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WORKING PAPER
MAY 2022
Reducing Pernicious Polarization:
A Comparative Historical Analysis
of Depolarization
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel
Reducing Pernicious Polarization:
A Comparative Historical Analysis
of Depolarization
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel
© 2022 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved.
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Contents
Summary 1
Introduction 3
The Problem of Polarization and Its Consequences
for Democracy 4
Global Patterns in Polarization 8
Identifying and Classifying Depolarization Episodes 12
Gauging the Sustainability of Depolarization Episodes 16
Conclusions 23
Appendix A: List of All Depolarization Episodes (1900–2020) 25
Appendix B: List of All Depolarization Episodes by
Context Group 29
Appendix C: Features and Limitations of the Data 35
About the Authors 39
Acknowledgments 40
Notes 41
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 45
1
1
Summary
e global rise of political polarization has fueled concerns about its detrimental impact
on politics and society. From an increase in political violence to a decrease in the quality of
democracy and governance, the threats posed by pernicious polarization—the division of
society into two mutually antagonistic political camps—are diverse and acute. Determining
how to reduce these tensions is therefore an urgent challenge. Using data on political
polarization from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute data set, this working paper
assesses various instances of depolarization around the globe since 1900 and analyzes their
long-term sustainability.
Polarization is increasing worldwide. When broken down by region, V-Dem data suggest
that every region except Oceania has seen polarization levels rise since 2005. Africa has had
the smallest increase during this period, although it has long had high levels of polarization.
Rising polarization in Europe is being driven by deepening political divisions in Eastern and
Central Europe, Southern Europe, and the Balkans. In the Western Hemisphere, the largest
democracies—Brazil, Mexico, and the United States—are all experiencing extreme levels of
polarization. East Asia’s polarization levels have traditionally been low, though increasing
political tensions in places like South Korea and Taiwan are driving up the region’s score.
And in South Asia, India’s polarization has skyrocketed since 2014.
To better understand the various paths by which polarized societies might overcome or
reduce their political divisions, this working paper examines perniciously polarized countries
that have successfully depolarized, at least for a time. rough a quantitative analysis of the
V-Dem data set, this study identies 105 episodes from 1900 to 2020 where countries were
2 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
able to reduce polarization from pernicious levels for at least ve years. ese 105 episodes
represent roughly half of the total episodes of pernicious polarization during the time period,
thus indicating a fairly robust capacity of countries to depolarize. If considered in terms of
country experiences rather than episodes (because many countries have experienced multiple
episodes in a cycle of polarization and depolarization), then the data indicate that two-thirds
of the 178 countries for which V-Dem provides polarization data have experienced one or
more episodes of pernicious polarization, but only thirty-ve countries (20 percent) have
failed to experience any depolarization to below-pernicious levels.
Given this apparent capacity among the majority of the world’s countries to depolarize
from pernicious levels at least some of the time, this analysis seeks to identify the contexts
and sustainability of those experiences and to encourage further research into their causal
mechanisms and outcomes for democracies. e analysis oers a preliminary discussion of
the potential meaning and normative implications of depolarization as a concept and policy
goal. It then uses qualitative analysis to identify patterns in the contexts of various depolar-
ization cases and gauge the sustainability of these trends.
Most of these depolarization episodes were associated with dramatic changes in a country’s
political life. An analysis of contextual factors showed that almost three-quarters of the cases
came after major systemic shocks: a foreign intervention, independence struggle, violent con-
ict, or regime change (primarily in a democratizing direction). In the remainder of cases,
countries depolarized within a given regime structure, whether democratic or autocratic.
Tellingly, the authors identied no cases of depolarization from pernicious levels among
liberal democracies. is is because very few countries classied as full liberal democracies
have ever reached pernicious levels; the United States stands out today as the only wealthy
Western democracy with persistent levels of pernicious polarization.
Just under half of all depolarizing cases were able to sustain depolarization for a decade or
longer. In a second sizeable group of cases, countries managed polarization to some degree,
either living with chronic near-pernicious levels after depolarizing, or else repolarizing to
near-pernicious levels within ten years. Finally, 15 percent of the cases returned to pernicious
levels within the rst decade. Troublingly, when the authors analyzed the entire time period
from 1900 to 2020, nearly half of the countries that had sustained depolarization or man-
aged polarization for at least a decade later returned to pernicious levels of polarization.
ese outcomes illustrate the diculty of sustaining low levels of polarization, and they
indicate that a cyclical pattern of polarization, depolarization, and repolarization may be
characteristic of political life in many places. Only a fraction (14 percent) of cases resulted in
sustained depolarization over the long term. e mechanisms and strategies that enable such
sustained depolarization in democracies will be the subject of future research. But given the
small number of democracies (eleven) able to accomplish this feat amid the larger pattern
of cyclical polarization and depolarization, it will be crucial to also understand strategies of
managing polarization at moderately high levels while avoiding democratic erosion, govern-
ment dysfunction, or returns to pernicious polarization and potential violence.
3
Introduction
In the last decade, the division of societies into “us versus them” political camps has prompt-
ed alarm over the threats polarization poses to political life around the world. An emerging
body of scholarly work points to extreme polarization as a key factor contributing to govern-
ment dysfunction, political conict, democratic erosion, and incremental autocratization.1
us, nding ways to depolarize societies or to manage polarization while ensuring govern-
ability is an urgent task.
To better understand the various paths by which societies might overcome or reduce political
divisions, this working paper examines perniciously polarized countries that have success-
fully depolarized, at least for a time. It seeks to identify patterns in the political contexts of
these countries and gauge the sustainability of these depolarization cases. To the authors’
knowledge, this study represents the rst attempt to identify a comprehensive list of depo-
larization episodes and determine the contexts in which they occurred. ough it is an early
eort, the 105 episodes provide a clear picture of where, when, and for how long depolariza-
tion has come about in recent history (see appendix A). It is worth noting at the outset that
these patterns are descriptive and not explanatory. is data set will provide the basis for
future research to investigate causal mechanisms and strategies used in various contexts.
e working paper is organized as follows. e rst section denes polarization and de-
polarization, examines global trends in polarization, and describes how such trends aect
democratic quality. e second section outlines the methods for case selection and variable
measurements. e third section analyzes the contexts of each depolarization episode. In
some cases, countries were weathering major political changes such as the aftermath of
4 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
violent conict, independence struggles, changes in their political regimes, or foreign inter-
ventions. In other cases, depolarization occurred within autocratic or democratic regimes
without these other catalysts. e fourth section then examines the sustainability of these
depolarization episodes, identifying which countries sustained this momentum, which ones
simply managed near-pernicious levels of polarization, and which of them repolarized to
pernicious levels over the subsequent decade. It also examines levels of polarization in these
countries in the long run. Finally, the fth section discusses lessons learned from these broad
patterns of depolarization.
The Problem of Polarization and Its
Consequences for Democracy
To assess the causes and consequences of polarization and depolarization, it is important to
outline how these concepts are dened and measured.
Defining Polarization and Depolarization
Polarization can be thought of as a process, a state of equilibrium, and a political strategy. It
is a process of simplifying politics in ways that lead toward a binary division of society into
mutually antagonistic camps.2 Some degree of political polarization is natural and healthy
in a democracy to distinguish the platforms of competing political parties and to encourage
citizens to participate in politics more when major policy changes are needed. But as the
process of polarization deepens and is prolonged, “the normal multiplicity of dierences in
a society increasingly align along a single dimension and people increasingly perceive and de-
scribe politics and society in terms of ‘Us’ versus ‘em.’”3 Scholars thus increasingly analyze
the growing partisan divides among citizens in psychological terms of social identity and
intergroup conict, in which each member becomes ercely loyal to their side and wants it
to win at all costs, while expressing strong bias or prejudice against the other group.4 Social
identiers such as ethnicity, social class, religion, language, or place of residence become
aligned with one’s partisan identity.5
When polarization reaches a state of equilibrium, with a society divided into binary, mutu-
ally distrustful political camps where neither side has an incentive to pursue a depolarizing
strategy, it has pernicious consequences for democracy: parties become unwilling to com-
promise, voters lose condence in public institutions, and normative support for democracy
may decline. In extreme cases, each camp begins to view the opposing camp and its policies
as an existential threat to its own way of life or the nation as a whole. ey come to perceive
the “Other” in such negative terms that a normal political adversary competing for power
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 5
is transformed into an enemy to be vanquished. is can be called pernicious polarization.
