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Political Behavior

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03.06.2019 | Original Paper

Political Considerations in Nonpolitical Decisions: A Conjoint Analysis of Roommate Choice

verfasst von: Richard M. Shafranek

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 1/2021

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Abstract

Research shows the increasing tendency of partisan considerations to influence decisions outside the context of politics, including residential choice. Scholars attribute this tendency to affective distaste for members of the other party. However, little work has investigated the relative influence of political and nonpolitical factors in these situations—and it has not sufficiently ruled out alternative explanations for these phenomena. Do people mainly choose to socially avoid members of the other party for political reasons, or is partisanship simply perceived to be correlated with relevant nonpolitical considerations? In some settings, political affiliation may serve primarily as a cue for other factors. As a result, studies that manipulate partisanship but fail to include other individuating information may exaggerate partisanship’s importance in these decisions. To address this shortcoming, I assess the impact of political and nonpolitical considerations on roommate selection via conjoint analysis. I find that partisanship strongly influences this social decision even in the presence of nonpolitical-but-politically-correlated individuating information. Partisan preferences are also moderated by roommates’ perceived levels of political interest. Finally, other social traits do matter, but how they matter depends on partisanship. Specifically, partisans report increased willingness to live with counter-stereotypic out-partisans. This suggests that partisan social divides may be more easily bridged by individuals with cross-cutting identities.

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Economists describe this distinction as “taste-based” versus “statistical” discrimination (see, e.g., Guryan and Charles 2013). The former refers to discrimination grounded in animus toward an outgroup. The latter refers to the use of group membership to make inferences about some other trait or characteristic: for example, given limited information, an employer might attempt to assess a prospective employee’s projected productivity based on what he believes about the average productivity of other members of their race, gender, or ethnicity.

For example, imagine a respondent who particularly hates country music, but is largely indifferent about politics. This person might report that they are unwilling to live with a potential roommate who is described as a Republican not because of their political views, but because Republicans (stereotypically) tend to enjoy country music. A researcher might regard this reported “social distance” as symptomatic of affective polarization—since it is observationally equivalent—even though it is actually unrelated to politics.

Subjects were undergraduates enrolled in political science courses who were required to participate in research pool studies for course credit.

To enhance experimental realism, the levels for sexual orientation were weighted 80% straight, 20% LGBT.

Pure independents were excluded from this analysis due to the lack of a single outgroup category here; independent leaners were grouped with the party they preferred.

Evidence for an interactive effect is partly contingent on the precise operationalization. There is less to suggest an interactive effect in the binary outcome models; this may be due to the smaller amount of variation in the dependent variable. Regressing these variables on the rating outcome suggests an interaction between out-partisan affiliation and interest, with out-partisans being evaluated more negatively when they are described as more interested in politics.

There is additionally some evidence of an interaction between respondent political interest and roommate partisan affiliation, with out-partisan roommates being evaluated increasingly negatively as respondent political interest increases. However, this interaction is not robust across different model specifications.

Here, stereotypical Republicans had attribute levels of white, straight, evangelical Christian, likes country music, likes hunting and fishing, and values respecting traditions. Counter-stereotypic Republicans had attribute levels of black, LGBT, nonreligious, likes hip-hop, likes theatre/performing arts, and values treating others fairly. Counter-stereotypic and stereotypical Democrats had the same sets of attribute levels, respectively. The remaining attributes were held constant at “somewhat interested in politics,” “somewhat clean and tidy,” “likes to go to parties on weekends,” and “goes to bed at 11 pm.”

In part, we might expect these evaluations to relate to what social psychologists call the “black sheep effect”—i.e., the tendency toward attitude extremity when judging fellow ingroup members. The black sheep effect holds that people will judge likeable ingroup members more positively than comparable outgroup members—and unlikeable ingroup members more negatively than comparable outgroup members (Marques and Paez 1994). Interestingly, this is not entirely what we observe here: while “likable” (i.e., stereotypical) co-partisans are indeed evaluated more positively than counter-stereotypic out-partisans (who are identical in every respect save partisan affiliation), stereotypical out-partisans are still evaluated most negatively, again illustrating the strength of partisan affiliation in interpersonal evaluations.

One possibility, of course, is that exposure to counter-stereotypic out-partisans merely results in subtyping (Hewstone 1994). Such subtyping allows people to preserve their prior stereotypes of—and affect toward—the outgroup as a whole (Kunda and Oleson 1995).

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Titel: Political Considerations in Nonpolitical Decisions: A Conjoint Analysis of Roommate Choice
verfasst von: Richard M. Shafranek
Publikationsdatum: 03.06.2019
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 1/2021
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09554-9

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