Laptops and Politics II: Microtargeting and the Relationship between Collegiate Consumer Technology Choices and Parental Partisanship

All personal choices by individuals, what they drink, what kind of products they buy, what kind of candy they consume can reveal the type of political ideologies those individuals hold. “Campaigns have entered the era of „Big Data‟ - they target voters based on scraps of information they gather from unlikely places” (Wadhwa 2012). Campaigns utilize this available data to their advantage and are able to combine all of this information to learn about voters and what they like to increase their chances at getting elected. Extant studies of microtargeting and consumer behavior have indicated relationships between drink preference, candy preference (and other consumer choices) and political preferences. Such studies have revealed a link between Democrats and light-colored spirits and more moderate political thinkers and their choice Butter Fingers as their favorite candy. In spite of critiques of the usefulness of microtargeting (Hersh 2015) and earlier work by two of us (Woolf and Twombly 2014) finding little to no relationship between consumer electronics choices and partisanship or political preference, we extend the body of research by looking to the next level of purchaser. In the initial Woolf and Twombly (2014) study, the purchasing and political preferences of college freshmen were examined. The authors themselves, as well as conference discussants, noted that at the time of purchase the actual purchasers may well be the students‟ parents. In this study we examine that relationship; the one between the parental partisanship and purchase of electronic device. Yet, in rerunning the original tests with tests better suited to the data, we find support for the original hypothesis as well. The data is from the same survey of college freshmen entering a small liberal arts college in south central New York State in the fall of 2014. The survey included questions regarding the students‟ perceptions of their parents‟ political preferences. We still seek to determine if such consumer preferences tell us anything more about the differences, particularly in thought processes, between Democrats and Republicans, and can that knowledge aid in attempts to bridge our political divide?