Political Homophily in Personal Relationships: Proof from Online Dating Behavior

Political Homophily in Personal Relationships: Proof from Online Dating Behavior

Abstract

Perform men means affairs in relation to political similarity? History jobs has shown that social relationships tend to be more politically similar than expected by chance, but the reason for this concordance try not clear. Could it possibly be because individuals like politically similar rest, or is it owing to confounding issue such as for example convergence, social buildings, and sorting on nonpolitical properties? Approaching this question is tough because we typically never see partners just before connection formation. As a result, we control the site of online dating. We very first conducted a nationwide research which we randomized governmental traits in matchmaking users. Second, we assessed behavioural data from a national internet dating society. We find that folks evaluate potential matchmaking lovers most favorably and so are more prone to contact all of them when they’ve comparable political properties. The magnitude on the impact resembles that of informative homophily and 1 / 2 as huge as racial homophily.

Scholars believe partisan loyalties increase beyond problem roles and disagreements over policy, bleeding into social interactions.

For example, survey proof suggests that individuals do not want to feel company with, or posses kids wed, people in the opposing party (Iyengar et al. 2012). It really is unclear, however, whether these survey replies predict people’s behaviors outside this type of an investigation environment. Read more