Colloquium in Mar. 2023
Sinn Won Han (Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University, U.S.)
Are the political left less likely to have children than the political right? U.S. society is facing heated political and social debates over which groups have driven recent decreases in the fertility rate, the lowest in 100 years.
This study aims to empirically investigate “the political fertility gap thesis”, one of the issues on the declining fertility rate in the U.S. Using the European Social Survey (2004 & 2010) and International Social Survey Programme (2012 & 2017), the study analyzes how an individual’s political orientation is associated with the subjective indexes of fertility in the 30 OECD and EU countries. The subjective indexes used as dependent variables are (1) parity-specific fertility intentions among the married, (2) perceived ideal number of children for a family, and (3) perception of children as life’s greatest joy.
The study fails to find meaningful associations between most of the fertility indexes and an individual’s political orientation in almost all examined countries. The study discusses the implications of this null result.
