Can’t We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics

Abstract

Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whether who serves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women’s behavior as elected representatives and citizens’ beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs. We evaluate this claim with an original dataset on women’s presence in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017 combined with survey data on partisans’ affective ratings of political opponents. We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.

Who Dislikes Whom? Affective Polarization between Pairs of Parties in Western Democracies

“…Research about hostility across party lines, that is, affective polarization , has until recently focused on the United States (Druckman and Levendusky 2019; Iyengar et al 2019). Yet, a growing comparative affective polarization literature has emerged (Adams et al 2022; Bassan-Nygate and Weiss 2022; Boxell, Genzkow, and Shapiro 2020; Gidron, Adams, and Horne 2020; Harteveld 2021a, Harteveld 2021b; Hernandez, Anduiza, and Rico 2021; Hobolt, Leeper, and Tilley 2020; Horne, Adams, and Gidron 2022; Lauka, McCoy, and Firat 2018; Reiljan 2020; Wagner 2021; Westwood et al 2018). This research primarily analyzes cross-national variations in affective polarization.…”

Do Women Make More Protectionist Trade Policy?

“…7 Our first analysis examines party platforms in 81 national elections across 20 democracies from 1996 to 2017 (474 total party platforms). 8 We combine data on women's descriptive representation in parties' parliamentary delegations taken from Adams et al (2022) 9 with estimates of parties' trade preferences based on content codings of their electoral manifestos provided by Volkens et al (2020). Following Lowe et al (2011), we aggregate all positive and negative statements regarding trade, where higher values reflect a preference for greater trade restrictions (including domestic protections, quotas, tariffs, etc.…”

We Love, They Hate: How Radical Right Partisans Use Emotion Narratives to Consolidate Affective Polarization

“…Affective polarization--the tendency to view partisans as positive and opposing partisans as negative (Iyengar and Westwood 2015)--affects how we vote, where we live, and whom we fall in love with (Iyengar et al 2019). Consequentially, researchers devote considerable attention to this influential concept, studying its causes (e.g., Mason 2016), consequences (e.g., Druckman et al 2021), and remedies (e.g., Adams et al 2022;Levendusky 2018).…”