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.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The ideological homogeneity of social networks is enhanced by structural dynamics such as geographic sorting, the growing politicization of the rural-urban divide, and 'lifestyle' differences that are correlated with political orientation.
“The ideological homogeneity of social networks is enhanced by structural dynamics such as geographic sorting209–211, the growing politicization of the rural–urban divide212,213, and ‘lifestyle’ differences that are correlated with political orientation107,214–216”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [214]
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 101 · Cited by 440
- Authors
- DellaPosta, D., Shi, Y., & Macy, M.
- Affiliations
- Cornell University (US)
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2015-03
- Volume
- 120
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1473-1511
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- OpenAlex
- W2230959951
- Cited by
- 440
- References
- 101
- Citations by year
- 2026: 35 · 2025: 63 · 2024: 63 · 2023: 47 · 2022: 43 · 2021: 55 · 2020: 37 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 26 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 144.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Journal of Sociology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › American Political and Social Dynamics
- Keywords
- lifestyle politics, culture wars, political ideology, leisure, consumption, aesthetic taste, individual morality, homophily, social influence, self-reinforcing dynamics, liberals and conservatives
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Life Style, Politics, Social Identification, United States
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
