Another take on the Netherlands / Lee Badgett

[By Maggie's leave, here's a guest post from M. V. Lee Badgett, a professor of economics at U-Mass./Amherst and president of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies.]

As now Maggie Gallagher (in her post today) and I and others have argued, the changes in family formation in European countries (and some states here) have probably made it more likely that same-sex couples would be given the right to marry or register as partners. That’s a different causal argument than the main point being driven by Stanley Kurtz, though. He continues to say that the legal recognition of same-sex couples “locked in and reinforced” preexisting conditions and changes in marriage. But the only outcome measure that comes close to supporting his claim is a subtle change in the nonmarital birth rate trend in the Netherlands. He’s made much of an apparent acceleration in the growth of nonmarital births in the 1990s that he argues coincides with the debate on same-sex marriage. Please bear with me for one last look at his claim.

The timing just doesn’t work for Kurtz’s argument, as Jon Rauch has earlier argued here. Kurtz is claiming that nonmarital births increase at a faster rate than they had before after the Dutch parliament passed the registered partnership law for same-sex and different-sex couples in 1997. (It went into effect in 1998.) However, this rapid increase in nonmarital births was not unprecedented in the Netherlands: both the number of nonmarital births and the nonmarital birth rate rose at fastest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s, well before the same-sex marriage debates.

Furthermore, I used a statistical equivalent of the “ruler test” proposed by some commenter here. Laying a ruler alongside the data from 1984 to 1994 shows a steady increase in the nonmarital birth rate. The rates after 1995 or 1996 require making the ruler steeper, suggesting that rates are rising faster. I confirmed the timing with regressions—things change around 1995.

And let’s not forget biology. Remember that in any year about ¾ of babies born were conceived in the prior year. In other words, an unmarried couple’s decision to have a child is usually made 9 months earlier. So most of these “extra” babies born to nonmarried mothers (actually, mostly to two cohabiting parents who will eventually marry) were conceived in 1994 and 1995. That pushes back whatever might or might not have changed in Dutch culture to the year that a new government without the conservative Christian Democrats had just taken over (1994). That was the political turning point that intensified gay political efforts and made it possible to pass registered partnerships--three years later in 1997. In hindsight, some might say the writing was on the wall for same-sex marriage by the mid-90s, but it was hardly a done deal, requiring a change in government to get it enacted.

So if it’s not same-sex marriage, what caused the changes in nonmarital birth rates around 1995? I don’t know. It’s very difficult for demographers to explain in any convincing way these kind of changes.

I have a hunch, though—call it a hypothesis. If you look at a similar graph of nonmarital birth rates in the Scandinavian countries, you see a period of low rates, followed by a period of rising rates, and eventually, the rate stops rising. This pattern looks like an elongated S—it’s a remarkably smooth pattern over time. Eventually the rate flattens out in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark. It’s higher but stops rising. Think about an S-curve like a hill. The gradual rise at the bottom must be followed at some point by a steepening of the hill to get you to the top. (This steepening is the increase in the rate of change pointed to by Kurtz as his evidence for the harm of same-sex marriage.) As you get closer to the top, the hill gets less steep even though you’re still going up. (For you calculus fans, the acceleration changes to deceleration where the sign of the second derivative changes.)

Demographers were looking at nonmarital births and other measures when they identified “the second demographic transition,” and it all started long before registered partnership was even a gleam in the eye of a Danish MP. But demographers have been looking at this process while we’re in the middle of it. Maybe there’s an end, or a sort of new equilibrium (as we economists call it). The Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Hungary, etc., seem to be going through this transition at different times and in different stages, and probably for somewhat different reasons. If they follow the pattern of the Scandinavian countries, that transition means a period of faster growth in the nonmarital birth rate at some point. Eventually, I suspect that the nonmarital birth rates will stop increasing in these countries at some higher but stable rate.

Finally, it’s not just Kurtz’s timing that’s off in this argument. His claims to have cultural “evidence” of the influence of same-sex marriage assumes that cohabiting couples focus in on just a few of the things happening around them in the 1990s having to do with same-sex couples. Someday, when we’re all still blogging about these issues from our nursing homes, someone is bound to point to some apparent change in marriage-related behavior in the U.S. that seemed to start around 2003 and blame it on the debate about same-sex marriage. They’ll point to media coverage of couples marrying in Massachusetts and San Francisco. They’ll look at gay characters on TV shows. They’ll quote Congressman Barney Frank and other prominent politicians (if they can find any) speaking on C-SPAN about the need to give same-sex couples equal marriage rights. They’ll find some academics who predict that giving gay couples marriage rights will not have a harmful effect on heterosexual marriages. What they probably won’t mention are Britney Spears’s momentary marriage, “The Bachelor,” or “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire”—all cultural events that are likely to be far more influential than what a relative handful of same-sex couples might or might not represent. Kurtz picks out a few cultural influences from the Netherlands that allegedly “explain” a subtle demographic change that started years earlier, while ignoring the rest of what went on at that time. That might be fodder for a Dutch dinner party debate, but it’s not a convincing causal story.
posted by Jon at 8:17 PM | link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home