If you haven’t already, go read the study of marriage’s role in the last election by W. Bradford Wilcox and Peyton Roth, published on TAC’s main page this morning. The data show that married Americans in general, and states and counties with higher proportions of married men and women, were more likely to vote Republican this past November. It’s an elegant and accessible bit of social science. 

I am always tempted to place the “science” there in quote marks. This is despite my degree in the thing, or perhaps very much because of it. I am a known social science skeptic, but here I am, pushing data on you. “You only like studies that confirm what you already think!” my friends and enemies both might say. Yes, first, I’m human and your studies tell me that’s pretty normal. Second, studies that confirm what I already think have, in addition to colorful graphs, the benefit of seeming intuitively right, indicating a relationship that could be deduced from various convictions about things and their natures. 

So, I like this finding not just because I still think that, despite their absolute best and impressive efforts to the contrary, Republicans remain the better vehicle for conservatives to win political victories, and so anything in their favor is something that might slow the tightening ratchet. I also like it because this finding matches my intuitions about marriage, politics, and republics. It fits with my theorizing, even less scientific in the modern sense than the election return number crunching and polling data. Married people should tilt Republican. Republican policy should tilt toward married people. 

Why? Marriage is both pre-political and the first political institution. Bonded mating pairs do not need a city, it is true, but a city comes very quickly after they meet the neighbors, and their kids meet the neighbors’ kids, and suddenly the family tree is in full bloom. Marriage as a covenant or contract is law’s attempt to recognize realities of biology, property, and religion both natural and conventional. Political institutions have tended to formalize measures that found their origins in regulating the proto-institution of marriage, in its monogamous and polygamous forms. 

So, marriage, as the bedrock of the family, is itself a cornerstone in the whole pile of institutions we associate with civilization. And thus I associate it, even before I’d seen the graphs, with republics and Republicans. If we believe the public civic life of the political body to emerge from a collection of smaller political units, that the citizen is defined by belonging, not just to the polity, but to many of the various bodies that make it up, then we wish to preserve a multiplicity of orders and institutions, including marriage, in our mixed regime, our res publica. 

Democrats—naturally enough to the name, after the tribal connotation of demos has faded (but may be coming back?)—increasingly reduce political arrangements to something between the individual and the state, with group identity emerging as a common claimed feature of individuals. In a secularizing and liberalizing society, marriage is increasingly thought of, if not popularly engaged in, as a luxury consumer product. You and another independent and successful individual like you, go in together on this expensive thing called marriage, and you’re lucky if you have time for two kids. All of which is to say, it’s not as if blue voters don’t get married, but when I looked at this social “science,” I can’t say I was surprised.