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The Effects of Political Attitudes on Affective Polarization: Survey Evidence from 165 Elections
Abstract
How do individual-level political attitudes influence affective polarization on a global scale? This article contributes to the debate on the social distance of party affect by testing a set of hypotheses in 165 elections across the world. With a sample of over 170,000 voters, the results of multilevel mixed-effects regressions demonstrate that ideological radicalism, political knowledge, and external efficacy substantively affect how voters see the main political parties in electoral disputes taking place in 52 countries from 1996 to 2019. Satisfaction with democracy, however, is context-dependent; it positively influences affective polarization only when generalized democratic satisfaction is low. Furthermore, I show that these correlations remain stable regardless of the operationalization of affective polarization-that is, based on two dominant parties and weighted for multiparty competition. These findings provide robust inputs to the study of party preferences and social distance in a cross-national longitudinal perspective.
... 'Affective polarisation'individuals' positive attitudes towards their party/candidate and negative attitudes towards the 'opposite' sideis on the rise across many democracies (Iyengar et al., 2019). A growing scholarship seeks to understand the causes and consequences of affective polarisation around the globe (Guedes-Neto, 2023;Waldrop, 2021). Emerging research points to detrimental repercussions across several areas: From aggregate-level threats to democracy (Finkel et al., 2020), to elite level processes (Leonard et al., 2021), and individuals' preferences (Hobolt et al., 2024) and day-to-day lives (Iyengar et al., 2019). ...
As affective polarisation rises worldwide, so do concerns about how political disagreements affect social relationships, including families – a core building block of societies. The impact of political division on families has been a topic of interest for media outlets, but scholarship remains scarce. To contribute to this emerging debate, we ask: What factors increase the risk of election-driven family conflicts? Employing data from a national survey in Brazil, a highly polarised context, we find that the prevalence of election-driven family conflicts is low, affecting roughly only 3.5% of respondents. As our theory-development exercise reveals, even if not widely spread, election-driven family conflicts disproportionately affect one group: Lesbian, gay, and bisexual respondents. Our study adds to a growing scholarship on the detrimental impacts of polarised elections on the LGBTQI+ community – and reinforces the need for further research to investigate the heterogeneous effects of emerging political dynamics on marginalised groups.
... Accordingly, the more radical the degree of emotional and evaluative hostility of political actors toward each other, the greater the degree of affective polarization. 33 The United States, in turn, remains a deeply divided country, largely influenced by the increased partisanship and anti-opponent hostility seen in most political players. The result of this kind of centrifugal processes has become the so-called "culture wars" -proxy conflicts in the political arena, affecting a variety of disagreements, ranging from issues related to racial contradictions, historical heritage, problems of police violence and ending with social values promoted in video games. ...
... In recent years, a growing number of studies have explored affective polarization in multiparty systems around the globe (e.g. Boxell et al., 2022;Garzia, Ferreira da Silva and Maye 2023;Gidron, Adams & Horne 2020;Guedes-Neto 2022;Reiljan 2020;Torcal and Comellas 2022;Wagner 2021). Some of the studies on this topic show that, in multiparty contexts, citizens usually display positive feelings towards several parties and animosity towards another set of parties, conforming different affective blocs that tend to be related to ideological and social cleavages (e.g. ...
In multiparty contexts, we know that affective polarization tends to cluster in ideological blocs, although the factors driving this process are still quite unexplored. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap in the literature by exploring the capacity of ideological identity vis-à-vis issue-based ideology to polarize sentiments towards party voters into two opposing left-right blocs. Specifically, we provide empirical evidence that affective attachments to ideological labels increase the affective distance between ideological blocs to a greater extent than issue extremity and issue consistency. These bipolarizing effects of ideological identity persist even when the identity is inconsistent with issue-based ideology. Additionally, we show that bipolar affective polarization exerts little reverse influence on ideological identity. We support these arguments using an original survey from the TRI-POL project carried out in five multiparty systems: Argentina, Chile, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
Voters of governing parties are more satisfied with democracy than opposition voters, but the consequences of this winner-loser gap remain underexplored. We argue that electoral losers should be more supportive of referendums than electoral winners as representative democracy has failed electoral losers, whereas electoral winners aim to protect their party’s ability to govern without constraint. In addition, we theorize that affective polarization should strengthen this gap. Using cross-national survey data from thirteen European democracies, we find that electoral losers consistently show greater support for referendums than winners, and affective polarization amplifies this effect. Yet, the effect of affective polarization is solely attributed to a decrease in support for referendums among polarized election winners. These findings raise questions about the role of affective polarization in undermining the accountability mechanism between electoral winners and their parties. Concerns about electoral losers might be overstated and potentially overlook the democratic implications of electoral victory.
