Affective Polarization & Democratic Attitudes: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

• In Event: Political Behavior under Electoral Authoritarianism

Abstract

Politics in many countries are characterized by high levels of affective polarization, that is, citizens’ increasing levels of antipathy, distrust, and negative sentiments across partisan lines. Theoretically, scholars consider rising affective polarization as a potential driver of democratic backsliding as it politicizes liberal democratic norms and heightens partisan cue taking. These, in turn, might lead citizens to have lower tolerance for outparty groups and prioritize partisanship over democratic norms. Therefore, citizens become less likely to push back would-be autocrats from their own in-group and sometimes even actively support their undemocratic behavior. Despite these theoretical conjectures about how affective polarization could erode democracy, we lack empirical evidence to support them. In fact, some recent studies focusing on the case of the U.S. failed to register a causal association between affective polarization and democratic attitudes. This paper contributes to the affective polarization and democratic backsliding literature by presenting data from an original, nationally representative survey experiment fielded in Turkey. Turkey is an appropriate context to address this question, as the country has recently experienced both high levels of affective polarization and significant democratic backsliding. In addition, it is a multi-party system that better mirrors other political contexts around the world than the two-party system of the U.S. In our survey we manipulate respondents’ affective polarization and observe whether these manipulations lead to a change in their democratic attitudes. More specifically, we employ treatments designed to lower respondents’ affective polarization levels and then measure the treatment effects on both conventional democratic battery questions and a candidate-choice conjoint experiment that circumvents social desirability bias. Through this novel design, we find that the lowered affective polarization levels indeed lead to strengthened democratic attitudes. In particular, respondents in treatment groups are more likely to punish in-party candidates who violate democratic norms, especially when it comes to violating political rights of out-party members.

Authors

• S. Erdem Aytaç, Koç University

• Seda ÇALIŞIR

• Busra Soylemez-Karakoc, Koc University