It’s the Homophily, Stupid: How Apolitical Similarities Affect Political Conversations. A Cross-Country Dynamic Parallel Experiment

Political conversations are crucial for democracy, yet the mechanisms underlying the selection of conversation partners remain unclear. This paper investigates how observing others’ apolitical characteristics – such as their gender, age, personality, or lifestyle choices – influences people’s decision to engage in political conversations, providing evidence supporting the “incidental model” of political conversations (Minozzi et al., 2020). We introduce the “dynamic parallel conjoint design” and field it in the Czech Republic, France, Italy, and Sweden. Our findings indicate that observing apolitical similarities with conjoint profiles consistently increases the likelihood of engaging in political conversation. While some studies suggest that observing apolitical similarities informs expectations about others’ political ideologies, which are then used to select conversation partners, our results show that political conversations are driven by the propensity to interact with people similar in apolitical respects, regardless of ideological expectations. Our study contributes to debates on political conversation dynamics and introduces an innovative methodological approach to studying implicit mediation in political behavior.