This article provides a systematic review of the literature on affective polarization, emphasizing its emotional, identity-based, and systemic dimensions across diverse political contexts. It examines the current state of research, revealing the phenomenon’s manifestations in both multiparty and two-party systems, and highlights key drivers such as identity dynamics, moral conviction, and media influences. The article identifies significant gaps in conceptual clarity and mitigation strategies, particularly concerning entrenched partisanship. Through the synthesis of various methodological approaches and the provision of a comparative perspective, this work emphasizes the implications of affective polarization on social trust, democratic governance, and political stability, thereby offering actionable insights for scholars and policymakers.
Scholars increasingly raise concerns about the alleged detrimental impact of affective polarization on citizens’ democratic attitudes. Yet, prior studies on the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support have yielded mixed results: Whereas some scholars report evidence that affective polarization erodes citizens’ support for democracy, others report null findings. In this research note, we posit that one relevant explanation for these mixed results is that the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support is not linear, but rather negatively curvilinear (i.e., an inverted U‐shape). Though extreme levels of affective polarization may harm citizens’ democratic commitments, a moderate amount of affective polarization can strengthen democratic support by heightening the political stakes and stimulating democratic involvement. Employing generalized additive modelling on data from the CNEP collected in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we show strong and robust support for this negatively curvilinear pattern. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics between affective polarization and democratic support, as well as for the recommended estimation strategies of future studies that aim to explore this relationship.
Affective polarization, a concept that originated in the USA, has increasingly been studied in Europe’s multi-party systems. This form of polarization refers to the extent to which party supporters dislike one another – or, more technically, to the difference between the positive feelings towards the supporters of one’s own political party and the negative feelings towards the supporters of other parties. Measuring this gap in Europe’s multi-party systems requires researchers to make various important decisions relating to conceptualization and measurement. Often, our focus could instead lie on assessing partisan hostility or negative party affect, which is easier to measure. While recent research on affective polarization in Europe has already taught USA lot, both about affective polarization and about political conflict in Europe, I nevertheless suggest that research in this field faces four challenges, namely developing better measures, more sophisticated theories, clearer accounts of affective polarization’s importance and successful ways of reducing negative party affect, if this is indeed desirable.
Este artigo tem como objetivo avaliar o efeito da ideologia sobre o voto em Bolsonaro na eleição presidencial de 2018. Nosso argumento é que, após um longo período de ação discreta sobre o comportamento político dos brasileiros, os fatores ideológicos voltaram a ter relevância. A partir de uma perspectiva contextualista, apresentamos indícios de que a reorganização da direita no parlamento, nas ruas e nos meios de comunicação e a oferta de uma candidatura de extrema direita na competição eleitoral criaram condições favoráveis para o alinhamento, no eleitorado, entre a ideologia e a escolha eleitoral em 2018. Os dados revelam que o brasileiro está mais ideologicamente orientado e confirmam o impacto da ideologia sobre o voto. Palavras-chave: ideologia; comportamento eleitoral; eleições 2018 Introdução A discussão sobre a relação entre ideologia e comportamento eleitoral tem uma longa tradição na ciência política, que remonta aos estudos seminais da escola de Michigan (Campbell et al., 1960; Converse, 2006a). Segundo esses estudos, o partidarismo é, exceto para a minoria de eleitores mais escolarizados e interessados por política, um tipo de identificação predominantemente afetiva, sendo, no limite, desprovido de conteúdo ideológico. A maioria dos eleitores seriam, então, ideologicamente inconsistentes. Desde então, reinou um pessimismo a respeito da capacidade de o eleitorado se orientar na política a partir de referências ideológicas (Kinder, 2006; Kinder e Kalmoe, 2017), agravado no caso das novas democracias (Bustikova e Zechmeister, 2017). No Brasil, diversos autores chegaram a conclusões semelhantes. Estudos desenvolvidos nas décadas de 1960, 1970 e 1980 (Cintra, 1968; Lamounier, 1980; Reis, 1978) mostraram a ausência de posições ideológicas em relação ao regime político na adesão das classes populares ao MDB. Estudos mais recentes têm identificado a compreensão
Over the past two decades, there has been a marked increase in partisan social polarization, leaving scholars in search of solutions to partisan conflict. The psychology of intergroup relations identifies empathy as one of the key mechanisms that reduces intergroup conflict, and some have suggested that a lack of empathy has contributed to partisan polarization. Yet, empathy may not always live up to this promise. We argue that, in practice, the experience of empathy is biased toward one’s ingroup and can actually exacerbate political polarization. First, using a large, national sample, we demonstrate that higher levels of dispositional empathic concern are associated with higher levels of affective polarization. Second, using an experimental design, we show that individuals high in empathic concern show greater partisan bias in evaluating contentious political events. Taken together, our results suggest that, contrary to popular views, higher levels of dispositional empathy actually facilitate partisan polarization.
