The Intergenerational Transmission of Mating Behaviour in Europe

Manuel T. Valdés, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Nadia Nadia Steiber, University of Vienna

Partners are often selected according to shared traits, a behaviour known as positive assortative mating. A widely studied form of assortative mating is based on education, with individuals preferring partners with similar levels of education. By sorting similar individuals into families and determining the resources available to children, educational assortative mating contributes to social closure, inequality, and the intergenerational transmission of social advantage. Crucially, this contribution would be accentuated if mating preferences were transmitted across generations, which has been surprisingly overlooked in previous research. Using data from three waves and 32 countries participating in the EU-SILC study, we examine a sample of 410,000 individuals in a co-residing relationship. For all cases, we know their own, their partner’s, and their parents’ educational attainment. Our results show that the most likely partnering outcome for an individual is that of their parents. Most notably, women from hypogamous families are most likely to partner hypogamously, while men from hypergamous families are most likely to partner hypergamously. Additionally, we test whether the inheritance of parents’ mating behaviour is moderated by the prevalence of homogamy at the population level. As explained, our results carry crucial implications for the reproduction of social advantage across generations.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination

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