Prior Union Research Articles

Opening the Ballot Box: Examining the Union Voting Behavior of Scholarship Football Players

Northwestern football players were the first college sports team to participate in a union certification election. The NLRB declined to assert jurisdiction and the ballots were not counted. This paper examines the nexus of factors influencing voting patterns at Northwestern based on both survey data and extensive interviews. The findings affirm and extend those from prior union voting behavior studies. Here, however, intersectionality of race and socio-economic status was a key factor. Voting also turned-on perceptions of employee status and what party or parties constituted management. Animosity toward the NCAA was close to unanimous while players were hesitant to shed negative light on Northwestern.

Cooperative performance evaluation among homogeneous parallel decision making units with coalition structures

For large groups like chain hotels, internal cooperation among subsidiaries and external cooperation among groups are both important strategies to increase profits. To fight for more superiority in payoff allocation, the subsidiaries in a group usually make up a prior union in the form of internal cooperation such as resource sharing and information sharing. In data envelopment analysis (DEA), many studies discuss the external cooperation among independent decision making units (DMUs) based on cooperative game theory, but few simultaneously consider the information sharing among network structure DMUs and information and resource sharing among internal sub-units. How to evaluate the cooperative performance among large groups with different subsidiaries and how to allocate joint payoff? To answer this question, we construct a cooperative game with coalition structures, named the DEA game with coalition structures. We view groups as homogeneous parallel DMUs and their subsidiaries as sub-units. In our proposed game, each DMU is a prior union where sub-units are players. Through the network DEA, we measure the cooperative performance from the perspective of relative efficiency. Based on cooperative game theory, we demonstrate our game is balanced, super-additive and monotone, and one payoff allocation in the coalitional core can be found by calculating the dual programming for the grand coalition. Furthermore, we use the two-step Shapley value to allocate the overall payoff of the grand coalition to sub-units. Finally, we verify our approach by experimenting with the operational data of seven international star quality and high-end chain hotels in Taiwan in 2015.

A Cinderella effect in the childcare assistance provided by European grandparents

Survey data from 36,771 European grandparents were analyzed with respect to childcare assistance that interviewees provided to their birth children versus stepchildren. Interviewees with current partners provided far more such assistance to adult children who were the progeny of both partners than to those who were stepchildren of either one's self or one's partner, but both husband and wife helped the wife's children from prior unions more than they helped the husband's children, supporting the interpretation of stepfathers' involvement as primarily an investment in the new partnership (“mating effort”) rather than in the grandchildren. Interviewees resided farther away from their adult stepchildren than from their birth children, on average, but discriminative care did not depend merely on residential proximity, being substantial regardless of whether proximity was statistically controlled. Grandmothers without current partners exhibited the greatest discrimination, with stepchild: birth child Odds Ratios of 0.10 or less in various analyses, whereas grandfathers without partners exhibited no significant discrimination. Interviewees of both sexes listed far more stepchildren, proportionately, if they had a current partner than if they were either widowed or divorced, however, which suggests that single respondents may have omitted former stepchildren with whom they had ceased to interact from their list of children, and hence that the degree to which single grandparents divest from them may be even larger than estimated.

Migration, Family Formation and Fertility in the Americas

In many low- and medium-income countries that are the traditional sources of international migrants, total fertility rates have dropped to levels at or near replacement. In this context of low fertility, we expect migration’s effects on fertility to operate primarily through marital timing and marital stability. We examine the effects of international migration on age at first marriage, union dissolution, timing of first birth, and completed fertility, using retrospective life-history data collected in Mexico and eight other Latin American countries by the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) and the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP). Using discrete-time hazards and Poisson regression models, we find clear evidence that early migration experience results in delayed marriage, delayed first birth, and a higher rate of marital dissolution. We also find evidence among women that cumulative international migration experience is associated with fewer births and that the estimated effects of migration experience are attenuated after taking into account age at union formation and husbands’ prior union experiences. As fertility levels in migrant origin and destination countries continue on their path toward convergence, migrant fertility below native fertility may become more common due to migration’s disruptive effects on marital timing and marital stability and the selection of divorced or separated adults into migration.

Gray divorce and mental health in the United Kingdom.

The number of older people who experience marital break-up has increased in many Western countries. However, limited empirical attention has been given to the study of the consequences of later-life divorce or separation. Previous studies on gray divorce are often cross-sectional and tend to capture a mix of short- and long-term effects of divorce and possibly selection effects into divorce. Drawing on data from nine waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009/2010-2017/2018), we analyze the effect of marital break-up on the mental health of 909 adults aged 50 or over to test the crisis model and the chronic strain model of divorce. We use fixed effects linear regression models to account for time-invariant confounders and distinguish between pre- and post-divorce effects. Our results indicate that older adults' depressive symptoms (GHQ) increase in the years before and upon union dissolution. After separation, depressive symptoms decrease and return to approximately previous baseline levels. Our analyses on heterogeneity in the effects of gray divorce show that post-divorce adjustment is faster for childless adults than for parents. We find no evidence that adjustment after gray divorce is slower for women than for men, or for persons who already experienced a prior union dissolution than for those who separate for the first time. The results are consistent with the crisis model of divorce but in contrast with the chronic strain model of divorce. Older adults are able to adjust to marital break-up, and their fertility histories tend to moderate the negative effect of later-life divorce on mental health.

