Pronatalist attitudes in Europe

The concept of pronatalism is usually used for describing a range of family policies that encourage
reproduction. However, we argue that understanding pronatalism also as an attitude helps better
understand the diverse demographic landscape of Europe and individual childbearing decisionmaking
in societies facing sub-replacement fertility. We discuss different dimensions of
pronatalism, and we touch upon issues like the morality of procreation, fears of depopulation,
nationalism, xenophobia, and personal autonomy. In particular, we propose the concepts of
“cultural pronatalism” and “ideological pronatalism” as related to the often-neglected attitudinal
aspect.
We operationalize ideological and cultural pronatalism based on two survey items: the acceptance
of childbearing as a duty towards society and the importance of having children for a successful
marriage or partnership, respectively. We use data from the European Values Study (2008–2010, 2017–2020) to
compare the levels of pronatalist attitudes in 45 European countries with very different fertility
behaviour, socio-economic context, policies and historical legacy. Country-differences are quite
large: the proportion seeing childbearing as a duty towards society varies between 4% in the
Netherlands and 83% in Bulgaria; 28% in Denmark and 97% in Albania considers children important
for a successful marriage or partnership. On the country level, we study the relationship between
the level of ideological and cultural pronatalism on the one hand and different demographic indicators on the other hand. We also look at the individual-level factors behind pronatalist attitudes and the interplay between personal and
societal views using multilevel logistic regression models.