This must be the oddest story the Guardian‘s political editor, Michael White, ever wrote.

Forget about the conventional wisdom that parents influence the way their children vote. A new paper by two British academics yesterday upturned a longstanding western idea to suggest that it was the other way around. What’s more, daughters make families vote Labour or Lib Dem.

“This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more leftwing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more rightwing … the paper ends with a conjecture: leftwing individuals are people who comes from families into which, over recent past generations, many females have been born.”