Low Fertility and Policy: Contexts of State Concern and Policy Enactment

Emily Marshall, Princeton University

Policies thought to increase fertility have received increasing attention from scholars and policymakers in recent years. While many studies have sought to determine the effects of family policy on fertility levels, few have examined the extent to which national-level demographic characteristics predict state concern over low fertility or changes in family policy. This paper seeks to improve understanding of the conditions that lead to changes in state concern and intervention by examining the relationship between the timing of these changes and their demographic and political contexts. Event-history analysis is used to model two outcomes: national-level changes in family policy that increase support for families, and changes in official state views on national fertility levels from “satisfactory” to “too low”. The models test the predictive power of variables including period TFR, proportion of the population of working age, migration rates, political orientation of the governing party, and GDP.