This was a year of dramatic changes in Brazilian politics, as the established parties and actors that had dominated Brazilian politics for two decades were humbled. The year began with the administration of the extremely unpopular, lame duck President Michel Temer, and ended awaiting the inauguration of far-rightist President Jair Bolsonaro on January 1st, 2019. In this article, we describe and analyze the major events of 2018 in Brazilian politics. From the perspective of legislative and executive productivity, the year was largely uneventful, as President Michel Temer had spent most of his political capital mustering the legislative votes needed to avoid prosecution for corruption. Yet transformations were afoot in parties and civil society. Three of the country's most traditionally important parties – the PT, PMDB, and PSDB – were decimated, and the PT's icon and standard-bearer Lula da Silva imprisoned. Meanwhile, the right and far-right grew in importance, and Jair Bolsonaro won the presidency with the sponsorship of the previously extremely small Social Liberal Party (PSL).
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 system and even society at large. The aim of this article is to study the concept of affective polarisation in European party systems. It introduces the Affective Polarisation Index (API) that allows for measuring and comparing levels of affective polarisation also in multiparty systems. This novel measure is applied to 22 European democracies and the United States between 2005 and 2016. The results indicate that affective polarisation is acutely present in European party systems, as partisans are often extremely hostile towards competing parties. The most affectively polarised countries are in Central Eastern and Southern Europe where the degree of affective polarisation is notably higher than it is in the United States, while Northwestern European countries are more moderate in terms of partisan feelings. Further analysis reveals that affective polarisation is significantly correlated with ideological polarisation, but the relationship between the two appears to be conditional: in some Western European political systems ideological polarisation does not lead itself to strong interparty hostility, while in Central Eastern Europe a high degree of affective polarisation can be present even in ideologically centrist party structures. These findings validate the claim that ideological and affective polarisation are two distinct aspects of polarisation, and that the latter also merits additional attention.
The affective, identity based, and often negative nature of partisan polarization in the United States has been a subject of much scholarly attention. Applying insights from recent work in social psychology, we employ three novel large-N, broadly representative online surveys, fielded over the course of 4 years, across two presidential administrations, to examine the extent to which this brand of polarization features a willingness to apply dehumanizing metaphors to out-partisans. We begin by looking at two different measures of dehumanization (one subtle and one more direct). This uncovers striking, consistent observational evidence that many partisans dehumanize members of the opposing party. We examine the relationship between dehumanization and other key partisan intensity measures, finding that it is most closely related to extreme affective polarization. We also show that dehumanization “predicts” partisan motivated reasoning and is correlated with respondent worldview. Finally, we present a survey experiment offering causal leverage to examine openness to dehumanization in the processing of new information about misdeeds by in- and out-partisans. Participants were exposed to identical information about a melee at a gathering, with the partisanship of those involved randomly assigned. We find pronounced willingness by both Democrats and Republicans to dehumanize members of the out-party. These findings shed considerable light on the nature and depth of modern partisan polarization.
At least two theories have been offered that explain the rise of affective polarization. Some scholars, relying on social identity theory, argue that as the relevance of party identification increased, Americans became more likely to see their in-party in positive terms and the out-party in negative terms. Other scholars argue that affective polarization is a reaction to increasingly extreme political actors. This study seeks to arbitrate between these two theories of affective polarization through a survey experiment which asks respondents to rate candidates whose party (or lack thereof) and ideology (or lack thereof) is randomly assigned. In line with the policy-oriented view of affective polarization, respondents reacted far more strongly to ideology than party, especially if it was the ideology of the member of the out-party.
Using longitudinal research designs, we examine the role of politicization in the development of polarization. We conducted research in two different political and national contexts. In Study 1, we employ a panel sample of supporters of the Tea Party movement in the United States and examine the relationship between the strength of their politicization and their subsequent feelings towards conservatives versus liberals (affective polarization) as well as their subsequent perceptions of commonalities with conservatives versus liberals (cognitive polarization). In Study 2, we employ a panel sample of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community in Germany and examine the politicization–polarization link with regard to feelings towards, and perceived commonalities with, feminists versus supporters of a populist right‐wing political party. We obtained converging evidence suggesting that politicization promotes both affective and cognitive polarization. There was also some, but very limited evidence pointing to reverse causation. The danger of escalating polarization is discussed.
Despite substantial advances in political participation across Latin America, relevant data from the region reveals an important cross-national and temporal variation in voter turnout. Unlike existing region-specific explanations of voter turnout, but in line with research on advanced democracies, we show here that actual electoral mobilization in Latin America is linked to the ideological and programmatic shifts experienced by political elites since the 1990s. Specifically, we first suggest that by setting clear programmatic stances and differentiation polarization allows voters to better understand the costs and benefits of turning out to vote. When more public policy is at stake, elections become more consequential, and thus voters are more likely to turnout. Second, polarization facilitates the formation of party brands that structure the policy preferences of voters, easing their mobilization to the polls. Our results, using elite survey data and electoral turnout for eighteen Latin American countries during the 1993–2010 period, provide strong statistical support for the elite polarization-turnout hypothesis and remain robust to different specifications of the model. Substantially, an increase in one standard deviation in elite polarization increases turnout – measured as a percentage of registered voters – by about 7 percentage points. This effect increases to 9 percentage points when turnout is measured as a percentage of the voting age population.
