Existing theory has identified the capacity of political revolutions to effect change in a variety of social institutions, although relationships between revolution and many institutions remain unexplored. Using historical data from twenty-two European and four diaspora countries, the author examines the temporal relationship between timing of revolution and onset of fertility decline. The author hypothesizes that specific kinds of revolutionary events affect fertility by engendering ideological changes in popular understandings of the individual’s relationship to society and ultimately the legitimacy of couples’ authority over their reproductive capacities. Results demonstrate that popular democratic revolutions—but not institutionalized democratic structures—predict the timing of the onset of fertility decline.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1983); Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York: Mentor Books, 1962); Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850 (San Francisco: Longman, 2000).
2.
Philip S. Gorski, "The Protestant Ethic Revisited: Disciplinary Revolution and State Formation in Holland and Prussia," American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 265-316; Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1930).
3.
John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 4.
4.
Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People, Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945- 1991 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lynn Avery Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
5.
Kenneth T. Andrews, "The Impacts of Social Movements on the Political Process: The Civil Rights Movement and Black Electoral Politics in Mississippi," American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 800-819; David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, "Social Movement Spillover," Social Problems 41 (1994): 277-98; Thomas R. Rochon and Daniel A. Mazmanian, "Social Movements and the Policy Process," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528 (1993): 75-87; William H. Sewell, Jr., "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841-81; William H. Sewell, Jr., "Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology," in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 245-80.
6.
European world refers to countries geographically located in Europe or established through European colonization with majority European-origin populations.
7.
Frank W.Notestein hypothesized that "the secularizing influence of the French Revolution was undoubtedly important" in sparking early French fertility decline in "Population: The Long View," in Food for the World, ed. T. W. Schultz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 40n4.
8.
Sources cited in the text are included in the notes. A complete listing is available from the author.
9.
John Boli, Francesco O. Ramirez, and John W. Meyer , "Explaining the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education," Comparative Education Review29 (1985): 145-70.
10.
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions; Tilly, European Revolutions.
11.
Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter, "The Role of General Theory in Comparative-historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology97 (1991): 1-30.
12.
Edgar Kiser and Yong Cai, "War and Bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an Anomalous Case," American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 511-39; Edgar Kiser and April Linton, "The Hinges of History: State-making and Revolt in Early Modern France," American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 889-910; Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse. Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
13.
Bendix, Kings or People; Kiser and Cai, "War and Bureaucratization."
14.
Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion; Jack Goldstone and Bert Useem, "Prison Riots as Microrevolutions: An Extension of State-centered Theories of Revolution," American Journal of Sociology 104 (1999): 985-1029; Doug McAdam, "Recruitment to High-risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer," American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 64-90.
15.
Bendix, Kings or People.
16.
Goodwin, No Other Way Out.
17.
Roger V.Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class; Markoff, Abolition of Feudalism; Sewell, "Historical Events"; Sewell, "Three Temporalities."
18.
Bendix, Kings or People.
19.
Meyer and Whittier, "Social Movement Spillover."
20.
McAdam, "Recruitment to High-risk Activism"; Gould, Insurgent Identities; Rochon and Mazmanian, "Social Movements"; Sidney G. Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965- 1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
21.
Jo Freeman, "Introduction," in Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, ed. Jo Freeman ( New York: Longman, 1983), 1-5.
22.
Etienne Van de Walle and John Knodel, "Europe’s Fertility Transition: New Evidence and Lessons for Today’s Developing World," Population Bulletin34 (1980): 3-38. France appears to be an outlier. Most estimates indicate French fertility was declining by the early nineteenth century.
23.
John C. Caldwell, "Toward a Restatement of Demographic Transition Theory," Population and Development Review 2 (1976): 321-66; Kingsley Davis, "The World Demographic Transition," Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 237 (1945): 1-11; Richard A. Easterlin, "An Economic Framework for Fertility Analysis," Studies in Family Planning 6 (February 1975): 54-63; Notestein, "Population."
24.
Barbara Anderson, "Regional and Cultural Factors in the Decline of Marital Fertility in Europe," in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Revised Proceedings from a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 293-313; Ron Lesthaeghe and Chris Wilson, "Modes of Production, Secularization, and the Pace of Fertility Decline in Western Europe, 1870-1930," in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Revised Proceedings from a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 261-92; Poul C. Mattheissen and James C. McCann, "The Role of Mortality in the European Fertility Transition: Aggregate-level Relations," in The Effects of Infant and Child Mortality on Fertility, ed. Samuel H. Preston (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 47-68; Francine Van de Walle, "Infant Mortality and the European Demographic Transition," in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Revised Proceedings from a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 201-33; Susan Cotts Watkins, "Conclusions," in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Revised Proceedings from a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 420-49.
