Spatial Aspects of the Rise of Nonmarital Fertility Across Europe Since 1960: The Role of States and Regions in Shaping Patterns of Change

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of states and regions in shaping spatial patterns of nonmarital fertility in Europe since 1960 using a dataset of 497 European subnational regions and smaller countries. Almost all regions registered substantial nonmarital fertility increases over the last 50 years. Prior research by Watkins (1991) has shown that in the first half of the 20 th century states played a dominant role in drawing the demographic map of Europe. As a result, subnational regional variation decreased, while differences between countries increased. In this paper, we investigate whether states continue to play such a dominant role in delineating patterns of nonmarital fertility between 1960 and 2007. We find that variation in nonmarital fertility levels increased as a whole across Europe, and states continued to be important for determining these patterns. However, the role of states relative to regions declined in the latest period examined (1990 and 2007).Possible explanations for the changes include increased supranational integration, for example within the European Union, and decentralisation within states leading to increases in variation in subnational contextual conditions.

Two period measures for comparing the fertility of marriage and cohabitation

“…Vital statistics are still largely computed following the traditional distinction between marital and nonmarital fertility  historically, legitimate and illegitimate fertility , not acknowledging the social phenomenon of unmarried cohabitation. For this reason, fertility estimates for cohabitation based on vital statistics are a rarity; when available, they are limited to the number or proportion of children born to cohabiting women (Klüsener, Perelli-Harris, and Sánchez Gassen 2013). There is no established way to compare the fertility of marriage and cohabitation.…”

A Geography of Cohabitation in the Americas, 1970–2010

“…Billy and Moore 1992 ;Bocquet-Appel and Jakobi 1998 ;Boyle 2014 ;Klüsener et al 2013 ;Vitali et al 2015 ) but may be attributable to the lack of data and limited access. Surveys' microdata have become the primary statistical source for family studies.…”

Childbearing within Marriage and Consensual Union in Latin America, 1980–2010

“…Vital statistics are still largely computed following the traditional distinction between marital and non-marital fertility, and thus have not usually incorporated the social phenomenon of cohabitation into the birth statistics. For this reason, it is hard to find fertility estimates by union type based on vital statistics (Klüsener, Perelli-Harris, and Sánchez Gassen 2013). Attempts at estimating fertility within marriage and within consensual union performed since the 1990s show a variety of solutions, but most of them rely on the use of survey data with retrospective histories (e.g.…”