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Teens in the reddest Republican states and the bluest Democratic ones are the most likely to grow up with parents who stay married — and Utah is a key exhibit in a new analysis reporting that.

University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and psychologist Nicholas Zill wrote a new paper for the Institute for Family Studies that analyzed census data and found that strong Democratic or Republican states tend to have more children reared in intact marriages than do states with a closer mix between parties.

They conclude the reason for this trend in very Republican states, such as Utah, is that their residents are more likely to have deep cultural and "religious commitments to marriage and to raising children within marriage."

Meanwhile, in heavily Democratic states, residents tend to have more education and higher income — and the authors write that college-educated adults "tend to get and stay married nowadays."

The authors note that U.S. Census data for 2008-2011 show that Utah has the highest rate of children in two-parent households: 57 percent. Other GOP states near the top include Nebraska and Idaho.

But strong Democratic states such as Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey also have high rates.

Wilcox and Zill note their findings challenge other research in recent years that has given red states a bad reputation "for talking a conservative game regarding family, but utterly failing to deliver on their old-school aspirations in the real world" with high divorce rates.

They note that some have argued that the "red-state family model — which discourages premarital sex, encourages younger marriage, restricts abortion access, and idealizes the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker family — is simply unworkable, and maybe even destructive, in the 21st century."

Research had suggested, they said, that the blue-state model of achieving more education and delaying marriage was better able in today's economy to provide stable families for children.

But Wilcox and Zill wrote that such research tended to look only at divorce rates. It failed to consider that 41 percent of children are now born to single parents who never were married — and they "are much more likely to experience family instability and single parenthood."

When they looked at census data about children who grow up in families where parents were and are married, and combined it with an index of how strongly states vote Republican or Democratic, they found something a bit unexpected.

"States voting consistently Republican, such as Utah, Nebraska and Idaho, are more likely than average states to have their adolescents grow up with married parents, but so are states voting consistently Democratic, such as Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey," they wrote.

"Our bottom line: In understanding the confusing contours of political and family geography, it looks like both education and ideology matter." —

Rates of children in

two-parent households

Highest

Utah • 57%

Minnesota • 56%

Nebraska • 55%

New Jersey • 54%

New Hampshire, North Dakota • 53%

Lowest

Mississippi • 32%

Louisiana • 36%

Arkansas • 37%

Alabama • 38%

Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina • 39%

Source: American Community Survey