It is dierent from lesser states of polarization in that the strength of animosity and distrust
between the camps, its entrenchment in political dynamics, and its negative consequences
for democracy are more severe. Pernicious polarization is dicult to reverse because of
equilibrium conditions that incentivize polarization-reproducing behavior by all sides, and
reversing it may take external shocks, major sociopolitical upheavals, or purposeful collective
action and political strategies.6
Finally, polarization can also be used instrumentally by political elites as a strategy to gain
and retain power.7 Postures of Manichaean moralizing judgment, identifying the ingroup as
good and the outgroup as evil, are a nefarious aspect of this polarizing strategy, which aims
to discredit the moral legitimacy of an opposition. Prior research has also found that polar-
ization around “formative rifts”—unresolved historical debates around citizenship, national
identity, and early myths from a country’s founding—has a particularly divisive quality
because formative rifts cannot be eliminated without fundamentally reconguring the state
in question.8 Because people often nd themselves on one side of these rifts or the other by
birth, activating these rifts is likely to be socially and psychologically divisive and to involve
questions about who should be viewed as rightful citizens and who should represent them.
is denition of polarization is descriptive in the sense that it is helpful for identifying,
measuring, and modeling polarization, and it is explanatory in the sense that it is useful for
understanding and explaining the processes it entails and the outcomes it produces.
By contrast, no such concept of depolarization exists, given the lack of theoretical or concep-
tual work on the topic. is analysis oers an operational denition, viewing depolarization
merely as a reduction in the level of political polarization as measured by experts’ assess-
ments of the level of hostile interactions between political camps.
Although this operational denition of depolarization appears straightforward, understand-
ing the limitations of this denition is crucial to correctly interpreting this study’s ndings.
First, no one yet knows the degree to which the social and political eects of polarization
and depolarization are symmetrical—that is to say, whether the consequences of a certain
amount of polarization can be reversed by the same amount of depolarization. e authors’
earlier research indicates that the incentives created by the logic of pernicious polarization
make it hard to reverse. Signicant evidence shows how a rise in the level of polarization
aects society and politics, but comparable data on depolarization is lacking. Second, and
relatedly, while polarization is a divisive process that simplies the complexity of politics by
emphasizing “us versus them” divisions, it remains unclear whether depolarization serves
as a unifying and reconciling process in which cross-cutting ties reemerge. For example,
depolarization may result from repression by autocratic regimes, but repression is unlikely
to generate solidarity. In short, depolarization (like polarization) can look very dierent and
have dierent mechanisms depending on context.
6 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Measuring Polarization
Until recently it was dicult to measure and compare pernicious polarization cross-nation-
ally; instead, qualitative comparative studies and proxy measures dominated analysis of its
mechanisms and eects.9 However, in 2020, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute
released a new measure for political polarization, allowing for cross-national empirical stud-
ies.10 Grounded in survey data from over 3,000 country experts, V-Dem’s unique method-
ological approach also allows for longitudinal studies of data on political dynamics. With an
average of ve to seven experts assessing specic indicators for each country, the V-Dem data
set covers 202 countries and political entities from 1900 to 2020. V-Dem’s political polariza-
tion metric asks country experts to answer the question: “To what extent is society divided
into mutually antagonistic camps in which political dierences aect social relationships
beyond political discussions?”11 e measure uses a 0 to 4 scale with the following possible
responses:
• 0: “Not at all. Supporters of opposing political camps generally interact in a friendly
man ner.”
• 1: “Mainly not. Supporters of opposing political camps are more likely to interact in
a friendly than a hostile manner.”
• 2: “Somewhat. Supporters of opposing political camps are equally likely to interact
in a friendly or hostile manner.”
• 3: “Yes, to a noticeable extent. Supporters of opposing political camps are more
likely to interact in a hostile than friendly manner.”
• 4: “Yes, to a large extent. Supporters of opposing political camps generally interact
in a hostile manner.”
e authors of this working paper consider any score between 3 and 4 to be a reasonable
proxy for the concept of pernicious polarization, in which partisan identity becomes a social
identity and political divisions extend into social relations. As societies divide into mutually
antagonistic camps, this dynamic creates conditions in which supporters of opposing politi-
cal camps are more likely to interact in a hostile rather than friendly manner.
As in any eort to quantify intangible political dynamics, this data set has limitations. It is
rooted in retrospective, subjective judgments of experts and therefore is imperfect and likely
incomplete. Valid criticisms have been raised against these data and, more broadly, quantita-
tive studies of polarization. e authors recognize these concerns and address them at length
in appendix C.
Nevertheless, limitations are inherent to any data set on historical levels of polarization, and
tradeos are inherent in comparative and longitudinal research. Still, analyzing trends in
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 7
polarization and depolarization dynamics within countries and comparing across countries
provides the basis for identifying common patterns, exploring associated factors, and design-
ing research studies to examine causal mechanisms. ese benets can outweigh the costs,
as long as researchers are transparent about the limitations and do not make unsupported
causal inferences. is study, then, represents a rst attempt at understanding comparative
polarization and depolarization over time, which other researchers hopefully will build upon
and improve.
Classifying Regimes
To classify the political systems of the countries it covers, this study also uses V-Dem’s
categorization of political regimes over time through its Regimes of the World index. V-Dem
created this measure with a scale of 0 to 3 as a composite of several of its indicators about
electoral and liberal components of democracy (see table 1).12 Although there are many met-
rics of regime classication—including Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index or the
Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity scale, V-Dem’s data are especially useful since they also
extend to 1900, allowing for a more straightforward analysis of a country’s political regime
and polarization levels in a given year. Moreover, as studies have shown, V-Dem’s data are
closely aligned with other metrics in over 90 percent of cases, reecting a high degree of
agreement among them.13
Table 1. V-Dem’s Regimes of the World Scoring System
Scale Rating Regime Type Regime Description
0 Closed autocracy “No multiparty elections for the chief executive or the
legislature”
1 Electoral autocracy “Multiparty elections for the chief executive and the legislature,
but failing to achieve that elections are free and fair”
2 Electoral democracy
“Free and fair multiparty elections . . . [but deficits in] access to
justice, or transparent law enforcement, or liberal principles of
respect for personal liberties, rule of law, and judicial as well as
legislative constraints on the executive”
3 Liberal democracy
“Free and fair multiparty elections . . . [and] access to justice,
transparent law enforcement and the liberal principles of
respect for personal liberties, rule of law, and judicial as
well as legislative constraints on the executive.”
Source: Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staan I. Lindberg, and Jan Teorell et al.,
“V-Dem Codebook v11.1,” Varieties of Democracy Project, 283, https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/img/refs/
codebookv111.pdf.
8 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Global Patterns in Polarization
ough data-driven, comparative polarization research is in its early stages, a few trends
stand out. First, “us versus them” polarization is increasing worldwide. Every region in the
world except Oceania has seen polarization levels rise since 2005 (see gure 1). Africa has
had the smallest increase during this time period, although its regional averages have been
higher than those of other regions since the 1980s. Europe had a large spike during World
War II and then sustained relatively low levels of polarization, until it began rising again
in 2005. Latin America and Asia broadly depolarized following democratic transitions in
the 1970s and 1980s, but then they began repolarizing after 2000. Oceania had the lowest
regional averages until it began polarizing in the 1970s and reached similar levels to other
parts of the world. e Middle East and North Africa remained at moderately high levels
until polarization surged in the mid-2000s.
