Where you live can affect how likely you are to marry. It’s not just a matter of certain geographies correlating with marriage rates; different places actually have causal roles, according to a New York Times analysis of data compiled by Harvard economists.
What’s equally fascinating is how the political affiliation of a place contributes to marriage rates. Liberal areas tend to discourage marriage, while conservative areas tend to encourage it.
“Spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America — especially liberal bastions like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington — makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country. And no place encourages marriage quite like the conservative Mountain West, especially the heavily Mormon areas of Utah, southern Idaho and parts of Colorado,” wrote David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy for The Times.
Here’s a graphic (with Kennebec County highlighted) that shows the marriage rates for all counties plotted by how the county voted in the 2012 presidential election. The size of the bubbles represents population.
So it makes sense, given Maine’s relatively middle-of-the-road political affiliation, that it makes marriage only slightly (0.5 percentage points) more likely. The researchers also discovered that cities tend to discourage marriage, while rural areas and small towns tend to encourage it.
Children growing up in Aroostook, Washington, Franklin or Piscataquis counties — some of the most rural and conservative parts of Maine — are 3 percentage points more likely to be married by age 26 than if they grew up in an “average place.” They are 2 percentage points more likely to be married by age 26 if they grew up in Penobscot, Lincoln, Androscoggin or Somerset counties. And they are 2 percentage points less likely to be married if they grew up in more-liberal Cumberland County.
Oxford, York, Knox and Hancock counties apparently have no real effect on marriage rates, while children in Kennebec, Sagadahoc and Waldo counties are 1 percentage point more likely to be married by age 26 than if they grew up in an “average place.”
The data line up with surveys. A Pew Research Center poll, for example, found that 59 percent of Republicans said society was better off when people made marriage and having children a priority, while only 35 percent of Democrats said so.
To determine the causal nature of place, researchers Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren studied 5 million children who moved during the 1980s and 1990s. They tracked those who grew up and were less or more likely to marry than similar people who grew up elsewhere. (They also examined how much they earned later in life, as we wrote about May 5.)
They were able to track outcomes based on the age of the children when they first moved. The younger the children were who moved to New York, for instance, the less likely they were to marry by age 26.
Explore the data by clicking here.
