Stability and Change in the Effects of Female Educational Attainment on the Risk of Union Dissolution. A Seventeen-Country Comparison JUHO HÄRKÖNEN AND JAAP DRONKERS

In this paper we explore the changes in the relationship between female educational attainment and the risk of union disruption in seventeen countries: Austria, Estonia, Finland, Flanders (Belgium), France, West-Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. We start from the hypothesis presented by William J. Goode (1962; 1979; 1993), stating that in the Western countries, the initially positive relationship between social class and divorce would gradually change during the modernization process and waning of barriers to divorce, so that eventually there would either be no relationship between the two, or that the lower classes would divorce more. We expand the examination to all unions – not just marriages – due to the increasing importance of non-marital cohabitation in many of our countries. We run separate models for all unions. We first analyse the data within each of the seventeen countries with discrete-time event-history analyses. We find important variation across countries in the relationship between education and union disruption, and find that the relationship has become more negative in five countries. Second, we use multi-level models for event-histories in discrete time to examine the macro-level correlates of this variation. We report that a higher level of employment in service sector and higher percentages of economically active women are associated with a more negative relationship between education and union disruption. Overall, we find support – although not unanimous – for Goode’s hypothesis, and conclude that the waning of social, and economic barriers to union disruption increases the risk of union disruption relatively more among the less educated. Previous versions of the paper have been presented at the 99 th Annual Conference of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, 14th-17th August 2004, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences workshop on Longitudinal Data Analysis in Southampton, 18 th -27 th August 2004, the 3 rd Conference of the European Research Network on Divorce, December 2nd 4th 2004, in Cologne, 37 th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology in Stockholm, 5th-9th July 2005, and the Notestein Seminar at Princeton University, 27th September 2005. We thank the participants of these seminars and conferences, and especially Gunnar Andersson, Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Josef Brüderl, Tak Wing Chan, Paul de Graaf, Matthijs Kalmijn, Torkild Hovde Lyngstad, Anne-Rigt Poortman and Michael Wagner for valuable comments. All remaining errors are ours. A companion paper focusing solely on divorce has been submitted for publication in the European Sociological Review, Special Issue on the Causes and Consequences of Divorce in Europe. Juho Härkönen is a researcher and doctoral candidate, and Jaap Dronkers professor of social stratification and inequality, at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Please address correspondence to Juho Härkönen or Jaap Dronkers, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Via dei Roccettini 9, 50016 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy. Telephone: +39-349-1216627. Fax: +39-055-4685201. Email: Juho.Harkonen@IUE.it. Email: jaap.dronkers@iue.it