The Relationship Between Political Orientation and Childbearing in Western Europe

In recent years, prominent politicians and commentators have attributed low and declining fertility to values associated with the political left, such as social liberalism, feminism, and secularism. Exploring how political orientation relates to childbearing can improve the understanding of the role values play in contemporary fertility patterns. Yet, empirical evidence on this relationship remains limited. This study examines how multiple dimensions of political orientation relate to the achieved number of children among individuals aged 40-79 in 16 Western European countries, using data from round 9 of the European Social Survey (collected in 2018-2020). A significant positive association between right-leaning self-placement on the left/right scale and fertility is found in Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Spain, whereas the association is non-significant in the other 12 countries. Social conservatism is positively associated with fertility in most countries, whereas economic egalitarianism, immigrant hostility, and pro-environmentalism are, in most cases, not significantly related to fertility. The strongest associations between party preference and fertility appear in Finland and Spain, where voters for right-wing parties tend to have more children than voters for left-wing parties. In half of the examined countries, voters for conservative or Christian democratic parties have significantly more children than voters from at least one leftist or liberal/centrist party family. However, several countries show no significant fertility differences by party preference. Overall, the findings highlight substantial variation in the relationship between political orientation and fertility, across countries and across different dimensions of political and value orientation.Keywords: political preferences, fertility, value orientation, social conservatism, nationalism, climate change, environment, European Social Survey