The Last Bastion is Falling: Survey Evidence of the New Family Reality in Italy

Abstract

The study makes use of the 2016 Household Multipurpose Survey of Family, Social Subjects, and Life Cycle to demonstrate that family‐related behavior is now rapidly changing in Italy. The country is often taken as a stronghold of traditionalism. We, instead, highlight recent and substantial changes in cohabitation, dissolution, and nonmarital fertility in the country. In doing so, we carefully assess the predictions made by the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) and show that trends in Italy are monotonically moving in the direction of the SDT. There are, though, important differences across educational groups and regions, that is, family‐related behavior is also changing in the South of Italy in much the same way but not at the same speed as in the rest of the country.