Hearts Divided: How Political Polarization Shapes Our Closest Connections

Emily Van Duyn (Associate Professor, University of Illinois) will be giving a research presentation, co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Political Psychology and the Minnesota Journalism Center.

Hearts Divided: How Political Polarization Shapes Our Closest Connections

Republicans and Democrats are likely to share the same neighborhood, race, religion, and political beliefs as their friends and family. Yet as so many of us witnessed during the pandemic the past few election cycles, “cross-cutting” relationships – those in which romantic partners hold different political beliefs – stressed and often broke apart marriages and families. With her new book, Hearts Divided: How Political Polarization Shapes Our Closest Connections, Van Duyn examines what happens when people hold different political views in intimate relationships. Through in-depth interviews with individuals in current cross-cutting relationships and those who have previously ended a cross-cutting relationship, along with survey data of politically similar and dissimilar romantic partners, she explores how partisans in cross-cutting relationships experience political difference—including how these differences relate to their media consumption, their political expression and behavior, and the political socialization of their children. In turn, she considers the lessons cross-cutting relationships hold for how (and how not) to alleviate political polarization in the U.S.

About Emily Van Duyn
Emily Van Duyn is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Illinois, Van Duyn earned her PhD in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Her research explores why people talk (or do not talk) about politics and the role of digital media in facilitating a space for community and political discourse. She tackles these questions using diverse methodologies, including surveys, experiments, interviews, and ethnography.