Replication Data for: Non-Political Identity Signals as Information Shortcuts: Evidence from Three Experiments

A rich literature has documented how voters navigate the complex information landscape by using heuristics, or “information shortcuts,” to help them make sense of the political world. Additionally, a budding line of research also argues that our current polarization crisis has extended beyond just the political and now even affects the non-political realm. We submit that voters may be using these non-political identity signals (e.g. a candidate driving a Toyota Prius or eating at Chick-Fil-A) as heuristics to make sense of the contemporary political era. Using three original survey experiments, we find that these non-political identity cues are indeed used by voters as partisan heuristics, but only in the absence of political (partisan and issue) informational cues. Furthermore, we also suppress the effect of partisan identification when we provide orthogonal non-political information. These findings show that non-political identity items can be used by citizens as information shortcuts to help citizens navigate the complicated political waters that surround them, but that their effect in light of other pieces of information is minimal.