Eric Kauffman

Eric Peter Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a specialist on Orangeism in Northern Ireland, nationalism, and political and religious demography. He has authored, co-authored, and edited multiple books on these subjects. Eric Kaufmann was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and Japan. His ancestry is half Jewish, one-quarter Chinese, and one-quarter Costa Rican. 

His father, Steve Kaufmann, is of Jewish descent, and his grandfather is a secularist hailing from Prostejov in the modern Czech Republic. His mother is a lapsed Catholic; he himself attended Catholic school for only a year. He received his BA from the University of Western Ontario in 1991. He received his MA from the London School of Economics in 1994, where he subsequently also completed his Ph.D. in 1998.

Kaufmann was a lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Southampton from 1999 to 2003. He was a fellow at the Belfer Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, for the 2008–09 academic year. Kaufmann joined Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2003. He became a professor of politics there in 2011. He has been an adjunct fellow of the conservatarian Manhattan Institute think tank since 2020.

Kaufmann has argued that in the Western world, as the second demographic transition occurred during the 1960s, people began moving away from traditional, communal values towards more expressive, individualistic outlooks, owing to access to and aspiration for higher education. These changing values were also influenced by the spread of lifestyles once practiced only by a tiny minority of cultural elites. The first demographic transition resulted from falling fertility due to urbanization and decreased infant mortality rates, which diminished the benefits and increased the costs of raising children. 

In other words, it made more economic sense to invest more in fewer children, as economist Gary Becker argued. Although the momentous cultural changes of the 1960s leveled off by the 1990s, the social and cultural environment of the very late twentieth century was quite different from that of the 1950s. Such changes in values have had a major effect on fertility: member states of the European Economic Community saw a steady increase in not just divorce and out-of-wedlock births between 1960 and 1985 but also falling fertility rates.

In 1981, a survey of countries across the industrialized world found that while more than half of people aged 65 and over thought that women needed children to be fulfilled, only 35% of those between the ages of 15 to 24 (younger Baby Boomers and older Generation X) agreed. Consequently, Europe suffers from an aging population at the start of the twenty-first century. This problem is especially acute in Eastern Europe, whereas in Western Europe, it is alleviated by international immigration. In addition, an increasing number of children born in Europe have been born to non-European parents. 

Because children of immigrants in Europe tend to be about as religious as they are, this could slow the decline of religion (or the growth of secularism) in the continent as the twenty-first century progresses. In the United Kingdom, the number of foreign-born residents stood at 6% of the population in 1991. Immigration subsequently surged and has not fallen since (as of 2018). 

Research by Kaufmann and political scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin suggests that such a fast-paced ethno-demographic change is one of the key reasons behind the public backlash, which has manifested itself in the form of national populism across rich liberal democracies, an example of which is the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, which resulted in a vote for the UK to leave the European Union (Brexit).

Much of Kaufmann's research concerns the growth of religion around the world. Factors that determine how many children a woman has in her lifetime—that is, her completed or total fertility rate—include her educational attainment, her income, and how religious she is. For example, in the cities of the Middle East, women who supported Sharia law had 50% higher fertility than those who opposed it the most at the turn of the century. 

According to the World Religious Database, the proportion of the human population identifying with a religion increased from 81% in 1970 to 85% in 2000 and is predicted to rise to 87% in 2025. In addition, the Catholic Church gained 12% additional followers between 2000 and 2010, mainly from Asia and Africa. In 2018, Muslims had a median age of 23, Hindus 26, Christians 30, Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated 34, and Jews 36. For comparison, the median age of the global population was 28 in 2018. Overall, Christians have a fertility rate of 2.6, and Muslims 2.9. Islam is the world's fastest-growing religion. Meanwhile, the expansion of secularism will slow in Europe as the twenty-first century progresses.