The Politics of Mate Choice (Church attendance and booze not to be discounted)

Interesting study.

The  Politics  of  Mate  Choice

Forthcoming,  Journal  of  Politics

Alford,  Hatemi,  Hibbing,  Smith,  Eaves  and  Martin

Abstract

Recent research has found a surprising degree of homogeneity in the personal political communication network of individuals but this work has focused largely on the tendency to sort into likeminded social, workplace, and residential political contexts. We extend this line of research into one of the most fundamental and consequential of political interactions—that between sexual mates. Using data on thousands of spouse pairs in the United States, we investigate the degree of concordance among mates on a variety of traits. Our findings show that physical and personality traits display only weakly positive and frequently insignificant correlations across spouses. Conversely, political attitudes display interspousal correlations that are among the strongest of all social and biometric traits. Further, it appears the political similarity of spouses derives in part from initial mate choice rather than persuasion and accommodation over the life of the relationship.

So far so good, but the following observation leaves room for interpretation.

Neither sleeping nor smoking patterns is strongly correlated between spouses, but correlations for alcohol consumption and church attendance are large (one might speculate about the impact of two very common, if socially divergent, locations in which prospecting for mates often occurs). Generally, the largest correlations are found for those measures that might be expected to have greater social impact, notably church attendance, educational attainment, and political affiliation. Support for one political party or the other is definitely concordant, with a correlation between spouses of nearly 0.6 (see also Stoker and Jennings 2005)

Implications, and this is not particularly surprising as one quite often sees couples where one is, well, quite on the heavy side, or his or her facial appearance not reflected.

Mates tend to be positively but only weakly concordant on most personality and physical traits, but, James Carville and Mary Matalin aside, spousal concordance in the realm of social and political attitudes is extremely high. Moreover, political concordance appears to arise in substantial part from assortative mating rather than from spousal assimilation or social homogamy. The evidence here of very substantial positive assortment on political attitudes confirms similar findings in favor of initial assortment in other fields. Recent studies in family science and gerontology (Hamon and Ingoldsby 2003), clinical psychology (Feng and Baker 1994; Furnham 2009), behavior genetics (Heath and Eaves 1985), and social psychology, (Luo and Klohnen 2005) all present clear evidence of a prominent role for positive assortment on attitudes before marriage.

...

Our data show that spousal concordance is high and that assortative mating is a major contributor to that concordance, though we cannot draw any ultimate conclusions regarding real longitudinal patterns. However, we do know that political divergence did not begin with the ‘‘red state—blue state’’ divide, but rather is at least as old as Athens versus Sparta. And we can say that the existence of high levels of political concordance across spouses and the importance of assortation in generating that concordance offer a novel contributing explanation for the enduring tendency toward ideological division in political life—an explanation suggesting that the timeless character of political divisiveness may emanate not just from the machinations of elites but also from the nuances of courtship.

Perhaps it might be a little too harsh to sum it up thus: spouses with the same political affiliation get along best, spiced up with some church visits and booze.