How Political Differences Affect College Roommates’ Lives Outside of Politics

• In Event: Social and Environmental Influences on Behavior

Abstract

Partisan animus among ordinary Americans has increased markedly in recent decades (Iyengar et al. 2012; Mason 2018). Americans not only are more likely to dislike and distrust members of the opposition party; both Democrats and Republicans say that “the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and close-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines” (Iyengar 2019, 129). Of major concern is that research suggests that partisan animus may spill over and affect behaviors and attitudes outside of the realm of politics. Partisans are less likely to form friendships and romantic relationships with out-partisans (e.g. Chen and Rohla 2018; Huber and Malhotra 2017). They are less likely to engage in economic exchange across party lines (Michelitch 2015 and McConnell et al. 2018), and partisanship may alter professional decision making as well (e.g., Hersh and Goldenberg 2016). Yet credible causal inferences about this topic have been difficult to obtain, in part, because measuring social interaction (homophily) and social diversity is often challenging—see for example the ongoing debate about whether US citizens are sorting into increasingly homogenous neighborhoods (e.g., Abrams and Fiorina 2012; Bishop 2009; Mummolo and Nall 2016)—and few studies can disentangle the forces that shape the diversity of one’s social context from the effects of this context (Shalizi and Thomas 2011).

We address these observational challenges with fine-grained data and a research design that examines the behavior of randomly-assigned college roommates (over 2,000 first-year students) living in university housing, thus eliminating the possibility that exposure to partisan differences arises as an artifact of shared interests and backgrounds. Our rich archival records allow us to examine the effects of exposure to partisan differences on individuals’ decisions to maintain interpersonal relationships by examining students’ change of room requests and subsequent roommate selections. Moreover, our data afford the opportunity to examine whether exposure to partisan differences negatively affects individual performance by examining students’ grade point averages.

Authors

• Brad T. Gomez, Florida State University

• Matthew Pietryka, Florida State University