Marieke Heers – Ivett Szalma: Attitudes towards voluntary childlessness and immigrants: Are they connected?  

European Population Conference 2022

Abstract

Across Europe, concomitant with low fertility rates, there is an increasing number of individuals who remain voluntarily childless. Yet, large between-country heterogeneities exist in the level of voluntary childlessness and societal attitudes towards voluntary childlessness differ across but also within countries. Amongst demographers and policymakers, immigration is discussed as a way to increase labour force and recently also to maintain the population size. This study sets out to analyse if attitudes towards immigration predict attitudes towards voluntary childlessness in Europe. When analysing this relationship, we distinguish two dimensions of attitudes towards immigration: economic and cultural concerns about immigration. We use data from the European Social Survey (Round 9) and apply multilevel regression models.

Our results show that there is a positive association between acceptance of immigrants and voluntary childlessness at both the individual and the country level. Individuals who consider immigrants as a cultural threat are less tolerant towards voluntary childlessness. At the country level the attitudes towards voluntary childlessness are less favourable in countries where more people reject immigration for cultural threats. This suggests that the relationship between attitudes towards immigration and attitudes towards voluntary childlessness are based on the cultural survival of the nation concept.