Affective Polarization in Multiparty Systems? Comparing Affective Polarization Towards Voters and Parties in Norway and the United States

Abstract

A growing body of comparative studies on partisan hostility – a phenomenon known as affective polarization – is providing evidence that partisan affective polarization is generally no greater in the United States than it is in many European multiparty systems. This article takes the comparative literature on affective polarization one step further by presenting the first comparative study on affective polarization that simultaneously uses, compares and combines a direct measure of affective polarization towards voters (using the inter‐party marriage measure) and an indirect measure of affective polarization towards parties (using the like/dislike of party measure) while accounting for the fact that multiparty systems have numerous political parties. This is done by comparing the levels of affective polarization in the United States and Norway. The results show greater affective polarization in the United States relating to parties, but the differences between these two countries are indistinguishable from chance when focusing on the affect relating to voters. This provides empirical evidence that comparative evidence of negative affect towards parties cannot necessarily be generalized to suggest that there is comparative evidence of negative affect towards voters. Yet the results also suggest that negative feelings towards out‐parties move to some extent to the personal level in terms of negative feelings towards voters of these out‐parties.

Intergroup threat and affective polarization in a multi-party system

“…The present paper contributes to a growing research literature in this area in multi-party contexts (e.g. Knudsen, 2021;Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016).…”

“…The present paper contributes to a growing research literature in this area in multi-party contexts (e.g. Knudsen, 2021;Gidron et al, 2020;Harteveld, 2021;Wagner 2021) using data from Sweden, a multi-party system with a relatively high degree of affective polarization compared to other Western European countries (Reiljan, 2020). In addition, we contribute to the growing literature on affective polarization by analyzing why some individuals are more biased than others when evaluating their in-and outgroups, focusing specifically on the role of intergroup threat.…”

Ideological Tripolarization, Partisan Tribalism and Institutional Trust: The Foundations of Affective Polarization in the Swedish Multiparty System

“…However, it should be clarified that this scale captures attitudes towards political parties as broad objects, and should be distinguished from the items that measure social distance between party supporters, e.g, the attitude towards having an out‐party in‐law. Although the two are moderately correlated to each other, they represent distinct, but equally important, manifestations of affective polarization (Druckman & Levendusky 2019; Knudsen 2020). Moreover, the open meaning wording of the like‐dislike question leaves it up to the respondent what to base their evaluation on (Wagner 2020), which fits with our approach of regressing different ideology and partisan identity related variables against the affective polarization measure.…”

Affective blocs: Understanding affective polarization in multiparty systems

“…Although partisans tend to rate their own party higher than do others, the ratings of other parties are more uniform. Finally, when asked to rate parties, people tend to think of party elites, and opinions of supporters are less negative (Druckman & Levendusky 2019;Knudsen 2020).…”

“…Unlike previous approaches (e.g. Huddy et al 2018;Knudsen 2020), ours is not based on a priori grouping parties based on blocs or government coalitions or selecting a subset of parties for analysis (Boxell et al 2020). Thus, our analysis is guided by the following open research question:…”