The changing socioeconomic gradient in the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation: Evidence from a latecomer of the Second Demographic Transition

The existing literature on the (changing) socioeconomic gradient of divorce is not without shortcomings. First, virtually all studies have operationalized individuals’ socioeconomic status through education, downplaying that class differences may be equally (or even more) important. While education may proxy cultural and cognitive skills, social class could more accurately capture individuals’ economic means. Second, most studies have only focused on married couples, despite non-marital cohabitation having become commonplace. Third, the majority of studies have exclusively focused on women. This study addresses such oversights by analyzing the educational and social class gradients of marriage and cohabitation in Italy—a country widely-known as a latecomer of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) and long characterized by a limited diffusion of union dissolution. We adopted non-proportional hazard models to estimate survival curves and probabilities of union dissolution for married and cohabiting women and men, stratifying by education, social class, and cohort. We found that education and social class play an important and independent role as antecedents of union dissolution in Italy. Our results suggest a vanishing, among women, and a reversal from positive to negative, among men, of the educational and social class gradients of marital dissolution across cohorts. We found no clear socioeconomic gradient in the dissolution of cohabiting unions, neither in terms of education nor social class. However, cohabiting men who are not employed were found to face a much higher risk of union dissolution.