Life-Cycle Transitions and Political Participation: The Case of Marriage
Abstract
We investigate the consequences of changes in marital status for political participation, treating marital status as marking points of continuity and transition in an individual's life history and marriage as a setting that fosters interaction and interdependence between marital partners. The analysis is based on panel and pseudopanel data from the 1965–82 socialization study of parents, offspring, and spouses. We find that marital transitions affect participation in four ways: (1) marital partners adjust their activity levels to become more like each other after marriage; (2) marital transitions of any type, especially marriage among younger people, tend to depress participation; (3) the overall effect of marriage, however, is powerfully mediated by the participation level of the partner; and (4) these mediation effects are greatest for political activities that involve collective efforts or draw upon the couple's joint resources.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Marriages are much more politically homogeneous than one would expect by chance.
“Observational survey data have long found that marriages are much more politically homogeneous than one would expect by chance (Stoker 1995).”
From The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States (2019) · cites this paper as Stoker 1995
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 23 · Cited by 370
- Authors
- Stoker, L., & Jennings, M. K.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
- ORCID
- Stoker, Laura
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1995-06-01
- Volume
- 89
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 421-433
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W1966305122
- Cited by
- 370
- References
- 23
- Citations by year
- 2026: 24 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 35 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 41 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 14
- FWCI
- 17.06
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Political Science Review (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Social Sciences › Demography › Family Dynamics and Relationships
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
- Keywords
- political participation, marriage, marital status, life cycle transitions, spousal interaction, partner effects, mediating effect
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