Breaking down the regions further reveals a more nuanced picture of the countries and sub-
regions driving these broader trends. In Europe, for example, the Balkans, East and Central
Europe, and Southern Europe are largely fueling the region’s recent rise in polarization,
while Western Europe and the Nordic countries remain at comparatively low levels but have
seen rises since 2005 as well (see gure 2). In South Asia, Bangladesh has been consistently
polarized since its independence in 1971, while India’s polarization levels have surged since
the accession of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 (see gure 3).
FIGURE 1
Political Polarization by World Region Since 1900
SOURCE: Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staan I. Lindberg, and Jan Teorell et al.,
“V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1,” V-Dem, March 2021, https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/archive/previous-data/v-dem-dataset/.
ASIAAFRICA EUROPE
MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA (MENA)
AMERICAS
OCEANIA
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 20201900
Source: Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staan I. Lindberg, and Jan Teorell et al., “V-Dem
Dataset Version 11.1,” V-Dem, March 2021, https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/archive/previous-data/v-dem-dataset/.
Figure 1. Political Polarization by World Region Since 1900
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 9
NORDIC COUNTRIES
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 2
Polarization in Europe Since 1900
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
BALKANS EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
WESTERN EUROPESOUTHERN EUROPE
1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 20201900
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
FIGURE 3
Polarization in South Asia Since 1945
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
1945 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
PAKISTAN
BANGLADESH INDIA
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Figure 2. Polarization in Europe Since 1900
Figure 3. Polarization in South Asia Since 1945
10 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
In the Americas, the largest democracies—Brazil, Mexico, and the United States—have
been driving the recent increase in the region’s polarization levels. Figure 4 shows that the
United States remained below the world and Latin American averages from 1900 until 2002;
it has continued to climb above world averages ever since. As gure 5 illustrates, extremely
high levels of polarization can be observed in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States in recent
years—though all countries in South America except Paraguay and Uruguay are currently at
pernicious levels of polarization.
FIGURE 4
Polarization in Latin America and the United States Since 1900
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 20201900
LATIN AMERICA
WORLD
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 5
Polarization in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States Since 1900
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 20201900
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0 BRAZIL
MEXICO
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Figure 4. Polarization in Latin America and the United States Since 1900
Figure 5. Polarization in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States Since 1900
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 11
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 6
Polarization in Advanced Western Democracies Since 1950
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
CANADA JAPAN
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2020
OCEANIA
SOUTHERN EUROPE WESTERN EUROPE
NORDIC COUNTRIES
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Figure 6. Polarization in Advanced Western Democracies Since 1950
Finally, what about polarization in advanced Western democracies worldwide? In this re-
spect, the United States stands out. Figure 6 shows that, since 2005, U.S. polarization levels
have skyrocketed above those of other long-standing democracies. In fact, only two other
peer democracies ever came close to pernicious levels of polarization at all: France reached
this benchmark for one year during the political upheaval of 1968, and Italy was just shy of
pernicious levels in the 1970s during the tumultuous period known as the Years of Lead.14
Polarization in the United States, by contrast, has risen consistently since 1990 and has been
at pernicious levels since 2015. e polarization of U.S. politics is more akin to the experi-
ences of younger, less wealthy, and severely divided democracies and electoral autocracies
than to those of its more consolidated democratic peers.15
ere tends to be a negative (or inverse) relationship between polarization and the quality of
democracy. e world experienced a global wave of democratization accompanied by depo-
larization following World War II, with the restoration of democracy in Europe and parts of
Latin America and independence movements in Africa and Asia. Another rise in polarization
coincided with a decline in democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by depolarization
during the ird Wave of democratization beginning in the late 1970s. Finally, a decline
in democracy can be observed after 2014 following the rise in polarization that began the
decade before.
12 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Statistical analysis conrms the existence of this relationship. A study by Murat Somer,
Jennifer McCoy, and Russell Luke found that rising political polarization predicted deteri-
oration in liberal democracy scores and that periods of sustained, severe levels of pernicious
polarization have the most damaging eects on democratic quality.16 e reasons are many
and may vary by country, but this general pattern of growing unwillingness to compromise
and perceptions of the other side as an existential threat may encourage leaders to take
steps to entrench their electoral advantage, concentrate power in the executive branch,
and delegitimize critics and opponents.17 Concomitantly, depolarization is associated with
improvements in democratic quality; however, periods of substantial depolarization from
previously severe and pernicious levels do not add to that improvement (as pernicious polar-
ization added to democratic erosion). is suggests that once a country reaches severe levels
of polarization, this condition is uniquely bad for democracy, and simply reducing it will not
necessarily help restore democratic quality.
Identifying and Classifying
Depolarization Episodes
e 105 depolarization episodes covered in this working paper took place between 1900
and 2020. e full set of cases is listed in appendix A. For the purposes of this study, a
depolarization episode was dened as any ve-year period during which a country’s level
of polarization declined from pernicious levels to below-pernicious levels (by a value of at
least 0.4 on the polarization scale), without repolarizing above 3.0.18 is threshold of a 0.4
decrease was chosen to ensure that all of the depolarization episodes reected a substantial
reduction of animosity between political camps.
e set of 105 depolarization episodes represents almost exactly half of the total number
(211) of pernicious polarization episodes during this time period. at is to say, over 200
times between 1900 and 2020, countries reached polarization levels above 3.0 on the
polarization scale for at least one year, and in half of those episodes, they were able to reduce
it below pernicious levels for at least ve years. Notably, the majority (58 percent) of those
unresolved pernicious episodes are recent cases where countries have sustained pernicious
polarization to date (like the United States), or cases in which ve years have not yet elapsed
to be able to assess whether they will meet the depolarization criteria or not (such as the
drop in Indonesia’s polarization levels in 2019). e other 42 percent of episodes are those in
which countries either remained perniciously polarized in the long run (such as Venezuela
from 2002 to date or Bangladesh since independence in 1971), or more often, ones in which
states repolarized within the ve-year window and so do not meet the criteria for a depolar-
izing episode (such as Armenia, which has repolarized six times since 1996).
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 13
Another way to assess the capacity to depolarize is to look at the number of countries that
have done so, rather than the quantity of episodes, because some countries have had cyclical
polarization, with multiple episodes of pernicious polarization and depolarization. V-Dem
presents data on political polarization for 178 countries. Of these, 117 countries (66 percent)
experienced one or more episodes of pernicious polarization, but only thirty-ve countries
(20 percent) failed to experience any depolarizing episode from pernicious levels (again, the
United States stands out as an example of this with its ongoing period of pernicious
polarization beginning in 2015).
Given this apparent capacity among the majority of the world’s countries to depolarize at
least some of the time from pernicious levels, the analysis here seeks to identify the contexts
and sustainability of those experiences and to encourage further research into the causal
mechanisms and outcomes for democracies. us, after identifying these depolarizing
episodes, the authors sought to identify the broad political contexts of each case. To do so,
the authors conducted qualitative research on each country’s political history immediately
prior to and during the episode period. Based on this contextual analysis, they then deter-
mined which primary change—if any—appeared to have created enabling conditions for
depolarization. ey then grouped each case by these contextual factors, whether depolariza-
tion occurred after a certain type of shock or whether within a given regime type if no such
shock was identied.
Some episodes could plausibly be grouped under multiple categories. India’s depolarization
between 1946 and 1950, for example, took place after a violent internal conict, regime
change, and independence. However, given that the systemic political change that generated
both violent conict and a change in the country’s regime score was directly related to the
country’s newfound independence, India was categorized as a case of depolarization after
resolving an independence struggle; in other words, independence was the primary contex-
tual factor that enabled depolarization.
By contrast, in cases where there was no systemic shock and a country’s regime score did
not change, depolarization episodes were labeled as occurring within a given regime type.
Future research will examine the causal mechanisms leading to depolarization in these cases.
For example, a liberalizing political opening, involving a change from a more traditionally
repressive leader to a more liberalizing authoritarian leader, may lead to depolarization even
without a change of regime category from “closed autocracy.” Similarly, an elite political
conict may cause polarization, with depolarization occurring after one side essentially wins
and becomes the dominant party, thus reducing or even repressing polarization.
