Emily Van Duyn, Associate Professor, Communication
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. Some estimates have as many as 5.4 million couples in the U.S. experiencing political difference with their partner. 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 a difference not only in policy preferences, but a difference in norms, values, and even realities. In turn, she considers the lessons cross-cutting relationships hold for how (and how not) to alleviate political polarization in the U.S.
Emily Van Duyn’s 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. Her work is concerned with the effects of social, geographic, and political polarization and how these phenomena threaten liberal democratic norms. Her work has been published in many journals, as well as featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
