Breeding or burying: the extinction of the Spanish nation. A systematized literature review about demographic panics construction

Abstract

The ongoing process of demographic change in European and Spanish societies, deserved a considerable amount of media and political attention. This attention is related also to the recent electoral successes of different radical right-wing parties. Thus, the messages we receive daily are deeply influenced by their anti-feminist, nativist and xenophobic ideology. In this way, demographic change is being constructed as a crisis, as a “demographic catastrophe”, which furthermore, bear important consequences for gender and for the immigrant and refugee population in terms of sexual and reproductive rights, among others.

To address this reality, we contextualize the change through different demographic indicators and carry out a systematic literature review. We focus on the bibliography dealing with demographic panics as the most relevant to understand the construction of demographic change as a problem. We conclude with a reflection on the need to analyse demographic change panics in Spain after the irruption of Vox on the national political scene.