How personal is the political? Democratic revolution and fertility decline

Journal of Family History

Volumn 34, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 407-425

  Bailey, Amy Kate ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Democratic movements; Demographic transition; European fertility decline; Fertility; Ideological individualism; Revolution

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; BIRTH RATE; CIVIL DISORDER; CIVIL RIGHTS; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; DEMOGRAPHY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; EUROPE; FAMILY SIZE; FERTILITY; HISTORY; LEGAL ASPECT; MARRIAGE; NUCLEAR FAMILY; PHYSIOLOGY; POLITICAL SYSTEM; POPULATION DYNAMICS; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL CHANGE;

ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; BIRTH RATE; CIVIL DISORDERS; CIVIL RIGHTS; DEMOCRACY; DEMOGRAPHY; EUROPE; FAMILY CHARACTERISTICS; FERTILITY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; MARRIAGE; NUCLEAR FAMILY; POLITICAL SYSTEMS; POPULATION DYNAMICS; SOCIAL CHANGE;

EID: 70349742279     PISSN: 03631990     EISSN: 15525473     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0363199009344692     Document Type: Article

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107. This approach risks measurement error because of differences in temporal classification. However, early stages of social movements are difficult to identify, making precise measurement impossible.
108. For example, event history analysis might appear to be an appropriate methodological approach. However, significant theoretical and practical concerns make event history analysis inappropriate for the question and data, particularly the difficulty of identifying a time 0 for entering the risk pool. Structural equation modeling (SEM) might also seem useful since I am investigating the latent construct of ideological individualism and its manifest influence on the relationship between revolution and fertility. Unfortunately, standard errors for SEM assume large sample sizes, rendering the number of cases in this analysis far too small to support SEM. I rely on statistical approaches that are more appropriate for the limitations of the data.
109. The shrinking lag time between year of revolution and onset of fertility decline likely reflects greater availability of more effective contraceptive methods. Early fertility control efforts primarily involved restricting coitus and reliance on abortion. The availability and adoption of barrier methods occurred much later. See, e.g., Wally Seccombe, Starting to Stop: Working-class Fertility Decline in Britain, Past and Present 126 (1990): 151-88. Given the high failure rate of natural methods-monthly pregnancy risk remains above 5 percent until the wife nears forty years old for couples with monthly coitus-and historic misunderstanding of the timing of a woman's fertile period, the extended lag time among countries with earlier revolutions is unsurprising.
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111. Caldwell's theory applies to the direction of intergenerational wealth flows. Women's labor force participation should capture this measure because women's willingness to engage in paid labor has been linked to an emphasis on providing resources for children. See, e.g., Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences. Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
112. In supplementary analyses, I substituted in a measure of the total proportion of the population that was Catholic or Orthodox Christian to account for the variety of religious adherence among the countries analyzed. For example, Orthodox Christianity is the primary religion in both Greece and Russia and is similar to Catholicism structurally and theologically in ways that may influence the relationship between the religious and cultural landscape and the prevailing fertility regime. Results were substantially the same.
113. This restricted sample is used for theoretical, and not methodological, reasons. Using dfBeta and Cook's distance to identify influential cases reveals that no country exerts undue influence on either the overall goodness of fit of the model or the size and significance of individual regression coefficients.
114. The analyses presented here were confirmed by bootstrap with one thousand draws per regression estimation. Christopher Z. Mooney and Robert D. Duval, Bootstrapping. A Nonparametric Approach to Statistical Inference (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).
115. Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2004 (Polity IV) database, computer file, version p4v2004 (Fairfax, VA: Polity IV Project, 2004).
116. The main Polity IV Web site may be found online at http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
117. Including this measure has empirical as well as theoretical grounding. Preliminary explorations tested four separate threshold measures. This value demonstrated the strongest relationship to fertility decline, measured by both the amount of variance explained and the coefficient value.
118. Those countries are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Romania. Romanian fertility data are from the European Fertility Project. Additional fertility estimates are from John C. Caldwell and Lado T. Ruzicka, The Australian Fertility Transition: An Analysis, Population and Development Review 4 (1978): 81-103 (for Australia).
119. Elise F. Jones, Fertility Decline in Australia and New Zealand, 1861-1936, Population Index 37 (1971): 301-38 (for Australia and New Zealand).
120. Marvin McInnis, The Population of Canada in the Nineteenth Century, in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 371-432 (for Canada).
121. For example, many countries that experienced revolution crossed the polity score threshold only following World War I, when reforms were imposed on them by the coalition of victorious nations.
122. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer, Explaining the Origins, 157.
123. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New York: Russell Sage, 1990).
124. Although see John C. Caldwell and Pat Caldwell, High Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa, Scientific American 262, no. 5 (1990): 118-25.
125. Easterlin, Economic Framework.
126. Lesthaeghe, On the Social Control of Human Reproduction.
127. Lesthaeghe, A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change.