Conceptual Framework for the Evaluation of the Impact of Societal Instabilities on Demographic Behavior: A Model Linking Social, Political, Psychological and Demographic Variables

The paper proposes a model linking various types of societal instabilities with fertility outcomes. The model incorporates the premises of the extended uncertainty reduction theory, originally developed by Friedman, Hechter and Kanazawa (1994), implying increasing fertility as the means to reduce uncertainty. In the previously published paper on the topic (Frantsuz and Ponarin, 2020) the major premises of the uncertainty reduction theory were explicated, the basic model of using it by linking instability with fertility trends was proposed, and the empirical test of the impact of two types of sociopolitical instabilities on fertility dynamics in the USSR/post-Soviet Russia was performed. In this paper I expand the analysis of the uncertainty reduction theory, supplement the previously outlined general model with the extended one, that takes into account the impact on fertility of societal instabilities of various types, scale and magnitude. I formulate the new assumptions that stem from this elaborated model, the ones leading to a broad array of testable hypotheses. The proposed conceptual framework allows for testing the hypotheses of various instabilities’ impact on fertility outcomes in various regions and countries, as well as at different historical periods, even when micro-level data on the individual perceptions of these uncertainties is not available. The importance of such an approach is paramount in the light of problems related to the limited possibilities of performing adequate retrospective qualitative analysis of the individual perceptions of societal instabilities.

Population Review

Volume 62, Number 1, 2023

Type: Article, pp. 168-191

Conceptual Framework for the Evaluation of the Impact of Societal Instabilities on Demographic Behavior: A Model Linking Social, Political, Psychological and Demographic Variables

Authors: Yuri Frantsuz

Authors affiliations: University of New Mexico, Department of Political Science

Corresponding author/address: [email protected]

Abstract

The paper proposes a model linking various types of societal instabilities with fertility outcomes. The model incorporates the premises of the extended uncertainty reduction theory, originally developed by Friedman, Hechter and Kanazawa (1994), implying increasing fertility as the means to reduce uncertainty. In the previously published paper on the topic (Frantsuz and Ponarin, 2020) the major premises of the uncertainty reduction theory were explicated, the basic model of using it by linking instability with fertility trends was proposed, and the empirical test of the impact of two types of sociopolitical instabilities on fertility dynamics in the USSR/post-Soviet Russia was performed. In this paper I expand the analysis of the uncertainty reduction theory, supplement the previously outlined general model with the extended one, that takes into account the impact on fertility of societal instabilities of various types, scale and magnitude. I formulate the new assumptions that stem from this elaborated model, the ones leading to a broad array of testable hypotheses. The proposed conceptual framework allows for testing the hypotheses of various instabilities’ impact on fertility outcomes in various regions and countries, as well as at different historical periods, even when micro-level data on the individual perceptions of these uncertainties is not available. The importance of such an approach is paramount in the light of problems related to the limited possibilities of performing adequate retrospective qualitative analysis of the individual perceptions of societal instabilities.

Keywords

Fertility, societal instability, uncertainty reduction theory

Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge the great impact on this paper made by the proponents of the uncertainty reduction theory-Drs D. Friedman, M, Hechter and S. Kanazawa; I would also like to express gratitude to the Central European University for providing me with its resources for familiarizing with research on various kinds of societal instabilities during the Research Fellowship over there; Great thanks for tremendous help in advancing this topic to my advisors and Dissertation Committee members-Drs J. Broadbent, R. Macmillan, I. Savelsberg, D. Levison and A. Meyer.

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