Table 2 shows the breakdown of depolarizing episodes grouped by context. e ve contex-
tual categories—foreign intervention, postconict, postindependence, post–regime change,
and within a given regime type—also feature subcategories meant to add more nuance.
Some of the episodes within a given regime category may also involve a signicant political
upheaval or change in the type of government. For example, China between 1975 and 1979
underwent dramatic political and economic changes as it transitioned from totalitarianism
under Mao Zedong to a more economically and politically open form of self-described
14 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
collective leadership; however, despite fundamental changes in the nature of the regime, it
was coded in the same regime type since China remained a closed autocracy. Given that the
total number of depolarization episodes is 105 (very close to 100), the number of cases in any
context category roughly corresponds to the category’s percentage share of the total as well.
Table 2. Contexts of Depolarizing Episodes Globally (1900–2020)
Category Subcategory Subcategory count Total count
Foreign intervention 3 3
Postconflict Intrastate conflict 21
24Interstate conflict 3
Postindependence Peaceful 7
15Violent 8
Post–regime change
Autocracy to democracy
(any levels) 23
36
Democracy to autocracy
(any levels) 2
Closed autocracy to electoral
autocracy 9
Electoral autocracy to closed
autocracy 2
Electoral democracy to or
from liberal democracy 0
Within regime
Within closed autocracy 9
27
Within electoral autocracy 11
Within electoral democracy 7
Within liberal democracy 0
Total 105 105
ese data allow for several ndings. First, the prevalence of systemic shocks in bringing about
depolarization—whether after a civil conict, a foreign war, regime change (primarily from
autocracy to democracy), or the resolution of an independence struggle—was especially strik-
ing. Nearly three-quarters of the depolarization episodes came after such systemic disruptions.
Among the systemic shocks, foreign intervention is the least common context for depolar-
ization: there were only three such cases, and only one of them was sustained after ve years.
is appears to give little reason to believe that domestic political polarization can be resolved
successfully and sustainably by outside powers intervening in another country’s politics.
Second, this analysis showed, perhaps not surprisingly, that countries frequently depolarize
in the aftermath of violence. is most frequently came after the resolution of some sort of
Source: Authors’ classifications based on V-Dem data.
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 15
internal state conict, whether a civil war, ethnic conict, or revolutionary upheaval (one-fth
of all depolarizing episodes). Some countries, albeit a signicantly smaller set, depolarized after
resolving a violent conict with another country. In such cases of internal or external conict,
the authors expect that depolarization occurs with the resolution of polarization that may have
contributed to the conict in the rst place, either because one side wins and perhaps suppress-
es the polarization or because the two sides reach a negotiated solution.
ird, 14 percent of the cases involved depolarization after independence struggles. is is
not surprising, as independence campaigns often divide society not only over the goal of in-
dependence but also over the timing and means of such dramatic political change; moreover,
the resolution of such conicts, whether by force or more peaceful political processes, can
obviate these tensions. Many of these cases were drawn from the wave of colonial indepen-
dence movements after World War II, though others took place in the aftermath of World
War I. Violence played an important role in many of these independence-related depolariza-
tion episodes, as more than half of them came in the aftermath of armed struggles.
e remaining depolarization episodes—those that came after regime change or within a
given regime type—were the most interesting. ese cases are the most likely to provide
policy-relevant insights for contemporary cases of pernicious polarization in democracies.
A comparison of these two categories showed that depolarization periods following regime
change are the most common depolarization context, constituting a plurality (34 percent)
of all episodes. is nding conrmed the authors’ expectations and previous ndings that
pernicious polarization is a problem that may be resolved through fundamental transforma-
tions of how a society is governed and distributes power.
Analyzing the subcategories of post–regime change contexts clearly shows that autocrati-
zation is rarely followed by depolarization. ere were only two cases where depolarization
followed autocratization: Turkey from 1980 to 1984 and Fiji from 2012 to 2016. In sharp
contrast, there were twenty-three cases (almost two-thirds of the post–regime change
cases) where regime change from autocracy to democracy was followed by depolarization.
Meanwhile, nine of the cases involved liberalization within autocratic regimes, a trend that
points to the potential normative power of democracy. Even a relatively modest opening of
democratic space—bringing about a transition from closed to electoral autocracy, but short
of a transition to even electoral democracy—may have a chance of depolarizing a society.
Yet not all depolarization seems to require a signicant systemic shock or regime change;
indeed, a quarter of the cases are episodes of depolarization within a given regime structure.
is does not mean that these countries had a complete lack of political upheaval or consti-
tutional change, just that their regime type as listed in the Regimes of the World index did
not shift or else perhaps showed a short, temporary blip prior to the depolarization period
before returning to its steady status in its original regime category.
Each of these depolarization cases within the same regime type exhibits its own mechanisms
and strategies. Furthermore, depolarization is not always a positive occurrence. In closed
Source: Authors’ classifications based on V-Dem data.
16 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
autocracies, for example, depolarization may come about as political space is closed and
opposition is repressed, perhaps following a contested succession struggle. In electoral autoc-
racies, depolarization may come about after only limited reforms. In electoral democracies,
by contrast, depolarization has come after political parties have brokered a deal, a contested
election has been resolved, or a polarizing leader has been voted out.
Notably, there were no examples of depolarization from pernicious levels among liberal
democracies. is reects two interrelated issues. First, very few advanced democracies
have suered pernicious levels of polarization, which suggests that liberal democracy has
been quite eective at preventing pernicious polarization (at least so far). At the same time,
this may also suggest that it is very hard to address pernicious polarization within liberal
democracy once such a country reaches that point. Instead, democratic erosion is strongly
associated with pernicious polarization, and regime degradation may be a risk.19
Gauging the Sustainability of
Depolarization Episodes
Having examined which contexts tend to coincide with depolarization episodes, it is worth-
while to turn to some key questions about the sustainability of depolarization. First, it is
important to consider what happens in the aftermath of a depolarization episode: Is depolar-
ization sustainable for a decade or more, or do societies tend to repolarize to pernicious levels
in the short run? Second, do some contexts tend to result in more durable depolarization
than others? And third, can depolarization be sustained in the long term, beyond a decade,
or is polarization more commonly a cyclical pattern of politics?
Trends in the Sustainability of Depolarization From Pernicious Episodes
To determine what happened to a country’s polarization levels after the initial depolarization
episode, this analysis tracked the ten years following the end of the initial depolarization
period and traced the trajectory of the country’s polarization metric over that time. Four
outcomes were possible (see table 3).
A sustained depolarization episode is any period where the initial ve-year decline in polar-
ization was followed by ten years without any signicant repolarization, dened as increasing
by at least 0.4 on the 0 to 4 scale. For example, the Belgian episode (1945–1949) is a typical
case of sustained depolarization. As gure 7 shows, after the end of World War II, Belgium’s
polarization levels dropped as the country transitioned from a closed autocracy under Nazi
occupation to a liberal democracy.
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 17
Table 3. Potential Outcomes of Depolarization Episodes
Medium-Term Result
of Depolarization
Description
Nonsustained The country’s polarization level became pernicious again within
ten years
Sustained
The country’s polarization level remained constantly below
pernicious levels (3.0) and (in some cases) continued to decline
over the next ten years
Managed
The country repolarized a substantial amount (a change of 0.4 or
more on the scale) without becoming pernicious within the ten-year
window or the country’s degree of polarization remained somewhat
volatile at near-pernicious levels (between 2.6 and 2.99 on the scale)
Indeterminate The country’s depolarization episode is too recent to measure a
subsequent ten-year window
Source: Definitions assigned by the authors.