This article analyses the dramatic electoral decline of German social democracy since 2003. It argues that the SPD's decision, under the leadership of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to engage in welfare state retrenchment and labour market deregulation during the ‘Hartz reforms’ (2003–05) demoralised the SPD electorate. The SPD subsequently lost half of its former electoral coalition, namely blue-collar voters and socially disadvantaged groups, while efforts to gain access to centrist and middle-class voters have failed to produce any compensating gains. While the SPD's decline from a large to a mid-sized party is part of a larger transformation of the German party system, no political recovery is possible for social democracy without a fundamental change of strategy, namely efforts to regain former voters by offering credible social welfare and redistributive policies. The SPD will not be able to delegate such policies in a ‘convoy model’ to other parties, such as the Left Party; nor will a modest ‘correction’ of the earlier course, such as has been attempted since 2009 under the leadership of current party chairman Sigmar Gabriel, be sufficient to recover lost electoral ground.
This paper examines the effects of our modern media environment on affective polarization. We conducted an experiment during the last month of the 2012 presidential election varying both the choice of media sources available about the major presidential candidates, and the tone of political advertisements presented to subjects. We posit that voters in a high-choice, ideologically-diverse media environment will exhibit greater affective polarization than those in a “mainstream” ideologically neutral environment. We also hypothesize that subjects who are exposed to negative rather than positive political advertisements will show increased affective polarization. We provide causal evidence that the combination of a high-choice ideologically diverse media environment and exposure to negative political ads, significantly increases affective polarization. We also find that both overall information search and selective exposure to information are influenced by our experimental manipulations, with the greatest amount of search, and the most biased search, conducted by Romney supporters in the Negative Ads, Diverse Media condition.
Scholars have reached mixed conclusions about the implications of increased political polarization for citizen decision-making. In this paper, we argue that citizens respond to ideological divergence with heightened affective polarization. Using a survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens, we find that increased ideological differences between political figures produce increasingly polarized affective evaluations, and that these differences are especially large among respondents with stronger ideological commitments and higher levels of political interest. We provide further support for these findings in an observational study of citizens’ evaluations of the U.S. Senators from their state. We also find that the polarizing effects of ideological differences can be largely mitigated with biographical information about the public officials, which suggests that the pernicious consequences of ideological polarization can be overcome by focusing on matters other than political disagreement.
The minimal effect theory of campaign studies stipulates that intense political competition during campaigns assures and reinforces the initial party choice of the electorate. We find that this reinforcement is two-fold. During the campaign, the party preference of the voters’ in-group party increases while the party preference of the voters’ out-group parties decreases. Voters’ preference for their most preferred party (MPP) increases during the election campaign, while their preference for their least liked party decreases during the campaign (LPP). Across parties voters experience an increase in their preference for their most preferred party and a decrease for their least liked party as the campaign progresses. These trends show that the political campaign polarizes the electorate by increasing the affective distance between in-group party and out-group party preferences, thereby resulting in stronger political polarization after the campaign than before the campaign. The data utilized in this study is a large six-wave panel-study of Danish voters’ party preferences during the Danish parliamentary election of 2011. Thus, the analysis provides evidence of the minimal effect theory and of political polarization within a multi-party context.
How does representative government function when public administration can reshape democracy? The traditional narrative of public administration balances the accountability of managers, a problem of control, with the need for effective administration, a problem of capability. The discretion modern governments give to administrators allows them to make tradeoffs among democratic values. This book challenges the traditional view with its argument that the democratic values of administration should complement the democratic values of the representative government within which they operate. Control, capability and value reinforcement can render public administration into democracy administered. This book offers a novel framework for empirically and normatively understanding how democratic values have, and should be, reinforced by public administration. Bertelli's theoretical framework provides a guide for managers and reformers alike to chart a path toward democracy administered.
American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization, i.e., partisans' resentment toward political opponents. We advance debates about America's partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the US over the past 25 years with affective polarization in 19 other western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans' dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly since the mid-1990s than in most other Western publics. We then show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high; when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity; and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions. Our findings situate American partisan resentment and hostility in comparative perspective, and illuminate correlates of affective polarization that are difficult to detect when examining the American case in isolation.
The distinction between a person’s ideological identity and their issue positions has come more clearly into focus in recent research. Scholars have pointed out a significant difference between identity-based and issue-based ideology in the American electorate. However, the affective and social effects of these separate elements of ideology have not been sufficiently explored. Drawing on a national sample collected by SSI and data from the 2016 ANES, this article finds that the identity-based elements of ideology are capable of driving heightened levels of affective polarization against outgroup ideologues, even at low levels of policy attitude extremity or constraint. These findings demonstrate how Americans can use ideological terms to disparage political opponents without necessarily holding constrained sets of policy attitudes.
