Partisan Fertility in the Aftermath of the Great Recession

Chiara Ludovica Comolli, Department of Statistical Sciences - University of Bologna
Gunnar Andersson, Stockholm University

The timing of fertility declines in developed societies during the last decade prompted scholars to associate it with the Great Recession of 2008. However, the persistence of fertility declines during the 2010s suggests that other developments, maybe triggered by the crisis, have influenced fertility. Here, we investigate how the growing support for right-wing populist parties may have affected childbearing trends. We focus on Sweden where the vote share of Sweden Democrats increased seven-fold between 2006 and 2022, and fertility rates simultaneously declined by more than twenty percent. We use population-register data to construct complete individual-level fertility histories and link women to the Sweden Democrats share of votes in their municipality of residence in the elections that were held in 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018. We estimate fixed effects models to test whether changes in the support for Sweden Democrats in the local municipality influenced the average woman’s probability of having a child in a negative direction, net of observed and unobserved individual-level and municipality characteristics.

Keywords: Fertility, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Longitudinal studies , Civil Registration and Vital Statistics

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