Divorce rate in England and Wales, divorces per 1000 married
Source: ONS via BBC
Many of the headline claims are accurate; the rate of divorce continues to decline, and marriage is more stable than cohabitation. However, the major issue is that much of this is often in phrasing the effect as being a causal one, for example:
the declining divorce rate suggests that marriage itself is becoming more stable.
This is only one possible explanation. Another is that marital dissolution rates are partially reflecting selection processes, and these processes vary over time.
There is a reasonable history of finding selection processes in marital formation and subsequent dissolution (here's a classic). The exact manner of this selection will vary: as suggest in the Lillard et al article some of it will be endogeneity: couples who are less confident in their relationship will either cohabit first as a trial marriage before committing, or will continue to cohabit without translating their cohabitation into marriage. As such marriage will tend to have lower rates of dissolution because they are the relationship which were less likely to fail in the first place. Another route of selection is that marriage is increasingly the preserve of relatively advantages couples: socially advantage seems to depress union dissolution regardless of whether the union is a marital one or a cohabiting one- although the marital advantage remains across all socioeconomic strata.
In either case, the fact that marriage is a select process means that interpreting declines in divorce as being due to the changing nature of marriage ignores the fact that the type of people who marry, and the intensity of selection effects into marriage, will also influence the rate of marital dissolution. It's undoubtedly true that there have been changes to the institution of marriage across time and some of this has influenced dissolution rates. However, ignoring changes in the composition of the married population- the characteristics of married people- is to miss out an important explanatory factor.
