Note: Divorce and Politics: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

May 20, 2004

Note: Divorce and Politics

Interesting...

KeepMedia | BusinessWeek:DIVORCE AND WOMEN VOTERS: In the early postwar period, a majority of women favored Republican candidates, while men were more inclined toward Democrats. In recent decades, however, voting patterns have reversed sharply, with far more women supporting Democrats and men voting Republican.

Recent elections highlight the shift. The support of women was a big factor in Bill Clinton's victories, and if women's votes alone had been counted in 2000, Al Gore would have won by a landslide. While polls suggest that George W. Bush has at least temporarily closed the gender gap after September 11, it still exists at the Congressional level. The crucial question for political strategists of both parties, of course, is just why this has occurred....

In a new study, however, economists Lena C. Edlund and Rohini Pande of Columbia University conclude that the major cause is the differing impact of the decline in marriage on the economic well-being of men and women. Since the early 1960s, as the proportion of marriages ending in divorce has risen to nearly 50% and as more people have chosen to defer marriage or remain single, the unmarried share of the adult population has surged to 44%. In the study, which will appear in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Edlund and Pande relate this trend to the reversal in men's and women's party allegiances and the subsequent widening of the political gender gap. Arguing that the decline in marriage has tended to make men richer and women poorer, they find that states with rising divorce rates have seen a decline in support for Democrats among men and a marked rise in such support among women. The data also show that women become more likely to vote Democratic after a divorce and less likely after marriage....

Posted by DeLong at May 20, 2004 04:01 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this post

Comments

The conservatarians are going to have a feeding frenzy on this thread. Kind of reminds me of people blaming the availability of pornography on the Abu Ghraib pictures. Moralist conservative flame on...

Posted by: non economist on May 20, 2004 04:32 PM

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The shift is surely a consequence of the major shift in party adherence which took place over this period. Prior to "the sixties", Southern conservatives were Democrats, now they're Republicans; Northeastern affluent liberals were Republicans (think Case, Javits, Keating), now they're Democrats. Most of the party positions have also reversed: "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter."

So women supported Republicans when the image of a Republican woman was Margaret Chase Smith and women avoid Republicans when the image of a Republican woman is Ann Coulter.

Posted by: jam on May 20, 2004 05:02 PM

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44 percent unmarried? Not bad. That's about as close to the mainstream statisticity as i've ever clawed. And speaking of claws, maybe this is my subset's subconscious motto:

" Sure I'll take your marital bliss ... when you PRY IT INTO MY COLD DEAD HANDS !"

Posted by: bianco on May 20, 2004 05:37 PM

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Unfortunately for my party, it's become an issue where it's prudent only to be Republican and a Woman if you're (a) economically secure and (b) have the luxury of a stable family to raise your children in.

Otherwise, women and children are suffering the most from the growing income inequity gap. Not only are women still making less than men over their lifetime, the impact of disproportionate childraising duties, but they're the most likely to suffer from divorce following money troubles. As such they are much more likely to be on the government aid programmes. We're not talking about welfare queens here, we're talking about single or divorced and remarried moms trying to feed their kids and send them to a decent school and struggling to find health care and career advancement opportunities.

It worries me to think that not only are we disenfranchising the most vulnerable people in our society but essentially we're second-mortgaging our future - because these kids will be America's labor pool, talent pool, and creative leaders of tomorrow. As such the current failure of social programs is not only unconscionsable, it's foolhardy.

However the conservative and Republican party have become so sickened by the waste and inefficiency they associate with liberal mismanagement that they've turned to radical Federal rollback in "starve the beast" and "break the bank" strategies. The fact that most conservatives and Republicans are also middle or working class stiffs also and will suffer greatly in the fallout of the success of such a program hasn't penetrated their dense state of reality yet.

I'm pretty stumped, and not sure what to do. I'm pretty sure Democrats couldn't fix the programs and get the spending rail back on track, and I'm absolute sure the Republican party will not do it. Scylla and Charybdis, oui vey!

Posted by: Oldman on May 20, 2004 06:37 PM

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"The data also show that women become more likely to vote Democratic after a divorce and less likely after marriage...."

