
 
 
 
 Who’s got happier families, Democrats or Republicans? David Leonhardt reports on a new study that says it’s Republicans: 
 
 Among married people between the ages of 20 and 60, 67 percent of Republicans report being “very happy” with their marriages….That gap shrank when the researchers factored in demographic differences between parties….But the gap did not disappear. Even among people with the same demographic profile, Republicans are slightly more likely than Democrats to say they are happily married. The seven-percentage-point gap that exists between Republicans and Democrats without any demographic controls shrinks to three percentage points with those controls. 
 
 OK, so three percentage points. And since this study was done by Brad Wilcox of the right-wing Institute for Family Studies, you have to figure it’s as friendly toward Republicans as possible. But even Wilcox admits that causality might work in the opposite direction: 
 
 The GSS data and our earlier research suggest that an elective affinity—based on region, religion, culture, and economics—has emerged in the American electorate: married people are more likely to identify as Republican and unmarried people are more likely to identify as Democratic. 
 
 Sure. The Democratic Party is obviously more friendly toward non-married couples and the Republican Party is more dedicated to the proposition that (heterosexual) marriage is important. So the survey difference could be due to the fact that Republicans are simply less likely to admit to an unhappy marriage. As Wilcox says, “Perhaps Republicans are more optimistic, more charitable, or more inclined to look at their marriages through rose-colored glasses.” 
 
 Personally, I’d be happy to put this whole subject to rest. The differences are small no matter how you slice the data, and really, who cares? Republicans generally report higher happiness levels overall, which is understandable at one level (conservatism doesn’t challenge your comfort level much) but peculiar at another (if they’re so happy, what’s the deal with the endless anger and outrage?). But whatever the reason, if they’re generally happier they’re probably also happier with their marriages. 
 
 As for generally dysfunctional family behavior (teen pregnancy, divorce rates, etc.), I suspect that has a lot more to do with social factors like race, age, religion, and so forth. Party ID doesn’t seem likely to play a huge role as a causal factor. Unless someone comes up with some genuinely blockbuster results, I’m willing to just call this a tie and move on. ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist, has written two recent papers noting that children in conservative parts of the country are more likely to grow up with both parents than in liberal ones. In both articles, he challenged the view that blue states are more conducive to stable family life than red states. 
 
 Now Mr. Wilcox, a professor at the University of Virginia, has published an analysis of data about individual families rather than geographical areas. And he argues this data continues to support his case that the so-called blue-state family model is overrated. 
 
 Self-identified Republicans are more likely to be married and less likely to be divorced than self-identified Democrats, write he and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, based on an analysis of the General Social Survey, an oft-studied national poll. Republicans also report being more satisfied with their marriages on average than Democrats. 
 
 Among married people between the ages of 20 and 60, 67 percent of Republicans report being “very happy” with their marriages. Among Democrats, the share was 60, as it is among independents, write Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah. 
 
 That gap shrank when the researchers factored in demographic differences between parties. Whites and the religiously observant are both more likely to be Republicans and more likely to report having happy marriages. 
 
 But the gap did not disappear. Even among people with the same demographic profile, Republicans are slightly more likely than Democrats to say they are happily married. The seven-percentage-point gap that exists between Republicans and Democrats without any demographic controls shrinks to three percentage points with those controls. 
 
 The findings are broadly consistent with previous work, also based on national surveys, finding that Republicans are happier with their lives than Democrats on average and also more likely to be married. 
 
 The researchers acknowledge that the gap could stem from people’s attitudes toward life — and survey questions — rather than from the quality of their marriages. “Perhaps Republicans are more optimistic, more charitable or more inclined to look at their marriages through rose-colored glasses,” they write in the article, which was published by the Institute for Family Studies. But it also seems possible that the more respect and even reverence for the idea of marriage in conservative communities affects people’s behavior and attitudes toward their marriages. 
 
 Continue reading the main story Politics and Marriage Satisfaction Republicans report being happier with their marriages on average than Democrats or independents. Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Democrat Independent Republican 60% 36 4 60 36 4 67 31 Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Democrat Independent Republican 60% 36 60 36 67 31 
 
 A few decades ago, there was a fairly widespread assumption that “family values” were more the province of conservative America than liberal America. That notion was upended in academic circles by a series of articles and studies, the most important and influential being “Red Families v. Blue Families,” a 2010 book by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone. Liberal attitudes toward gender equality, sexual orientation and education all seem to foster stronger, more stable family lives. 
 
