Abstract
This study investigates the role of changing social relations for fertility decline during the European fertility transition. The growth of voluntary associations at the end of the nineteenth century entailed a radical shift in the landscape of social relations in Sweden. By combining micro-census data from 1890 to 1900 with local-level membership data for three voluntary association groups, this article assesses the effect of parish-level voluntary association size on net fertility in Sweden using mixed-effects Poisson regression models. The results show that the adoption of fertility limitation during the transition period was associated with the creation and diffusion of the idea of respectability within large social network organisations, an idea that has previously been shown to be connected to fertility limitation. Furthermore, by applying a social network perspective, the results show that the strength of the effect was dependent on the structure of the social networks in terms of size, density, and homogeneity. Voluntary association size had the strongest effect for the free churches, which created dense heterogeneous networks through systems of social control, while the size of the temperance association showed no effect on fertility because the connections between nodes were sparse.
Highlights
This study investigates the role of changing social relations for fertility decline during the European fertility transition in the late nineteenth century
This study shows that the adoption of fertility limitation during the transition was associated with the creation and diffusion of ideational effects within large social network organisations
By applying a social network perspective, the results show that the strength of the effect was dependent on the structure of the social networks in terms of size, density, and homogeneity
Summary
This study investigates the role of changing social relations for fertility decline during the European fertility transition in the late nineteenth century. This study contributes to the field by applying a social network perspective to the analysis of the relationship between voluntary association activity and fertility during the European demographic transition For this analysis, the voluntary associations provide distinct social networks that were ideationally driven and operated independently of traditional social network structures, such as family or parish communities; they represent new forms of horizontal networks connecting individuals through voluntary interactions. The link between respectability and low fertility has been argued to explain free-church members relatively early adoption of fertility limitation during the transition in a region of northern Sweden (Junkka and Edvinsson 2016) Another contribution of this study is to test if these patterns can be generalised across a larger population by modelling the possible effects of voluntary association activity on fertility on a national scale. The final objective was to estimate how the relationship between voluntary association size and fertility changed over time and between rural and urban environments
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