Figure 7. Sustained Depolarization in Belgium (1945–1959)
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 7
Sustained Depolarization in Belgium (1945–1959)
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
4.0
3.5
1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959
In managed polarization episodes, a country’s polarization level remains less than pernicious,
but it either experiences substantial repolarization or remains close to pernicious—between
2.6 and 2.99 on the scale. For example, Hungary (1989–1993) is a typical case of managed
polarization based on the rst criterion. As gure 8 demonstrates, Hungary suered from
pernicious polarization for a very long time. Only after 1989 did the country’s polarization
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
18 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
rate drop below pernicious, and it stayed at less-than-pernicious levels over the subsequent
ten years (1994–2004). Since the country’s polarization metric increased from 1.75 in 1993
to 2.44 in 2003 (by more than 0.4), this case was categorized as managed polarization.
Nevertheless, Hungary was unable to sustain this depolarization in the long run: it returned
to pernicious levels of polarization in 2010 when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party,
Fidesz, won a supermajority in parliament and embarked on a campaign to overhaul the
country’s constitution.
Turkey, on the other hand, is an example of managed polarization where the country’s
polarization levels hovered at close-to-pernicious levels. As seen in gure 9, Turkey was able
to depolarize after a 1980 coup, but its polarization levels remained above 2.8 until 2001.
e country became perniciously polarized in 2002 when the Justice and Development
Party won control of parliament.
By contrast, nonsustained depolarization occurs if a country’s polarization score returns to
pernicious levels within ten years. Bolivia (2008–2012) is an illustrative example. As gure
10 shows, the country’s polarization metric remained below pernicious levels for four years
but returned to pernicious levels in 2016. In 2020, the country witnessed destructive levels
of polarization with an all-time high score (3.98) after a contested election in November
2019 and civilian protests forced out a controversial incumbent president, after which a
divisive interim government took power and new elections were held in October 2020.20
Finally, some depolarization episodes occurred too recently to establish a subsequent ten-year
trajectory, so these cases were coded as indeterminate.21
Figure 8. Managed Depolarization in Hungary (1948–2020)
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 8
Managed Depolarization in Hungary (1948–2020)
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
1948 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 19
Figure 9. Managed Depolarization in Turkey (1975–2020)
Figure 10. Nonsustained Depolarization in Bolivia (2008–2020)
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 9
Managed Depolarization in Turkey (1975–2020)
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
1975 1980 19901985 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
POLITICAL POLARIZATION RATING
FIGURE 10
Nonsustained Depolarization in Bolivia (2008–2020)
SOURCE: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
2019 20202008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Source: Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1.”
Table 4 illustrates the breakdown of the depolarization cases in terms of outcomes. While
the plurality of episodes were sustained over the following decade, an equal proportion were
either managed or nonsustained. is chart illustrates a recurring theme: even after falling
below pernicious levels, polarization can remain a major dynamic in a country’s politics.
20 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Table 4. Distribution of Medium-Term Outcomes After Depolarization Episodes
Category Number of episodes Percentage
Sustained depolarization 48 46%
Managed polarization 34 32%
Nonsustained depolarization 16 15%
Indeterminate 7 7%
Total 105 100 %
e context in which depolarization occurs may aect how sustainable it ends up being.
Table 5 presents this relationship, showing the total number of cases in each context catego-
ry and the percentage of cases in that category that are sustained, managed, or nonsustained.
Table 5. Distribution of Aftermath of Depolarization Episodes by Context
Category Subcategory Sustained (%) Managed (%) Nonsustained (%) Total count
Foreign
intervention 33% 33% 33% 3
Postconflict Intrastate conflict 55% 40% 5% 20
Interstate conflict 0% 67% 33% 3
Postindependence Peaceful 43% 14% 43% 7
Violent 50% 37% 13% 8
Post–regime
change
Autocracy to democracy
(any levels) 61% 30% 9% 23
Democracy to autocracy
(any levels) 0% 100% 0% 1
Closed autocracy to
electoral autocracy 71% 29% 0% 7
Electoral autocracy to
closed autocracy 50% 50% 0% 2
Electoral democracy to or
from liberal democracy N /A N /A N /A 0
Within regime
Within closed autocracy 33% 33% 33% 9
Within electoral autocracy 20% 50% 30% 10
Within electoral democracy 40% 40% 20% 5
Within liberal democracy N /A N /A N /A 0
Note: This table omits the indeterminant category of seven cases too recent for assessing sustainability, so the total number of cases reported
here is 98. (These seven cases are listed in table 8 at the end of appendix C.)
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 21
e data set does not allow the authors to draw causal inferences, but the ndings suggest
directions for future research. e depolarization contexts that appear to yield the most
sustainable change are those where politics becomes more open, whether after a democratic
transition or even liberalization within an authoritarian regime. e resolution of violent
intrastate conict also frequently results in sustained depolarization. ese ndings oer
tentative evidence that competitive politics—or democracy, depending on how the ndings
are interpreted—and an end to widespread violence are two eective ways of addressing
polarization.
Long-Term Outcomes of Depolarization Episodes
Although it is encouraging to see that the majority of cases show sustained depolarization or
managed polarization over the rst ten-year period that followed, it is worth asking: How
many of these cases were able to avoid pernicious polarization beyond that initial ten-year
window? Each episode was examined until 2020 (the last year available in the V-Dem data
set when this analysis was conducted). e ndings oer a somewhat hopeful picture. Out
of forty-eight episodes where depolarization was sustained for at least a decade, twenty-nine
cases (about 60 percent) have avoided repolarizing to pernicious levels to date. Even more
encouraging, table 6 shows that half of these long-term depolarizers have been able to keep
their polarization levels below 2.0, well below the pernicious threshold of 3.0.
Table 6. Sustained, Long-Term Depolarization (up to 2020)
Country Depolarization
Episode Years
Below 2.0 Until 2020 Between 2.0 and 3.0 Until 2020
Angola 2002–2006 X
Belgium 1945–1949 X
Burkina Faso 1990–1994 X
Cambodia 1997–2001 X
Cape Verde 1974–1978 X
Chile 1987–1991 X
Cuba 1959–1963 X
Czech Republic 1989–1993 X
Dominican Republic 1996–2000 X
Finland 1918–1922 X
Guatemala 1996–2000 X
Guinea-Bissau 1994–1998 X
Iran 1979–1983 X
Ireland 1923–1927 X
Jordan 1970–1974 X
Kenya 1961–1965 X
Namibia 1989–1993 X
22 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Country Depolarization
Episode Years
Below 2.0 Until 2020 Between 2.0 and 3.0 Until 2020
Mozambique 1989–1993 X
Norway 1945–1949 X
Panama 1989–1993 X
Philippines 1945–1949 X
Russia 1993–1997 X
Serbia 2000–2004 X
Seychelles 1992–1996 X
Sierra Leone 2001–2005 X
South Africa 1993–1997 X
Spain 1973–1977 X
Suriname 1996–2000 X
Uruguay 1983–1987 X
In contrast, out of the thirty-four cases of managed polarization, fewer than half (41 per-
cent) were able to avoid repolarizing to pernicious levels, demonstrating their vulnerability to
repolarization (see table 7). Together, nearly half (thirty-nine of eighty-two) of the sustained
and managed episodes repolarized to pernicious levels in the long run, suggesting that there
may be a strong cyclical element to pernicious polarization.
Table 7. Managed, Long-Term Polarization
Country Depolarization
Episode Years
Below 2.0 Until 2020 Between 2.0 and 3.0 Until 2020
Afghanistan 2000–2004 X
Albania 1989–1993 X
Croatia 1995–1999 X
Cyprus 1989–1993 X
Djibouti 1996–2000 X
Greece 1973–1977 X
Laos 1975–1979 X
Liberia 2003–2007 X
Mali 1990–1994 X
Moldova 1991–1995 X
Paraguay 1953–1957 X
Rwanda 1999–2003 X
South Korea 1952–1956 X
Tunisia 1987–1991 X
Source: Compiled by the authors based on V-Dem data.
Source: See Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1,” V-Dem, March
2021, https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/archive/previous-data/v-dem-dataset.
