Finland is traditionally associated with a consensus-like political culture, low partisan hostility and consistent levels of ideological polarization. Despite this, concerns about political polarization are widespread. A possible explanation is that affective polarization, a phenomenon characterized by increasing emotional distances between political groups, is increasing. This paper examines trends and individual level predictors of affective polarization in the Finnish electorate between 2003 and 2019, using survey data from five national election studies. Additionally, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of affective polarization in multiparty settings by introducing a measure based on the absence of neutrality towards parties. The results show a general increase in affective polarization over the period and identifies ideological extremity as the main predictor of the phenomenon. While the impact of ideological positions on the left–right scale didn’t change according to any discernible pattern over time, positions on the GAL–TAN scale begun driving affective polarization in 2011. The importance of sociocultural issues has since increased and having a strong TAN position became the strongest predictor of affective polarization in 2019. Feeling close to a party had a more consistent effect on affective polarization, albeit not as large as ideological extremity. Increasing affective polarization might undermine the prevailing consensus culture in Finnish politics. However, it might also have positive effects as a corrective to voter apathy, leading to increased participation. This makes Finland an interesting case for further studies of the causes and effects of affective polarization.

Finland is traditionally associated with a consensus-like political culture, low partisan hostility and consistent levels of ideological polarization. Despite this, concerns about political polarization are widespread. A possible explanation is that affective polarization, a phenomenon characterized by increasing emotional distances between political groups, is increasing. This paper examines trends and individual level predictors of affective polarization in the Finnish electorate between 2003 and 2019, using survey data from five national election studies. Additionally, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of affective polarization in multiparty settings by introducing a measure based on the absence of neutrality towards parties.The results show a general increase in affective polarization over the period and identifies ideological extremity as the main predictor of the phenomenon. While the impact of ideological positions on the left-right scale didn't change according to any discernible pattern over time, positions on the GAL-TAN scale begun driving affective polarization in 2011. The importance of sociocultural issues has since increased and having a strong TAN position became the strongest predictor of affective polarization in 2019. Feeling close to a party had a more consistent effect on affective polarization, albeit not as large as ideological extremity.Increasing affective polarization might undermine the prevailing consensus culture in Finnish politics. However, it might also have positive effects as a corrective to voter apathy, leading to increased participation. This makes Finland an interesting case for further studies of the causes and effects of affective polarization.

Affective polarization refers to people having favorable attitudes toward their preferred political parties, or inparties, along with their supporters, and negative attitudes toward other parties, or outparties, and their supporters. Originally an American concept, there is now growing interest in studying (AP) in European countries characterized by multiparty systems. So far, researchers have primarily focused on like-dislike ratings when measuring affect, which has relegated another important aspect to the background, namely attitudes toward ordinary supporters of parties. Open questions also remain relating to how political ingroups and outgroups should be conceptualized in situations with large numbers of relevant political parties. We examine these puzzles using data from an online panel in Finland. First, we measure partisan social distance, or feelings toward interacting with supporters of different parties, in addition to commonly used like-dislike ratings of parties. We find that social distance differs from party like-dislike ratings in that respondents are less likely to report animosity toward outparty supporters. Second, we measure multiple party identification based on party support and closeness, and find that people commonly have not one, but many potential inparties. Finally, we build two individual-level AP measures and apply them using both like-dislike ratings and social distance scales. One of the measures is based on identifying a single inparty, while the other takes the possibility of multiple inparties into account. We find that choosing which type of attitude to measure is more consequential for the outcome than how partisanship is operationalized. Our results and discussion clarify relationships between AP and related constructs, and highlight the necessity to consider the political and social context when measuring AP and interpreting results.