title: Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
abstract: Popular accounts of "lifestyle politics" and "culture wars" suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972-2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simplesolution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of "latte liberals" and "bird-hunting conservatives" much like the one in which we live.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: DellaPosta
authors.forename: Yongren
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Macy
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008019:Life Style; D011057:Politics; D012933:Social Identification; D014481:United States