The Cultural Dimension of the Globalization Divide. Do Lifestyle Signals affect Cosmopolitans’ Willingness to interact?

Abstract In the context of the rise of right-wing populist parties in the past decades, many researchers have addressed the question of increasing social polarization and threats to social cohesion. In this article, we contribute to this discussion by looking at the cultural side of the globalization divide from the perspective of cleavage theory. More precisely, we ask if respondents interpret lifestyle characteristics as signals for the socio-political position of others and whether these attributions influence the willingness to interact socially. Based on data from a factorial survey experiment, we show that cosmopolitans categorize other persons based on different lifestyle characteristics and are more likely to interact with those who have a similar cosmopolitan lifestyle.