Authoritarian Pronatalism and the Pyrrhic Defeat
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Abstract:
Every strongman national leader from Mussolini to MAGA has used pronatalism to stoke their political movements, with calls to embrace traditional family structures and nostalgia for patriarchal norms. But despite some short-term results – including in Nazi Germany – they have not succeeded in reversing fertility decline. So why do they persist? I use Pyrrhic Defeat theory, drawn from criminology and the “war on crime” – which describes elite windfalls achieved through policy failures – to explain this pattern. Authoritarians today are riding a wave of popular panic over falling birth rates, and Great Replacement fears of immigration, so pronatalism serves their political needs even if the policies fail to raise birth rates. I discuss implications for liberal pronatalism as well.
Bio:
Philip Cohen is a professor of sociology and a demographer at the University of Maryland, College Park, where his research and teaching concern families and inequality. His commentary on topics ranging from race and gender inequality to parenting, poverty, and popular culture has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since 2016, he has been the founding director of SocArXiv, an open archive for the social sciences, and an advocate for open science in the research community. He is active in efforts to reform the system of scholarly communication, and often speaks on the topics of how scholars can productively engage with our many public audiences, to improve our work and deepen its impact. His latest book is Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists (Columbia University Press, 2025).