Affective polarization: its measurement in multi-party contexts and its relationship with ideology

Presenter: Josep Maria Comellas (RECSM - Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

 Mariano Torcal (RECSM Director - Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Affective polarization broadly refers to the extent that individuals feel sympathy towards in-groups and antagonism towards out-groups. While this topic has been extensively studied in the United States, affective polarization has increasingly received comparative attention in an attempt to study this phenomenon in multi-party settings. In the first part of the presentation, we revise some of the main indices proposed in the literature to measure affective polarization, and we explain the ones that we have implemented using different datasets (CNEP, CSES, E-DEM). Then, in the second part, we present a paper that is focused on the relationship between ideology and affective polarization. Concretely, we test the predominance of identity over issues in explaining affective polarization in a multi-party system, taking advantage of an original panel dataset (E-DEM, 2018-2019) collected in Spain. The main results show that ideological identity and affective polarization strongly reinforce each other over time, polarizing society in identity terms but not so much due to conflicts emerging for issue positioning and sorting. Issue-based ideology exerts more modest affective polarizing effects, and only among those individuals whose positions in concrete issues are quite in line with their ideological identity.

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