Hajnal Line Research Articles

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

North and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long conformed to the Western European Marriage Pattern, i.e., men and women marry relatively late; many people never marry; children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households, and households often have non-kin members. This pattern goes back at least to the thirteenth century and perhaps to prehistoric times. I argue that this environment of weaker kinship caused northwest Europeans to create communities based on shared moral rules, rather than shared kinship. Community members enforced these rules by monitoring not only the behavior of other members but also their own behavior and even their own thoughts. Initially, this new mindset did not have a genetic basis. Individuals acquired it within the bounds of phenotypic plasticity. Over time, however, a genetic basis would have developed through the survival and reproduction of individuals who were better at being socially independent, at obeying universal rules, at monitoring other community members, and at self-monitoring, self-judging, and self-punishing. These psychological adaptations—independent social orientation, universal rule adherence, affective empathy, guilt proneness—are moderately to highly heritable. Although they are complex, they required only minor evolutionary changes to evolve out of mechanisms that were already present but limited to specific behavioral contexts. Affective empathy, for instance, is a species-wide trait but usually confined to relations with close kin, particularly between a mother and her young children. An evolutionary scenario is proposed, and two questions discussed. Are these mental traits too complex to have evolved over a span of 30 to 300 generations? Are they too altruistic to be sustainable?

The prevalence of single-parent families and stepfamilies in Europe: can the Hajnal line help us to describe regional patterns?

The study’s main objective is to gauge the prevalence of family forms following separation and divorce in Europe. In addition to the comparison of the prevalence of single-parent families and stepfamilies in Europe based on data of the ‘Generations and Gender Program’ (GGP), family patterns which draw on marriage and divorce rates on the one hand, and on the incidence of single parenthood and stepfamilies on the other hand are investigated. Data are available for 17 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Sweden) and include a total of 58,336 family households with minor children. The analysis first presents descriptive statistics allowing comparisons of the prevalence of single-parent families and stepfamilies. Secondly, a cluster analysis was carried out to identify family patterns around Europe and to answer the question, whether the Hajnal line can help us to describe regional differences. By taking marriage and divorce rates as well as the prevalence of single parenthood and stepfamilies into account we were able to identify four clusters of family patterns, which give no support for Hajnal’s line anymore. Family patterns in Europe are quite complex and hard to systemize by an East–West divide.

Latent class models for cross-national comparisons: the association between individual and national-level fertility and partnership characteristics

Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national comparative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility.

Social differences in household structures in the 19th century: Moscow and its outskirts

During the last few decades, ideas about household structures in the territories lying east of the Hajnal line have changed considerably. Not only has the line itself been transformed into a fairly wide ‘transitional’ zone and its location on the European map been changed, but the variety of family forms found behind the generalised characteristics of the “Eastern” territories has made scholars re-examine certain theoretical concepts and findings.
 The new concepts are based on the growing number of micro-studies covering the territories of Central and Eastern Europe and provide very detailed information on family size and structures. For Russia, which has always been considered a model of the Eastern type of household organisation, new data have appeared as well, making it possible to re-examine the theories concerning Russian households.
 However, scholars more often pay attention to geographic rather than social stratification of household types. The majority of studies are devoted to the social group of peasants, especially of peasant serfs, while household structures in other social groups are less explored.
 In this article, we seek to fill this gap by providing a comparison of household structures in two social groups, namely of Moscow merchants and of serfs who lived near Moscow in the middle of the 19th century. The household structures in the two groups were entirely different: one in two merchant families was a nuclear one consisting of a couple with or without children, or a single parent with children, while in the peasant population multiple households, including several nuclear families, predominated (60% of the total number of households). The most likely explanation for this is the two groups’ different obligations to the state.

