Parenthood and Politics: Surveying State and National Legislators in Germany

Our broader research agenda asks a series of interrelated questions about the role of politicians’ family lives in their career trajectories, tackling several important, enduring issues regarding gender, family status, and parliamentary representation. In what ways does parenthood shape political careers – both the timing of entrance into and exit from office, as well as career progression and promotion? To what extent are these consequences gendered? Specifically in this paper, we present our findings from a survey distributed to all current members of the German Bundestag, as well as current members of the 16 state legislatures in Germany (survey distributed November 2023). The survey poses questions about respondents’ political careers; their parental status, including the age(s) of any children at earlier stages in their career; and their attitudes towards the family-friendliness of their legislative workplaces, including suggestions for how supports could be improved. The survey, which identifies politicians by their constituency, provides crucial validation for an earlier dataset that we gathered from German politicians’ public-facing biographies on their official websites (dataset covers all elected members of seven Bundestag terms, 1994 to 2017). Both legal privacy protections and cultural attitudes towards privacy in Germany restrict the generalizability of what individual politicians’ choose to share. In particular, these bios sometimes omit mention of parenthood, which means neither that the politician is a non-parent nor that parenting has not affected their careers. Our preliminary findings indicate that motherhood exacts a stiffer penalty than fatherhood. Taken together, these findings make important contributions to our understanding of the role of family life in political careers.