Economic inequality and the cross-cutting of social circles: Evidence for a Great Gatsby curve in European marriage and partnership markets

The paper uses unique and cross-nationally comparative survey data from the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to examine the stratification of marriage and partnership markets by partners’ social origins. Across birth cohorts, socio-economic boundaries in partnership markets have been weakening as societies have become more prosperous. At the same time, rising inequality is found to enhance the value of social origins in partnership markets, thus confirming Peter Blau’s basic saliency theorem. These twin effects of the aggregate income distribution emerge consistently for broad social classes, parental level of education, occupational status, and household disposable incomes as operational measures of respondents’ social origins. Educational and class homogamy in the child generation are providing partial explanations for the observed patterns, but sizable unexplained residuals suggest that attention to factors like residential segregation or the social segregation of leisure activities is required to more fully understand the relationship between inequality and the social structure of contact opportunities. The analyses furthermore specifically reveal that aggregate income levels in adolescence, but inequality in standards of living in the child generation’s adult life are the relevant structural drivers of social reproduction in marriage and partnership markets.