Millions of Co-purchases and Reviews Reveal the Spread of Polarization
and Lifestyle Politics across Online Markets
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06556v1
- Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2022 18:16:37 GMT
- Title: Millions of Co-purchases and Reviews Reveal the Spread of Polarization
and Lifestyle Politics across Online Markets
- Authors: Alexander Ruch, Ari Decter-Frain, Raghav Batra
- Abstract summary: We study the pervasiveness of polarization and lifestyle politics over different product segments in a diverse market.
We sample 234.6 million relations among 21.8 million market entities to find product categories that are politically relevant, aligned, and polarized.
Cultural products are 4 times more polarized than any other segment.
- Score: 68.8204255655161
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- Abstract: 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. Specifically, using graph and language data
from Amazon (82.5M reviews of 9.5M products and product and category metadata
from 1996-2014), we sample 234.6 million relations among 21.8 million market
entities to find product categories that are most politically relevant,
aligned, and polarized. We then extract moral values present in reviews' text
and use these data and other reviewer-, product-, and category-level data to
test whether individual- and platform- level network factors explain lifestyle
politics better than products' implicit morality. We find pervasive lifestyle
politics. Cultural products are 4 times more polarized than any other segment,
products' political attributes have up to 3.7 times larger associations with
lifestyle politics than author-level covariates, and morality has statistically
significant but relatively small correlations with lifestyle politics.
Examining lifestyle politics in these contexts helps us better understand the
extent and root of partisan differences, why Americans may be so polarized, and
how this polarization affects market systems.
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