The Politics of Walmart Moms: Parenthood and Political Attitudes in the 2012 Election

Abstract

This research uses 2012 National Election Studies data to explore how parenthood shapes the public opinion of women and men. Our analyses show that being a parent shapes attitudes on issues directly connected to children, such as government funding for education and day care, but also on issues less connected to the day-to-day activities of parenting, including the appropriate role of government and abortion. While the label “Walmart Mom” captures the reality that a large and growing number of mothers are struggling economically, the effect of motherhood, on most issues, holds for all women, regardless of socioeconomic status. This article discusses the implications of our findings concerning the politics of motherhood and fatherhood in light of the changing structure of America’s families.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.