Food for (political) thought: exploring the relationship between affective polarization and political inferences from apolitical cues

Research on political stereotypes in the US has shown that individuals rely on apolitical cues, such as cars or clothes, to infer the political preferences of others. We investigate whether this behavior is at play also in multi-party European systems and its relationship with affective polarization by designing and running a survey vignette experiment on a sample of the Italian population where participants are asked to guess the party preferences of a person in a restaurant according to their food choices. In detail, we expect participants with higher levels of affective polarization to be more inclined to resort to cultural shortcuts attached to food characteristics, such as being “ethnic”, “typical”, “vegan” or “carnivorous”, to make inferences on the ideological lining of their consumers. This is likely to happen because of the (sometimes stereotypical) association between these food characteristics and specific demographics, psychological traits, and political issues. Our results aim at casting a light on the mechanism pushing some people to categorize others at the very first stage of an interaction based on apolitical cues, thus hindering communication and exchanges across groups and party lines.