaries, let alone the vehicles for Darwinian evolution.