Republicans happier in their marriages than Democrats

The study used data from the 2012 – 2014 General Society Survey, studying the habits of self-identified Republicans, Democrats and Independents that have been or are married, and are between 20 and 60 years of age.

MAYBE. Because remember that OTHER recent study, which found that Republicans are lying liars when it comes to reporting things about how happy they are?

Overall, regardless of party affiliation, more of those who reported they were in “very happy” marriages are white college graduates who attend church.

Wilcox and his co-author Nicholas Wolfinger also explored marital quality, finding that among those who are married, 67 percent of Republicans say they are “very happy” in their marriages. Women, minorities and less religious Americans are more likely to identify as Democrats.

Wolfinger and W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, published the study Monday in Family Studies: The Blog of the Institute for Family Studies.

In fact, when behaviors rather than self-reports were examined, liberals seemed to have a small but statistically significant happiness edge. Level of education made the least statistical difference.

“Perhaps Republicans are usually more cheerful, more generous, if not more available to list of partnerships by way of rose-colored glasses”, they can done. Prior to the research by Wolfinger and Wilcox, other studies had claimed “blue” families were traditionally more strong and stable, than “red” families with more conservative beliefs.

Wilcox said he began investigating the link between partisanship and marriage following the rise of the 2010 book “Red Families v. Blue Families”, which argued that blue regions cultivate stronger and more stable families because of liberal emphasis on education and the tendency to delay marriage and parenthood, all of which are linked to lower divorce rates. Since Republicans are on average more religious than Democrats, religiosity helps to explain much, though not all, of their advantage.

“One reason Republicans have happier marriages”, the report posits, “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”. Wilcox finds that children in red counties are more likely to be living with biological parents compared to children in blue counties.