Abstract
It has long been debated how legalizing same-sex marriage would affect (different-sex) family formation. In this article, I use data on OECD member countries for the period 1980–2009 to examine the effects of the legal recognition of same-sex couples (through marriage or an alternative institution) on different-sex marriage, divorce, and extramarital births. Estimates from difference-in-difference models indicate that the introduction of same-sex marriage or of alternative institutions has no negative effects on family formation. These findings are robust to a multitude of specification checks, including the construction of counterfactuals using the synthetic control method. In addition, the country-by-country case studies provide evidence of homogeneity of the estimated effects.
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Notes
For more on Proposition 8, see document 678 from case number 09-CV-2292, or the transcript of David Blankenhorn’s testimony, available online (http://www.afer.org/our-work/hearing-transcripts/perry-trial-day-11-transcript/). For the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, see Rep. Henry Hyde’s intervention in House of Representatives Report 104-664, 1996. Finally, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as of January 2014, there were 33 U.S. states with constitutional or statutory provisions that effectively prohibit same-sex marriage (see http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/human-services/same-sex-marriage-overview.aspx).
Throughout the article, “traditional family form” refers to different-sex married couples and to children born in these marriages.
Waaldijk (2004) compared the rights and obligations stemming from the two institutions and found that 84 % of the rights of different-sex marriage are offered by the Danish registered partnership.
Using the same type of evaluation as before, Waaldijk (2004) estimated that “pacs”-ed couples have only 55 % to 63 % of the benefits offered to married couples.
German partnership is only open to same-sex couples and was extended in October 2009 to cover all the rights and obligations of marriage.
Several other countries adopted weak or strong versions of registered partnership in recent years, but they are considered “nonadopters” in this article due to their late enactment of the laws: Hungary (weak version in July 2009), Austria (strong version, January 2010), and Ireland (strong, January 2011). The United States is also considered “nonadopter,” although a few states introduced same-sex marriage or civil unions, because these states represent a minority and because marriages and civil unions conducted in these states are not granted the federal rights and obligations of marriage.
Same-sex marriage has also been legal in South Africa since 2006; in Norway and Sweden since 2009; in Argentina, Iceland, and Portugal since 2010; and in a few U.S. states, starting with Massachusetts in 2005. South Africa and Argentina are not included in the analysis, and the other countries are considered “nonadopters” because of the period under study (see the Data section).
See also Dee (2008) for a similar argument.
As mentioned earlier, some of the registered partnership laws allow for both same-sex and different-sex partnerships. In this case, the law could have an effect on (different-sex) family formation just by creating a competing institution to marriage. I do not explicitly consider this effect because it is not directly related to the legal recognition of same-sex couples, but the estimated effects from models controlling for this feature (available upon request) are virtually identical to the main results reported in the article.
The number of couples entering SSM or SSRP is much smaller than the number of different-sex couples who marry. Over the study period, on average, same-sex marriages and same-sex registered partnerships were equivalent to about 2 % and 1.6 % of different-sex marriages, respectively.
Results with variables that take the value of 1 if there was an SSM/SSRP law in effect for any fraction of the year (available upon request) are virtually identical.
It is possible that what matters is whether a law recognizing same-sex couples is enacted, regardless of whether it introduces SSRP or SSM. A specification replacing the two law dummy variables with an indicator for any type of law produces qualitatively identical results (available upon request).
Norway legalized same-sex marriage in January 2009. Given that the law was introduced at the very end of the sample period, I consider Norway a strong SSRP-adopter. In addition, as mentioned earlier, I abstract from the fact that a small number of U.S. states legalized same-sex marriage or civil unions/domestic partnerships.
Canada does not provide separate information on same-sex and different-sex marriages. The data from the three SSM-adopting countries that distinguish between same-sex and different-sex marriages (the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain) show very small differences between the two marriage rates. This is not surprising because the two measures are identical by construction before the introduction of SSM, and same-sex marriages represent a very small fraction in all marriages (less than 3 %). Therefore, the results using the overall marriage rate (available upon request) are virtually identical.
