Marriage rate vs. Political corruption
Holds up after adjusting for income
Across 46 countries, Marriage rate and Political corruption rise and fall together at r = +0.39 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). It holds up almost unchanged when only countries with similar income (GDP per person) are compared (r = +0.45, q = 0.022, allowing for the many pairs tested). Caution: leave-one-out range spans 0.16 in r.
Comparing countries across the middle half of marriage rate, 3.7 to 5.33 marriages per 1,000 people, political corruption is worse by 0.0816 points at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 0.0742 points.
Link before adjusting (r)+0.392p = 0.007 · 46 countries
After adjusting for national income+0.454p = 0.002 · likely range [+0.18, +0.66]
p, allowing for regions0.001standard error 0.054 · 5 regions
Check for luck (q)0.022across 12,497 pairs
How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.
Marriage rate · marriages per 1,000 peoplelink with income -0.06 · independent
Political corruption · index (0-1)link with income -0.68 · high
“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.
Every country as a dot
best-fit line line after adjusting
Four ways to measure the link
| Method | r | p | Countries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard (Pearson), not adjusted | +0.392 | 0.007 | 46 |
| By rank (Spearman), not adjusted | +0.229 | 0.125 | 46 |
| Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income | +0.454 | 0.002 | 46 |
| By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income | +0.276 | 0.067 | 46 |
The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 46 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: -0.061 (a minus sign means it grew).
How solid is it?
Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from +0.347 (without RUS) to +0.504 (without BGR). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: RUS (-0.107).
Fragile: this link may not hold up.
- leave-one-out range spans 0.16 in r
- correlation moves sharply once outliers are trimmed
Within each region
Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Europe & Central Asia | 32 | +0.42 |
By income third
If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Poorest third | 16 | +0.49 | |
| Middle third | 15 | +0.46 | |
| Richest third | 15 | +0.19 |
By largest religious group
Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Christians | 38 | +0.39 |
Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = +0.252 after dropping 6 countries.
Two series, one country
Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.
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Over time, within countries
Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 33years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.
Within countries over time, there is no link that is clearly more than chance (r = -0.028, comparing each country only with itself over the years, and each year only with the same year elsewhere). Whatever the cross-country picture shows, countries whose marriage rate moved did not tend to see their political corruption move with it.
Across countries (adjusted)+0.454for comparison
Within countries+0.126each country vs itself
…and vs the same year elsewhere-0.028q = 0.890 · 44 countries
Year-on-year changes+0.019q = 0.714
Read with care.
- Almost all of the second indicator's variation is between countries, so the within-country estimate rests on a small part of the data.
1,362 country-years (one country in one year), 44 countries, 1990–2022, about 31 years each on average. Share of the variation that happens within countries over time: 41% for Marriage rate, 8% for Political corruption. The margins of error allow for each country appearing many times, and for each year’s value being close to the year before.
Year-to-year changes are a cautious test, not a final answer. Looking only at changes from one year to the next removes each country’s own trends. But it also makes measurement mistakes louder, which pulls the results toward zero. A near-zero result here is weak evidence of no link, not proof.
With one measure years behind the other
Same year (lag 0): -0.028. A peak away from zero does not show which comes first. These series change slowly — this year’s value is close to last year’s. That makes the curve smooth and nearly symmetric, whatever produced the data. Even a sharp peak at one lag (a gap of some years) would not prove that one measure changes the other.
The largest value on this curve (-0.09 at lag +7) is higher than the same-year one by 0.06. That gap is not a finding. It is the largest of 21 closely related estimates, and picking the biggest of many tests always makes it look bigger. That is exactly why nothing on this site is ranked or chosen by lag.
The data
marriages per 1,000 people | index (0-1) | Years | |
|---|---|---|---|
| China CHN | 9.6 | 0.554 | 2012, 2025 |
| Cyprus CYP | 8.9 | 0.166 | 2019, 2025 |
| Russian Federation RUS | 8.5 | 0.783 | 2013, 2025 |
| Turkiye TUR | 6.8 | 0.804 | 2022, 2025 |
| Hungary HUN | 6.6 | 0.488 | 2022, 2025 |
| Latvia LVA | 6.3 | 0.07 | 2022, 2025 |
| United States USA | 6.2 | 0.06 | 2022, 2025 |
| Romania ROU | 6.2 | 0.419 | 2022, 2025 |
| Lithuania LTU | 5.7 | 0.159 | 2022, 2025 |
| Israel ISR | 5.46 | 0.107 | 2021, 2025 |
| Slovak Republic SVK | 5.4 | 0.29 | 2022, 2025 |
| Denmark DNK | 5.34 | 0.004 | 2022, 2025 |
| Estonia EST | 5.3 | 0.025 | 2022, 2025 |
| Austria AUT | 5.24 | 0.095 | 2022, 2025 |
| Czechia CZE | 5.1 | 0.171 | 2022, 2025 |
OECD Family Database, indicators SF3.1 (marriage and divorce rates) and SF1.2 (children in families); US series before 1990 from the US Census Bureau and CDC/NCHS
Coppedge, M. et al., V-Dem Dataset, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project
Sources
Marriage rate
Crude marriage rate
OECD · via Our World in Data · CC BY 4.0 (OECD terms and conditions) · updated annual
Registered marriages in the year per 1,000 people (counted at mid-year), from official records. Couples living together and registered partnerships are left out. So the rate shows how often people marry, and nothing about how many live as couples. New Zealand counts civil unions. Same-sex marriages count in each country's figure from the year it made them legal. This is the only ready-made series that compares countries. It covers only OECD members, about forty countries, nearly all of them rich. So its links with other measures are worked out over only a third of the countries on the site, and adjusting for GDP has less to remove. The low points in 2020 are the pandemic, not a break in the series. But the British and Canadian series stop at 2020, so their latest value is that low point: 1.4 and 2.6, against 3.7 and 3.9 the year before. The links with the governance measures stay the same using pre-pandemic values, or with both countries removed. No "better" direction is set: it describes how people live, not how well a country is doing.
Political corruption
Political corruption index
V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · via Our World in Data · CC BY 4.0 · updated annual
Expert ratings of corruption across the government, parliament, courts and public sector. It runs the opposite way to the Corruption Perceptions Index, where higher means cleaner. So the two should move strongly in opposite directions. V-Dem is also one of the datasets Transparency International combines into that index.
How this was computed
Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2012–2025. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 5 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 12,497 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated DYB 2024. How the country data works · explore Marriage rate and Political corruption
This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Marriage rate changes Political corruption, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.
More links with Marriage rate or Political corruption
- Political corruption vs Rule of law before -0.87 → after adjusting -0.77
- Political corruption vs Voice and accountability before -0.81 → after adjusting -0.69
- Liberal democracy vs Political corruption before -0.78 → after adjusting -0.68
- Free and fair elections vs Political corruption before -0.78 → after adjusting -0.65
- Government effectiveness vs Political corruption before -0.81 → after adjusting -0.64
- Political corruption vs Regulatory quality before -0.80 → after adjusting -0.62
- Civil liberties (FH) vs Political corruption before +0.73 → after adjusting +0.60
- Participatory democracy vs Political corruption before -0.71 → after adjusting -0.59