The decline in fertility and its potential consequences are today on the agenda of across the global North. Both a challenge and an opportunity, states today grapple with how to approach population change, and the European Commission considers state policy responses to fertility decline a key issue of our time. Here, the Central and East European Region, in particular Poland and Hungary, stand out by having departed on an explicit pro-natal path to incentivize and valorize childbearing. In contrast, Sweden and Germany do not. Yet, Sweden’s extensive labor-market-oriented family policies (increasingly adopted in Germany) are beginning to obtain a pro-natal framing as fertility decline enters the public discourse.
This project studies the social and political sustainability or unsustainability of pro-natal policies, and policies motivated by effects on fertility, in the context of population change in the Baltic, Central- and Easter-European regions. Will pro-natal policies be found illegitimate, found legitimate, and/or lead to political cleavages between men and women and between parents and the increasing share of non-parents?
An interdisciplinary collaboration across Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and Germany, the project investigates this question by creating a unique dataset that combines survey experiments on attitudes toward pro-natal policies and state involvement in reproduction, demographic analysis of population change, and policy analysis, across the four countries.