Journal article
Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
The American journal of sociology, Vol.120(5), pp.1473-1511
03/01/2015
DOI: 10.1086/681254
PMID: 26421344
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 simple solution 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.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
- Creators
- Daniel DellaPosta - Sociology and CriminologyYongren Shi - Cornell UniversityMichael Macy - Cornell University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The American journal of sociology, Vol.120(5), pp.1473-1511
- Publisher
- Univ Chicago Press
- DOI
- 10.1086/681254
- PMID
- 26421344
- ISSN
- 0002-9602
- eISSN
- 1537-5390
- Number of pages
- 39
- Grant note
- NRF-2013S1A3A2055285 / National Research Foundation of Korea SES-1226483; SES-1303533 / U.S. National Science Foundation; National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/01/2015
- Academic Unit
- Sociology and Criminology
- Record Identifier
- 9984306240102771
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