Damn! All those married lesbians are gonna vote for Bush!

Posted by: Matt McIrvin on May 20, 2004 07:33 PM

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Aha! See, Democrats support gay marriage so that the institution of marriage will be destroyed so that fewer people will get married so that more women will get poorer so that more women will vote Democrat. It all makes so much sense...

Posted by: Conservative Hack on May 20, 2004 08:20 PM

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Oldman has it right, I think. A newly-divorced woman with a child or two in tow is likely to have a smaller income, thus she should gravitate toward the party which at least nominally is for "the little guy," the party which cares more about welfare, child support, and other social programs.

Posted by: Linkmeister on May 20, 2004 10:49 PM

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IIRC (could someone look up the polls), the shift occurred around 1980, when the Republican party went anti-choice.

Before the Reagan take over in 1980, both parties were split and generally imcomprehensible on the issue.

This may be that issue, rather than politics.

Posted by: Matthew Saroff on May 21, 2004 07:42 AM

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OOPS!

Should read "rather than economics", not "rather than politics".

Posted by: Matthew Saroff on May 21, 2004 07:43 AM

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...or it's all the homosexuals' fault.

I mean about the marriage thing, that is.

Posted by: yam on May 21, 2004 09:08 AM

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Just goes to show what the women's movement created: a society where women depend on society instead of men. Women now look to the State to provide the security that husbands used to provide. If you depend on society for your welfare, it's definitely in your interest to keep those transfer payments coming to you, isn't it? Guess you should vote democrat, then.

Posted by: foo on May 21, 2004 09:44 AM

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What is most troublesome about these statistics is not the behavior of women but that of men. Men, it appears, prefer to abdicate responisiblity to lovers (spouses?), children, and society to live in a perpetual state of libertarian-inspired adolescence in which their only aim in life is to accumulate a personal fortune and take part in life's simple pleasures.

How ironic that feminism, by weakening the bonds of marriage, has allowed men to take part in such destructive freedom while leaving women with the responsibility to rear children in a society that is becoming, in my view, increasingly less supportive of working families because it has been weakened by attacks made by the male oliGOPolists in power.

As a witness to the victimization of my single mother when my father left her to raise her three children alone (as he sought to imprison another women with marriage vows), I experienced the consequences of the libertine attitudes of some members of the baser sex.

To her credit, my mother used the opportunity of freedom from her husband's oppression to succeed in her IT career and to explore her love of poetry, while always being most attentive to her childrens' needs. Of course, this experience made her a strong Democrat (though she had always leaned in that direction). But it also made her children liberals.

The fact that there are hordes of young men and women, raised by single Democratic mothers who would never vote with their Republican fathers, ought to reassure the Democratic party about its future.

Posted by: Sean on May 21, 2004 12:04 PM

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Sean,

I think you mean *libertine*, not libertarian.
In your first paragraph. (Noted that you use
the correct word, later in the text.) Libertarians are rather dogmatic about personal responsibility.

While I understand the theme of the post, please remember that neither Libertarians nor Republicans believe that women and children (or for that matter anybody) should be left to starve. The difference in ideology between the platform of the Democratic party and that of the (classic) Republicans is what is perceived to be the legitimate domain of the various bodies politic and the private charitable institutions.

Democrats are typically (although not always) willing to cede more power to the state in order
to provide social welfare whereas Libertarians and Republicans would rather see this need filled by
charities.

Posted by: Nate on May 21, 2004 03:53 PM

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Would rather see this need filled by charities?

1. How does the state prevent charities from filling the need now?

2. If, under some shockingly unexpected set of circumstances, charities do not have the resources to fill this need do Libertarians and Republicans prefer a Malthusian solution to "ceding more power to the state"?

Posted by: Anita Slade on May 22, 2004 09:08 AM

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Anita: the gov't impedes private charity effort by taking an enormous chunk out of personal income, that's how.

Very interesting discussion, although it's disappointing to see how even very reasonably-explained right-wing views are treated with irrational disdain on this site.

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