Zeitschriftenartikel

Italy’s non-negligible cohabitational unions

Gabrielli, G. G., Hoem, J. M.
European Journal of Population, 26:1, 33–46 (2010)

Abstract

Italy has long been regarded as the country with negligible non-marital cohabitation par excellence, but lately the pattern has begun to change and entry into consensual unions has increased strongly in younger Italian generations. The present paper is devoted to a study of such features between 1980 and 2003 based on the data from the Italian variant of the Gender and Generations Survey, Round 1. We consider entry into marriage and entry into cohabitation as competing risks and show how the incidence of cohabitation consistently is much the lower but that it has increased by some 70% over the twenty-odd years of our study while the marriage rate has dropped by almost as much. We find great variation across major regions of the country. The rise in cohabitation is confined to Northern and Central Italy, while the risk of marriage formation has declined strongly all over the country. Unlike previous investigations our data suggest that non-marital cohabitation may be taking over whatever minor role civil marriage has had in Italian union formation.
Das Max-Planck-Institut für demografische Forschung (MPIDR) in Rostock ist eines der international führenden Zentren für Bevölkerungswissenschaft. Es gehört zur Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, einer der weltweit renommiertesten Forschungsgemeinschaften.