Abstract
“Lifestyle politics” suggests that political and ideological opinions are strongly connected to our consumption choices, music and food taste, cultural preferences, and other aspects of our daily lives. With the growing political polarization this idea has become all the more relevant to a wide range of social scientists. Empirical research in this domain, however, is confronted with an impractical challenge; this type of detailed information on people’s lifestyle is very difficult to operationalize, and extremely time consuming and costly to query in a survey. A potential valuable alternative data source to capture these values and lifestyle choices is social media data. In this study, we explore the value of Facebook “like” data to complement traditional survey data to study lifestyle politics. We collect a unique dataset of Facebook likes and survey data of more than 6500 participants in Belgium, a fragmented multi-party system. Based on both types of data, we infer the political and ideological preference of our respondents. The results indicate that non-political Facebook likes are indicative of political preference and are useful to describe voters in terms of common interests, cultural preferences, and lifestyle features. This shows that social media data can be a valuable complement to traditional survey data to study lifestyle politics.
Highlights
Voting is central to the democratic process and the well-functioning of our political system
To classical variables such as socio-demographics and issue preferences, our personal values and lifestyle choices correlate with our political preferences
The fact that Facebook likes achieve high predictive accuracy shows that they are capturing additional information, which we argue are related to values and lifestyle
Summary
Voting is central to the democratic process and the well-functioning of our political system. Voting behavior and party preference are well-studied by a broad range of social scientists who try to explain how and why decisions are made by the electorate. Electoral pioneers from the Michigan and Columbia school both stressed the importance of these long-term factors in explaining voting behavior [1, 2]. In the US context party identity was key, while in many European countries, more religious and class-based cleavages were driving voters [3]. As these stable factors started losing importance, scholars gradually started devoting more attention to short-term factors such as concrete issues and popular candidates [4, 5]. Studies showed that a better educated electorate became more volatile and more affected by issue priorities [6] and candidate evaluations [7]
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