Demography Leads to More Conservative European Societies

Abstract

On basis of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (in total 66,188 participants from 14 European countries) and the European Gender and Generation Survey (in total 121,248 participants from 11 countries), we investigated i) whether differences in political attitude and attitudes on family values (i.e. attitude towards homosexual couples, attitude towards female reproduction) are associated with differences in the average number of children, and ii) whether such an association between fertility and attitudes affects the population share of those attitudes in the following generations.We found that in most analyzed countries, right-wing/conservative individuals have, on average, more children and grandchildren than left-wing/liberal individuals. We further found that the proportion of right-wing/conservative individuals increases from generation to generation. These findings suggest that differential demography may lead to a shift of prevailing political attitudes.

Keywords: political attitude, family attitudes, fertility, Europe