Andres Reiljan

• European University Institute

This chapter reviews the existing knowledge on affective polarization in Europe. Various studies confirm that group-based political hostility is present all across the continent, as indicated by polarized feelings toward political parties, leaders and fellow citizens with different party (or other political) affiliations. The chapter presents the a...

Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective pola...

With this paper, we pay tribute to Peter Mair by looking back at the three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of the pan-European Voting Advice Application (VAA) EU Profiler/euandi – a project in which Peter Mair had a very crucial role in its early years. We describe the unique standing of the EU Profiler/euandi in the VAA landscape and take an analytical l...

This research note investigates the scope of regional variations in levels of affective polarization across Europe and contrasts it to national scores to highlight the theoretical and empirical interest of a disaggregated approach. Using all waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset, we compute an affective polarization sco...

Existing research on political parties’ policy positions has traditionally relied on expert surveys and/or party manifesto data. More recently, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have been increasingly used as an additional method for locating parties in the policy space, with a closer focus on concrete policy issues. In this manuscript, we examine...

Currently, very little is known about the individual level foundations of affective polarization outside the US context. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring the predictors of affective polarization in Sweden, using nationally representative survey data. From 2010 till the 2018 elections, the Swedish multiparty system was divided int...

This chapter gives an overview of party leadership selection in two major Estonian political parties since their inception in the early 1990s and an-alyses these processes within the boundaries of the framework proposed by Aylott and Bolin in the first chapter of this volume.

This data article provides a descriptive overview of the “EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009-2019)“ dataset and the data collection methods. The dataset compiles party position data from three consecutive pan-European Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), developed by the European University Institute for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 20...

Several scholars in the United States have recently addressed an increased partisan animosity between Democrats and Republicans, and have termed this phenomenon ‘affective polarisation’. This surge in partisan affective polarisation is perceived to be highly problematic, as it has been found to have a negative impact on the functioning of the party...

This study compares the spatial positioning of over 200 political parties across 28 European Union (EU) member states in two cross-national voting advice applications (VAAs) developed for the 2014 European elections: EUvox and euandi. We find that the two VAAs show highly similar results in terms of party positioning on the cultural liberal-conserv...