The changing pattern of urban fertility in eastern Australia 1966–1976

The article seeks to enhance understanding of post-transitional demographic change by examining the working out at the local level of the macro-scale societal processes underpinning the recent cyclic oscillation in Australian reproductive behaviour. Variations in urban marital and overall fertility between 1966 and 1971 and between 1971 and 1976 are described and analysed. In general, inter-urban variability in both measures diminished greatly, as did the explanatory power of ecological differentials, suggesting widespread acceptance of the small family norm throughout the study-area. While the process of convergence was continuous for marital fertility, structural changes contributed to later divergence of overall fertility levels, in accordance with Alonso's cyclical model of change. The current low level of residual inter-urban variability suggests that little more may be gained from analyses of this type.     

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD EFFECT IN A LOCAL ELECTION

One of the more popular ideas in electoral geography is that there is a positive correlation between residential proximity and voting behaviour. Often referred to as the neighbourhood effect, the idea is quite simply that individuals within a given local area tend to vote similarly. The process involves, it is suggested, social contacts between neighbours leading to political discussion and information flow which exerts an influence on the way people vote. Closely related to, but distinguishable from the neighbourhood effect is the friends-and-neighbours effect whereby neighbours of a particular candidate will tend to know him better, discuss him more, and support him more avidly than they will other candidates. Since the concepts of the neighbourhood effect and the friends-and-neighbours effect have been adopted into the literature of political geography, and have become central as explanatory models for certain spatial patterns of voting behaviour,¹ the rather inconclusive and contradictory findings of researchers using these concepts require examination, and the concepts and process require an empirical test.