Have Contemporary Russian Pronatal Policies Evolved More to Address the Nation's Housing Needs than its Demographic 'Crisis'? (original) (raw)
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Policy Experiment in Russia: Cash-for-Babies and Fertility Change
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2011
Population decline in modern day Russia is alarmingly steep: Russia loses approximately 750 thousand people each year. To combat population decline, the Russian government instituted aggressive pro-natalist policies. The paper evaluates the capacity of new policies to change women's reproductive behavior using a socio-institutionalist theoretical framework, which analyzes the gendered interaction between the states, the labor market, and family. The paper arrives to a disappointing conclusion that while efforts to improve fertility are quite aggressive, new policies do not challenge gendered hierarchies neither in public nor in private spheres, which will further depress fertility rates of Russian women. Russia is facing a steep population decline framed by below replacement birth rates and a catastrophic surge in mortality rates. Since 1993, the first year marked by sharp population decline, Russia has lost about four percent of its population; on average, the Russian population shrinks by seven hundred fifty thousand people
"How to Use the Maternity Capital: Citizen Distrust of Russian Family Policy.
During the last decade Russian politics have aimed at stimulating the birth rate, most famously by the maternity capital program. This article provides results from the first extensive study of citizen use and attitudes to this benefit and concludes that Russian women and families harbor a deep distrust of the program and Russian social policy, as it sends contradictory messages combining paternalistic and liberal trends. Many eligible mothers have not activated their capital due to various bureaucratic obstacles they encounter. Contrary to the expectations of economists and sociologists, the results indicate that middle-class families have more resources to use their capital.
Comparative population studies, 2024
This study aims to highlight the changes in fertility patterns of Russians which occurred after the USSR's dissolution or disintegration, taking a long historical perspective. After that disruption, thirty cohorts were born and raised who never lived under the Soviet system. Fifteen more cohorts (those who were born between 1975 and 1990) remember that system only as a part of childhood, but their adult life started after the iron curtain had fallen and a flood of new ideas and practices spilled into all spheres of life. At the same time, the increased concern among the Russian elite about the declining population and low birth rates led to the adoption of a pronatalist family policy based on monetarist approaches reinforced by conservative-traditionalist ideology. Our main research question asks: To what extent did state social and family policies in Russia, which are based on the ideology of traditionalism and conservatism, derail or slow down the modernization of the quantitative and structural parameters of fertility patterns within the Second Demographic Transition context? Our analysis is based on indicators from period and cohort fertility tables, specific for age and parity. Extrapolations are used for Russia's female cohorts born 1971-1994 to arrive at expected ultimate fertility outcomes. Our evidence, obtained from the comprehensive analysis of fertility tables, reveals that the transformation of the Russian fertility model continues to be in line with the Second Demographic Transition common to developed countries, and that two decades of active pronatalist policy in the context of strengthening the conservative family ideology did not stop the modernization of fertility patterns.
Using maternity capital: Citizen distrust of Russian family policy
During the last decade Russian politics have aimed at stimulating the birth rate, most famously by the maternity capital program. This article provides results from the first extensive study of citizen use and attitudes to this benefit and concludes that Russian women and families harbor a deep distrust of the program and Russian social policy, as it sends contradictory messages combining paternalistic and liberal trends. Many eligible mothers have not activated their capital due to various bureaucratic obstacles they encounter. Contrary to the expectations of economists and sociologists, the results indicate that middle-class families have more resources to use their capital.
European Journal of Women's Studies
During the last decade Russian politics have aimed at stimulating the birth rate, most famously by the maternity capital program. This article provides results from the first extensive study of citizen use and attitudes to this benefit and concludes that Russian women and families harbor a deep distrust of the program and Russian social policy, as it sends contradictory messages combining paternalistic and liberal trends. Many eligible mothers have not activated their capital due to various bureaucratic obstacles they encounter. Contrary to the expectations of economists and sociologists, the results indicate that middle-class families have more resources to use their capital.
