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Has Divorce Become a Pro-Natal Force in Europe at the Turn of the 21st Century?

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Abstract

Since the 1990s, the correlation between divorce and total fertility has turned positive on the country level in Europe. This paper investigates whether this positive association also holds on the individual level. To this end, it uses micro-level data from the third round of the European Social Survey about 23 countries. We introduce location-scale models to analyze both the average number of children and the dispersion around this number. Particular attention goes to the role played by repartnering. We find that a past divorce experience is generally negatively associated with the number of children ever born for both men and women, even for people who are in a new post-divorce union. So, contrary to what is suggested by aggregate level correlations, divorce has not become a pro-natal force in Europe. The only exception may be remarried men, who are somewhat more likely to have three or more children in our sample. Whereas the difference in average number of children born between divorced and never divorced people is small, divorce is associated with much greater heterogeneity in childbearing.

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Notes

  1. The proportional odds constraint of our models implies that the odds that the response variable (number of kids) falls within a next category rather than the current one depends only on the values of the covariates and on the regression parameters (not on the considered categories of the response). More technically: the constraint implies that the log of the modeled cumulated odds ratio is proportional to the distance between the covariates involved; the same proportionality applies to each subsequent logit in the sequence of cumulative logits (see McCullagh 1980 for a technical treatment). To the extent that this constraint is violated, odds will be under- or overestimated for specific categories. However, an equivalent limitation would apply for any other type of model that could be applied to this problem in practice.

  2. The difference between the coefficients for men and women (−1.144 and −0.810, respectively) is statistically significant at the level of α = 0.05 for a one-sided t-test of equality of coefficients, estimating the standard error of the difference between the coefficients of the male and the female samples following Clogg et al. (1995) at 0.1989. The same procedure for testing differences between the coefficients estimated for the male and female sample is applied below.

  3. Test of gender inequality of coefficients statistically significant at the level of α = 0.01 (difference is 0.492, SE 0.176).

  4. Tables 2 and 3 contrast the divorced with the never divorced. To test the statistical significance of the difference between the divorced who currently live in a consensual union and the divorced who remarried, we re-estimated model 3 both for men and for women. For men, the contrast is estimated at 1.003 with SE 0.274, p < 0.001. For women, the contrast between divorced in consensual union and those in remarriage is 0.679 with SE 0.219, p < 0.01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CeSO/Centre for Sociological Research, University of Leuven, Parkstraat 45 bus 3601, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Jan Van Bavel

  2. Interface Demography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 5, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Mieke Jansen & Belinda Wijckmans

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  1. Jan Van Bavel
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  2. Mieke Jansen
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  3. Belinda Wijckmans
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Correspondence to Jan Van Bavel.

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Van Bavel, J., Jansen, M. & Wijckmans, B. Has Divorce Become a Pro-Natal Force in Europe at the Turn of the 21st Century?. Popul Res Policy Rev 31, 751–775 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-012-9237-6

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