The Political Significance of the “Second Demographic Transition” in the US: A Spatial Analysis

One of the very first persons to observe an empirical and statistical link between voting outcomes and actual demographic behavior was the Austrian professor Julius Wolf (1862-1937). Wolf was professor of economics and social sciences in Zürich, and noted the remarkable correlation between the birth rates in German administrative areas (Kreize) and the voting outcomes in favor of the Socialist party immediately after World War I (1928). Also before the war, Wolf had devoted quite a bit of attention to the problem of the fertility decline in Germany, and he discussed the issue within the framework of political and cultural changes within the German population (1912). Outside Germany, Wolf’s work was largely unknown or forgotten, and it remained completely absent from the volumes produced during the Princeton project on the reconstruction of the European fertility transition. But not only the Princeton book by John Knodel (1974) on Germany missed the statistical link that Wolf had teased out, but also subsequent work on the Prussian fertility transition by Patrick Galloway et al. (1994) overlooked this very important source.