The cliché that liberals shop at Trader Joe’s, while conservatives prefer Walmart, is no doubt overstated. But where would the perception come from?

Newly published research provides a compelling answer: brand-name products. Conservatives gravitate toward them, and Walmart, unlike Trader Joe’s, is packed with them.

That provocative conclusion can be drawn from a study in the journal Psychological Science. A research team led by Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business has discovered a relationship between voting behavior, high levels of religiosity, and “seemingly inconsequential product choices.”

They argue that your decision to vote for a certain candidate, and purchase a particular brand of detergent, springs from the same basic impulse:

“Our empirical results, based on extensive field data, provide strong evidence that more conservative ideology is associated with higher reliance on established national brands (as opposed to generics) and a slower uptake of new products.”

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Listed in eighth place in the CBI top 25 country brands this year, the U.S. has fallen eight places since 2009, when the U.S. took the top spot and FutureBrand found some truth in the jingoistic chant "USA, number one." The CBI Index this year found Switzerland to have the top country brand, while the U.K.'s brand enjoyed a two-place leap to eleventh place, likely due to London Olympics attention.

In a release, FutureBrand explained how country brand perception is measured for their annual report:

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