Explore the vast range of titles available.

Our study examines how attitudes towards family and gender roles have changed since the ultimate collapse of communism in Hungary. With respect to evaluating the effects of the regime change, it is important to note that Hungary is unique in having pre-transition measures on attitudes from the International Social Survey Program. In analyzing the nature of value shifts, an arithmetic method that decomposes the changes into population turnover and individual (period) components is used. According to the results, period effects fluctuated over the quarter of century, while the population turnover effects point continuously and clearly towards liberalization of family and gender-role attitudes. Since the period effects were usually stronger, they shaped the fluctuating nature of overall change. Namely, there is a clear trend towards re-traditionalization immediately following the regime change and liberalization thereafter, although there are also signs of continued support for traditional values. The series of repeated modules of the ISSP allowed us to examine a key premise of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory in the case of Hungary. We concluded that the detected direction of the attitude change does not support the examined premise of the SDT. * This article belongs to a special issue on “Demographic Developments in Eastern and Western Europe Before and After the Transformation of Socialist Countries”.

References to the second demographic transition (SDT) have increased dramatically in the past two decades. The SDT predicts unilinear change toward very low fertility and a diversity of union and family types. The primary driver of these changes is a powerful, inevitable, and irreversible shift in attitudes and norms in the direction of greater individual freedom and self-actualization. First, we describe the origin of this framework and its evolution over time. Second, we review the empirical fit of the framework to major changes in demographic and family behavior in the United States, the West, and beyond. As has been the case for other unilinear, developmental theories of demographic or family change, the SDT failed to predict many contemporary patterns of change and difference. Finally, we review previous critiques and identify fundamental weaknesses of this perspective, and we provide brief comparisons to selected alternative approaches.

Trends toward later and less marriage and childbearing have been even more pronounced in East Asia than in the West. At the same time, many other features of East Asian families have changed very little. We review recent research on trends in a wide range of family behaviors in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We also draw upon a range of theoretical frameworks to argue that trends in marriage and fertility reflect tension between rapid social and economic changes and limited change in family expectations and obligations. We discuss how this tension may be contributing to growing socioeconomic differences in patterns of family formation. This focus on East Asia extends research on the second demographic transition in the West by describing how rapid decline in marriage and fertility rates can occur in the absence of major changes in family attitudes or rising individualism.

This paper explores the correlates of attitudes toward marriage and children in North Cyprus, South Cyprus, Turkey and Greece, using the most recent wave of the European Values Study (EVS) data. The results show the most support for the second demographic transition theory. The combined effects of education, religiosity, political ideology and gender ideology explain the most variance in family values among these four countries. Less religiosity and egalitarian gender ideology are correlated with egalitarian attitudes towards marriage and children throughout, but cross-country differences are also significant. The effects of parenthood, marital status, education, and political ideology are in the expected direction, yet the effects are not universal but country-specific.

Kidney disease has been described as the most neglected chronic disease. Reliable estimates of the global burden of kidney disease require more population-based studies, but specific risks occur across the socioeconomic spectrum from poverty to affluence, from malnutrition to obesity, in agrarian to post-industrial settings, and along the life course from newborns to older people. A range of communicable and noncommunicable diseases result in renal complications and many people who have kidney disease lack access to care. The causes, consequences and costs of kidney diseases have implications for public health policy in all countries. The risks of kidney disease are also influenced by ethnicity, gender, location and lifestyle.  Increasing economic and health disparities, migration, demographic transition, unsafe working conditions and environmental threats, natural disasters and pollution may thwart attempts to reduce the morbidity and mortality from kidney disease. A multisectoral approach is needed to tackle the global burden of kidney disease. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) emphasize the importance of a multisectoral approach to health. We map the actions towards achieving all of the SDGs that have the potential to improve understanding, measurement, prevention and treatment of kidney disease in all age groups. These actions can also foster treatment innovations and reduce the burden of such disease in future generations.

There has been a lack of debate between and frameworks for theories of the causes of poverty. This article proposes that most theories of poverty can be productively categorized into three broader families of theories: behavioral, structural, and political. Behavioral theories concentrate on individual behaviors as driven by incentives and culture. Structural theories emphasize the demographic and labor market context, which causes both behavior and poverty. Political theories contend that power and institutions cause policy, which causes poverty and moderates the relationship between behavior and poverty. I review each theory's arguments, contributions, and challenges. Furthermore, I explain how to integrate, classify studies into, and distinguish between theories. Ultimately, I argue that poverty research would benefit from more explicit theory and theoretical debate, as well as greater interdisciplinarity and integration between studies of the United States, rich democracies, and developing countries.

The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, I develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. I then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in national party coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.