In this article we analyze the effects of election salience on affective polarization. Campaigns and elections epitomize the moment of maximum political conflict, information spread, mobilization, and activation of political identities and predispositions. We therefore expect that affective polarization will be higher just after an election has taken place. By the same token, as elections lose salience, affective polarization will diminish. We analyze this question using CSES data from 99 post-electoral surveys conducted in 42 countries between 1996 and 2016. Our identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of survey interviews with respect to the election day as an exogenous measure of election salience. The empirical findings indicate that as elections lose salience affective polarization declines. The article further contributes to the debate on the origins of affective polarization by exploring two mechanisms that may account for this relationship: changes in ideological polarization and in the intensity of party identification. Both are relevant mediators, with ideological polarization seemingly playing a more important role.
Affective polarization captures the extent to which citizens feel sympathy towards partisan in-groups and antagonism towards partisan out-groups. This is comparatively easy to assess in two-party systems, but capturing the pattern of affect towards multiple parties is more complex in multiparty systems. This article first discusses these challenges and then presents different ways of measuring individual-level affective polarization using like-dislike scores, a widespread measure of party sympathy. Using data for 51 countries and 166 elections from five modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I then show that affective polarization adds to existing concepts as a way of understanding political participation and democratic orientations. Studying affective polarization outside the US could therefore have important consequences for our understanding of citizen perceptions of politics as well as citizen behaviour, but we need the appropriate measures to do so.
Electoral accountability requires that voters have the ability to constrain the incumbent government’s policy-making power. We express the necessary conditions for this claim as an accountability identity in which the electoral system and the party system interact to shape the accountability of parliamentary governments. Data from 400 parliamentary elections between 1948 and 2012 show that electoral accountability is contingent on the party system’s bipolarity, for example, with parties arrayed in two distinct blocs. Proportional electoral systems achieve accountability as well as majoritarian ones when bipolarity is strong but not when it is weak. This is because bipolarity decreases the number of connected coalitions that incumbent parties can join to preserve their policy-making power. Our results underscore the limitations that party systems place on electoral reform and the benefits that bipolarity offers for clarifying voters’ choices and intensifying electoral competition.
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House. Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.
A well-functioning democracy requires a degree of mutual respect and a willingness to talk across political divides. Yet numerous studies have shown that many electorates are polarized along partisan lines, with animosity towards the partisan out-group. In this article, we further develop the idea of affective polarization, not by partisanship, but instead by identification with opinion-based groups. Examining social identities formed during Britain’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, we use surveys and experiments to measure the intensity of partisan and Brexit-related affective polarization. The results show that Brexit identities are prevalent, felt to be personally important, and cut across traditional party lines. These identities generate affective polarization as intense as that of partisanship in terms of stereotyping, prejudice, and various evaluative biases, convincingly demonstrating that affective polarization can emerge from identities beyond partisanship.
We explore how partisan affect shapes citizens' views of party ideology and political competition. We argue that voters' affective ties to parties (both positive and negative) lead them to perceive the ideological positions of those parties as more extreme. Further, when voters are "affectively polarized," i.e., they strongly like some parties and dislike others, they are more likely to view politics as high stakes competition, where ideological polarization is rampant, participation is crucial, and electoral outcomes are highly consequential. Using cross-national survey data covering 43 elections in 34 countries, we show that partisan affect indeed impacts perceptions of party ideology and that affective polarization alters beliefs about the nature of political competition.
While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines. This phenomenon of animosity between the parties is known as affective polarization. We trace its origins to the power of partisanship as a social identity, and explain the factors that intensify partisan animus. We also explore the consequences of affective polarization, highlighting how partisan affect influences attitudes and behaviors well outside the political sphere. Finally, we discuss strategies that might mitigate partisan discord and conclude with suggestions for future work. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 22 is May 11, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Recent scholarship suggests that American partisans dislike other party members so much that partisanship has become the main social divide in modern politics. We argue that at least one measure of this “affective polarization” conflates a dislike for members of the other party with a dislike for partisanship in general. The measure asks people how they feel about their child marrying someone from another party. What seems like negative affect toward the other party is, in fact, negative affect toward partisans from either side of the aisle and political discussion in general. Relying on two national experiments, we demonstrate that although some Americans are politically polarized, more simply want to avoid talking about politics. In fact, many people do not want their child to marry someone from their own party if that hypothetical in-law were to discuss politics frequently. Supplementary analyses using ANES feeling thermometers show that inparty feeling thermometer ratings have decreased in recent years among weak and leaning partisans. As a result, the feeling thermometer results confirm the conclusion from the experiments. Polarization is a phenomenon concentrated in the one-third of Americans who consider themselves strong partisans. More individuals are averse to partisan politics. The analyses demonstrate how affective polarization exists alongside weakening partisan identities. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Elites in the U.S. have become increasingly polarized over the past several decades. More recently, the degree to which partisans view the opposing party more negatively than their own — a phenomenon called affective, or social, polarization — has increased. How does elite polarization inform affective polarization? We argue that partisans respond to increasing levels of elite polarization by expressing higher levels of affective polarization, i.e. more negative evaluations of the opposing party relative to their own. Motivated reasoning further encourages partisans to blame the opposing party more than their own. Results from surveys collected from 1978 through 2016 provide strong support for our theory. We further find that increasing levels of political interest magnify the relationship between elite and affective polarization. These results produce important implications for the health of democratic systems experiencing high levels of elite polarization.
