It turns out the parents of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rick Perry knew what they were doing when they named their babies.
A research paper by a team of University of Chicago political scientists found that liberals and conservatives, in addition to all of their other differences, have distinct tendencies when it comes to choosing names for their newborns.
Names with the soft consonant “l” or that end in a long “a” — for example, President Obama’s daughter Malia — are more likely to be found in Democratic neighborhoods, while names with hard vowel sounds such as K, G or B — think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s sons Track and Trig — are more popular in Republican communities.
“We find strong differences in birth-naming practices related to race, economic status and ideology,” said the paper, “Liberellas versus Konservatives: Social Status, Ideology, and Birth Names in the United States.”
“Although higher status mothers of all races favor more popular birth names, high-status liberal mothers more often choose uncommon, culturally obscure birth names,” the paper said. “Liberals also favor birth names with ‘softer, feminine’ sounds while conservatives favor names with ‘harder, masculine’ phonemes.”
The study stops short of listing baby names as conservative or liberal, but does offer findings based on data derived from an examination of the 2004 California birth records, electoral precincts and the 2000 U.S. Census.
The authors devised a “Male Gender Score” for names, which reveals that “college-educated white mothers choose names with more feminine phonemes as their neighborhood becomes more liberal.”(continued)
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