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 23
e cyclical nature of polarization is made even clearer by another group: countries that have
experienced pernicious polarization multiple times after their initial depolarization episode.
is vicious cycle of polarization, depolarization, and repolarization has occurred frequently
in seventeen countries. Bolivia, Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
France, Hungary, Iran, Peru, Serbia, South Africa, Timor-Leste, Turkey, Uruguay, and
Venezuela became perniciously polarized at least two more times; Cambodia and Russia repo-
larized to pernicious levels three more times; and Senegal did so a whopping four more times.
Conclusions
is working paper represents a rst attempt to identify and analyze a collection of depolar-
ization cases. Although the data set did not support causal inferences, this study established
a few key ndings.
e analysis demonstrates that countries can successfully depolarize from pernicious levels
of polarization and remain depolarized for at least ve years, as illustrated by the 105 such
episodes globally since 1900. e vast majority (78 percent) of these experiences were
sustained or managed for a subsequent decade. When looking at the long term, however, the
picture becomes less rosy: nearly half (thirty-nine) of the eighty-two sustained and managed
episodes repolarized to pernicious levels in the long run. e managed cases of polarization
showed the most vulnerability to repolarizing to pernicious levels in the long run.
Only a fraction (14 percent) of the depolarizing episodes resulted in sustained low levels
(below 2.0) of polarization in the long term (at least to date). Investigating the mechanisms
and strategies that enable such sustained depolarization within a democratic context will
be the subject of future research. But given the small number of democracies (eleven) able
to accomplish this feat amid the larger pattern of cyclical polarization and depolarization,
it also will be crucial to understand strategies of managing polarization at moderately high
levels while avoiding democratic erosion, government dysfunction, or returns to pernicious
polarization and potential violence.
is analysis also points to the strong role of democratizing experiences in depolarizing
societies. e global waves of democratization accompanying the defeats of fascism and
communism, decolonization, and the end of military authoritarian dictatorships in the
twentieth century provided the context for many of the depolarizing episodes. On the other
hand, only seven episodes of depolarization occurred within an electoral democracy (and
none within a liberal democracy).
24 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
History therefore oers fewer cases to learn from for addressing a major challenge the
world faces in the twenty-rst century: democracies are increasingly suering from perni-
cious polarization. e United States poses a particularly troubling case, as it is the only
advanced Western democracy that has suered such high levels of polarization for such an
extended period. is experience, along with the recent high levels of polarization in other
large democracies, such as Brazil, India, and Turkey, points to the urgent need not only to
learn from the past but also to innovate new mechanisms to reduce or better manage this
phenomenon.
25
Appendix A: List of All Depolarization
Episodes (1900–2020)
e table below shows the full list of 105 depolarization cases that appear in this
working paper.
Country Depolarization episode years
Afghanistan 2000–2004
Albania 1989–1993
Angola 2002–2006
Argentina 1982–1986
Azerbaijan 1995–1999
Bahrain 2000–2004
Belgium 1945–1949
Bolivia 1920–1924
Bolivia 1981–1985
Brazil 1989–1993
Bulgaria 1925–1929
Burkina Faso 1990–1994
Burma 2009–2013
Burundi 1961–1965
Burundi 1974–1978
26 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Country Depolarization episode years
Cambodia 1953–1957
Cambodia 1991–1995
Cambodia 1997–2001
Cameroon 1994–1998
Cape Verde 1974–1978
Chile 1930–1934
Chile 1987–1991
China 1975–1979
Colombia 1957–1961
Colombia 2009–2013
Croatia 1995–1999
Cuba 1959–1963
Cyprus 1989–1993
Czech Republic 1989–1993
Democratic Republic of the Congo 1965–1969
Democratic Republic of the Congo 2002–2006
Djibouti 1996–2000
Dominican Republic 1996–2000
Egypt 2014–2018
Ethiopia 2009–2013
Fiji 2012–2016
Finland 1918–1922
France 1914–1918
France 1945–1949
Greece 1973–1977
Guatemala 1996–2000
Guinea-Bissau 1994–1998
Honduras 2010–2014
Hungary 1920–1924
Hungary 1989–1993
India 1946–1950
Indonesia 1966–1970
Iran 1911–1915
Iran 1979–1983
Ireland 1923–1927
Italy 1945–1949
Ivory Coast 2010–2014
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 27
Country Depolarization episode years
Jordan 1970–1974
Kenya 1961–1965
Laos 1975–1979
Liberia 2003–2007
Madagascar 1991–1995
Mali 1990–1994
Malta 1989–1993
Mexico 1929–1933
Moldova 1991–1995
Mongolia 2008–2012
Montenegro 2006–2010
Mozambique 1989–1993
Namibia 1989–1993
Nicaragua 1959–1963
Norway 1945–1949
Panama 1989–1993
Paraguay 1953–1957
Peru 1939–1943
Peru 1979–1983
Peru 2000–2004
Philippines 1945–1949
Poland 1987–1991
Romania 1991–1995
Russia 1906–1910
Russia 1926–1930
Russia 1993–1997
Rwanda 1972–1976
Rwanda 1999–2003
Senegal 1962–1966
Senegal 1969–1973
Senegal 1994–1998
Senegal 2012–2016
Serbia 1945–1949
Serbia 2000–2004
Seychelles 1992–1996
Sierra Leone 2001–2005
South Africa 1993–1997
28 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Country Depolarization episode years
South Korea 1952–1956
Spain 1973–1977
Suriname 1996–2000
Syria 1998–2002
Timor-Leste 1999–2003
Timor-Leste 2007–2011
Tunisia 1987–1991
Turkey 1923–1927
Turkey 1980–1984
Uganda 1985–1989
Uruguay 1904–1908
Uruguay 1983–1987
Venezuela 1928–1932
Venezuela 1957–1961
Yemen 1967–1971
Zimbabwe 1979–1983
29
Appendix B: List of All Depolarization
Episodes by Context Group
e table below categorizes all the depolarization episodes by context.
