The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States

Abstract

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.

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

“…Polarization among citizens comes in two varieties. ' Attitudinal polarization' concerns partisans taking extreme opposing issue positions, whereas 'affective polarization' refers to partisans disliking and distrusting those from the opposing party(ies) 87,88 . Affective polarization has political consequences, such as decreasing trust 89 , privileging partisan labels over policy information 90 and believing false information 91 , that can undermine social and economic relationships 88 and impair public health.…”

Measuring and Unpacking Affective Polarization on Twitter: The Role of Party and Gender in the 2018 Senate Races

“…The present study extends the work of Conover, Dang-Xuan, Iyengar, Steiglitz and others [10,11,27,28,29,48] by proposing to systematically measure affective polarization as the difference between sentiment about one's own party (in-group party) [48] and sentiment about opposing parties (out-group parties) [29] as expressed on Twitter.…”

“…The main goals of this study are to a) determine whether affective polarization can be measured using Twitter data and b) to unpack affective polarization, as it is expressed on Twitter [28], to better understand what may be driving this polarization. Iyengar et al [27], using data from the American National Election Study (ANES), measure affective polarization as the difference between mean in-party feeling and mean outparty feeling. They show that affective polarization has significantly increased over the last three decades.…”

“…When discussing partisan polarization it is important to distinguish between different types of polarization. For example, ideological polarization is the extent to which the ideological policy positions differ between parties [2] whereas affective polarization is the extent to which supporters of one party (or group) dislike the members of other parties (or other groups) [27]. While most studies, when measuring partisan polarization, have focused on ideological polarization, the focus of this work is to examine affective polarization.…”

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“…Emotional dynamics that lead to amplification or attenuation of a certain group emotion may create increased divisions within a larger group, and thus may also fuel processes of polarization and radicalization. If a certain emotional influence process leads a subgroup to amplify its emotions in response to a particular issue, other subgroups may react to such a change with further polarization (Iyengar et al, 2018;Myers & Lamm, 1976 Gross, 2012). Such negative perceptions of deviants may further exacerbate these polarization processes and can play a role in radicalization (for a review see Doosje et al, 2016;Kruglanski et al, 2014).…”