Author
Listed:
- Borbála Júlia Szczuka
(Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence, Hungary / Doctoral School of Sociology and Communication Science, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary)
Abstract
The Visegrád countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia) faced a sharp decline in fertility rates after the regime change in 1989. Since then, total fertility rates have largely remained below the EU average, although they have increased during the past decade. Family policies (support for the parental caregivingmodel) and the conditions of women’s employment might be shaping these trends. Besides the pronatalist rhetoric, there is another reason why people might alter their fertility plans: climate change‐related worries. Our analysis in this article examines whether such concerns exist in these four countries, pointing out that the efficacy of pronatalist measures depends on the widespread adoption of such attitudes among young people of childbearing age. Pronatalist pressure is strong in the V4 countries but may be diluted by strengthening environmentalist norms. Scholarship about the relationship between climate change‐related concerns and fertility in these pronatalist countries is scarce. I examine this potential relationship by analysing respondents’ ideas about the generally and personally ideal number of children using Eurobarometer data from 2011 through logistic regression analysis. The results are contradictory: Climate change concerns seem to be positively associated with a smaller ideal family size in Hungary, but only from a general perspective (i.e., not for respondents personally). A positive relationship can be found in the Czech Republic regarding climate concerns and personal ideal family size. In Slovakia, a strong negative association was observed between climate change‐related concerns and smaller general and personal ideal family sizes.
Suggested Citation
Borbála Júlia Szczuka, 2022.
"Climate Change Concerns and the Ideal Number of Children: A Comparative Analysis of the V4 Countries,"
Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(3), pages 206-216.
Handle:
RePEc:cog:socinc:v10:y:2022:i:3:p:206-216
DOI: 10.17645/si.v10i3.5228
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:socinc:v10:y:2022:i:3:p:206-216. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira or IT Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.