Political Ideology and Racial Homogamy

What explains the relative persistence of racial homogamy in romantic relationships? One possibility is structural—these patterns reflect the fact that social interactions are already stratified along racial lines—while another attributes these patterns to individual-level preferences. We present novel evidence from an online dating community involving more than 250,000 people in the United States about the frequency with which individuals both express a preference for same-race romantic partners and act to choose same-race partners. Prior work suggests that political ideology is an important correlate of conservative attitudes about race in the United States, and we find that conservatives, including both men and women and Blacks and Whites, are much more likely than liberals to state a preference for same-race partners. Further, conservatives are not simply more selective in general; they are specifically selective with regard to race. Do these stated preferences predict real behaviors? In general, we find that stated preferences are a strong predictor of a behavioral preference for same-race partners, and that this pattern persists across ideological groups. At the same time, both men and women of all political persuasions act as if they prefer same-race relationships even when they claim not to. As a result, the gap between conservatives and liberals in revealed same-race preferences, while still substantial, is not as pronounced as their stated attitudes would suggest. We conclude by discussing some implications of our findings for the broader issues of racial homogamy and segregation. Introduction Although interracial marriages have been steadily increasing over time (Fu and Heaton 2008), racial homogamy—the disproportionate prevalence of same-race romantic partners (Fu and Heaton 2008; Schoen and Wooldredge 1989; Blackwell and Lichter 2004)—is a persistent phenomenon. Among all newlyweds in 2008, for example, only 9% of whites and 16% of blacks married someone whose race was different than their own (Passel, Wang, and Taylor 2010). Such racial homogamy is consequential both sociologically and economically. To the extent that information, resources, and opportunities are structured by one’s social network (Coleman 1988; Portes 1998), the homogeneity of marital and family ties is likely to affect both individual-level outcomes, such as educational achievement, occupation, and income (Campbell, Marsden, and Hurlbert 1986; Grodsky and Pager 2001), as well as collective phenomena, such as racial inequality, segregation, and polarization (Baldassarri and Bearman 2007). Population-level statistics indicate the extent of racial homogamy in society. They do not, however, reveal its underlying causes. In particular, there are at least two possible— and qualitatively different—contributing factors. First, relationship partners may be selected from a pool of racially similar candidates because of the preexisting homogeneity of an individual’s social environment (Feld 1981)—including their educational institution, profession, and friends. Second, individuals may simply prefer same-race relationships for reasons as diverse as religious beliefs, social or cultural expectations, a sense of shared identity, or race-related physical attributes. Although these two mechanisms, one structural and the other preference-based, are theoretically distinct, differentiating between them empirically can be problematic. As has been previously pointed out (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001), cross-sectional network data are equally consistent with either mechanism; and although recent work utilizing longitudinal network data has found that observed homophily on both race (Wimmer and Lewis 2010) and non-racial attributes (Kossinets and Watts