When politics enters the family: electoral outcomes and fertility in the United Kingdom

Summary

This paper examines the relationship between political outcomes and fertility behavior by linking electoral results with individual-level fertility outcomes in the United Kingdom. Drawing and the narrative decision-making framework (Vignoli et al., 2020; Johnson, Bilovich, & Tuckett, 2023) and the role of political polarization in fertility outcomes (Dahl et al. 2022) it considers how alignment between one’s political preferences and the actual party in power shapes fertility behaviour. Specifically, the study tests whether this alignment increases the probability of a first birth using longitudinal data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) over the period 1991–2020. We derive the month of conception from respondents’ birth histories and combine this information with measures of their political preferences (extrapolated to account for every month in the studied period). The results of a complementary log-log model indicate that the probability of conception is higher when an individual’s preferred party is in government.