Religion and ideology in demographic analysis

This paper describes the world’s major religious populations in 2010. We provide new population estimates for eight religious groups: Christians, Muslims, the religiously unaffiliated, Hindus, Buddhists, members of folk or traditional religions, Jews and other world religions. We are the first to reveal median age data for each religion. These results are the product of a multi-year, international collaboration to evaluate and standardize data from thousands of sources to produce the best available social scientific estimates of religious populations in 232 countries and territories of the world.

The paper studies the fertility transition and explains under which conditions its forerunners started to reduce their fertility. It focuses on Jews in Bohemia, who had low fertility rates very early on, not only in comparison with the total country population but also in comparison to Jews elsewhere in Europe. A unique set of aggregate data on population change from the late 18th century until the Shoah allows tracking the process of Jewish fertility transition in its entirety, comparing it with gentiles and interpreting it in its cultural and socio-historical context. The paper shows that Jewish fertility was limited within marriage already in the 18th century. A further sharp decrease came after 1848, when Jews acquired equal civil rights. The necessary conditions for fertility decline thus came together at this time: low mortality, upward mobility aspirations, high human capital, low religiosity, and a favorable legal and socio-economic environment.

Demographic transformations that occurred in developed countries during the past decades, including the delay in marriage and age at first birth and the significant decline in fertility rates, are usually explained by increases in women’s education and labour force participation as well as the decline in traditional forms of religious practice and the shift of values towards greater individualism. The current paper, explores the relationship between religion and women’s transition to first birth in highly secularized Western countries – France and Britain – and the role of education in affecting this relationship. Using data from the French survey of the Generation and Gender Programme and the British Household Panel Survey, the relationships between religious factors and the transition to first birth are examined by employing a model of event history analysis. The findings show a differential effect of education on completed fertility and entry into motherhood according to women’s level of religiosity.

We examine how people understand and conceptualize developmental idealism – a cultural schema that links ideas about societal and familial development. For centuries, scholars and policy makers have written that the world is dynamic, changing from traditional to modern, that modern families are causes of modern societies, that modern societies are causes of modern families, and that modern societies and families are better than traditional ones. These ideas have spread widely around the world, with the capacity for fostering change. The question motivating our research concerns the extent to which people link together the various aspects of developmental idealism as a package. Do individuals who endorse one aspect of developmental idealism endorse other aspects, or is there little relationship between how individuals evaluate the various aspects? We investigate these issues using 2008 data collected in Nepal. Our data indicate that Nepalis link some aspects of developmental idealism together but not others.

Buddhism is the dominant religion in a number of Asian countries and the most common religion in some of the countries with the lowest fertility levels in the world. The relationship between Buddhism and childbearing has received comparatively limited scholarly attention so far. Studies of of childbearing in other religions tend to find that religiosity is positively related to fertility.
After considering Buddhist teachings regarding contraception, family formation, and childbearing ideals, we do not find evidence that Buddhism is inherently pronatalist. Our hypothesis is the Buddhist affiliation and commitment level is not associated with higher fertility.
We analyze patterns of childbearing among Buddhists in several Asian countries: India, Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Mongolia, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. We investigate how Buddhist affiliation (and religiosity when available) related to the number of children ever born, controlling for education, urbanization, union status and age. Our preliminary empirical results suggest that in many countries, Buddhist affiliation is not associated with significantly higher fertility. For instance in Thailand, Buddhism is negatively associated with fertility (among women aged 25-49), also when education and region is controlled for.