“Be Nice or Leave Me Alone”: An Intergroup Perspective on Affective Polarization in Online Political Discussions

Abstract

Affective polarization—growing animosity and hostility between political rivals—has become increasingly characteristic of Western politics. While this phenomenon is well-documented through surveys, few studies investigate whether and how it manifests in the digital context, and what mechanisms underpin it. Drawing on social identity and intergroup theories, this study employs computational methods to explore to what extent political discussions on Reddit’s r/politics are affectively polarized, and what communicative factors shape these affective biases. Results show that interactions between ideologically opposed users were significantly more negative than like-minded ones. These interactions were also more likely to be cut short than sustained if one user referred negatively to the other’s political in-group. Conversely, crosscutting interactions in which one of the users expressed positive sentiment toward the out-group were more likely to attract a positive than a negative response, thus mitigating intergroup affective bias. Implications for the study of online political communication dynamics are discussed.

Capturing Diverse and Precise Reactions to a Comment with User-Generated Labels

“…We found that this mechanism had a positive effect in encouraging more deliberate participation across users. The effect of diversity on reducing affective polarization has gained scholarly attention [1,3,17,23,30,37,42]. While aggregated UGLs improved participants' understanding of others' multifaceted evaluation of a comment, our findings show that simply increasing exposure to diversity does not increase the tolerance towards the outgroup.…”

Intergroup contact reduces affective polarization but not among strong party identifiers

“…The present analysis contributes to the literature on the roots of affective polarization. Marchal (2022) concluded that conversations (with negative critique) and group context spur affective polarization. Lelkes (2021) reported that some scholars point to ideological values and elite messages as sources of affective polarization.…”

“…1414Wojcieszak and Warner (2020, p. 792) suggest that in‐group contact may be more frequent than out‐party contact (for a similar proposition, see Marchal (2022, p. 7); both studies utilize American data). Our material does not fully confirm this claim; in particular, the superficial contact indicator is clearly skewed in favor of out‐party contact (see Figure online appendix).…”

Who's to blame for failed integration of immigrants? Blame attributions as an affectively polarizing force in lay discussions of immigration in Finland

“…Missing from this literature is microlevel, qualitative investigation of how affective polarization takes shape in people's talk. The few qualitative studies have looked only at elite discourse (e.g., Meislová, 2022) or social media (e.g., Marchal, 2022; Pettersson & Sakki, 2023; Sakki & Martikainen, 2021). The present article's analysis of lay interviews promises to fill the gap.…”