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Entry to Marriage and Cohabitation in Russia, 1985–2000: Trends, Correlates, and Implications for the Second Demographic Transition

La mise en couple en Russie, 1985–2000: tendances, facteurs associés et implications par rapport à la seconde transition démographique

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Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed declining marriage rates and increasing cohabitation in Russia. Are these trends short-term responses to the economic and political crises accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 or do they represent a longer-term shift driven by ideational changes like those shaping the “second demographic transition” in many developed countries since the 1960s? Our analyses of individual-level rates of entry to first marriage and cohabitation using 3,510 marital histories spanning 1985–2000 from the Survey of Stratification and Migration Dynamics in Russia show that the precise timing of these trends, the patterns of association between marriage and cohabitation rates and individual and contextual covariates, and the relationship between cohabitation and marriage entry mostly confirm the “transition” perspective. However, although Russia’s retreat from marriage, an especially radical departure from historically predominant patterns, involves ideational changes, the mechanisms driving these changes in Russia differ from those identified in accounts of the second demographic transition in other countries.

Résumé

Au cours des décennies récentes, le mariage a décliné au profit de la cohabitation hors-mariage en Russie. Cette tendance est-elle une réponse à court terme aux crises économiques et politiques qui ont accompagné le démantèlement de l’Union Soviétique à la fin de l’année 1991, ou reflète-t-elle plutôt une évolution idéationnelle du type de celles qui ont influencé la “deuxième transition démographique” dans de nombreux pays développés depuis 1960? Nos analyses des taux d’entrée en premier mariage et en cohabitation sur la période 1985–2000, à partir de 3,510 biographies individuelles extraites de l’Enquête sur les Dynamiques de Stratification et de Migration en Russie, démontrent que le calendrier de ces évolutions et le type de relation entre entrée en mariage et entrée en cohabitation apportent surtout du crédit à la perspective de “transition”. Quoique le déclin du mariage en Russie, en rupture avec les schémas ancestraux, implique des changements idéationnels, les mécanismes sous-jacents dans ce pays diffèrent de ceux qui ressortent en lien avec la transition démographique dans d’autres pays.

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Notes

  1. From the economic perspective, marriage rates might be lower in urban areas due to the greater cost of raising children there rather than any cultural differences. However, urban–rural cultural differences seem to us to be the more plausible mechanism in the context of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

  2. The history data run through the month of the survey, but we end our observation window in December 2000 (nine months prior to the September 2001 wave) because we can only identify pregnancies by backdating births.

  3. The results for models of entry to any marriage closely resemble those for first marriages. We follow convention by reporting the first marriage results. Re-marriages should be analyzed separately, but our data contain too few for this purpose (157). We analyze any cohabitation rather than just first cohabitation because we have relatively few cohabitation entries in the data, therefore statistical power is at a premium, and we cannot distinguish first from subsequent cohabitations for those respondents at risk at the outset of the observation window.

  4. Following a reviewer’s suggestion, we tried two alternatives: treating coded cohabiters who were 35 or older and 25 or older in December 1984 as if they had previously been married, neither approach yielded different results.

  5. Models using dummy variables for three-year age groupings yield the same substantive findings, and the polynomial specifications fit considerably better even though they are more parsimonious.

  6. We interpolate regional income data for 1986–1989 using 1985 and 1990 figures. We standardize regional mean wages to 1991 rubles using region-specific inflation rates. We set unemployment to zero for all regions from 1985 to 1991, when regional data are unavailable and unemployment was so low that inter-regional differences probably did not affect union formation. In order to avoid conflating inter-regional variation and change over time, we centered the regional measures at the annual means for all regions. Official data on regional mean wages and unemployment likely contain errors and distortions, but these are the best available data on regional economic performance and they demonstrate predictable relationships with other regional measures, such as net migration rates (Gerber 2006c).

  7. The sample sizes vary for these cross-sections because some respondents enter the valid sample when they turn 16 or move to Russia, while others exit when they turn 46 or move out of Russia.

  8. For parsimony of presentation, we show only the BIC statistic for each model and only the results for the full (adjusted) specifications. The results for the raw (unadjusted) models were the same. We will provide full fit information upon request.

  9. Our observation window starts in January 1985; therefore, we cannot tell whether the trends, we observe began earlier. The key point is that they began well before the Soviet collapse, contrary to the “crisis” perspective.

  10. In order to obtain predicted hazard rates, substitute values for covariates and exponentiate the resulting sum. For adjusted hazards, we use baseline (zero) values on all covariates except age. Note that the magnitude of decline in adjusted hazards varies depending on the values of the other covariates in the model.

  11. We substituted baseline categories for missing values on covariates and included dummy variables denoting such substitutions, whose parameters we do not report because they have no substantive interpretation.

  12. As in the other figures, for estimated adjusted hazard rates, we set all covariates other than age and time at zero.

  13. Note that the y-axis in Fig. 4 is on a different scale than the y-axis in Fig. 2, as the case for Fig. 5 versus 3.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge helpful comments from Julie Brines, Larry Bumpass, Brienna Perelli-Harris, and the anonymous reviewers for EJP. Data collection was funded by a grant to the first author from the National Science Foundation (SBR 0096607).

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Theodore P. Gerber & Danielle Berman

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Correspondence to Theodore P. Gerber.

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Gerber, T.P., Berman, D. Entry to Marriage and Cohabitation in Russia, 1985–2000: Trends, Correlates, and Implications for the Second Demographic Transition. Eur J Population 26, 3–31 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-009-9196-8

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