Been looking at some of the arguments put forward by the "no" case. One of them is that by changing the definition of marriage, the institution itself becomes less relevant, meaning less marriages will occur, which isn't an ideal option. Seems a bit counter intuitive, you would think that by increasing the eligible pool of people that can get married, you would also increase overall marriage rates. But that all depends if people aren't put off marriage by the new eligibility.
Anyway, thought I would look at marriage rates in the Netherlands (which has had gay marriage longer than anyone else) to see if there was any impact.
So I downloaded marriage and birth stats from Statistics Netherlands, as well as population stats and made a dataset of marriage incidence (per 10,000 people) and birth incidence (per 10,000 people). Also added a dummy variable indicating Gay Marriage (which began in 2001)
Unfortunately, could only get stats from 1995-2016.
Running a regression, with dependent variable = Marriage Incidence, and independent variables being Birth Incidence and Gay Marriage dummy variable, leads to the following result.
So it does appear that the introduction of Gay Marriage did produce a reduction of 4 marriages per 10,000 people. This is statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval as well.
While it is only a small data set of 22 years, the result should give people pause if they believe marriage is an institution that should be continued. But if you want to accelerate the death of it, vote "Yes".
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