Partisanship continues to divide Americans. Using data from the American National Election Study, as well as implicit attitude tests, we argue that Americans’ partisan identity has become highly salient. Partisans have become more negative towards the opposing party on both explicit and implicit measures, and these biases spill over into their everyday decisions. Partisanship has become one of Americans’ most salient social identities.
The alignment between partisan and other social identities has generated a rift between Democrats and Republicans that is deeper than any seen in recent American history. Without the cross-cutting identities that have traditionally stabilized the American two-party system, partisans in the American electorate are now seeing each other through prejudiced and intolerant eyes. In this article, partisan social divisions are examined in the 2016 electorate, with an eye to the co-occurrence between these social divisions and contemporaneous resistance to compromise and intolerance of social outgroups. In particular, as Republicans and Democrats grow more socially distinct, they like outgroups less and privilege victory over the national greater good. This effect is particularly visible among Republicans, whose social makeup is particularly homogeneous, even in comparison with Democrats. Some potential solutions are briefly addressed.
What drives affective polarization in American politics? One common argument is that Democrats and Republicans are deeply polarized today because they are psychologically different'motivated by diametrically opposed and clashing worldviews. This paper argues that the same psychological motivation'authoritarianism'is positively related to partisan extremism among both Republicans and Democrats. Across four studies, this paper shows that authoritarianism is associated with strong partisanship and heightened affective polarization among both Republicans and Democrats. Thus, strong Republicans and Democrats are psychologically similar, at least with respect to authoritarianism. As authoritarianism provides an indicator of underlying needs to belong, these findings support a view of mass polarization as nonsubstantive and group-centric, not driven by competing ideological values or clashing psychological worldviews. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.
This study extends the boundary conditions of the work on media effects on polarization by (1) examining whether exposure to news coverage about a contentious political issue polarizes attitudes, especially among the already-polarized citizens; (2) analyzing "easy" and "hard" dimensions of EU attitudes; and (3) offering causal and generalizable evidence in a non-US context. Individual-level data from a representative four-wave panel survey are matched with coded content data on the amount of coverage about the EU in numerous news outlets. Results show that strongly opinionated citizens exposed to news about the EU polarize following exposure, and that the "easy" dimensions of EU attitudes polarize more than the "hard" attitude dimensions. Moreover, polarization emerges among strong EU supporters and opponents alike. These results extend the polarization literature to naturalistic settings and suggest that the polarizing effects of the media may be greater than previously acknowledged. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.
Partisan bias and hostility have increased substantially over the last few decades in the American electorate, and previous work shows that partisan strength and sorting help drive this trend. Drawing on insights from moral psychology, however, we posit that partisan moral convictions heighten affective polarization beyond the effects of partisanship, increasing partisan animosity and copartisan favoritism. Testing this theory using data from two national samples and novel measures of affective polarization in everyday life, we find that people who tend to moralize politics display more partisan bias, distance and hostility, irrespective of partisan strength. These results shed light on a different moral divide that separates the American public and raise key normative questions about moral conviction and electoral politics.
Over the last few decades, the American public has become more strongly partisan, affectively polarized, and sorted (i.e., aligned their partisanship with their policy preferences). This article presents a theory of partisanship in contemporary American politics as rooted in “the prejudiced personality”: need for closure. Based on uncertainty-identity theory and the theory of groups as epistemic providers, I argue that today's polarized parties are more appealing to individuals high in the need for closure, causing them to (1) identify strongly with their party, (2) to be intolerant of members of the opposing party, and (3) to conform to partisan authorities (i.e., to sort). The current article examines both observational and experimental data in assessing the effects of need for closure on partisan strength, affective polarization, and sorting. I conclude by discussing the normative implications of a mass public driven not by ideology or worldviews but by a group-centric and prejudiced cognitive style.
