Political Ideology and Store Patronage

People’s political ideology — democrat vs. republican, or liberal vs. conservative — is not simply a matter of preference over different policy positions, rather they reflect deep-seated differences in personality traits, cognitive processing styles and psychological values. As a result, these ideological leanings are likely to be predictive of people’s preferences and behaviors in a range of apolitical contexts. In this study, we investigate the association between political ideology and two key dimensions of households' store patronage behaviors — store format preference and store loyalty trait. We measure store patronage behaviors of over 23,000 U.S. households from Nielsen panel data. We use county-level vote shares of the Republican and Democratic parties across three U.S. Presidential elections to measure political ideology. We find strong and systematic association between political ideology and households’ store patronage behaviors. In addition, we find that demographics and locational characteristics play a significant role in determining households’ store patronage behaviors.