Ok, so if your friend names her newborn Reagan or Barack, you may not need to do much assuming about her political orientation.
But according to researchers at the University of Chicago, baby names do signal partisanship, even when the parents are not aware of it when making the choice.
Eric Oliver, Thomas Wood and Alexandra Bass analyzed the names of all California babies born in 2004, accounting for the mother’s race and education, and — based on zip code — the partisan bias of the mother’s neighborhood. They wanted to know if mothers living in red, blue or purple neighborhoods were systematically different from each other in how they named their child.
They found that partisan differences in baby naming were most notable among better educated whites.
The first difference they found was that educated whites living in more liberal neighborhoods chose “softer sounds” when naming both boys and girls — think Julian for a boy or Malia for a girl. They were also more likely to choose esoteric or uncommon names, whereas conservatives are more likely to select more traditional names. Esoteric names, they authors note, do not include phonemes of known names, such as “Jazzmyne for Jasmine”.
Oliver argues that liberals — consciously or not — “signal cultural tastes and erudition when picking their child’s name”. He and his novelist wife are examples of such: they named their daughter Esme after a character in a JD Salinger story.
Which brings me to another piece I’ve sat on for a while, waiting for it to be timely: a June 2012 piece in The Atlantic titled “Nobody names their baby Barack anymore.” After Obama was elected in 2008, the Social Security Administration said in a press release that it forecasted “Barack” to increase well into the top 1,000 most popular names. But their models were wrong. In fact, as the President’s term progressed the number of new babies bearing his name went down. There had been a significant jump from 2007 to 2009, from 5 babies to 69. But in 2010 only 28 little ones were named after the prez, and in 2011, just 15.
The authors compared this trend to that of various other presidents: Ronald, Jimmy, Lyndon, Dwight, Harry, Calvin, Woodrow and Theodore. They found that naming one’s child after the president used to be much more popular. The most dramatic incline in name popularity goes to Calvin (Coolidge), though Woodrow (Wilson) does well too. You can check out the graphs and charts here.
I guess the next matter to tackle is…. Does the popular elephant nursery decor end up on Republican registries more often? These are the important questions of our day.
Karen Cyphers, PhD, is a public policy consultant, researcher, and mother to three daughters.
