Or, more specifically, are these Republicans saying, “Yeah, my marriage is great!” but what you can’t see is that they’re crying into their tattered copies of Fifty Shades Of Grey because their Republican husbands are off having “boys’ night” again, and so they’re saying, “Yeah, it’s great”.
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Wilcox said his study shows that the “presumption” that blue families are stronger and more stable “doesn’t hold water in many important respects” and, in fact, “suggests the contrary”.
New research from couple of distinguished sociologists says of course.
Race and religious practice account for nearly half of the difference in Republican and Democratic marital satisfaction. Forty-seven proportion of ever-married Democrats could have been detached, in relation to 41 proportion of ever-married Republicans.
Wilcox said this is potentially because Republicans are more likely to embrace a “marriage-mindset”, which views marriage as the best way to “anchor” a relationship and a family.
“On average, more conservative counties across the country have more marriage, less non-marital childbearing and more family stability for their children than do more liberal counties”, according to the latest report. Even among people with the same demographic profile, Republicans are slightly more likely than Democrats to say they are happily married. Level of education made the least statistical difference.
But what we do know is this: “Democrats do not enjoy an advantage over Republicans when it comes to the quality of their marriages”, he writes. “Another reason is they tend to be more religious”.
The 7-percentage-point gap that exists between Republicans and Democrats without any demographic controls shrinks to 3 percentage points with those controls.
W. Bradford Cox, a professor at the University of Virginia and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah, write in the analysis of their new study “Red Families vs. Blue Families: Which Are Happier?”
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Wilcox said he began investigating the link between partisanship and marriage following the rise of the 2010 book “Red Families v. Blue Families”, which argued that blue regions cultivate stronger and more stable families because of liberal emphasis on education and the tendency to delay marriage and parenthood, all of which are linked to lower divorce rates. Since Republicans are on average more religious than Democrats, religiosity helps to explain much, though not all, of their advantage.
