Abstract
The proposed project aims to study how political polarization manifests itself in the willingness of individuals to conduct economic transactions across vs. within the political divide.
The project will do so using a combination of a field experiment and a follow-up telephone survey. In the field experiment, the research team will post on a website for classified ads a large number of fictitious ads for used cars in different localities throughout the country. To signal the political orientation of the sellers, we will use bumper stickers to manipulate the photographs included in the ads. Specifically, using the stickers ads will be randomly assigned either: (a) a right-wing orientation; (b) a left-wing orientation; or (c) a neutral orientation (the ads in this “control” group will have no sticker). The research team will then collect for each ad several main outcome variables: the number of hits on the ad on the website, the number of incoming inquiries, and the number of unique phone numbers associated with these inquiries.
In the second step, the research team will use the telephone numbers included in the logs of incoming inquiries to contact all prospective buyers and solicit their participation in a survey. These prospective buyers will not be alerted to the fact that they took part in the field experiment. The survey's main goal is to collect information on buyers’ political orientations.
By comparing outcomes across the three types of ads (right-wing, left-wing, and neutral), the field experiment will reveal the direction and strength of political discrimination in this market. To shed light on the sources of discrimination, we will merge the results of the field experiment with data on the political orientation (and other characteristics) of the relevant localities and with the results of the follow-up survey and then study the association between patterns of discrimination and political orientation both at the locality level and at the individual level.