Affective Polarization and Politicised Identities through India’s 2024 Elections

• In Event: Minority Politics in the Comparative Context

Abstract

Affective polarization is defined as dislike and distrust of the “other” political (or politicised) group. Its use outside the US context is limited, but growing rapidly. Few studies have followed affective polarisation both before and after elections, and fewer still have assessed affective polarisation associated with multiple politicised identities, including political party affiliation alongside race, gender, caste, gender and so forth.

Here we report the initial findings of a panel survey (N. approx 3,000) to be conducted via in-person interviews in the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, during February/March and June/July 2024. We present the results of explicit feeling thermometer and social distance measures of a range of different politicised groups in these states relative to one another. This allows us to demonstrate the importance of caste for inter-group sentiment within as well as across Muslim and Hindu communities, and to further compare the strength of these affective measures to those associated with people affiliated with prominent political parties (such as the BJP and Congress parties). Such patterns are further explored through the use of a conjoint experiment, which is designed to check the faithfulness of explicit responses to social distance measures, given social desirability concerns around issues such as willingness to live nearby or for family members to marry outgroup members (by different outgroup definitions).

A second conjoint experiment probes the relevance of these attributes for citizens’ assessments of trust in individual bureaucrats. Drawing on additional survey items, we assess associations between experiences of inter-group violence and the strength of affect towards different politicised groups at the individual level.

Authors

• Sayan Banerjee, Texas Tech University

• Anna Petherick, University of Oxford