Category Subcategory Number of cases
Postconflict Intrastate conflict 21
Country Years Outcome
Angola 2002–2006 Sustained
Burundi 1974–1978 Sustained
Colombia 1957–1961 Managed
Democratic Republic of the Congo 1965–1969 Managed
Djibouti 1996–2000 Managed
Guatemala 1996–2000 Sustained
Indonesia 1966–1970 Sustained
Ivory Coast 2010–2014 Nonsustained
Jordan 1970–1974 Sustained
Laos 1975–1979 Managed
Liberia 2003–2007 Managed
Mexico 1929–1933 Sustained
Paraguay 1953–1957 Managed
Russia 1926–1930 Sustained
30 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Rwanda 1999–2003 Managed
Sierra Leone 2001–2005 Sustained
Suriname 1996–2000 Sustained
Timor-Leste 2007–2011 Indeterminate
Uganda 1985–1989 Sustained
Uruguay 1904–1908 Managed
Yemen 1967–1971 Sustained
Postconflict Interstate conflict 3
Country Years Outcome
Croatia 1995–1999 Managed
Democratic Republic of the Congo 2002–2006 Nonsustained
South Korea 1952–1956 Managed
Postindependence Peaceful 7
Country Years Outcome
Burundi 1961–1965 Nonsustained
Cape Verde 1974–1978 Sustained
Kenya 1961–1965 Sustained
Moldova 1991–1995 Managed
Montenegro 2006–2010 Nonsustained
Philippines 1945–1949 Sustained
Timor-Leste 1999–2003 Nonsustained
Postindependence Violent 8
Country Years Outcome
Cambodia 1953–1957 Managed
Finland 1918–1922 Sustained
Hungary 1920–1924 Managed
India 1946–1950 Sustained
Ireland 1923–1927 Sustained
Namibia 1989–1993 Sustained
Senegal 1962–1966 Nonsustained
Zimbabwe 1979–1983 Managed
Foreign intervention 3
Country Years Outcome
Afghanistan 2000–2004 Managed
Cambodia 1991–1995 Nonsustained
Panama 1989–1993 Sustained
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 31
Post–regime change Autocracy to democracy
(any levels) 23
Country Years Outcome
Argentina 1982–1986 Sustained
Belgium 1945–1949 Sustained
Bolivia 1981–1985 Sustained
Brazil 1989–1993 Sustained
Chile 1987–1991 Sustained
Czech Republic 1989–1993 Managed
Dominican Republic 1996–2000 Sustained
France 1945–1949 Sustained
Greece 1973–1977 Managed
Hungary 1989–1993 Managed
Italy 1945–1949 Managed
Madagascar 1991–1995 Nonsustained
Mali 1990–1994 Managed
Norway 1945–1949 Sustained
Peru 1979–1983 Sustained
Peru 2000–2004 Managed
Poland 1987–1991 Managed
Romania 1991–1995 Nonsustained
Serbia 2000–2004 Sustained
South Africa 1993–1997 Sustained
Spain 1973–1977 Sustained
Uruguay 1983–1987 Sustained
Venezuela 1957–1961 Sustained
Post–regime change Democracy to autocracy
(any levels) 2
Country Years Outcome
Fiji 2012–2016 Indeterminate
Turkey 1980–1984 Managed
Post–regime change
Closed autocracy to
electoral autocracy
(any levels)
9
Country Years Outcome
Albania 1989–1993 Managed
Burkina Faso 1990–1994 Sustained
Burma 2009–2013 Indeterminate
Chile 1930–1934 Sustained
32 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Egypt 2014–2018 Indeterminate
Guinea-Bissau 1994–1998 Sustained
Iran 1979–1983 Sustained
Peru 1939–1943 Managed
Seychelles 1992–1996 Sustained
Post–regime change
Electoral autocracy to
closed autocracy
(any levels)
2
Country Years Outcome
Cuba 1959–1963 Sustained
Rwanda 1972–1976 Managed
Post-regime change
Electoral democracy
to and from liberal
democracy (any levels)
0
Country Years Outcome
Within regime Closed autocracy 9
Country Years Outcome
Bahrain 2000–2004 Nonsustained
Bulgaria 1925–1929 Managed
China 1975–1979 Sustained
Iran 1911–1915 Nonsustained
Mozambique 1989–1993 Sustained
Russia 1906–1910 Nonsustained
Serbia 1945–1949 Sustained
Turkey 1923–1927 Managed
Venezuela 1928–1932 Managed
Within regime Electoral autocracy 11
Country Years Outcome
Azerbaijan 1995–1999 Managed
Bolivia 1920–1924 Managed
Cambodia 1997–2001 Sustained
Cameroon 1994–1998 Managed
Ethiopia 2009–2013 Indeterminate
Honduras 2010–2014 Nonsustained
Nicaragua 1959–1963 Nonsustained
Russia 1993–1997 Sustained
Senegal 1969–1973 Managed
Syria 1998–2002 Nonsustained
Tunisia 1987–1991 Managed
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 33
Within regime Electoral democracy 7
Country Years Outcome
Colombia 2009–2013 Nonsustained
Cyprus 1980–1984 Managed
France 1914–1918 Sustained
Malta 1989–1993 Managed
Mongolia 2008–2012 Indeterminate
Senegal 1994–1998 Sustained
Senegal 2012–2016 Indeterminate
Within regime Liberal democracy 0
Country Years Outcome
35
Appendix C: Features and Limitations
of the Data
V-Dem’s methodology and data set must be critically evaluated to establish the data’s explan-
atory power. is appendix aims to describe V-Dem’s research methodology and identify
some of its limitations.
V-Dem’s data set is based on a decentralized research design in which country experts are
surveyed online to quantitatively assess a given country’s political situation.22 Country
experts oer a rich data source, but they also introduce problems of subjectivity. ese may
be related to any number of factors, including cultural and professional biases, personal
experiences, or ideological outlooks. Moreover, given that both regime type and polarization
are latent concepts (meaning that they are not directly observed but inferred), concerns
associated with country expert surveys may increase.
V-Dem has adopted a method using Bayesian item response theory to overcome challenges
of intercoder reliability for a single country. is approach helps scholars to convert raw
data coded in ordinal measure (these are variables that have an order or rank but without a
degree of dierence between categories) to point estimates for each indicator, country-year
observation, and their associated measures of uncertainty (condence intervals and standard
deviations). us, Bayesian item response theory allows V-Dem to correct for any bias that
might stem from country experts through this conversion and inclusion of uncertainty
measures.
36 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Yet this approach cannot solve issues stemming from how the expert coders perceive latent
variables across countries. While the option of having a single set of in-house expert coders
to assess all countries, or even a single region, could relieve some of the concerns of variation
across groups of experts, such an approach would sacrice some of the deep expertise of
country experts. V-Dem tries to partially resolve this by having bridge coders who have
cross-country and intertemporal expertise.23 In bridge coding, a single expert is instructed to
code multiple countries for all years. In comparison to a coder who rates multiple countries
for a limited period, bridge coders can explicitly compare dierent political contexts and
periods. Additionally, this approach helps the bridge coder measure the variable correctly by
avoiding potential systematic biases that might result from employing dierent standards in
measuring. ere are 700 bridge coders (25 percent of all experts), and these experts code
2.5 countries on average.24
Another issue stems from the retrospective evaluation of political dynamics. Country experts
are likely to suer from hindsight bias, “the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s
foresight of a particular event.”25 is tendency can be more problematic if an expert coder
cannot dierentiate their current knowledge that an event occurred from their assessment of
the period before that event.
V-Dem is aware of these limitations: to mitigate the outsized eects of individual ratings in
small samples, it recommends not using score estimates for individual countries in individ-
ual years with three or fewer expert assessments.26 In the identied depolarization episodes,
there are ve episodes with three or fewer experts: Brazil (1989–1993), Finland (1918–1922),
Mali (1990–1994), Timor-Leste (1999–2003), and Timor-Leste (2007–2011). ese cases
were kept in the data set because the study’s qualitative research also suggested these were
cases of depolarization.
e only case in the study’s qualitative desk research on each country’s political history
where major contextual factors that may have contributed to the depolarizing dynamic could
not be identied or corroborated is Cyprus (1989–1993). While these years also coincide
with the Cyprus conict, which has been an ongoing dispute since the 1960s, the political
trend of these years could not be attributed to any particular development in this conict.
us, this episode’s context is coded as electoral democracy, and it requires further investiga-
tion and input from country experts.
In addition to these categories, there were a number of cases that could not be evaluated
due to an insucient time horizon. It is too early to categorize depolarization episodes that
started in or after 2007 as to whether they were able to sustain depolarization or manage
polarization for another decade. In total, there were seven recent cases that could not be
categorized (see table 8).
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 37
Table 8. Indeterminate Recent Cases
Country Depolarization episode years Depolarization range
Burma 20 07–2014 3.82 to 1.84
Egypt 2014–2019 3.84 to 2.86
Ethiopia 2007–2020 3.47 to 2.61
Fiji 2002–2018 3.80 to 2.35
Mongolia 2008–2016 3.22 to 2.06
Senegal 2012–2016 3.19 to 1.64
Timor-Leste 2007–2016 3.05 to 1.50
39
About the Authors
Jennifer McCoy a nonresident scholar in the Democracy, Conict, and Governance
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; a professor of political science
at Georgia State University; a research aliate at Central European University’s Democracy
Institute in Budapest; and a visiting researcher at Koc University in Istanbul. She is working
on two books with Murat Somer on depolarization and reversing democratic erosion around
the world.
Benjamin Press is a research assistant in the Democracy, Conict, and Governance
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was formerly a
James C. Gaither Junior Fellow. His research focuses on international politics, comparative
political polarization, and U.S. foreign policy, especially as it relates to support for
democracy and human rights.
Murat Somer is a professor of political science at Koç University in Istanbul and an expert
on polarization, religious and secular politics, ethnic conict, autocratization, and democra-
tization in Turkey and around the world at large. His upcoming publications include Return
to Point Zero: e Turkish-Kurdish Question and two books in progress co-authored with
Jennifer McCoy on depolarization and reversing democratic erosion around the world.
