Аннотация:Citizens' personal identity groups exert a powerful influence over their preferences, particularly when their identity-related interests are perceived to be under threat. In American political rhetoric, parents are an identity group frequently targeted with fear and anxiety in the hopes of attracting support for particular policies. In this paper, we argue that these appeals to parental concerns do not influence all parents in the same way. With an experimental study of a large sample of parents, we find that threatening parental appeals exert a greater influence on fathers' policy preferences than they do on mothers'. To explain this difference, we rely on existing theories that mothers consistently incorporate parenthood into their preference formation, thereby minimizing their susceptibility to parental priming. For fathers, on the other hand, the relevance of parenthood for preference formation is dependent upon contextual factors, like identity primes. With a second experiment, we find strong support for this mechanism. This research has important implications for the distinct ways in which mothers and fathers incorporate their parental identity in political decision-making. More broadly, we offer insight into when identity primes might cause variability of response within identity groups.
