We present novel data that allow us to directly measure revealed preferences for politically similar relationship partners in the domain of online dating. Disentangling choice homophily from these alternative mechanisms is important because it suggests that ameliorating partisan divisions may be difficult if self-segregation is intentional rather than incidental. But such research does not definitively tell us whether this pattern reflects political choice homophily-a preference for those who are politically similar-or is instead a side effect of attitude convergence, constrained partner markets, or partner choice on the basis of other factors that are correlated with shared political orientations. At the same time, there is long-standing evidence that social relationships, including marriages, are more politically homogenous than one would predict by chance (e.g., Alford et al. It is unclear, however, whether these survey responses predict people’s behaviors outside of such a research setting. For instance, survey evidence indicates that individuals do not want to be friends with, or have their children marry, members of the opposing party (Iyengar et al. Scholars argue that partisan loyalties extend beyond issue positions and disagreements over policy, bleeding into social interactions. The magnitude of the effect is comparable to that of educational homophily and half as large as racial homophily. We find that people evaluate potential dating partners more favorably and are more likely to reach out to them when they have similar political characteristics. Second, we analyzed behavioral data from a national online dating community. We first conducted a nationwide experiment in which we randomized political characteristics in dating profiles. Consequently, we leverage the domain of online dating. Is it because people prefer politically similar others, or is it attributable to confounding factors such as convergence, social structures, and sorting on nonpolitical characteristics? Addressing this question is challenging because we typically do not observe partners prior to relationship formation. Do people form relationships based upon political similarity? Past work has shown that social relationships are more politically similar than expected by chance, but the reason for this concordance is unclear.
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