Project

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 nonparents?

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.