Sleeping with the enemy. Partners’ political attitudes and risk of separation

Does politics conflict with love? We aim at answering this question by examining the effect on union dissolution of partners’ (mis)match on political preferences, defined as self-reported closeness, intention to vote, or vote for a specific party. Previous studies argued that partners’ heterogamy may increase risk of union dissolution because of differences among partners in lifestyles, attitudes, and beliefs, and/or because of disapproval from family and community members. We posit that similar arguments can apply to political heterogamy and test the effect of this new heterogamy dimension using UK data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). The data offer a unique opportunity to disentangle the role of heterogamy by political preferences from the effects of heterogamies in other domains (e.g., ethnicity and religiosity) and from that of other partners’ characteristics, while also covering a long period of time (from 1991 to 2021). The data also allow to implement a more specific analysis about the referendum on UK’s permanence in the European Union (known as the Brexit referendum). We find a positive effect of political preferences heterogamy on union dissolution. In addition, diverging opinions on the Brexit referendum is associated to higher chances of partnership break-up.