The Bigger Sort: Mapping a Political Consumption Constellation

• In Event: 2241 - New Consumption Research: politics, class and networks

Abstract

It is popular to attribute the current state of American political polarization to the concept of cultural "echo chambers." When Americans self-segregate (or “sort”) themselves into distinct sets of cultural activities based on their preexisting biases, those biases are constantly reflected back and affirmed, like a self-perpetuating confirmation bias machine. But do these bubbles measurably exist? This paper applies innovative quantitative methods to a rich and rarely-used dataset: the National Consumer Survey. Like ancient navigators drawing lines between stars in the night sky, I attempt to map “constellations” among the myriad nodes of consumer products, to identify patterns in the ways that political partisans sort themselves culturally.

Author

• Nick Rogers, Stony Brook University