"Libertarians were most likely to use Ashley Madison ... they may “flee to sickness, in order to find with its help a surrogate satisfaction”

Uh-huh, salacious.

American Political‑Party Affiliation as a Predictor of Usage of an Adultery Website

Abstract 

The more politically conservative Americans are, the more restrictive their sexual attitudes are. A natural follow-up question is how this difference in attitudes relates to actual behavior. But self-reports of sexual behavior may be compromised by a social desirability bias that is influenced by the very sexual attitudes at issue. We employed a non-self-reported measure of sexual behavior: usage of the adultery-focused dating website Ashley Madison. Linking an August 2015 leak of user data from Ashley Madison to 2012 voter registration rolls from five U.S. states, we found 80,000 matches between 200,000 Ashley Madison user accounts and 50 million voters. According to simple rates in the sample, and also to predictively validated regression models controlling for state, gender, and age, we found that Democrats were least likely to use Ashley Madison, Libertarians were most likely, and Republicans, Greens, and unaffiliated voters were in between. Our results provide support for theories arguing that people with stricter sexual attitudes are paradoxically more likely to engage in deviant sexual behavior.

"Why might stricter attitudes be associated with less restricted behavior Freud (1910) popularized the idea that when people refuse to act on sexual urges, possibly unconscious ones, out of ethical concerns or other restraints of civilization, they may “flee to sickness, in order to find with its help a surrogate satisfaction” (p. 213). According to Freud, the “surrogate satisfaction” could be neurotic behavior with no apparent sexual significance, but it could also be sexual “perversion.” Freud also argued for a hydraulic model of male sexuality in which going without ejaculation created “pressure on the walls of the seminal vesicles” (quoted in Apfelbaum, 1984). However, empirical evidence that unexpressed sexual desire builds up over time is weak at best (see Arfer, 2016, for a review). To return to conservatives in particular, some investigators have even taken sexual repression (Sidanius, 1985) or sexual preoccupation (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) to be a defining feature of the right-wing personality."

Discussion

Using two analytic strategies, one simple and one complex, we found that a registered voter’s probability of spending money on AM for something other than deleting their account—hence, apparently intending to cheat in a romantic relationship—varied substantially based on their political party. Libertarians were most likely to use AM, Democrats were least likely, and Republicans, Greens, and unaffiliated voters were in between. This pattern mostly coincides with political conservatism, with members of more conservative or more right-wing parties using AM more often.

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