Marital matching in West Africa: an examination of interethnic and interreligious first marriages in Benin

Family formation patterns are in flux globally including assortative partner selection. Prior research notes the historical importance of shared social identities?specifically ethnicity and religion?in partner selection, with most couples sharing these social identities. Yet, in many contexts globally, large structural changes, such as increasing education, urbanization, and migration have created diverse sites for people of varying social groups to interact extensively, increasing the frequency of intermarriages along ethnic and religious lines. However, due to the importance of these social identities in value formation, marriages in which spouses? social identities do not match often experience higher levels of marital strain. ? Despite sub-Saharan Africa?s changing socioeconomic structures, there is minimal research on the frequency of interethnic and interreligious marriages and the marital strain experienced by these couples in the region. In this dissertation, I analyze the trends in interethnic and interreligious first marriages in Benin, West Africa. I use couples? data from five Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) collected between 1996 and 2018 to analyze the temporal and spatial trends in interethnic and interreligious marriages and the characteristics that are associated with entry into these marriages. I then examine the correlation between these marital types and indicators of marital strain, including fertility preference discordance and men?s engagement in extramarital sex. ? Three empirical chapters provide an examination of interethnic and interreligious marriages in Benin. The first empirical chapter, Chapter 3, explores the changes in interethnic and interreligious marriage over time by comparing marital cohorts (pre-1980s to the 2010s), followed by a spatial exploration of the geographic spread of interethnic and interreligious marriages. I use binary and multivariate logistic models to explore the relationship between intermarriage and men?s and women?s individual characteristics, as well as their characteristics relative to each other. These analyses indicate that interethnic first marriages have increased rapidly and are tied to increasing education, urbanization, and wealth. The increase in interethnic marriage seems to correlate with structural changes affecting the marriage market. Specifically, interethnic marriages appear to correlate with higher levels of potential interethnic interactions and the prioritization of matching human capital over shared group identity. I found no such patterns for interreligious marriages: the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of interreligious first marriages mirror those of the average intrareligious first marriage and these unions do not display consistent signs of increasing in frequency. My findings suggest that these two forms of intermarriage are not uniformly tied to larger socioeconomic changes and that they are distinct marital formation patterns. ? Chapter 4, the second empirical chapter, compares the fertility preferences and outcomes of interethnic and interreligious couples to their intraethnic and intrareligious counterparts. Ethnicity and religion both play important roles in shaping individuals? fertility preferences and couples? fertility outcomes. However, much of the literature on fertility is centered on women, and we know little about how different social identities within couples are linked to fertility preferences and completed fertility in sub-Saharan contexts. I find that men and women in interethnic marriages have significantly lower ideal family sizes than their intraethnic counterparts and that they are more likely to be concordant in their fertility preferences than intraethnically married couples. Contrarily, interreligious couples do not have distinct fertility preferences and they show only minimally increased concordance compared to intrareligious couples. The results for fertility outcomes among women ending their reproductive years indicate that interethnic couples do not have fewer children despite their lower preferences, however, interreligious couples have more children despite no difference in their preferences. These findings suggest that couples of different religious backgrounds experience fertility differently than intrareligious couples. Further, the differing outcomes between interethnic and interreligious couples indicate that interethnic and interreligious marriages are not uniformly tied to couples? fertility preferences and outcomes although both involve partners of different social identities. ? The third empirical chapter, Chapter 5, examines the presence of marital destabilizing behaviors that indicate low marital investment in intact marriages. Specifically, I examine two locally salient marital destabilizing behaviors?extramarital sex and polygyny. I ask whether men in interethnic or interreligious marriages are less invested in their unions by estimating if they are more likely to engage in behaviors that are disruptive to the couple-unit and that cause negative health outcomes for their wives. Using logistic regression, I find that interethnically married men have higher odds of engaging in extramarital sex, however, when controlling for educational attainment or wealth, this difference is non-significant. This indicates that it is not being interethnically married, per se, that results in this higher likelihood of engaging in extramarital sex, rather interethnically married men are disproportionately in higher socioeconomic brackets where extramarital sex is more common. Importantly, interethnic marriages are no more likely to transition to polygyny. Interreligiously married men, on the other hand, are significantly more likely to engage in extramarital sex, although not polygyny, than intrareligiously married men even when controlling for educational attainment and wealth. This suggests that men in interreligious marriages are less invested in their unions as they are more likely to engage in marital destabilizing behaviors that are linked to negative outcomes for their wives and children. That these findings differ across the two types of intermarriage suggests that interethnic couples do not experience similar levels of marital strain as interreligious couples, despite both being marriages across social groups. This further supports interethnic and interreligious marriages as being distinct marital patterns with different social meanings. ? In sum, the results of this dissertation indicate that marriage markets are in flux in Benin, West Africa in ways that are shifting the salience of shared social identities in partner selection. One of the main findings of this dissertation is that selection into and the outcomes of being in an intermarriage are not the same for the average interethnic and interreligious couple, indicating that intermarriage is not a uniform experience across social groups. Interethnic marriage in Benin is correlated with recent structural changes, such as increased access to school and urbanization. This supports research in other regions of the world finding that social identity homogamy often decreases with structural changes, especially those that diversify networks. Although interethnic marriages are uncommon, their ties to higher levels of education and wealth appear to be protective against higher marital strain, both in terms of their relative fertility preferences and the husband?s engagement in marital destabilizing behaviors. This may be because interethnic couples, on average, have more resources to weather familial discontent and are more likely to exhibit the characteristics that correlate with more power for wives in the relationship and higher levels of communication at the couple-level. ? Contrarily, in Benin, the average interreligious marriage mirrors the average intrareligious marriage outside of their choice to marry interreligiously. These couples are neither richer, nor more educated, nor more urban?and there have been relatively stable high rates of interreligious couplings across survey waves. Yet, interreligious marriages appear to experience more marital strain regarding fertility and extramarital sex than their intrareligious counterparts. This suggests that interreligious marriages experience higher levels of strain in the Beninese context and, unlike the interethnic couples, they are less likely, on average, to have the resources to help buffer this increased marital strain. These findings tie into rich literatures showing the benefits of increased resources in staving off marital strain and indicate that although both types of intermarriage involve partners marrying across social groups, interethnic and interreligious marriages are distinct in their correlation with structural changes and their marital outcomes.