The Swedish National Widow’s Pension Scheme extended certain pension benefits to married couples on January 1, 1990. This led to an abnormally large number of weddings in Sweden in 1989 (Hoem 1991). In the rest of the analysis, I replace this observation with the average of the Swedish marriage rate in 1988 and 1990.
The data are obtained from the World Development Indicators (sex ratio and total population) and from OECD (all other control variables). Note that some control variables are not available for the entire period, leading to some variation in sample size depending on the specification.
In order to further improve the precision of the estimates, I also include country-year controls. Figures plotting coefficient estimates from the specification without controls (available upon request) are qualitatively similar (see also the discussion on the similarity between the model with and without controls in the next section on Robustness Checks). This strategy can also be interpreted as a test of the underlying identification assumption of similar pre-intervention trends in adopting and never-adopting countries.
One scenario in which this could occur is if couples in nonadopting countries would want to “reclaim” the institution of marriage in adopting countries. This would imply that the benefits from reclaiming the institution in a different country are high enough to offset the relocation costs, which is unlikely: for example, because of the linguistic heterogeneity among OECD countries.
The effect of SSRP laws in this case is identified from the years that Belgium and the Netherlands had only an SSRP law—approximately three years each.
A second type of test plots the distribution of the ratio of post- to pre-intervention MSPE for all the placebo tests and places the MSPE for the adopting country in this distribution. An MSPE ratio at the right tail of the distribution can be interpreted as evidence toward “significance,” and an MSPE ratio at the lower tail of the distribution implies “insignificance.” The two approaches lead to the same conclusion (figures available upon request).
Unfortunately, there are not enough data on the vector of determinants to construct a counterfactual for Denmark and Norway, the earliest SSRP-adopting countries. Because the first ruling against discrimination in marriage in Canada was made in 2001 and several provinces started offering SSM as early as 2003, I consider the period 1992–2001 as the pre-intervention period for Canada. In the case of Spain, several provinces introduced domestic partnerships starting from 1998, so the pre-intervention period is 1988–1997. In both cases, the figures include vertical lines at both dates.
These variables are: the fraction of respondents who agreed with the statement “marriage is an outdated institution,” the average score provided to the question asking when divorce is justifiable (1 = never, 10 = always), the fraction of respondents approving of the situation “A woman wants to have a child as a single parent, but she doesn’t want to have a stable relationship with a man,” the average score provided to the question asking when abortion is justifiable (1 = never, 10 = always), and the fraction of respondents answering “not at all important” or “not very important” to the question “How important is religion in your life?” The first three variables are used when the outcome is the marriage rate or the divorce rate, and the last three are used when the outcome is the fraction of extramarital births.
As mentioned earlier, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain provide data on same-sex and different-sex marriages separately. The corresponding graphs in Online Resource 1, Fig. S1, include both the overall and the different-sex marriage rate. In addition, the Netherlands provides information on different-sex registered partnerships, and its graphs also include the difference-sex union rate (i.e., marriages and partnerships).
For example, suppose people can be of only two types: those who prefer to marry young and those who prefer to marry late. The introduction of SSRP or SSM could push the second type to the extreme of wanting to never marry. In this case, some of these individuals will indeed never marry, whereas others will switch to marrying young. In the short run, this will lead to more marriages until all the “switchers” have married. After that, the marriage rate will be lower because the only people who marry are those who want to marry young.
I find similar results using the fertility rate (the predicted number of children a women will have over her lifetime) instead of the crude birth rate.
I find similar results when using as dependent variable other measures of the state of the economy: the overall unemployment rate of men and of women, the labor force participation rate of young men and young women, and the overall labor force participation rate of men and women (results available upon request).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Meltem Daysal, Dan Hamermesh, Judy Hellerstein, and multiple anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own.
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Trandafir, M. Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Couples and Family Formation. Demography 52, 113–151 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0361-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0361-2