The Social Anchors of Affective Polarization

• In Event: Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference I: Polarization in Developing Democracies

Abstract

We know little about the extent to which Latin American “partisans” think about themselves and their rivals in the same way as partisans in other parts of the world do. Our paper addresses this gap with original experimental/observational survey data from Brazil and Argentina. We also rely on qualitative data collected via focus groups in both countries to get a sense of the meaning voters ascribe to partisan identities and contextualize survey findings. Specifically, we document the depth and intensity of partisan attachments and polarization across several dimensions: programmatic or policy preferences; degrees of perceived social distance, in-group favouritism, and out-group aversion; and reliance on cognitive mechanisms to enhance ontological security, including distorted perceptions of reality, group-size perceptions, and emotional reactivity to political events. We are thus able to trace the main contours of the key political fault lines (“grietas”) that have dominated Argentine and Brazilian societies over the past decade. The paper concludes by contrasting the kind of polarization present in these cases with what has been documented in the United States. On this front, we find that in Argentina and Brazil: (a) perceptions of social distance between groups are less intense; (b) out/in-group stereotyping is much more centred on questions of class; and (c) many partisans display identities defined primarily via antipathies to out-groups rather than a strong sense of belonging to an in-group. This leads them to dovetail with anti-political sentiments that, paradoxically, threaten the stability of existing partisan fault lines.

Authors

• Ezequiel Alejo Gonzalez Ocantos, University of Oxford

• Carlos Melendez, Universidad Diego Portales