In recent years, the attention of political scientists investigating political polarization has turned from the ideological aspects of polarization to its partisan and affective aspects. This recent turn implied that this area has experienced an urgent need to create appropriate polarization indices that are backed with high-quality data across time and countries to carry out comparative research. This paper argues that existing polarization indices mostly fail to adequately include the most important aspect of polarization, that is, bimodality. To fill this gap, it proposes a partisan polarization index using European Social Survey data on government satisfaction of partisan camps, which is available for 32 European countries between 2002 and 2020 for all in all 214 country-years. That is, the paper offers an insight into trends in partisan polarization for these 214 cases. The analysis of cases shows that in the last two decades polarization hit mostly Southern European countries and some East-Central European ones, like Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Poland and especially, Hungary. Within the realm of possibilities, the paper compares the newly constructed index to other polarization indices.

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Covering the largest sample of countries to date, this study examines the effect of three country-specific factors on the tone of electoral campaigns across Europe: electoral system disproportionality, party system fragmentation and the polarization of the electorate. We use an original dataset of statements made by political actors during 18 electoral campaigns in 9 European countries. Our multinomial logit model suggests that increasing disproportionality slightly increases negativity, while thanks to parties competing on the same market less polarized electorates invite more negative political campaigns. Finally, we find a U-shaped relationship between party system fragmentation and negativity: increasing the number of parties negativity decreases first, only to start increasing again once the party system becomes very fragmented. We explain this with parties altering their coalition strategies with the changing number of parties: less fragmentation makes it more likely to having to step into coalition with the competitors, thus decreasing negativity, while in very fragmented systems, parties not needed to any potential coalitions become easy targets to negative campaign.

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