A Research Brief on Prospective Marital Expectations among Cohabitors with Initial Marital Intentions

Having initial intentions to marry increases cohabitors’ likelihood of marriage, yet some cohabitors with such plans do not marry. One explanation for non-marriage may be that prior union experiences and the challenges of raising shared or stepchildren could temper initially strong marital intentions. Using the 2011–15 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), I examine prospective marital expectations among 531 current cohabitors in short-term unions (≤ 36 months) who report they were engaged or had definite plans to marry at the start of coresidence, focusing on prior union experiences, stepchildren, shared children, and pregnancy. A fifth of current cohabitors with initial marital intentions did not definitely expect to marry their partner, and the odds of definite expectations were lower if respondents’ partners had children from a prior union and higher if respondents were expecting a child. Prior union experiences, shared children, and the respondent’s own prior children were unrelated to expectations.

From Challenged Statehood to Democratic Civil-Military Relations: Defence Reform in Montenegro

ABSTRACTAfter gaining independence in 2006, Montenegro succeeded in establishing democratic civilian control over its armed forces in a short period of time, earning membership in NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program in 2006, Membership Action Plan in 2009, and NATO in 2017. This essay evaluates this swift process of defense reform in Montenegro and argues that such successful establishment of democratic civil-military relations was only possible because the 2006 referendum on independence settled the question of statehood and removed it from the political agenda. The same level of success was not possible in the prior union of Serbia and Montenegro, because Montenegro’s and Kosovo’s independence aspirations generated uncertainty regarding the country’s future and created incentives to maintain non-democratic civil-military relations, even as the country was undergoing democratic reforms in other areas. Once the question of statehood was settled, the new state was able to reform its defense sector and establish democratic control over its armed forces with unusual speed.

Is Variation in Biological and Residential Ties to Children Linked to Mothers' Parental Stress and Perceptions of Coparenting?

Mothers with children from prior relationships or with stepchildren may perceive greater challenges in parenting than their counterparts in less complex families. We use the Families and Relationships Study (FRS) to analyze parental stress and perceptions of co-parenting among cohabiting and married mothers with resident minor children (N = 679). Compared to mothers with only shared children, parental stress and perceptions of co-parenting generally do not differ when mothers have children from prior unions. However, mothers with resident stepchildren evaluate the distribution of childcare as less fair, consider their partners as less reliable co-parents, and rate their partner more poorly as a co-parent relative to those with no stepchildren. These findings suggest that creating a stepfamily through one's own children may not present additional parenting challenges or stressors whereas having stepchildren introduced through a partner may be linked to a different, and less positive, parenting experience.

Do Marriage and Cohabitation Provide Benefits to Health in Mid-Life? The Role of Childhood Selection Mechanisms and Partnership Characteristics Across Countries

Extensive research has found that marriage provides health benefits to individuals, particularly in the U.S. The rise of cohabitation, however, raises questions about whether simply being in an intimate co-residential partnership conveys the same health benefits as marriage. Here, we use OLS regression to compare differences between partnered and unpartnered, and cohabiting and married individuals with respect to self-rated health in mid-life, an understudied part of the lifecourse. We pay particular attention to selection mechanisms arising in childhood and characteristics of the partnership. We compare results in five countries with different social, economic, and policy contexts: the U.S. (NLSY), U.K. (UKHLS), Australia (HILDA), Germany (SOEP), and Norway (GGS). Results show that living with a partner is positively associated with self-rated health in mid-life in all countries, but that controlling for children, prior separation, and current socio-economic status eliminates differences in Germany and Norway. Significant differences between cohabitation and marriage are only evident in the U.S. and the U.K., but controlling for childhood background, union duration, and prior union dissolution eliminates partnership differentials. The findings suggest that cohabitation in the U.S. and U.K., both liberal welfare regimes, seems to be very different than in the other countries. The results challenge the assumption that only marriage is beneficial for health.

