Educationally heterogamous unions and country level inequalities in Europe before and after 1990

Abstract

Scholars are interested in the association between partnership formation and socioeconomic status due to the link with the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities. Previous findings showed that highly educated individuals are less likely than low educated to form heterogamous unions, i.e., when partners hold different levels of education. The educational gradient in heterogamy has been linked to the level of societal openness in a country. Still, it is not clear-cut to what extent these findings are generalizable across periods and countries. Using Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS) data of 15 European countries, we analyse the association between the educational gradient in heterogamous union formation and country level indicators of socioeconomic inequalities before and after 1990, applying a two-stage regression approach. We found that people with a low level of education are more prone to form heterogamous unions relatively to the highly educated. The Gini Index mildly explains the variation across countries of the gradient in heterogamy. For unions formed after 1990, we found that an increase in economic inequality is associated with a less steep negative educational gradient in heterogamy. Our study highlights the complexity of studying country level variation in educational assortative mating, all the more that it may entail differences related to the meaning of education in each country.