 But Mr. Wilcox’s recent writings strike me as significant because they’re a reminder that conservatism also has values and cultural attitudes — about the importance of marriage and family life — that seem to improve the environment in which children grow up. 
 
 Given the widespread anxiety right now about upward mobility in the United States — about how today’s children can grow up to live more prosperous lives than their parents — it’s worth looking for potential lessons from any political ideology. ||||| Blue families are stronger and more stable than red families. Until recently, this was the conventional wisdom in the media and the academy. But this belief has been challenged by new reports in Family Studies and the New York Times. At least at the regional level, blue families—that is, families in areas that vote Democratic in presidential elections—do not have an advantage. It turns out that, on average, more conservative counties across the country have more marriage, less nonmarital childbearing, and more family stability for their children than do more liberal counties. 
 
 Some scholars haven’t been persuaded by the new research. For instance, economist Noah Smith, who has argued that “liberal morality is simply better adapted for creating stable two-parent families in a post-industrialized world,” wondered if the new red families vs. blue families story held up at the family level: in his words, “Try doing family-level studies” of the red vs. blue divide. We have taken up Smith’s challenge in this Institute for Family Studies research brief. 
 
 Our analysis of adults aged 20 to 60 in the 2010-2014 General Social Survey (GSS) casts doubt on Smith’s contention. Forty percent of Democrats are currently married, versus 57 percent of Republicans.1 Forty-seven percent of ever-married Democrats have been divorced, compared to 41 percent of ever-married Republicans. These data are cross-sectional, so we cannot be sure about the causal relationship between party identification, marriage, and divorce.2 But the data lend no empirical support to the view that blue families are more stable. 
 
 Instead, the GSS data and our earlier research suggest that an elective affinity—based on region, religion, culture, and economics—has emerged in the American electorate: married people are more likely to identify as Republican and unmarried people are more likely to identify as Democratic. Given that marriage generally stabilizes family life, and that there is an affinity between marriage and conservatism, it may well be that it is actually conservatives and conservative regions that are better at fostering “stable two-parent families in a post-industrialized world.” More research is needed to investigate the effect of ideology and region on family stability over the life course. 
 
 But stability is only one measure of the character of family life. We further took up Noah Smith’s challenge by exploring how partisanship is related to another important family-level outcome: marital quality. The benefits of a happy marriage include better physical and psychological outcomes for adults, and, for couples who have children, better emotional and marital outcomes for their sons and daughters. Our main question in this research brief is simple: are red or blue spouses happier? 
 
 According to our analysis of the 2010-2014 GSS, red spouses are happier than blue spouses in their marriages. Married men and women between 20 and 60 years of age who are Republican are seven percentage points more likely than Democrats (and independents) to say they are “very happy” in their marriages. This is a statistically significant difference in marital quality. 
 
 Why are married Republicans happier than their Democratic counterparts? Perhaps the partisan divide can be accounted for by differences in the demographic and cultural composition of each party. After all, prior scholarship has found that marital quality varies by sex, race/ethnicity, education, and religiosity. In turn, each of these factors is linked to partisan identification in America. Women, minorities, and less religious Americans are more likely to identify as Democrats. By contrast, men, whites, and more religious Americans are more likely to identify as Republicans. (We also find a modest Republican advantage in college education in the 2010-2014 GSS.) 
 
 The figure above shows that there are indeed differences in marital quality by race/ethnicity, education, and religious service attendance among GSS respondents. Whites, college-educated Americans, and churchgoing Americans are more likely to report that they are very happy in their marriages, although the education difference isn’t statistically significant. So how do these compositional differences help us to understand partisan differences in marital quality? 
 
 As the figure above indicates, race and ethnicity clearly contribute to the red-blue divide. Once we factor in differences in marital quality by minority status, the Republican advantage shrinks. This suggests one reason Republicans have happier marriages is that, as a party with a larger share of white couples, they are less likely to face the discrimination, segregation, and poverty that minority couples often experience in America, all of which can compromise the quality of married life. 
 
 What about education and income? Given the centrality of social class in predicting better family outcomes for Americans, might the partisan difference in marital happiness be linked to these measures of socioeconomic status? No. The figure above suggests that socioeconomic differences do not help explain the Republican advantage. 
 
 Finally, we explore the extent to which religious service attendance drives the Republican advantage in marital quality. Churchgoing is associated with happier marriages, especially for couples who attend together. That’s because churchgoing couples enjoy more social, normative, and ritual support for their marriages and family lives. We find that religious differences account for a portion of the Republican advantage in marital quality, as the figure above indicates. In other words, once you control for religiosity, the Republican advantage in marital quality shrinks. 
 
