Millions of Co-purchases and Reviews Reveal the Spread of Polarization and Lifestyle Politics across Online Markets

Understand

Polarization in America has reached a high point as markets are also becoming polarized.

• Existing research, however, focuses on specific market segments and products and has not evaluated this trend's full breadth.
• If such fault lines do spread into other segments that are not explicitly political, it would indicate the presence of lifestyle politics -- when ideas and behaviors not inherently political become politically aligned through their connections with explicitly political things.
• We study the pervasiveness of polarization and lifestyle politics over different product segments in a diverse market and test the extent to which consumer- and platform-level network effects and morality may explain lifestyle politics.