What a dating app can teach us about bridging language and political divides in Europe?
Why this paper matters for everyday politics
Most political life in Europe happens far from parliament buildings—in cafés, group chats, classrooms, and, increasingly, on dating apps.
A new article by the MultiPoD partner ETHOS’ team in Political Science Research & Methods places online dating under the political microscope and finds that partisan identity shapes who we choose to meet—but norms of tolerance shape it even more. In a realistic conjoint experiment with 3,000 UK participants, the authors show that a profile’s party label influences selection about as much as familiar criteria like appearance, while explicit openness to opposing views is an even stronger draw. They also uncover asymmetries: counter-stereotypic cues (e.g., surprising trait–party combinations) can soften bias for some groups and intensify it for others. Though fielded in the UK, the mechanisms—party tags as social heuristics, and tolerance as a bridge—travel well across Europe’s multi-party, socially diverse democracies.
From party tags to language tags: the MultiPoD link
MultiPoD studies how multilingual spaces affect political participation across Europe’s cities and regions. This dating-app evidence offers three analogues:
1. Identity signals vs. bridging norms.
A party label on a profile works like a language cue in a public forum: it’s a fast proxy for community, values, or status. The finding that “tolerance” outruns party suggests that signals of linguistic openness—“happy to switch languages,” visible translation affordances, or welcoming code-switching—could outweigh initial sorting by language.
2. Asymmetries are the rule, not the exception.
Just as political groups reacted differently to counter-stereotypic cues, we should expect majority and minority language communities to respond unevenly to the same design nudges. That cautions against one-size-fits-all interventions: what bridges divides in, say, bilingual Brussels may backfire in Catalonia or South Tyrol.
3. Design shapes first contact.
The study built realistic profiles (photos, correlated traits, political cues) to mirror actual platforms; design choices determined which signals were salient. In our multilingual forums, interface features—default translation prompts, badges for cross-language helpers, or prompts that spotlight shared local issues before language—can similarly prime bridging rather than sorting.
Implications for MultiPoD practice
- Measure openness, not just identity. Alongside “who speaks what,” we are also going to track willingness to engage across languages; the dating results imply it can be a stronger predictor of cross-group interaction than identity alone.
- Prototype visible “bridging signals.” Test opt-in badges such as “EN/FR friendly,” “OK with code-switching,” or “Will translate summaries,” and A/B-test whether they raise cross-language replies.
- Design for the first message. Seed early prompts around shared problems (housing, transport, childcare) with inline translation; like “tolerance” on profiles, early norms can steer the whole conversation arc.
Bottom line
If tolerance can trump tribe when we decide whom to meet for coffee, it can also widen who speaks—and is heard—in multilingual civic spaces. For MultiPoD, the lesson is practical and hopeful: make openness easy, visible, and rewarded, and you expand the circle of participation across Europe’s languages and parties.
Read the paper: “Sleeping with the enemy: partisanship and tolerance in online dating”, Political Science Research & Methods.