Ozle m Tu ncel is a PhD candidate in political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta,
Georgia. Her research addresses competitive autocratic regimes, electoral politics, and
political parties.
40 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
Acknowledgments
e Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is grateful to the Ford Foundation, whose
generous support helped make the research for this paper possible. e authors appreciate
the helpful comments from members of Carnegie’s Democracy, Conict, and Governance
Program as well as Dan Slater and Adrienne LeBas on an earlier version of this paper.
41
Notes
1 omas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue, eds., Democracies Divided: e Global Challenge of Political
Polarization (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019); Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman,
Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021);
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); and Jennifer McCoy
and Murat Somer, eds., “Special Issue on Polarized Polities: A Global reat to Democracy,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 681, no. 1 (January 2019) https://www.aapss.org/volumes/
polarizing-polities-a-global-threat-to-democracy/.
2 Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: e Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Adrienne LeBas, From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and
Democratization in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jennifer McCoy, Tahmina Rahman,
and Murat Somer, “Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and
Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities,” American Behavioral Scientist 62, no. 1 (January 1, 2018):
16–42; and Kenneth M. Roberts, “Populism and Polarization in Comparative Perspective: Constitutive,
Spatial and Institutional Dimensions,” Government and Opposition (June 7, 2021): 1–23.
3 McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy.”
4 Donald P. Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the
Social Identities of Voters, Yale ISPS Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Lilliana Mason, “‘I
Disrespectfully Agree’: e Dierential Eects of Partisan Sorting on Social and Issue Polarization,” American
Journal of Political Science 59, no. 1 (January 2015): 128–145; and Henri Tajfel and J. C. Turner, “An
Integrative eory of Intergroup Conict,” in e Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by W. G.
Austin and S. Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979), 33–37.
5 Mason, “‘I Disrespectfully Agree.’”
6 Murat Somer, Jennifer McCoy, and Russell Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition
Strategies,” Democratization 28, no. 5 (2021): 929–948; and Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, “Pernicious
Polarization and Democratic Resilience in the US: Comparative Lessons,” in Democratic Resilience: Can the
United States Withstand Rising Polarization? edited by Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler and Kenneth
Roberts, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
42 | Reducing Pernicious Polarization: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Depolarization
7 Murat Somer and Jennifer McCoy, “Déjà vu? Polarization and Endangered Democracies in the 21st
Century,” American Behavioral Scientist 62, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 3–15.
8 Murat Somer and Jennifer McCoy. “Transformations rough Polarizations and Global reats to
Democracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 681, no. 1 (January 2019): 8–22,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716218818058.
9 Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, eds., “Special Issue: Polarization and Democracy: A Janus-Faced
Relationship With Pernicious Consequences,” American Behavioral Scientist 62, no.1 (2018) https://journals.
sagepub.com/toc/abs/62/1; and McCoy and Somer, eds., “Special Issue on Polarized Polities: A Global
reat to Democracy”; Carothers and O’Donohue, Democracies Divided; and Haggard and Kaufman,
Backsliding.
10 e Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute is an institution hosted by the Department of Political
Science at the University of Gothenburg (in Sweden). While V-Dem’s eorts to gather an extensive data
set on democracy date back to 2011, the full V-Dem data set was released in 2016. is research uses
version 11.1 of the data set, which was released in 2021. See Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik
Knutsen, Staan I. Lindberg, and Jan Teorell et al., “V-Dem Dataset Version 11.1,” V-Dem, March 2021,
https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/archive/previous-data/v-dem-dataset/.
11 Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staan I. Lindberg, and Jan Teorell et al., “V-Dem
Codebook (v11.1),” Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, March 2021, https://www.v-dem.net/static/
website/img/refs/codebookv111.pdf.
12 For more on the Regimes of the World index, see Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al.,
“V-Dem Codebook (v11.1),” 283.
13 Existing regime classications cannot be used interchangeably, and the research outcomes are highly
dependent on the selection of measures. Nevertheless, the level of agreement on categorizing regimes
between V-Dem and other data sets is more than 90 percent. For further discussion, see Gretchen Casper
and Claudiu Tus, “Correlation Versus Interchangeability: e Limited Robustness of Empirical Findings
on Democracy Using Highly Correlated Datasets,” Political Analysis 11, no. 2 (2003): 196–203; John
Högström, “Does the Choice of Democracy Measure Matter? Comparisons Between the Two Leading
Democracy Indices, Freedom House and Polity IV,” Government and Opposition 48, no. 2 (2013): 201–221;
and Espen Geelmuyden Rød, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Håvard Hegre, “e Determinants of Democracy:
A Sensitivity Analysis,” Public Choice 185, no. 1 (2020): 87–111. A comparison of RoW with regime indices
developed by Boix et al. (2013), Cheibub et al. (2010), Geddes et al. (2014), Wahman et al. (2013), the
Polity score, and Freedom House shows that the RoW index is more conservative if there is a disagreement
between them, since RoW’s categorization of democracy has a higher bar compared to others. For compar-
ison of these measurements, see Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staan I. Lindberg, “Regimes
of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes,” Politics and
Governance 6, no.1 (2018): 60. For these alternative measurements, see Carles Boix, Michael Miller, and
Sebastian Rosato, “A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007,” Comparative Political Studies
46, no. 12 (2013): 1523–1554; José Antonio Cheibub, Jennifer Gandhi, and James Raymond Vreeland,
“Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited,” Public Choice 143, no. 1 (2010): 67–101; Barbara Geddes, Joseph
Wright, and Erica Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives
on Politics 12, no. 2 (2014): 313–331; Michael Wahman, Jan Teorell, and Axel Hadenius, “Authoritarian
Regime Types Revisited: Updated Data in Comparative Perspective,” Contemporary Politics 19, no. 1 (2013):
19–34; Monty G. Marshall, Keith Jaggers, and Ted R. Gurr, “Polity IV Individual Country Regime Trends,
1946–2013,” Center for Systemic Peace, 2014, https://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm; and
Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2016,” Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/
les/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf.
14 “Italian Neofascism and the Years of Lead: A Closer Look at the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari,” Middlebury
Institute of International Studies at Monterey, March 4, 2022, https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/
academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/italian-neofascism-and-years-lead-closer-look.
15 Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press, “What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously
Polarized?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 18, 2022, https://carnegieendowment.
org/2022/01/18/what-happens-when-democracies-become-perniciously-polarized-pub-86190.
Jennifer McCoy, Benjamin Press, Murat Somer, Ozlem Tuncel | 43
16 Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
17 Haggard and Kaufman, Backsliding; and Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, “Toward a eory of
Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies,” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 681, no. 1 (December 20, 2018): 234–271, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/
full/10.1177/0002716218818782.
18 Each ve-year window started in the last year during which a country was perniciously polarized.
19 McCoy and Press, “What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously Polarized?”
20 Tom Phillips, “Bolivia’s New Leftwing President: ‘We Have Reclaimed Democracy,’” Guardian, November 8,
2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/08/luis-arce-bolivia-president-elect-left-morales.
21 A detailed explanation of the indeterminate category can be found at the end of appendix C.
22 Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Codebook (v11.1).”
23 Daniel Pemstein, Eitan Tzelgov, and Yi-ting Wang, “Evaluating and Improving Item Response eory
Models for Cross-National Expert Surveys,” V-Dem Working Paper no. 1, 2015.
24 Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staan I. Lindberg, and Jan Teorell et al., “V-Dem
Methodology (v11.1),” March 2021, https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/img/refs/methodologyv111.pdf.
25 Laura Levick and Mauricio Olavarria-Gambi, “Hindsight Bias in Expert Surveys: How Democratic Crises
Inuence Retrospective Evaluations,” Politics 40, no. 4 (2020): 494–509.
26 Coppedge, Gerring, Knutsen, Lindberg, and Teorell et al., “V-Dem Codebook (v11.1).”
45
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