Modes of Production, Secularization, and the Pace of Fertility Decline in Western Europe, 1870-1930

Citation: Lesthaeghe, R., Wilson, C. Modes of Production, Secularization, and the Pace of Fertility Decline in Western Europe, 1870-1930.
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Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

The authors identify three factors as central in calculating the advantage of fertility limitation under traditional explanations: the familial nature of most units of economic production; the dominant factor of production at the disposal of households in each occupational category; the direction and strength of intergenerational flows of goods, money, and services of all types. The authors argue that these explanations are incomplete. There is an additional cultural component to these changes that brought fertility control "within the calculus of conscious choice." The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a turning away from the Christian ethic and a movement toward secular ideals. Secularization involved the elaboration of a fundamentally individualistic philosophy. The second wave insisted on the political rights and power of a presumably homogeneous proletarian group. These demands were considered to be un-Christian and became a threat to the moral authority of the Church. The strong sense of individual responsibility found in Protestantism caused less upheaval among Protestant areas. In contrast, in Catholic areas, the "trauma of social change" was strongly felt and a strong backlash occurred within the Catholic Church. They hypothesize first that dependence on a familial, labor-intensive mode of production will lead to a late or slow transition. Second, in areas marked by high degrees of secularization, fertility is likely to be perceived as one more aspect of life that is under individual control. Third, the above relationships depend on the prevailing religious affiliation. Protestantism produced only limited reaction from the guardians of traditional morality, whereas in Catholic (or mixed) regions hostility of the Church created a strong division of society. Using data from provinces in Europe the authors evaluate these hypotheses. The dependent variable used is AeIg(t0, t1), the change in the standardized index of marital fertility, Ig, where t0 is the last date before a sustained drop in fertility, and t1 is the date at which any particular country reaches mid transition. The independent variables included in the analysis are the proportion of the active population engaged in agriculture and cottage industry (referred to in the text as FLIMP) and degree of secularization (measured as proportion of votes cast for parties of a nonconfessional or social-reformist slant in the first national elections held under universal male suffrage). The former can be considered the causal antecedent of the latter, so the authors generate a second variable, V2, which is the residual from the regression of secularization on FLIMP and indicates the excess or deficit of votes for secularized parties compared to the vote one would expect on the basis of the degree of employment in the FLIMP sectors. The data show evidence that Protestant areas showed a relatively homogenous fertility transition, while Catholic areas saw more heterogeneity. One percentage point increase in nonconfessional voting was accompanied by a one-percentage point advance in the fertility transition. Political affiliation was strongly related to regional lags and leads with respect to demographic behavior. 73.9% of the variance in the dependent variable is explained by secularization (43.3%) and FLIMP (30.6%). But secularization loses importance to FLIMP as one moves to Protestant regions and countries. Therefore, both a familial labor-intensive mode of production and secularization are related to the speed at which countries entered the fertility transition. The authors conclude that the moral and ethical acceptability of fertility control is embedded in a much broader ideological development, not necessarily concurrent with economic modernization. Reactions to such changes may occur in such a way that more fundamentalist views are juxtaposed to secular ones and these divergences are closely associated with the acceleration or retardation of the marital fertility transition.