Family Policy Awareness and Marital Intentions: A National Survey Experimental Study

Despite exten sively exam in ing the effects of fam ily pol i cies on mar riage and fer til ity rates, pre vi ous research has paid lit tle atten tion to the pro cess of pol icy implementation and has implic itly assumed that indi vid u als are fully aware of the pol- icy infor ma tion when mak ing mar i tal and fer til ity deci sions. Challenging this assump- tion, we the o rize pol icy aware ness as an impor tant mech a nism for under stand ing the potential influence of family policies on individuals' marital intentions, an understudied yet cru cial deter mi nant of fam ily for ma tion behav ior. In an exper i ment using a national sur vey of young unmar ried indi vid u als in Japan, respon dents were ran domly assigned to treat ment and con trol groups. The treat ment group was informed about 17 Jap a nese family policy benefits, but most of the respondents knew none or only a few of these benefits. After exposure to the policy information, the treatment group had significantly higher mar i tal inten tions than the con trol group, which had sim i lar base line char ac ter is- tics but no infor ma tion expo sure. Crucially, such pos i tive effects were par tic u larly pro- nounced among high-educated women and high-and low-educated men, reflecting the differentiated effects of policy awareness under Japan's traditional gender role norms. Overall, these findings highlight the pivotal role of policy awareness during the family for ma tion pro cess and con trib ute to the debate over whether and how fam ily pol i cies may influence different sub pop ulations.