NewsWire: 12/18/2020
- There used to be little or no difference in the fertility rates of liberal and conservative women—but now, conservative women have more children. Conservatives are more likely to have more kids and also to have them earlier; this gap is likely to grow. (Institute for Family Studies)
- NH: In the 1970s, there was little to no difference in the fertility rates of liberal and conservative women. But beginning in the 1990s the fertility rate of liberal women started to decline markedly below that of conservative women. Today, the completed fertility of conservative women over age 45 is about 0.25 higher than their liberal counterparts. The ideal number of kids that they’d like to have is also higher, on average, than among liberals’.
- This difference was on display in the 2020 election results. Pro-Trump counties have total fertility rates almost 25% higher than most pro-Biden counties. Demographer Lyman Stone, who conducted this analysis, also examined earlier presidential elections while controlling for county racial and ethnic characteristics and population densities. He found that the Republicans’ so-called “fertility advantage” has been stable since at least 2004.
- This gap is particularly remarkable given that Democrats perform much better among Hispanic and black voters, who tend to have higher birthrates than non-Hispanic whites (though this margin has narrowed in recent years; see “US Birthrate Drops 4th Year in a Row”).
- Stone emphasizes several times that the gap is not linked to race or any particular region of the country, but ideology. “Within racial or ethnic groups, within states or urbanized areas,” he writes, “the more conservative areas tend to have more babies.”
- What’s going on here? Is it that conservatives are more likely to get married and have kids, or that getting married and having kids makes someone conservative? Probably a mix of both. Given conservatives’ emphasis on marriage and family, it’s not surprising that holding conservative attitudes and beliefs would be associated with having more kids. What’s changed is that this difference is now statistically significant.
- The growing gap is the result of the transformation that has occurred in American political culture, where ideological identities are increasingly “stacking” atop one another to form “mega-identities.” Voting conservative or liberal now doesn’t just mean you’re conservative or liberal. If you vote conservative, you are also likely to be evangelical, to go to church frequently, to have a high-school degree but not college degree, and to live in a rural or suburban area with like-minded neighbors. Nearly all of these factors are associated with higher fertility rates--in particular, higher religiosity (see “Will the Religious Outnumber Nonbelievers in the Long Run?”). As many of the worldly reasons to have kids have weakened, religion has become of the last remaining powerful motivators for people to start families.
- Does this extra fertility grant conservatives a long-term growth edge over liberals? Perhaps. It doesn’t confer as large a fertility advantage as religiosity (where the fertility boost of the very religious over the very secular is even larger, about 2-to-1). But it does give a quantitative boost--and, because white conservatives are substantially more religious than white liberals, it does so for many of the same reasons.
- But we need to be careful. The next generation of children may or may not follow the example of their parents, and it’s hard to predict which side would be advantaged by such “apostasy.” One thing is for sure. The widening fertility gap points to increasingly divergent political cultures. Republicans are speaking to voters who see big families as a normal part of life, while Democrats are speaking to voters who have smaller families with single or two-income households in higher-cost zip codes.