“Social sorting” is a concept used by Mason (2016) to explain the process by which individuals' social identities grow increasingly aligned with a partisan identity, reducing social cross-pressures on political behavior. Roccas and Brewer (2002) have found that individuals who feel fewer cross-pressures more strongly identify with their ingroups and are less tolerant of outgroups. Accordingly, we create “objective” and “subjective” measures of social sorting to help identify the mechanism by which individual partisans connect social sorting to partisanship in the CCES and a nonprobability Internet sample. As racial, religious, and ideological identities have cumulatively moved into greater alignment with Democratic and Republican identities in recent decades, American partisans have grown increasingly identified with their parties due to the psychological effects of identity alignment captured in objective and subjective sorting mechanisms. However, we find that this effect is more powerful among Republicans than among Democrats, due to the general social homogeneity of the Republican party. Contrary to the assessments of modern political punditry, Republicans are more susceptible to identity-based politics.
There is widespread evidence that individuals select information that supports their convictions and worldviews. This behavior yields the formation of echo chambers – environments in which an individual’s own political beliefs are repeated and amplified and dissenting opinions are screened out. Recent research demonstrates that social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter can facilitate this selection into homogenous networks. Using data from a representative nation-wide online survey, we consider the degree to which respondents’ social media networks resemble virtual echo chambers. We then analyze the effect of these social media echo chambers on satisfaction with democracy among Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections. Our findings reveal that virtual echo chambers boost democratic satisfaction among Republicans but they do not have an effect on system support by self-identified Democrats. Our paper therefore adds to a growing literature linking online behaviors to mass attitudes about politics.
Using evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Spain, it is demonstrated in this article that in integrated and divided nations alike, citizens are more strongly attached to political parties than to the social groups that the parties represent. In all four nations, partisans discriminate against their opponents to a degree that exceeds discrimination against members of religious, linguistic, ethnic or regional out-groups. This pattern holds even when social cleavages are intense and the basis for prolonged political conflict. Partisan animus is conditioned by ideological proximity; partisans are more distrusting of parties furthest from them in the ideological space. The effects of partisanship on trust are eroded when partisan and social ties collide. In closing, the article considers the reasons that give rise to the strength of ‘partyism’ in modern democracies.
Democratic and Republican partisans dislike the opposing party and its leaders far more than in the past. However, recent studies have argued that the rise of affective polarization in the electorate does not reflect growing policy or ideological differences between supporters of the two parties. According to this view, though Democratic and Republican elites are sharply divided along ideological lines, differences between the policy preferences of rank-and-file partisans remain modest. In this article, we show that there is a close connection between ideological and affective polarization. We present evidence from American National Election Studies surveys that opinions on social welfare issues have become increasingly consistent and divided along party lines and that social welfare ideology is now strongly related to feelings about the opposing party and its leaders. In addition, we present results from a survey experiment showing that ideological distance strongly influences feelings toward opposing party candidates and the party as a whole.
Germany,the bulwark of democracy,liberalism,and prosperity in Europe,owes its success to the stability of its party system that has kept centrist parties in power even as extremist parties on the right and left have taken hold elsewhere in Europe. The recent rise of the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has aroused concerns of a possible fragmentation of the party system that may threaten this consensus-based German model. But Germany's established parties can avoid this outcome by drawing on their past experiences tackling upswings in support for extremist challengers. The handling of European and refugee matters by the grand coalition of the Conservatives (CDU/CSU) and Social-Democrats (SPD),led by chancellor Angela Merkel,is likely to stabilize the German party system in the foreseeable future. At least for the coming years,the German center will hold. © 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press.
While political polarization may lead to gridlock and other negative policy outcomes, representation is likely to be enhanced when parties differentiate themselves from each other and make it easier for voters to see the connection between their personal ideologies and the electoral offerings. These differences between parties may be especially important in developing democracies, where voters are still learning parties’ priorities and where parties do not always emphasize issues when campaigning. To test this proposition, I develop a measure of elite polarization in Latin America since the early 1990s based on legislative surveys. Individual-level voting patterns from mass survey data confirm that the connection between voters’ self-placement on the left-right scale and their electoral choice is stronger in polarized party systems, even when controlling for other party system factors like the age of the party system or electoral fragmentation. This effect on voting behavior is not immediate, however, as voters take time to recognize the new cues being provided by the changing party system.
Political interest is a crucial precursor to political engagement, but little is known about how to stimulate greater interest. The article explores the role social motives have in generating interest. A laboratory experiment is used in which it is possible to manipulate beliefs about the social rewards of political engagement as well as external efficacy beliefs. Across two types of measures for political interest (self-reports and revealed preferences), connecting political engagement with social rewards led to substantial increases in political interest. Moreover, these effects were particularly strong among individuals with low levels of external efficacy. Ultimately, the data provide clear evidence that political interest can be positively stimulated with social rewards mobilisation techniques and that it is rooted in beliefs about the potential motives pursuable through politics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of these results for studies of political participation and mobilisation efforts.