Who Helps the Degraded Housewife? Comments on Vladimir Putin's Demographic Speech.}
European Journal of Women's …, 2007
This article analyses the new demographic programme that was announced by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in 2006. The main goal of this programme is to encourage fertility, especially the birth of a second child. New benefits should elevate the status of wome taking maternity leave, who might otherwise suffer from discrimination in the family. The housewife is considered to be dependent and 'degraded'. We argue that this demographic politics recalls continuity with soviet gender politics centred on the support of wage-earning working mothers. The programme provokes different critiques. Liberal critics argue that the programme is a populist one and it may have undesired economic and social consequences. Conservative critics want to encourage more traditional 'woman' and 'family' roles in society. Feminist critics argue that this politcs would reinforce both the inferior position of women on the labour market and gender imbalances on the symbolic level.
2015
Diminishing regional diversity in fertility indicators was the dominant trend in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1990s, a period of the most intense political and economic transformation, this trend was interrupted and Russia experienced a short-term increase in regional variations in fertility, which occurred against the background of the rapid fall in its average quantum. Soon, however, the differentiation of fertility once again continued to decline, and, by the early 2000s, the uniformity of the Russian regions returned to the level characteristic of the 1980s. It can be stated as a period of uniform compensatory increase in fertility with tendency pulling regions, where period fertility rates have fallen too low, up to the regions with an average fertility level. The first five years of increase in total fertility rate (TFR) since 1999, not too change the regional heterogeneity, and it stagnated near the historically lowest level. But in 2007, the year when the new ...
Демографическое обозрение
The idea of an extraordinary growth in fertility in Russia is widespread in the Russian expert community and media space. This increase is believed to be indicative of the positive results of the special financial measures taken by the government after 2006 to stimulate fertility. The author’s viewpoint is more reserved. There are some positive developments, but their significance is quite insufficient to view the future of Russian fertility through rose-colored glasses. With this paper, we continue our previous long-term research in the field of in-depth demographic analysis of Russian fertility, incorporating the latest official statistical data for 2014. The paper provides an overview of the trends of key fertility indicators over a few decades, as well as developing some approaches to cohort fertility analysis in order to obtain more reliable projections. In the first part, we examine period fertility indicators (for calendar years), taking into account the latest changes in the...
Anthropology, Demography, and the Search for a Critical Analysis of Fertility: Insights from Russia
American Anthropologist, 2003
The socialist and postsocialist contexts offer important challenges for anthropologists developing a critical analysis of fertility. The need for fertility studies to address class and gender inequities is often overlooked by postsocialist scholars, whose work is mired in responses to the socialist past and ongoing pronatalist campaigns. I examine the ways that fertility analysis has been used in national political struggles in Russia, and explain why supporters of democratic reforms and women's rights have neglected to address gender and class issues in their fertility studies. While Russian nationalists cite fertility decline as proof that market reforms threaten Russia's existence, defenders of neoliberalism draw on demographic transition theory to redefine fertility decline as a universal sign of socioeconomic development. Working with conventional demographic paradigms and a postsocialist cultural logic, Russian transition theorists simultaneously oppose pronatalist politics, support women's reproductive choice, and reproduce the limitations of liberal paradigms regarding the family, society, and public policy. This article shows how anthropological critiques of demographic transition theory can be expanded and nuanced by considering the ways this theory gets adapted to particular cultural logics and political contests.
Contemporary Trends in Russia s Fertility Rate and the Impact of State Support Measures (2018)
Russia’s fertility rate jumped after 2007, when new state measures were introduced to support families with children. This article analyzes the structure of this increase and factors that have contributed to a growth in the fertility rate. In 2007, the greatest gains were made in terms of second and subsequent births, while the fertility rate for first births has remained virtually unchanged. The effectiveness of demographic policy measures taken since early 2007 in regard to the fertility rate can be evaluated on the basis of statistical calculations as an additional amount of 0.259 of the total fertility rate, which amounts to 35.4 percent for second and subsequent births and 17.1 percent for all births. Thus, there are grounds to speak about positive shifts in fertility rate indicators not just for hypothetical generations, but also for real generations.