Maternal union instability and childhood mortality risk in the Global South, 2010–14

Efforts to improve child survival in lower-income countries typically focus on fundamental factors such as economic resources and infrastructure provision, even though research from post-industrial countries confirms that family instability has important health consequences. We tested the association between maternal union instability and children’s mortality risk in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia using children’s actual experience of mortality (discrete-time probit hazard models) as well as their experience of untreated morbidity (probit regression). Children of divorced/separated mothers experience compromised survival chances, but children of mothers who have never been in a union generally do not. Among children of partnered women, those whose mothers have experienced prior union transitions have a higher mortality risk. Targeting children of mothers who have experienced union instability—regardless of current union status—may augment ongoing efforts to reduce childhood mortality, especially in Africa and Latin America where union transitions are common.

Union Experience and Worker Policy

Unions influence the U.S. political process in numerous ways. Although scholarship has examined labor’s effects on political office-holding, less research is available on the relationship between unions and legislator policy choice. In this article, I use theories of social identification, civic engagement, and intergenerational transfer of political values to explore the relationship between various definitions of a legislator’s prior union experience and his or her roll-call voting once in office. I employ multilevel mixed-effects regressions to analyze 2,427 federal and statewide worker-related votes cast by California’s legislators from 1999 to 2012. Results indicate that higher probabilities of having worked in a unionized occupation or having a family member who belonged to a union are positively associated with voting for union-supported issues. The relationship is not cumulative, however, and is moderated by factors both endogenous and exogenous to the legislator.

Repartnering and Childbearing After Divorce: Differences According to Parental Status and Custodial Arrangements

We use a stepfamily formation perspective to study two dimensions of the family life course following the dissolution of a first marriage. First, we examine how the presence of children from a prior union and the custody arrangements of those children influence the process of repartnering. In doing so, we extend the traditional explanations of union formation in terms of needs, attractiveness, and opportunities by taking into account the parental status of the new partners and a detailed classification of the custody arrangement of the children. Next, we investigate the likelihood of childbearing within those post-separation unions with a particular emphasis on the prior parental status of both partners. By studying post-separation union formation and fertility behavior together, we get a more complete depiction of stepfamily formation especially in their more complex forms. Our analyses are based on survey data for 2077 divorced men and 2384 divorced women collected in the Divorce in Flanders study. The results show that compared with other divorcees, full-time residential parents are the least likely to start a new union following separation and that parents are more likely to start a union with another parent than with a childless partner. Several of our results suggest that parenthood may not be a particularly attractive status on the partner market. Potential partners without children themselves appear especially reluctant to assume a (residential) step parental role. In contrast with the results for union formation, it is not the custody arrangement of the child(ren) but parental status itself that predicts childbearing within higher order unions. Our findings are important from a policy perspective as they stress the consequences of gender-neutral childrearing patterns following divorce for the repartnering of women after separation.

Fertility after repartnering in the Netherlands: Parenthood or commitment?

In this paper, we focus on childbearing after the dissolution of the first marital union. The discussion of what drives fertility decisions after dissolution has been largely dominated by the arguments that: (a) people want to have a child as a way to achieve the adult status of parenthood (the "parenthood hypothesis"), and that (b) a shared child can signal the partners' commitment to each other (the "commitment hypothesis"). Earlier studies have reported mixed findings for these hypotheses. We used couple data from several Dutch surveys (N = 8094 couples of which 10.2% included a repartnering partner) and utilized a new analytical approach to test the commitment proposition in particular. Our main findings lend support to the parenthood hypothesis when it comes to men's transition to a union-specific birth and to the commitment hypothesis when considering women's transition. Whereas for men, children from a prior union decrease the likelihood of transitioning to a union-specific birth, for women children from a prior union do not matter. That is, women would find it important to confirm the union as a family despite the presence of children. Additional support for the commitment hypothesis for women is that being in a second union rather than first union increases chances of parity progression.

Determinants of Long-Term Unions: Who Survives the “Seven Year Itch”?

Most studies of union formation focus on short-term probabilities of marrying, cohabiting, or divorcing in the next year. In this study, we take a long-term perspective by considering joint probabilities of marrying or cohabiting by certain ages and maintaining the unions for at least 8, 12, or even 24 years. We use data for female respondents in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate choice models for multiple stages of the union-forming process. We then use the estimated parameters to simulate each woman’s sequence of union transitions from ages 18–46, and use the simulated outcomes to predict probabilities that women with given characteristics follow a variety of long-term paths. We find that a typical, 18 year-old woman with no prior unions has a 22 % chance of cohabiting or marrying within 4 years and maintaining the union for 12+ years; this predicted probability remains steady until the woman nears age 30, when it falls to 17 %. We also find that unions entered via cohabitation contribute significantly to the likelihood of experiencing a long-term union, and that this contribution grows with age and (with age held constant) as women move from first to second unions. This finding reflects the fact that the high probability of entering a cohabiting union more than offsets the relatively low probability of maintaining it for the long-term. Third, the likelihood of forming a union and maintaining it for the long-term is highly sensitive to race, but is largely invariant to factors that can be manipulated by public policy such as divorce laws, welfare benefits, and income tax laws.