Although anecdotal stories of political anger and enthusiasm appear to be provoked largely by issues such as gay marriage
or healthcare reform, social sorting is capable of playing a powerful role in driving anger and enthusiasm, undercutting the
perception that only practical disagreements are driving higher levels of political rancor. Because a highly aligned set of
social identities increases an individual’s perceived differences between groups, the emotions that result from group conflict
are likely to be heightened among well-sorted partisans. An experimental design in a national online survey manipulates political
threats and reassurances, including a threat to a party and a threat to distinct policy goals. Issue positions are found to
drive anger and enthusiasm in the presence of issue-based messages, but not all party-based messages. Partisan identity drives
anger and enthusiasm in the presence of party-based threats and reassurances, but not all issue-based messages. Social sorting,
however, drives anger and enthusiasm in response to all threats and reassurances, suggesting that well-sorted partisans are
more reliably emotionally reactive to political messages. Finally, these results are driven not by the most-sorted partisans,
but by the emotional dampening effect that occurs among those with the most cross-cutting identities. As social sorting increases
in the American electorate, the cooler heads inspired by cross-cutting identities are likely to be taking up a smaller portion
of the electorate.
Over the last two decades, as the number of media choices available to consumers has exploded, so too have worries over self-selection into media audiences. Some fear greater apathy, others heightened polarization. In this article, we shed light on the latter possibility. We identify the impact of access to broadband Internet on affective polarization by exploiting differences in broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations (ROW). We merge state-level regulation data with county-level broadband penetration data and a large-N sample of survey data from 2004 to 2008 and find that access to broadband Internet increases partisan hostility. The effect occurs in both years and is stable across levels of political interest. We also find that access to broadband Internet boosts partisans' consumption of partisan media, a likely cause of increased polarization. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LWED0F.
Multilevel data are structures that consist of multiple units of analysis, one nested within the other. Such data are becoming quite common in political science and provide numerous opportunities for theory testing and development. Unfortunately, this type of data typically generates a number of statistical problems, of which clustering is particularly important. To exploit the opportunities offered by multilevel data, and to solve the statistical problems inherent in them, special statistical techniques are required. In this article, we focus on a technique that has become popular in educational statistics and sociology - multilevel analysis. In multilevel analysis, researchers build models that capture the layered structure of multilevel data, and determine how layers interact and impact a dependent variable of interest. Our objective in this article is to introduce the logic and statistical theory behind multilevel models, to illustrate how such models can be applied fruitfully in political science, and to call attention to some of the pitfalls in multilevel analysis.
The surge in support for Eurosceptic parties in the 2014 Euroelections is investigated through a case study of Greece, a country which suffered a dramatic dealignment of its party system after the onset of the Eurozone crisis. The extent to which crisis-era developments represent a rupture is assessed by setting the recent rise of party Euroscepticism in its historical context. Eurobarometer data is used to investigate the relationship between party and popular Euroscepticism and an alternative domestically-driven explanation of causality. The conclusion is that the crisis era has been a game-changer in attitudes towards European integration. The rising vote for Eurosceptic parties is not simply a side-effect of domestic protest. Instead the EU has become a significant electoral target.
Germany came relatively unscathed through the economic turbulence of recent years. For some observers, Germany is the biggest beneficiary of the Eurozone and the winner of the crisis. This begs the question of why, at the height of Germany’s post-war European influence, have an increasing number of Germans withdrawn their support from the European project? The Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) is Germany’s first Eurosceptic party to attract substantial electoral support in local, national and European elections. The article firstly presents a brief summary of the AfD’s European politics. It then traces the party’s ideological roots back to ordoliberal critiques of the Maastricht Treaty and argues that there was a deep scepticism towards European integration among Germany’s conservative elites well before the introduction of the Euro. The sudden surge in German Euroscepticism has to be understood within the context of broader cultural changes and a lack of political choice. An unprecedented moral panic about European bailouts and the European Central Bank’s monetary policy created a sense of emergency that paved the way for the AfD’s success.
In this study, we evaluate how voter polarization and the level of partisanship influence electoral outcomes. We show that when the level of partisanship is low, the polarization of voter preferences translates into popular support for extreme parties. In contrast, longstanding attachments to mainstream (moderate) parties dampen the relationship between voter polarization and support for extreme parties. The implication of these findings is that the lack of voter attachment to parties contributes to extreme party competition, while strong attachment can help reduce party extremism even if electorates are polarized.
Numerous studies conclude that countries in which citizens express higher levels of satisfaction with democracy also tend to display higher levels of voter turnout in national elections. Yet it is difficult to draw causal inferences from this positive cross-sectional relationship, because democracies feature many historical, cultural, and institutional differences that are not easily controlled for in cross-sectional comparisons. We apply an alternative, temporal approach to this issue by asking the question: Are over-time declines (increases) in aggregate levels of satisfaction within democracies associated with increases (declines) in levels of voter turnout within these democracies? Our temporal analysis of this relationship in 12 democracies over the period 1976–2011 reveals a pattern that is the opposite of that suggested by previous cross-sectional studies: namely, we find that over-time increases in citizens’ satisfaction with democracy are associated with significant decreases in voter turnout in national elections in these countries.