Republicans and Democrats don't seem to agree on very much these days. They are divided on the kinds of television shows they watch, cars they drive and beers they drink. And now research by political scientists at the University of Chicago adds one more thing to that list: baby names.
Why study baby names at all? In order to understand all those other differences. The authors of this paper — Eric Oliver, Thomas Wood and Alexandra Bass — note that it's often unclear whether partisan consumer habits are really due to partisanship. It could be that companies successfully market products to specific demographics that happen to have a partisan leaning. Baby names are different. As Oliver and colleagues write, baby names "are highly related to taste and fashion but largely free from market effects."
To understand whether Democrats and Republicans choose different kinds of baby names, the researchers compiled an unusual set of data. They took all of the births in the state of California from 2004 — about 500,000 in all. For each baby born, the data contained the child's first name, the mother's first name, the father's first name (where available) and the mother's education, race and address. Using these addresses, they then matched each mother to her Census tract and thereby determined whether she lived in an area that was predominantly Democratic, Republican or somewhere in between. The question is whether mothers who lived in red, blue and purple neighborhoods were systematically different. They were, in two respects.