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The Democracy of Dating: How Political Affiliations Shape Relationship Formation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2020

Matthew J. Easton  and
John B. Holbein Open the ORCID record for John B. Holbein [Opens in a new window]
Matthew J. Easton
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, 745 Kimball Tower, Provo, UT84602, USA, matteaston@byu.edu, Twitter: @easton_matty
John B. Holbein
Affiliation:
Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia, 111 Garrett Hall, Charlottesville, VA22903, USA, jh5ak@virginia.edu, Twitter: @johnholbein1
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Abstract

How much does politics affect relationship building? Previous experimental studies have come to vastly different conclusions – ranging from null to truly transformative effects. To explore these differences, this study replicates and extends previous research by conducting five survey experiments meant to expand our understanding of how politics does/does not shape the formation of romantic relationships. We find that people, indeed, are influenced by the politics of prospective partners; respondents evaluate those in the political out-group as being less attractive, less dateable, and less worthy of matchmaking efforts. However, these effects are modest in size – falling almost exactly in between previous study estimates. Our results shine light on a literature that has, up until this point, produced a chasm in study results – a vital task given concerns over growing levels of partisan animus in the USA and the rapidly expanding body of research on affective polarization.

Keywords

affective polarizationrelationship formationpolarizationpartisan attachmentsreplicationsurvey experiment
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , Winter 2021 , pp. 260 - 272
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

Author order based on alphabetization; the authors contributed equally to this paper. We wish to thank the National Science Foundation (SES-1657821) for funding support. We are grateful to Matthew Baldwin, Michael Barber, David Broockman, Adam Dynes, Samantha Frazier, Jay Goodliffe, Chris Karpowitz, Jeremy Pope, Julia Stamper and audiences at Brigham Young University, the Mary Lou Fulton Undergraduate Research Conference, the 2018 MPSA, and the 2019 MPSA for their help and feedback on this paper. The studies in this paper were approved by the Brigham Young University (E18118) and University of Virginia (3698) Institutional Review Boards. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24CXA7. The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

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