 In sum, this Institute for Family Studies brief indicates that married Republicans are more likely than married Democrats to say they are in very happy marriages. Partisan differences in race/ethnicity and religious practice account for more than half of the GOP advantage, but we cannot explain the remainder of it. Perhaps Republicans are more optimistic, more charitable, or more inclined to look at their marriages through rose-colored glasses. But what we do know is this: Democrats do not enjoy an advantage over Republicans when it comes to the quality of their marriages. Further, the General Social Survey indicates that Republicans are also more likely to be married, and less likely to be divorced, than their Democratic fellow citizens. Our analysis of family-level data on marriage, divorce, and marital quality provides no support for the theory that blue families are superior to red families in America. Instead, the evidence suggests the contrary. 
 
 W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. Their coauthored book, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, will be published by Oxford University Press at the beginning of 2016. 
 
 Appendix ||||| Today, the conventional wisdom is that “red families” are weaker than “blue families,” a view that was cemented by the publication of Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s groundbreaking 2010 book on family life and political culture, Red Families v. Blue Families. Red America, the argument goes, is more likely to embrace outmoded views about sex, gender, and marriage that are ill suited to the new economy and the more egalitarian world that we now live in. By contrast, blue America emphasizes education, delayed parenthood, and gender egalitarianism, all values that are supposed to equip its citizens to build comparatively stronger and more stable families in twenty-first-century America. 
 
 In an interview with Cahn and Carbone, Neal Conan at NPR summarized the conventional wisdom this way: 
 
 The most stable families, the homes with two parents to nurture their kids, are found in the liberal strongholds along the East and West Coasts. [By contrast]… the red states, the heartland states, if you will, the states that tout family values or celebrate family values, there are religious and traditional [values there] that you [Cahn and Carbone] say increase the likelihood of having less stable families. 
 
 There is only one problem with the conventional wisdom about family life in red and blue America. It’s mostly wrong. While it’s true that some of the bluest states in the country—such as Massachusetts and Minnesota—have some of the most stable families, some of the reddest states—such as Utah and Nebraska—do, too. In fact, at the state level, as Nicholas Zill and I recently showed at Family Studies, the relationship between voting Republican and stable family life is curvilinear: that is, the bluest states and the reddest states are most likely to enjoy high levels of family stability for the children living within them. In other words, at the state level, there is no straightforward, linear relationship between voting Democratic and children enjoying a more stable family life. 
 
 But the state-level focus of this discussion misses the connection between family stability and political culture at the local level. After all, there are plenty of blue states with lots of red counties (think Pennsylvania), and vice versa (think Texas). Up until now, we have not known about the connection between local political culture and stable family life. As this research brief shows, it turns out, at the local level, red counties typically enjoy somewhat stronger families than do blue counties on at least three measures worth considering: marriage, nonmarital childbearing, and family stability.1 
 
 Figure 1 shows that counties that gave a larger share of their vote to the Republican presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) in 2012 have a higher share of their population that is married. This is true with and without controls for region, education, race, and age at the county level (and weighting for population size). The data suggest that marriage is more likely to ground and guide adult lives, including the entry into parenthood, in red America. The red advantage in marriage, in all likelihood, flows in part from higher levels of religious participation and normative support for marriage found in more politically conservative counties. 
 
 Indeed, as Figure 2 shows, red counties also have somewhat lower levels of nonmarital childbearing. Again, this relationship holds up with and without county-level socio-demographic controls. Being born within marriage matters because children who are born into a married home are much more likely to experience stable family lives than children born to unmarried couples or single parents. 
 
 Contrary to the thesis that blue America does a better job of delivering family stability to our nation’s children, Figure 3 shows that today’s teens are more likely to be living with their biological parents if they live in a red county. Specifically, both with and without controls for county trends in education, race, and age (and weighting for population size), teens in red counties are more likely to be living with their biological parents, compared to children living in bluer counties. To be sure: the positive link between voting Republican and family stability is only modest, but it runs directly against the conventional wisdom. 
 
 This finding is noteworthy because children raised in stable, two-parent families are more likely to avoid detours in life that can get them off track, such as a teenage pregnancy or incarceration. They are also significantly more likely to get a good education and to flourish in the contemporary labor force. And Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s new research tells us that communities with more two-parent families are also more likely to foster high levels of economic mobility for poor children. 
 
 Now, it is true that divorce is more common in the South, a region that tilts red. As I have noted, “the legacy of slavery, low levels of education, a history of underinvesting in public institutions, and a Scotch-Irish culture marked by higher levels of family instability” all seem to have combined to make family life more fragile in the South. If the South did a better job of fostering marital stability, the red family advantage would be stronger than it is. 
 
