Is Covenant Marriage a Policy that Preaches to the Choir? A Comparison of Covenant and Standard Married Newlywed Couples in Louisiana

Recently, concern about relatively high non-marriage and divorce rates encouraged policymakers to focus marriage and welfare law reforms on marriage promotion initiatives. The creation of the 1997 covenant marriage law in Louisiana grows out of this context and is an historically unprecedented innovation. The provisions of covenant marriage make entering and exiting marriage marginally more difficult, and are a firm step toward a return to fault-based divorce. The law provides a social experiment by creating a two-tier marriage regime. Never before have citizens had the option between two sets of laws to govern their marriages. In this study, we use demographic and social-psychological data from the first wave of a panel study of 538 newlywed couples who married in Louisiana in 1999-2000, shortly after the implementation of covenant marriage. We compare covenant and standard marriages to examine whether spouses who have characteristics that predispose them to marital stability self-select into covenant marriage. Covenant and standard married couples share similar childhood and economic histories, but differ in most other measured respects. Covenant married couples hav