If You Go Right, I go Left! Partners’ Political Preferences and Union Dissolution

• In Event: 3523 - Family Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 3: Divorce/Relationship Dissolution

Abstract

Does politics conflict with love? We aim at answering this question by examining the effect on union dissolution of partners’ matching on political affiliation, defined as self-reported closeness or intention to vote for a specific party. We use UK data from the BHPS and UKHLS, which allow us to follow couples for up to 25 years. The data offer a unique opportunity to disentangle the role of heterogamy in political preferences from the effects of other partners’ characteristics and to cover a long period of time (from 1991 to 2016) that includes several general elections and other important political events that may increase the salience of political preferences. We anticipate a positive effect of political preferences heterogamy on union dissolution. We also expect a high degree of heterogeneity in this relationship with respect to individual (e.g., political interest) and contextual (closeness to general elections) factors.

Authors

• Alessandro Di Nallo, Université de Lausanne

• Bruno Arpino, Università di Firenze