Affective Polarization and Long-Term Partnership

Last registered on May 11, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Affective Polarization and Long-Term Partnership
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0018541
Initial registration date
May 03, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
May 11, 2026, 7:59 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country
United States of America
Region

Primary Investigator

Name
Jaemin Woo
Affiliation
Brown University
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Camilla Adams
PI Affiliation
Brown University
Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-05-04
End date
2026-12-31
Keywords
Electoral, Gender, Welfare
Additional Keywords
affective polarization, partisan aversion, discrete choice experiment, willingness to pay, transferable utility matching, Choo-Siow, marriage market
JEL code(s)
D10, J12, J16, D72
Secondary IDs
AsPredicted #288515; Brown IRB STUDY00000970
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
We study how partisan aversion shapes long-term partnership formation in the United States. We field a discrete choice experiment on approximately 1,200 partisans aged 25-45 in which party identity, education, income, attractiveness, religiosity, and family plans vary independently across hypothetical partner profiles. The experiment measures willingness to pay for each attribute, with primary focus on cross-party avoidance. We embed the experimentally identified preferences in a transferable-utility matching model following Choo and Siow (2006), calibrated to observed population type masses and couple shares. The experimental design has two waves. Wave 1 fields profiles drawn from uniform marginals over each attribute. Wave 2 fields profiles selected per task by Bayesian adaptive design, using the Wave 1 hierarchical Bayes posterior as the Wave 2 prior. We use the calibrated model to compute counterfactual singlehood rates and cross-party couple shares under (i) removing partisan aversion and (ii) rebalancing partisan composition within gender × education cells.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Adams, Camilla and Jaemin Woo. 2026. "Affective Polarization and Long-Term Partnership." AEA RCT Registry. May 11. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.18541-1.0
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
See experimental design.
Intervention Start Date
2026-05-04
Intervention End Date
2026-09-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
1. Willingness to pay for cross-party avoidance, expressed in USD of partner annual income, estimated separately for the eight cells defined by gender × party × education at the BA threshold.
2. Counterfactual change in the singlehood rate when partisan aversion is removed, relative to baseline equilibrium.
3. Counterfactual change in the cross-party couple share when partisan aversion is removed, relative to baseline equilibrium.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Outcome 1 is estimated from the discrete choice experiment. Outcomes 2 and 3 are computed from the matching model. See Experimental Design.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
1. Willingness to pay for the remaining attributes (education, attractiveness, religiosity, family plans).
2. Counterfactual change in singlehood and cross-party couple share when partisan composition is equalized within each gender × education cell.
3. Heterogeneity in willingness to pay across self-reported relationship status, religion, and family plans.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Outcome 1 reports the full vector of trait coefficients for completeness and benchmarking against prior literature. Outcome 2 sets the Democrat and Republican shares to 50/50 within each gender × education cell (preserving total mass per cell) and re-solves the matching equilibrium. Outcome 3 estimates separate cell-level coefficients for the relevant subgroups, conditional on cell sample sizes.

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We use a discrete choice experiment to estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) for partner attributes among US adults aged 25-45 recruited through Prolific. We seek to estimate WTP for cross-party partnership separately by gender, party, and education at the BA threshold. We embed the estimated preferences in a transferable-utility matching model and compute counterfactual singlehood and cross-party couple shares.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization is performed by computer. In Wave 1, both forced-choice and accept-or-reject task designs are drawn at random over the design space. In Wave 2, both blocks use a Bayesian adaptive algorithm (BACE) that selects each task to maximize expected mutual information about respondent-specific preference parameters given the running posterior. The display order of the six attributes within a profile is randomized at the respondent level. Block order is fixed (forced choice first, accept-or-reject second).
Randomization Unit
Individual.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
NA
Sample size: planned number of observations
~1,200 respondents
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
~300 respondents in each of four cells defined by gender × education at the BA threshold.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Not applicable. The objective is to estimate willingness-to-pay magnitudes for partner attributes.
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Brown University Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2025-10-22
IRB Approval Number
STUDY00000970
Analysis Plan