No Man's Land or Common Ground? How Identity and Ideology Shape Where We Live

How do territorial conflicts enter everyday social judgments? While research on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions, we shift our attention to territorial identities. Drawing on the concept of territorial affective polarization, this article examines how individuals in Catalonia weigh territorial and ideological cues when choosing where to live. We use a two-pronged empirical strategy. First, we analyze the relationship between an individual's left-right and territorial ideological positioning and the ideological composition of their new location using geo-located panel data. By tracking individuals' ideological profiles before and after residential moves, we investigate whether people select into areas based on ideological alignment. Second, using a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of the Catalan population, we examine the marginal influence of national identity and political ideology on residential choice. We field a design in which respondents choose between prospective neighbors sharing the same hallway, where neighbour profiles randomly vary along national identity markers, ideological positioning, and social attributes. Our preliminary results reveal two patterns: first, rather than a simple in-group versus out-group logic, we observe a pronounced neutrality premium. Neighbors with explicitly marked national identities are, on average, systematically penalized relative to profiles with no salient national labeling. This finding challenges narratives of a society neatly polarized along the lines of the Procés, suggesting that affective distance may be directed as much toward overt territorial signaling as toward specific out-groups. Second, ideological makeup outweighs territorial considerations. Namely, the far right emerges as the most strongly rejected attribute, with a penalty substantially larger than that associated with any territorial or national identity cue. This indicates that ideological extremism remains a more powerful affective boundary than territorial belonging, even in a context marked by salient national identity tensions. Our findings suggest that in everyday social judgments, the desire for political neutrality and the rejection of ideological extremes supersede the territorial divides that dominate the political discourse