Repartnering Following Divorce: Implications for Older Fathers' Relations With Their Adult Children

This study examined the implications of postdivorce fathers' new unions and additional (step)children for two aspects of older fathers' relations with adult children born from a prior relationship: frequency of social contact and fathers' financial transfers. Data from multiple waves of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 13,017 observations on 4,997 adult children belonging to 1,917 ever‐divorced fathers) were used to estimate multilevel models. The results indicated that divorced fathers who go on to form a new union have weaker relations with adult children from a prior union than their postdivorce counterparts who remain single. This finding partly reflects the detrimental effects of repartnered older fathers' new biological children and stepchildren. There is no difference between older remarried and cohabiting fathers' intergenerational ties. Moreover, fathers' additional biological children and stepchildren have similarly negative effects on fathers' relations with adult children from a previous union.

Determinants of Long-Term Unions: Who Survives the 'Seven Year Itch'?

Most studies of union formation focus on the probability of marrying, cohabiting, or divorcing in the next year. In this study, we take a long-term perspective by considering probabilities of forming unions by certain ages and maintaining them for eight or more years. We use NLSY79 data to estimate choice models for each stage of the union-forming process (single with no prior unions, cohabiting, first marriage, single with prior unions, non-first marriage) and, in turn, simulate women’s union-related outcomes from ages 18 to 42. Based on simulated outcomes, we predict that a representative, 18 year-old with no prior unions has a 27% chance of entering a union within four years and maintaining it for at least eight years. This predicted probability changes very little for a 24 year-old with no prior unions or for a 30 year-old with prior unions. For older women, however, cohabitation becomes the modal form of entry into long-term unions. We also find that the likelihood of experiencing a long-term union varies with a woman’s characteristics (especially race and family background), but is virtually invariant to factors that can be manipulated by public policy, including income tax laws, welfare benefits, and divorce laws.

“An Enemy, I suppose, that Nature has made”: Charlotte Smith and the natural enemy

This essay traces the history of the expression “natural enemy,” and finds the most rigorous, though subtle, investigation of the term in Charlotte Smith's final poem of 1807, Beachy Head. Joining John Thelwall's attempt to critique the popular British epithet for France by questioning its claim about “nature,” Smith begins her final “nature poem” with a figure keeping watch from the historic military site of Beachy Head, a site rife with anxiety about a possible French invasion. What emerges in the poem, however, is not the aggressive arrival of the invading enemy, but the geological history of Britain's prior union with France, a natural history that subverts the idea that the two nations were ever naturally enemies, since it suggests that, according to Smith, “we can trace our origin no farther than to the people we hate and despise.” Resisting the arguments of both a natural antipathy and a natural sympathy with France, Smith's poem focuses instead on the phenomenality of the border and the forms of watchfulness and attention demanded by war, to ask what relations to the foreign the rhetoric of the “natural enemy” might foreclose.

The First Cut is the Deepest? The Role of the Relationship Career for Union Formation

Using retrospective data from the survey Divorce in the Netherlands 1998, I examine the influence of the relationship career on chances of union formation. Frailty models accounting for unobserved heterogeneity show that previous union experiences reduce chances of union formation. Furthermore, formerly married persons are less likely to enter a new union than former cohabiters, and so are people who had short-lived prior unions or had children. Findings also indicate that the first cut is the deepest. Union formation probabilities drop substantially after the first union dissolves but remain constant after subsequent break-ups. Finally, the impact of prior union experiences on subsequent union formation is generally found to be stronger for women than men.

The relationship between life course events and union formation

This analysis examines how union formation is embedded within the life course, looking at the relationship between events (education, employment, fertility, prior union transitions, and residential factors) and union formation. A fourth of cohabitations and a third of marriages occur the same month as another event, increasing to 40% and 45%, respectively, when including events occurring in the two months before and after a union forms. Life course events in every domain are related to both cohabitation and marriage, with residential changes proving particularly important. The experience of other events near union formation might provide clues to why the union formed and have implications for future outcome and stability.

Are All Dads Equal? Biology Versus Marriage as a Basis for Paternal Investment

The stepfather relationship provides a source of potential conflict in remarriage families, because the mother and partner may have different interests in the well‐being of children from a prior union. Using three different theoretical perspectives—biology, sociology, and selection—this paper examines the engagement, availability, participation, and warmth of residential fathers in married biological parent, unmarried biological parent, married stepparent, and cohabiting father families. The data come from 2,531 children and their parents who were interviewed during the 1997 wave of the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Biology explains less of father involvement than anticipated once differences between fathers are controlled. Marriage continues to differentiate paternal investment levels, as do age of child and financial responsibility to nonresidential children.