Elite Affective Polarization: A Five-Country Comparative Study

• In Event: Polarization and Fear in Comparative Politics

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that partisan animosity among politicians has negative societal implications. First, hostility among elected officials adversely impacts their willingness to cooperate and co-govern, and lowers barriers for adopting undemocratic practices and for sanctioning discrimination and harsh measures against political rivals. Second, citizens take affective cues from politicians, and the more affectively polarized politicians are, the more citizens are likely to adopt similar attitudes. Yet our knowledge of how affectively polarized politicians are is remarkably limited, and is comprised of contradictory findings, documenting both lower (Druckman et al., 2023; Lucas and Sheffer, 2023) or higher (Enders, 2021) hostility levels relative to citizens, depending on the year and country case. We argue that reconciling this evidence requires a large-scale, comparative approach, and that politicians' affective polarization vary by predictable factors such as partisanship, extremism, and seniority, and importantly, by institutional context. We provide first evidence on such differences by directly measuring partisan animosity levels among 3,195 incumbent politicians in five countries (Germany, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom), showing markedly different elite affective polarization levels, and outlining potential explanations. Our results help identify which types of politicians drive affective polarization, and where they are most likely to be found.

Authors

• Lior Sheffer, Tel Aviv University

• Miguel M. Pereira, London School of Economics

• Nathalie Giger, University of Geneva

• Martin Baekgaard, Aarhus University

• Clareta Treger, University of Toronto