Over the past half-century, births outside marriage have risen sharply across Europe – but not everywhere equally. In Scandinavia and France, more than half of all births now occur outside marriage. In Greece and parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, the figure remains far lower. These are countries that have all experienced rising prosperity, expanding education, and broad cultural change. So why do their family landscapes look so different?
The second demographic transition – the broad shift toward cohabitation, later marriage, and childbearing outside wedlock that began in Northern Europe in the 1960s – has long been attributed to a sweeping post-war value change toward individualism and self-expression. But if this ideational shift is shared across Western societies, why do outcomes still vary so widely? A new study published in the European Journal of Population suggests that neither culture nor modernization alone can explain the gap. What matters is how they work together. Examining 23 countries over a 50-year period, Tugrul and Aassve focus on five values that tend to be passed down within families across generations: gender egalitarianism, religiosity, institutional distrust, generalized trust, and the strength of family ties.
In societies where egalitarian gender attitudes were already culturally ingrained, expanding women's education strongly accelerated the decoupling of marriage and childbearing – perhaps because where equal partnerships were already the norm, marriage was less of a prerequisite for starting a family as women gained economic independence. A similar pattern emerged for generalized trust. One way to read this: where people broadly trusted those beyond their immediate circle, the formal protections of marriage felt less essential – and education, by expanding women's economic independence, amplified this effect. A similar reading applies to inherited scepticism toward institutions: as education reduced reliance on churches, governments, and legal frameworks, existing distrust of these institutions may have made non-marital family forms all the more attractive.
On the other side, strong family ties worked as a buffer. In societies like those in Southern Europe, where close intergenerational bonds encourage young adults to stay in the parental home and follow traditional sequences – marriage first, then children – the same educational expansion produced much less demographic change. And religiosity, often assumed to be a clear brake on new family forms, showed no consistent moderating effect, suggesting its relationship with demographic behaviour is more complicated than commonly thought.
Rather than some countries simply being 'further along' in a universal transition, the picture that emerges is one of genuinely different pathways. Europe's diverse family patterns reflect distinct cultural starting points meeting the same structural forces – with very different results. For anyone seeking to understand why similar policies produce different outcomes across Europe, this study suggests looking at the cultural ground on which change lands.