Guest Editor Comments

One of the assumptions in family studies is that marriage behavior and household composition are conservative institutions strongly connected to social and economic characteristics of the society. Historically, household was the basic cell of production and consumption while in contemporary society still remains the basic unit for consumption. Family and household structures therefore do not change unless some important economic, social or political problems affect the society as a whole so any significant variation of their characteristics (age at marriage, percentage of single women, number and type of people living in the same household) are interpreted as signs of important social changes taking place in the society (Lesthaeghe 1983). While family is assumed to be a system (Cox and Paley, 1997) with well-defined and relatively stable characteristics, there are few theoretical attempts to define its parameters outside of the structuralist approaches to kinship (LeviStrauss, 1969 [1949]), which are focused on the connections between people belonging to the kin rather than factors modeling the structure of household.Almost fifty years ago, John Hajnal, an English/Hungarian statistician, made such an attempt by introducing the notion of an "European" pattern of marriage/household, characterized by high age at marriage, high proportion of people who never marry, women and men working as servants before marriage and establishing their own households upon marriage. Hajnal describes this pattern of marriage as "unique" and "almost unique" in the world and, although (for brevity) he calls it "European," he defines it as being applicable only to the Northwestern Europe, west of an imaginary line connecting "Leningrad" (Saint Petersburg) to Trieste. Eastern European countries, mostly falling east of the Hajnal's line, as well as some Southern European countries, were characterized as having a non-European household formation system:Although Hajnal did not intend to give a definitive perspective on the causes that led to such a particular system of household organization, he saw the pattern of marriage as being based on and influenced by the economic organization of life: ...a marriage almost by definition requires the establishment of an economic basis for the life of the couple and their children. The arrangements current in a society for achieving this must fit in with the marriage pattern: they will shape it and will be in turn influenced by it. (Hajnal, 1965: 132)Interestingly enough, Hajnal's line followed the same borders as the Iron Curtain, then dividing Europe into capitalist and socialist societies. As Churchill put it in a speech he gave at Westminster College, Missouri, in 1946, an iron curtain has descended after the World War II "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic." While the iron curtain was the result of the Yalta negotiations and the countries mixed together on one or the other sides of the curtain were highly dissimilar from an economic and social point of view, Hajnal's line implied that the Eastern nations were homogeneous from at least one point of view: historical marriage patterns. It gave a good, historical reason to look to Eastern European countries as being closely related to Russia/USSR rather than seeing them as part of Europe. The link between the Iron Curtain and family patterns is not explicitly discussed in Hajnal's work, but later on other authors (Todd (1985)) picked up and expanded the idea by arguing that the historical family structures are strongly related to the ideologies adopted by various European countries.Although the notion of a "Western European" as opposed to "the rest of the world" type of family is currently related to Hajnal's work, his research relied on and was influenced by the studies coming from the Cambridge Group for the Population History. Within a larger context of ideas, the 1950s-1960s were the times when Rostov's theory of modernization was quite popular in the academic world. …

Transformation of Partnership Formation in Eastern Europe: The Legacy of the Past Demographic Divide

This article analyses the transformation in the mode of partnership formation in seven countries of Eastern Europe. The aim of the study is to provide an up-to-date account of the switch from direct marriage to non-marital cohabitation as it has progressed from the 1960s to the mid-2000s, using data from the Generations and Gender Surveys. Unlike previous analyses of partnership formation, we examined the extent to which crossnational variations, in the onset and scale of transformation characteristic of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT), could be linked to nuptiality regimes that existed in the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries. With few exceptions, the results support the notion of correspondence between historical and contemporary patterns. Forerunners in the transition to partnership formation outside marriage tend to come from areas which exhibited a late/low prevalence of marriage; the latecomers are typically situated east of the Hajnal line. Thus our study corroborates earlier findings pertaining to the legacy the historical marriage patterns, extending them further, from the onset of the first to the second demographic transition. Our results are also in line with idea of the spatial continuity across successive waves of demographic innovation demonstrated in several studies for Western Europe. The findings reported in the article make a similar argument for Eastern Europe. In a broader framework, the results point to diversity of pathways along which family and fertility characteristic of the SDT have evolved. In view of the evidence presented in the article, Eastern Europe seems to embody two variants with regard to synchronism between a shift from direct marriage to non-marital cohabitation and postponement of childbearing.

Multiple Family Households East of the Hajnal Line: Evidence from Albania and Serbia

This article uses the Albanian population census of 1918 and the published results of four Serbian censuses of the second half of the 19th century to study the proportion of multiple family households in these countries. During the second half of the 19th century household complexity increased in Serbia despite a widespread notion of the dissolution of the multiple family households there. This confirms research that points to the fact that household divisions were a regular phenomenon and did not mean the dissolution of the institution of multiple family households. These two countries east of the Hajnal-line showed strong tendencies of living in multiple family households in this time period. The postulated contrast to Western Europe can therefore be based on evidence from quantitative research. Household complexity was higher in Northern Albania and in Serbia in the west, southwest and southeast of the country and we have to be aware that there were considerable variations within these countries.