Jesse Levitt, "Linguistic Pluralism in Switzerland and Belgium," Geolinguistics 3 (1977): 57-70; Massimo Livi-Bacci, A History of Italian Fertility during the Last Two Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Mortimer Spiegelman, "The Reproductivity of Jews in Canada, 1940-1942," Population Studies 4 (1950): 299-313; Susan Cotts Watkins, From Provinces to Nations: Demographic Integration in Western Europe, 1870-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
27.
Easterlin, "Economic Framework."
28.
Ansley J. Coale, "The Decline of Fertility in Europe since the Eighteenth Century as a Chapter in Human Demographic History," in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Revised Proceedings from a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 1-30; Phillips Cutright and Lowell Hargens, "The Threshold Hypothesis: Evidence from Less Developed Latin American Countries, 1950 to 1980," Demography 21 (1984): 459-73.
29.
John Cleland and Christopher Wilson, "Demand Theories of the Fertility Transition: An Iconoclastic View," Population Studies 41 (1987): 5-30; Timothy W. Guinnane, Barbara S. Okun, and James Trussel, "What Do We Know about the Timing of Fertility Transitions in Europe?" Demography 31 (1994): 1-20; Ron Lesthaeghe, "On the Social Control of Human Reproduction," Population and Development Review 6 (1980): 527-48; Ron Lesthaeghe, "A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions," Population and Development Review 9 (1983): 411-35; Lesthaeghe and Wilson, "Modes of Production"; Michael Teitelbaum, "Relevance of Demographic Transition Theory for Developing Countries," Science 188 (1975): 420-25; Van de Walle and Knodel, "Europe’s Fertility Transition."
30.
William J. Leasure, "A Hypothesis about the Decline of Fertility, Evidence from the United States," European Journal of Population 5 (1989): 105-17. Lesthaeghe, "On the Social Control of Human Reproduction"; Lesthaeghe, "A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change"; Lesthaeghe and Wilson, "Modes of Production"; Arland Thornton, "The Developmental Paradigm, Reading History Sideways, and Family Change," Demography 38 (2001): 449-65.
31.
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Watkins, From Provinces to Nations.
32.
Lesthaeghe, "A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change." Recent work suggests U.S. fertility may have declined later than previously believed. See, e.g., J. David Hacker, "Rethinking the "Early" Decline of Marital Fertility in the United States," Demography 40 (2003): 605-20.
33.
Ernest Benz, Fertility, Wealth, and Politics in Three Southwest German Villages 1650-1900 (Boston: Humanities Press, 1999).
34.
The countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and Wales. Including Austria and Hungary as separate cases, as well as England, Scotland, and Wales, seems warranted by differences in estimates of the onset of fertility decline, for Austria and Hungary, and in social indicators for both groups of countries.
35.
Roy Treadway , European Fertility Project Master Data File (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, Office of Population Research, 1980). For more information, please see http://opr.princeton.edu/archive/pefp/.
36.
Michael Hechter , International Colonialism Study: National Integration in the British Isles, 1851-1966, ICPSR 7533 (Ann Arbor, MI: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2001).
37.
Remi Lafort, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3 (New York Appleton, 1908). B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, Africa, Asia and Oceania, 1750-1993, 3rd ed. (New York: Stockton Press, 1998); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, Europe 1750-1993, 4th ed. (New York: Stockton Press, 1998); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, the Americas 1750-1993, 4th ed. (New York: Stockton Press, 1998).
38.
Coale, "Decline of Fertility"; Van de Walle and Knodel, "Europe’s Fertility Transition."
39.
Samuel H. Preston , Patrick Heuveline, and Michel Guillot, Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 12.
40.
The sources are David R. Weir, "New Estimates of Nuptuality and Marital Fertility in France, 1790-1911," Population Studies 48 (1994): 307-31 (for revised French estimates); Hacker, "Rethinking" (for the United States); and Michael R. Haines, "The White Population of the United States, 1790-1920," in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 305-69 (for the United States).
41.
Ansley J. Coale and Roy Treadway, "A Summary of the Changing Distribution of Overall Fertility, Marital Fertility, and the Proportion Married in the Provinces of Europe," in The Decline of Fertility in Europe, Revised Proceedings from a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project, ed. Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 31-181.
42.
John Bongaarts , "A Framework for Analyzing the Proximate Determinants of Fertility," Population and Development Review4 (1978): 105-32.
43.
Guinnane, Okun, and Trussel, "What Do We Know?"
44.
Lee L.Bean, GeraldineP. Mineau, and Douglas L.Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
45.