The article considers the evolution of two “Second Demographic Tradition” (SDT) core characteristics: fertility postponement and the rise of cohabitation, with particular attention being given to the first two decades of the new century. It can be considered as the sequel to the concise overview of the SDT published earlier in the US Proceedings of the National Academy (PNAS) (Lesthaeghe, 2014 ). In the first section, three optimistic views concerning the evolution of fertility are considered: (i) rises due to the end of postponement, (ii) rises connected with advancing human development and (iii) rises associated with advancing gender equality. The focus in this section is mainly but not exclusively on the European experience and its large degree of variation in fertility patterns. It is argued that these three optimistic predictions of sustained fertility rises are mainly based on observations prior to 2010, with too much weight being given to four Nordic countries and too little to other Western European countries with very similar fertility levels. However, these expectations have been thwarted during the second decade, even in the presence of advances in human development and/or gender equality. Hence, the original SDT prediction of 1986 of sustained sub - replacement fertility still holds after 35 years. We expect this to continue during the third decade as well. Furthermore, single-factor explanations are not likely to do justice to far more intricate situations that are responsive to varying structural and ideational influences. In the second section, the evolution of cohabitation is traced in Europe, the USA and Canada, the Latin American countries, three East Asian populations and selected sub-Saharan cases. At the onset, cohabitation can start either from a SDT basis among the better educated or among the poorer classes following a pattern of disadvantage (POD). It is argued that the feature of cohabitation spreads rapidly among all social classes and across all education groups and that in the process of increasing cohabitation, the POD versus SDT argument loses its significance. On a global scale, the rise in cohabitation is contingent on two dimensions: (i) contrasting historical patterns of kinship organisation, including the position of women, and (ii) further advances of the “ethics revolution”, indicating the growing dominance of individual autonomy over traditional societal norms. As a result, no breakthroughs in the near future are expected in countries with a Muslim or Hindu tradition in which no such major cultural shifts have occurred so far.

Background Population aging poses a demographic burden on a country such as India with inadequate social security systems and very low public investment in health sector. This challenge of accelerated demographic transition is coupled by the rural-urban disparity in access to healthcare services among the elderly people in India. An important objective of India’s National Health Policy (2017) is to “progressively achieve universal health coverage” which is posited upon mitigating the sub-national disparity that necessitates identifying the drivers of the disparity for targeted policy intervention. This study, therefore, makes an attempt towards the exploration of the prominent contributory factors behind the rural-urban gap in utilisation of healthcare among the older population in India. Methods The analysis has been done by using the unit level data of Social Consumption: Health (Schedule number 25.0) of the 75th round of the National sample Survey conducted during July 2017–June 2018. Two binary logistic models have been proposed to capture the crude and the adjusted association between health seeking behaviour and place of residence (rural/ urban). To compute the group differences (between rural and urban) in the rate of healthcare utilization among the elderly population in India and to decompose these differences into the major contributing factors, Fairlie’s decomposition method has been employed. Results The logistic regression models established a strong association between place of residence and likelihood of healthcare utilisation among the Indian elderly people. The results of the Fairlie’s decomposition analysis revealed considerable rural-urban inequality disfavouring the rural residents and health care utilisation was found to be 7 percentage points higher among the older population residing in urban India than their rural counterparts. Level of education and economic status, both of which are indicators of a person’s Socio-Economic Status, were the two major determinants of the existing rural-urban differential in healthcare utilisation, together explaining 41% of the existing rural-urban differential. Conclusion Public health care provisions need to be strengthened both in terms of quality and outreach by way of greater public investments in the health sector and by building advanced health infrastructure in the rural areas. Implementation of poverty alleviation programmes and ensuring social-security of the elderly are also indispensable in bringing about equity in healthcare utilisation.

This article argues that the trends normally linked with the second demographic transition (SDT) may be reversed as the gender revolution enters its second half by including men more centrally in the family. We develop a theoretical argument about the emerging consequences of this stage of the gender revolution and review research results that bear on it. The argument compares the determinants and consequences of recent family trends in industrialized societies provided by two narratives: the SDT and the gender revolution in the public and private spheres. Our argument examines differences in theoretical foundations and positive vs. negative implications for the future. We focus primarily on the growing evidence for turnarounds in the relationships between measures of women's human capital and union formation, fertility, and union dissolution, and consider evidence that men's home involvement increases union formation and fertility and decreases union instability. Although the family trends underlying the SDT and the gender revolution narratives are ongoing and a convincing view of the phenomenon has not yet emerged, the wide range of recent research results documenting changing, even reversing relationships suggests that the gender approach is increasingly the more fruitful one.