Several scholars in the United States have recently addressed an increased partisan animosity between Democrats and Republicans, and have termed this phenomenon 'affective polarisation' . This surge in partisan affective polarisation is perceived to be highly problematic, as it has been found to have a negative impact on the functioning of the party system and even society at large. The aim of this article is to study the concept of affective polarisation in European party systems. It introduces the Affective Polarisation Index (API) that allows for measuring and comparing levels of affective polarisation also in multiparty systems. This novel measure is applied to 22 European democracies and the United States between 2005 and 2016.The results indicate that affective polarisation is acutely present in European party systems, as partisans are often extremely hostile towards competing parties. The most affectively polarised countries are in Central Eastern and Southern Europe where the degree of affective polarisation is notably higher than it is in the United States, while Northwestern European countries are more moderate in terms of partisan feelings. Further analysis reveals that affective polarisation is significantly correlated with ideological polarisation, but the relationship between the two appears to be conditional: in some Western European political systems ideological polarisation does not lead itself to strong interparty hostility, while in Central Eastern Europe a high degree of affective polarisation can be present even in ideologically centrist party structures. These findings validate the claim that ideological and affective polarisation are two distinct aspects of polarisation, and that the latter also merits additional attention.

Currently, very little is known about the individual level foundations of affective polarization outside the US context. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring the predictors of affective polarization in Sweden, using nationally representative survey data. From 2010 till the 2018 elections, the Swedish multiparty system was divided into two affectively converged mainstream party blocs that were moderately polarized between each other, and an asymmetrically polarized populist right party that invoked significantly more hostility from the supporters of mainstream parties than vice versa. To unpack the foundations of affective polarization in such a tripolar configuration, we employ a methodological approach that distinguishes not just between in-and outparties but also in-and out-blocs, and separates different conflict dimensions. We find that: (1) voters with stronger partisan identities and more extreme political attitudes exhibit higher levels of affective polarization. The latter, however, is a better predictor of direct dislike towards political opponents; (2) the effects of political attitudes correspond to the tripolar nature of the party system: while affective polarization between the centre-right and -left blocs is mostly driven by socioeconomic positions, the hostility towards Sweden Democrats links predominantly to cultural issues, most notably immigration; (3) institutional trust has a two-edged relationship with affective polarization: populist right voters that trust the country's central institutions more, are less polarized towards mainstream blocs, whereas among centreright voters, higher trust associates with stronger animosity towards Sweden Democrats. We believe that these findings could have broad implications for affective polarization research in multiparty systems.

Existing research on political parties' policy positions has traditionally relied on expert surveys and/or party manifesto data. More recently, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have been increasingly used as an additional method for locating parties in the policy space, with a closer focus on concrete policy issues. In this manuscript, we examine the reliability of party positions originated from a VAA, utilizing the euandi longitudinal dataset, which provides data on positions of over 400 unique political parties across 28 EU member states from the European Parliament elections of 2009, 2014 and 2019.We cross-validate euandi data with the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). Our results attest the reliability of the euandi trend file vis-à-vis remaining data sources, demonstrating the validity of VAA-based methods to estimate the policy positions of European political parties. Convergence is especially high with CHES party placements. We also explore the sources of divergence in the estimation of policy positions across the three methods, finding little evidence of a systematic source of bias in the estimates between datasets. We conclude with an inventory of arguments in favour of party position measurements used by VAAs for the study of policy making in European democracies.

This study compares the spatial positioning of over 200 political parties across 28 European Union (EU) member states in two cross-national voting advice applications (VAAs) developed for the 2014 European elections: EUvox and euandi. We find that the two VAAs show highly similar results in terms of party positioning on the cultural liberal-conservative and pro-anti EU dimensions, while economic left–right placements converge less, especially concerning right-wing parties. Our analyses reveal that the higher overlap on the cultural and EU dimensions is a result, at least partially, of the inclusion of similar items used to measure these concepts, while most of the systematic divergence between the two VAAs in left–right placements stems from problematic issue-statements used in the dimensional calculations. We demonstrate how certain items can cause bias in the placements of specific party families by (1) not aligning with other statements that measure the same latent construct; (2) tapping into other latent constructs, in addition to the one they are supposed to measure; and (3) not inducing sufficient polarization between parties.

This research note investigates the scope of regional variations in levels of affective polarization across Europe and contrasts it with national scores to highlight the theoretical and empirical interest of a disaggregated approach. Using all waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset, we compute an affective polarization score for 143,857 individuals and aggregate these scores in 190 regions nested in 30 countries, across a period ranging from 1996 to 2019, covering 105 elections. We map variations in affective polarization across regions, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Our results reveal that the range of scores is larger across regions than between countries and that approximately half of the variation in affective polarization scores can be attributed to within-country heterogeneity. Second, we find that some countries display rather homogeneous regional patterns, while others display heterogeneous scores. Third, we show how the increase in the affective polarization scores over time at the national level can be driven by sharp changes in some regions only, while other regions remain stable. Overall, these results point to the added value of adopting a regional approach to the study of affective polarization.