Abstract
This contribution discusses the potentials of welfare-state approaches for fertility research in Europe. Demographers mostly concentrate on family policies and their effects on fertility. They usually find no fertility-elevating effects of individual family policies or only small effects on the aggregate level. This has led them to turn their attention instead to welfare states and to national configurations of social and family policies. In this contribution, I argue that welfare-state and single-policy approaches complement each other and that both are needed for a better understanding of fertility developments. I outline the main concepts of the welfare state and their usefulness for fertility research, underlining two aspects in particular: First, the relative persistence of the orientation of a welfare state provides a framework to assess the effects of policies and policy changes across countries and over time. Second, different welfare states are associated with different labor-market and educational systems, which allows us to view fertility behavior within a framework of interrelated complementary institutions.
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- 1.
The same applies to policies which aim at lowering fertility (Bledsoe et al. 1998).
- 2.
The allocation of the Netherlands and of Switzerland to the conservative welfare regime has also been contested; both are seen as hybrid cases (Arts and Gelissen 2002).
- 3.
Authors who stress path-dependency see the post-communist welfare institutions as partly reaching back to pre-communist times (Cerami and Vanhuysse 2009).
- 4.
Aggregate fertility measures have received much criticism because they do not reflect fertility-relevant behavioral aspects (e.g., Hoem 2008; Hoem and Mureşan 2011). Some authors therefore consider them inappropriate for the assessment of the relationship between policies and fertility. Nevertheless, they are still the dominant indicators of fertility development and are commonly used as reference categories in policy discussions.
- 5.
There is a substantial difference between the welfare-state approach and the approach based on “varieties of capitalism”. The former stresses the role of the state, the latter stresses the role of firms and employers in the development of social policies and in structuring economic relationships. My application of the varieties-of-capitalism approach selects only a specific aspect of this research line, a line which to me seems useful for fertility research.
- 6.
The terms “sector-coordinated” and “national-coordinated” economies refer to the way in which labor negotiations between employers’ associations and unions (e.g., collective bargaining) are carried out. The sector-coordinated economies lead to more occupation-/sector-specific welfare and labor-market systems, national-coordinated economies to more egalitarian systems (Thelen 2012).
- 7.
There is an exception for the most highly qualified women in Sweden, that is, women with a PhD. The Austrian data do not distinguish between the different levels of university-based tertiary education, so that no comparison is possible for this most highly educated group of women.
- 8.
The description focuses on the period from 1970 to 2000; this covers roughly the main reproductive years of women of the cohort 1955–59.
- 9.
This was extended to two months in 2002, but (a) most of the women of our cohort (1955–1959) had finished their childbearing by then, and (b) our data did not include the year 2002.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Tomáš Sobotka and Tomas Frejka for Fig. 3.1 and Tomáš Sobotka for the additional data for Fig. 3.1, as well as Jan Hoem and Gunnar Andersson for editorial advice. I acknowledge financial support by the Linnaeus Center on Social Policy and Family Dynamics in Europe (SPaDE), grant 349-2007-8701 of the Swedish Research Council.
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Neyer, G. (2013). Welfare States, Family Policies, and Fertility in Europe. In: Neyer, G., Andersson, G., Kulu, H., Bernardi, L., Bühler, C. (eds) The Demography of Europe. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8978-6_3
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