Varieties of Capitalism and Cross-national Variation in Fertility Rates
2026-04-28
The institutional approach to explaining cross-national variation in demographic outcomes has gained increasing visibility in both academic research and public policy discourse. In this vein, much of the literature has focused on the effects of welfare programs on risk management and the associated costs of fertility. However, an alternative, more comprehensive perspective, namely, the “varieties of capitalism,” emphasizes the role of broader social-structural and institutional characteristics of national economies in generating socioeconomic outcomes. This perspective has not been extended to debates around cross-national differences in demographic outcomes. We fill this void by elaborating on a varieties of capitalism account of cross-national and longitudinal variation in fertility rates. Drawing on panel data spanning more than three decades (1985‒2019) across 21 countries in the Global North, we investigate how institutional factors, through the lens of the varieties of capitalism perspective, correlate with differences in total fertility rates between countries and over time. Our results demonstrate that crucial institutional dimensions, such as centralization of wage bargaining, the employment protection index, and active labor market policies, are associated with variation in total fertility rates across countries and over time.