Resumen de Causes and consequences of affective polarisation in comparative perspective
Josep Maria Comellas Bonsfills
There is a growing attention both in academia and outside academia towards a phenomenon that is usually labelled affective polarisation, which refers to the extent to which individual express substantive levels of hostility towards opposing parties, their leaders and their rank-and-file supporters. This type of polarisation has been extensively studied in the United States and has begun to be studied in comparative perspective. In this dissertation, I deal with three main gaps identified in this burgeoning comparative literature. First, citizens tend to hold more polarised sentiments towards parties than towards voters, so that some individuals are more likely than others to extend their antipathy towards opposing parties to the people who support them. However, we do not know much about the factors that explain when polarised feelings towards parties spread to voters. Second, the irruption of radical right parties appears to be related to increasing levels of inter-partisan hostility. Nevertheless, we do not know if affective polarisation is simply a consequence of the rise of such parties or if this type of polarisation also precedes the emergence of the radical right. Third, although party leaders have gained centrality in most parliamentary and multiparty systems and some of them have increasingly played a divisive role, the literature analysing the polarisation of feelings towards leaders and comparing it with the polarisation of sentiments towards parties is scarce, especially outside the United States.
These gaps in the literature are addressed in three papers. In the first study, based on the Spanish E-DEM panel dataset, I show that when an individual affectively evaluates an opposing party that is moderately far from her in ideological terms, she tends to differentiate the party from its voters and assess substantially worse the former than the latter. However, when the ideological distance is high, individuals tend to discern in a much lower degree the opposing party from its voters and extend the dislike for the former to the latter. Moreover, individuals whose social identities are aligned with their party preferences tend to transfer their polarised feelings about parties to rank-and-file voters in a greater degree than individuals presenting low levels of social sorting. The second study deals with the relationship between the electoral emergence of radical right parties and affective polarisation by using the E-DEM panel dataset, which covers the entire period of the emergence of the radical right party VOX in Spain. The results show that the electoral emergence of VOX is preceded by high levels of negative feelings towards left-wing partisans among supporters of moderate right parties and low levels of positive sentiments towards their own in-group of partisans. Once VOX emerges in the electoral arena, overall levels of affective polarisation increase again, although to a different degree across partisan groups. In the third study, based on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems’ dataset, I show that the mean level of leader affective polarisation is substantially lower than the level of party affective polarisation in Western Europe, and that the electoral results of parties in national elections influence more the affective assessment of leaders than the evaluations of parties, which tend to be more consistent over time. To the extent that party leaders play an increasing pivotal role in Western Europe, these results imply that affective polarisation tendencies may become more volatile and depend more on the specific electoral results of parties and their leaders.
