After Swedish intermarriage

Ognjen Obucina, Stockholm University

This paper starts from the assumption that divorced individuals bring with them the experience of a failed marriage which may shape their future choices on the marriage market and aims to contribute to our knowledge of intermarriage, and social interaction in a multiethnic society in general, by comparing the subsequent partner choices of immigrants and natives in Sweden who had made what still is considered an atypical choice of entering intermarriage with the partner choices of natives and immigrants whose previous union was not exogamous. The empirical analysis in this paper is based on the Swedish register data from the STAR database (Sweden over Time: Activities and Relations) and covers the period between 1990 and 2007. All the analyses in the paper only include individuals who are between 20 and 55 years of age at the time of divorce. Descriptive statistics indicate that, regardless of the partner’s nativity and ethnicity in the previous union, natives tend to choose a native partner the second time around, and that this pattern is especially pronounced among women. The outcomes are more heterogeneous for immigrants who remarry. The multivariate analysis is based on event history models of competing risks or, more precisely, discrete-time multinomial logistic regression and it shows that for all groups defined by sex and nativity (native men, native women, immigrant men, immigrant women), the risk of entering one of four types of union (as defined by the ethnicity and nativity of the partner) is the highest for individuals who previously were in the same type of union. Also, the results indicate that the stronger the social boundary that was crossed when the previous marriage was formed, the lower the likelihood of marrying endogamously the second time around.