Demografie, 68(2): 77–105
https://doi.org/10.54694/dem.0372
Abstract
Since the mid-1970s, family patterns in the European South have undergone substantial change, with some increasing similarity in aggregate demographic indicators but also persistent cross-national diversity. In Mediterranean countries, declining marriage and fertility rates began in the 1970s, followed by an increase in divorce since the 1980s, although the timing and pace of change differ across countries. Against this background, the present study examines changes in divortiality in Greece, Italy, Spain, and France - a country that shares some geographic and cultural proximity with Southern Europe but also differs in important institutional and historical respects. The paper begins with a demographic analysis of divorce since the 1950s (period and cohort analysis). The second part explores attitudes toward divorce. Traditional demographic analysis, descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, binary logistic regression, and several machine learning algorithms (XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM and Random Forest) were employed. Our findings indicate that divorce has been more prevalent since the 2010s in France and Spain, while Greece and Italy remain at comparatively lower levels and experienced increases at a later stage. Attitudes toward divorce are also more positive in France and Spain. Age, sex, religiosity, marital status, and views regarding the deinstitutionalisation of marriage are associated with attitudes toward divorce. The machine learning models further indicate that age and religiosity are the most influential features contributing to the prediction of unconditional acceptance of divorce. Finally, we show that legal reforms have played an important role in shaping the observed trends in divortiality.
Keywords
divortiality, attitudes towards divorce, family law, religion, Machine Learning Algorithm
