Political Choice Homophily in Online Dating: The Roles of Perceived Quality, Goodness of Fit and Sanctions

In politically polarized societies, politics spills into non-political life, including online dating (Easton and Holbein, 2021; Huber and Malhotra, 2017). While political choice homophily, or the tendency to prefer politically similar others, is well-established, its underlying cognitive mechanisms have not yet been explored.

Drawing on social identity theory, we expect that individuals tend to view out-group party members less favorably in terms of their quality, or characteristics desired in mate selection, e.g. intelligence, honesty (Busby et al., 2021; Iyengar et al., 2012). Furthermore, we expect individuals to take political information as a proxy for (dis-)similarity in values (cf. Graham et al., 2009) and lifestyle preferences (DellaPosta et al., 2015). Finally, we hypothesize that individuals expect sanctions from family and friends for dating an out-partisan because close ties often have similar political views and political party preferences (Mutz, 2006).

Our study employed a quota-representative sample of 1,116 US-Americans aged 22-32 to examine potential mechanisms explaining the relationship between matching and non-matching political party membership and perceived likelihood of engagement (sending or responding to a message from a potential mate) in an online survey experiment. Respondents were shown a series of fictional dating profiles (6,574 observations) with randomized personal information, including a control group that did not include a political party.

Fixed effects models demonstrate that perceived quality (intelligence, character), goodness of fit (values and lifestyle), and expected sanctions mediate the positive effect of matching and the negative effect of non-matching party membership on perceived likelihood of engagement. Moderation analyses show that the negative effect of non-matching party membership significantly varied by partisan affect, whereby the effects were stronger among those who are more affectively polarized.

The results help to understand how partisanship influences first interactions in online dating and elucidate potential pathways by which affective polarization is reproduced at the micro-level.