The decision to use or not use violence may have been a tactical one. Substantial debate exists as to whether utilizing violence yields greater movement success or more durable outcomes. Specifically at question is under what conditions use of violence furthers movement goals. See, e.g., James W. Button, Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960s Riots (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); William A. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1975); Michael O’Keefe and Paul D. Schumaker, "Protest Effectiveness in Southeast Asia," American Behavioral Scientist 26 (1983): 375-94; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Michael Schumaker, "Policy Responsiveness to Protest-group Demands," Journal of Politics 37 (1975): 488-521; Elaine B. Sharp and Steven Maynard-Moody, "Theories of the Local Welfare Role," American Journal of Political Science 35 (1991): 934-50.
46.
Tilly, European Revolutions.
47.
Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, 12.
48.
This approach risks measurement error because of differences in temporal classification. However, early stages of social movements are difficult to identify, making precise measurement impossible.
49.
For example, event history analysis might appear to be an appropriate methodological approach. However, significant theoretical and practical concerns make event history analysis inappropriate for the question and data, particularly the difficulty of identifying a "time 0" for entering the risk pool. Structural equation modeling (SEM) might also seem useful since I am investigating the latent construct of "ideological individualism" and its manifest influence on the relationship between revolution and fertility. Unfortunately, standard errors for SEM assume large sample sizes, rendering the number of cases in this analysis far too small to support SEM. I rely on statistical approaches that are more appropriate for the limitations of the data.
50.
The shrinking lag time between year of revolution and onset of fertility decline likely reflects greater availability of more effective contraceptive methods. Early fertility control efforts primarily involved restricting coitus and reliance on abortion. The availability and adoption of barrier methods occurred much later. See, e.g., Wally Seccombe, "Starting to Stop: Working-class Fertility Decline in Britain," Past and Present 126 (1990): 151-88. Given the high failure rate of "natural" methods-monthly pregnancy risk remains above 5 percent until the wife nears forty years old for couples with monthly coitus-and historic misunderstanding of the timing of a woman’s fertile period, the extended lag time among countries with earlier revolutions is unsurprising. Maxine Weinstein, James W. Wood, Michael A. Stoto, and Daniel D. Greenfield, "Components of Age-specific Fecundability," Population Studies 44 (1990): 447-67, 462. The important point is that countries with the earliest revolution experienced the earliest fertility decline and those with later revolutions had delayed fertility declines.
51.
Caldwell’s theory applies to the direction of intergenerational wealth flows. Women’s labor force participation should capture this measure because women’s willingness to engage in paid labor has been linked to an emphasis on providing resources for children. See, e.g., Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences. Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
52.
In supplementary analyses, I substituted in a measure of the total proportion of the population that was Catholic or Orthodox Christian to account for the variety of religious adherence among the countries analyzed. For example, Orthodox Christianity is the primary religion in both Greece and Russia and is similar to Catholicism structurally and theologically in ways that may influence the relationship between the religious and cultural landscape and the prevailing fertility regime. Results were substantially the same.
53.
This restricted sample is used for theoretical, and not methodological, reasons. Using dfBeta and Cook’s distance to identify influential cases reveals that no country exerts undue influence on either the overall goodness of fit of the model or the size and significance of individual regression coefficients.
54.
The analyses presented here were confirmed by bootstrap with one thousand draws per regression estimation. Christopher Z. Mooney and Robert D. Duval, Bootstrapping. A Nonparametric Approach to Statistical Inference (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).
55.
Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2004 (Polity IV) database, computer file, version p4v2004 (Fairfax, VA: Polity IV Project, 2004).
56.
The main Polity IV Web site may be found online at http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
57.
Including this measure has empirical as well as theoretical grounding. Preliminary explorations tested four separate threshold measures. This value demonstrated the strongest relationship to fertility decline, measured by both the amount of variance explained and the coefficient value.
58.
Those countries are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Romania. Romanian fertility data are from the European Fertility Project. Additional fertility estimates are from John C. Caldwell and Lado T. Ruzicka, "The Australian Fertility Transition: An Analysis," Population and Development Review 4 (1978): 81-103 (for Australia); Elise F. Jones, "Fertility Decline in Australia and New Zealand, 1861-1936," Population Index 37 (1971): 301-38 (for Australia and New Zealand); and Marvin McInnis, "The Population of Canada in the Nineteenth Century," in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 371-432 (for Canada).
59.
For example, many countries that experienced revolution crossed the polity score threshold only following World War I, when reforms were imposed on them by the coalition of victorious nations.
60.
Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer, "Explaining the Origins," 157.
61.
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools ( New York: Russell Sage, 1990).
62.
Although see John C. Caldwell and Pat Caldwell, "High Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa," Scientific American 262, no. 5 (1990): 118-25; Easterlin, "Economic Framework"; Lesthaeghe, "On the Social Control of Human Reproduction"; Lesthaeghe, "A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change."
