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 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.
Chair: Jennifer Dowd