 But this divorce disadvantage does not translate into higher levels of family instability in red America as a whole. That’s probably because nonmarital childbearing, not divorce, is now the biggest engine of family instability in the United States. Here, red America’s stronger religious and normative support for marriage—manifested in higher rates of marriage and lower rates of nonmarital childbearing—means that the divorce disadvantage in red America is outweighed by the fact that children are more likely to be born to a married family in more conservative counties. The bottom line: the marriage advantage in red America helps explain why children in red counties are somewhat more likely to enjoy stable families than are children in blue counties. 
 
 These analyses don’t mean that other factors, such as education and race, are unimportant. As Cahn and Carbone would predict, the American Community Survey indicates that a higher level of education is also linked to more marriage, less nonmarital childbearing, and more family stability at the county level (see Appendix below). Teenagers in counties with lots of college-educated adults are more likely to be raised by their own married parents, because better-educated Americans are now more likely to get and stay married. And education is higher in blue counties. So, education would seem to play a particularly important role in stabilizing family life in blue America. 
 
 Furthermore, one reason that blue counties are more likely to have lower levels of marriage, higher levels of nonmarital childbearing, and more family instability is that they also have more African Americans. As the Appendix (below) indicates, the share of African Americans in a county is linked to lower levels of marriage, higher levels of nonmarital childbearing, and lower levels of family stability. Here, the cumulative effect of slavery, racism, segregation, and poverty help explain these family trends by race. 
 
 These analyses also tell us that red counties do not have an overwhelming advantage when it comes to family life. Unfortunately, only about one in two teens is part of a two-parent, biological family in most red and blue counties across America. 
 
 But this research brief makes it very clear that the conventional wisdom about red families vs. blue families is wrong. In contemporary America, red families have a modest comparative advantage when it comes to family stability for children. That’s in part, it would seem, because red America endows marriage with comparatively greater significance and power than does blue America. 
 
 W. Bradford Wilcox is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the co-author of “For Richer, for Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America.” He also directs the Home Economics Project at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. Follow him on Twitter @WilcoxNMP. 
 
 
 
 1. Earlier research and journalistic coverage have highlighted the elective affinity between high rates of marriage and voting Republican for president at the local levels. In fact, in 2012, the share married was one of the best correlates of red voting at the county level. This also means that the share unmarried in a county was one of the best correlates of voting blue. To put this another way: The arrow of causality between the (political) culture of red counties and marriage is likely to point both ways, with more conservative regions valuing marriage more, and with more married counties more likely to favor limited government, conservative values, and the Republican Party. 
 
 Appendix 
 
 The association between county partisanship and family stability holds in the South and the North, as the scatterplots below indicate. (Southern states include Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.) Also below are the regression equations for the three outcomes covered in this research brief: the share of adults married, percent of births to unmarried parents, and family stability. In each of these models, variables tapping county-level trends in education, age, race, and region (South vs. North) are controlled for, and the data are weighted by county population size.
– A University of Virginia sociologist who's not convinced that liberal families are better off than conservative ones has what he says is more data to back up his theory. W. Bradford Wilcox says that not only do families who live in "red" conservative counties "enjoy somewhat stronger families" than those who live in "blue" liberal counties: He's also analyzed data about individual families, not just geographical areas, and finds that self-identified Republicans are more likely than self-identified Democrats to be married and less likely to be divorced, the New York Times reports. And of married people between the ages of 20 and 60 polled in the survey on the Institute of Family Studies website, Wilcox found that 67% of GOPers reported they were "very happy" in matrimony, while only 60% of Democrats were, and 60% of independents. The gap did shrink to three percentage points once certain other demographic factors were taken into account (e.g., whites and religious people were more likely to say they have happy marriages). However, Kevin Drum writes for Mother Jones that we should probably "call it a tie" instead, since the study was done for a right-wing website—"You have to figure it's as friendly toward Republicans as possible," he notes—and because Republicans may simply be less likely to admit when their marriages are rocky. "As Wilcox says, 'Perhaps Republicans are more optimistic, more charitable, or more inclined to look at their marriages through rose-colored glasses,'" Drum points out. But David Leonhardt writes for the Times that "it also seems possible that the more respect and even reverence for the idea of marriage in conservative communities affects people's behavior and attitudes toward their marriages," adding that, "given the widespread anxiety right now about upward mobility … it's worth looking for potential lessons from any political ideology." (A stunning 99% of evangelical Christians said they were happy a few years back.)