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Do Apolitical Similarities Drive Political Engagement? Insights from Multi-Country Dynamic Parallel Conjoint Survey Experiment

Political Psychology
Political Sociology
Survey Experiments
Gaetano Scaduto
Universiteit Antwerpen
Silvia Decadri
Università degli Studi di Milano
Fedra Negri
Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca
Gaetano Scaduto
Universiteit Antwerpen

Abstract

Political conversation scholars are divided between those suggesting people use apolitical cues, such as fashion, cars, and food preferences, to infer other people’s politics and subsequently decide whether to interact with them (Carlson & Settle, 2022; MacKuen, 1990) and those claiming that similarity in apolitical preferences sparks social interactions across political lines (Balietti et al., 2021; Minozzi et al., 2020). Are political inferences from apolitical cues relevant in the decision to engage in political conversation with others, or do people engage based on apolitical similarities, regardless of the expected political positions of others engendered by these? To investigate this question, we build upon the parallel design conjoint experiment (Acharya et al., 2018), to field an innovative survey experimental design for the study of inferential mediations fielded in four countries and languages (Italy, France, Czech Republic, Sweden, N=6000). We collect respondents’ sociodemographics (gender, age, geographical region, education level), psychological traits (conscientiousness, openness to new experiences), and lifestyle preferences (pets, food, means of transportation), and we dynamically generate conjoint profiles that are more-likely-than-chance to be similar to the respondents. Participants are divided into two groups: one group sees only the apolitical traits of each profile, while the other also sees the political ideology of each profile. Participants are asked to decide who they would rather discuss politics with between two profiles. Through this design, we decompose the Average Treatment Effect of observing each attribute similarity between the respondent and profile on the willingness to discuss politics into the Average Controlled Direct Effect and the Eliminated Effect, with the latter interpretable as the portion of the effect mediated by political inferences. Results show that apolitical similarities do not substantially lead to political expectations in all four countries and that interactions are rather motivated directly by apolitical similarities.