The Genealogy of Eastern European Difference: An Insider’s View

The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay represents an attempt to persuade scholars to accept less stereotypical images of families from outside “Western Europe.” Well into the late 1990s, Eastern European literature on family forms remained screened off from the main current of European thought. Thus, not surprisingly, tracing the lineage of work from east of the ostensible Hajnal Line reveals the sharp differences between the findings of Eastern European researchers and the dominant assumptions of Western science. These marginalised discourses need to be integrated into mainstream research and discussion, so that scholars can better understand marriage, family, household and community patterns in Europe and elsewhere. The diversity of family forms and the rhythms of their development in historical Eastern Europe revealed in this literature also provide us with an excellent opportunity to free ourselves from a simplistic view of the continent’s familial history, and particularly from the one implied by the notion of a “dividing line.”

Patterns of family formation: Marriage and fertility timing in Bulgaria at the turn of the twenty-first century — A case-study of Sofia

In this paper, we discuss the changes in the process of family formation in Bulgaria at the end of the twentieth century. Studying the ideal patterns of family formation and the place of children and marriage within them, we offer six typological models. Based on recent population developments and social values changes, we argue that the Hajnal line and the associated hypothesis concerning the existence of separate Eastern and Western Marriage Patterns are irrelevant for understanding the present demographic situation. Attempts to update the line to accommodate recent developments are counter-productive as they obscure the commonality of demographic processes at work across the European continent.

Marriage in urban Albania (during the first half of the twentieth century)

This article analyses the marriage pattern in urban Albania, based primarily on the data of the Albanian Population Census of 1918. Age at marriage and the factors influencing nuptiality among the urban population are analysed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. The analyses show that the marriage pattern in urban Albania was similar to Laslett's Mediterranean set, while rural areas displayed an age at marriage for both men and women which was characteristic of the marriage pattern East of the Hajnal line. Albanian cities showed a higher age at marriage for both men and women than villages. The difference in age at marriage between urban and rural areas was noticeably higher for men, while the age at marriage for women showed smaller differences. An explanation for these differences in the age at marriage was found in a combination of traditional marital behaviour and demographic issues, which broadened or narrowed the marriage field, thus directly influencing the age at marriage.

Between 'traditional' collectivity and 'modern' individuality: an atomistic perspective on family and household astride the Hajnal's line (Upper Silesia and Great Poland at the end of the 18th century)

Between 'traditional' collectivity and 'modern' individuality: an atomistic perspective on family and household astride the Hajnal's line (Upper Silesia and Great Poland at the end of the 18th century)

Power and inheritance: Male domination, property, and family in eastern Europe, 1500–1900

A widespread inheritance pattern in eastern and southeastern Europe was based on equally partible male inheritance and excluded women from inheritance and dowry. The western transition zone to the other predominant European inheritance systems coincided with the Hajnal line, which divides the distribution of European marriage patterns in historical times. New evidence is added to the historical depth of the cultural–historical transition zone already postulated by Mitterauer. Since the early Middle Ages, this zone also marked the border region of two basic European agrarian systems: the western Grundherrschafts system, which led to the intervention of landlords into inheritance patterns and family structures of the serfs and the non-interventionist tributary systems, which left inheritance practices based on customary laws untouched until the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The above-mentioned inheritance pattern, which was also widespread in Asia, allocated a huge amount of power to the agnatic core of the family and was part of a patriarchal system shaped by patrilineality, patrilocality, low age at marriage, complex family forms, and fragmentation of the soil when demographic transition set in.

Economic and ecologic determinants of household organisation in the Northeastern Baltic region

The aim of this article is to contest the monocausal cultural explanation model for the existence of the eastern Finnish family system linked to an imaginary Hajnal line. By comparing two localities in the eastern part of Finland with common religion, language, political history and legislation but with different ecology and economy and household system, a case is made for the link between economic activity and household organisation.