Ideological extremism, perceived party system polarization, and support for democracy

Abstract

Does ideological polarization undermine or strengthen people’s principled support for democracy? In this study, we suggest that different manifestations of ideological polarization have different implications in this respect. Using data from 11 surveys conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of a group of liberal democratic countries, part of the Comparative National Elections Project, we look at how people’s level of ideological extremism and their perceptions of ideological polarization in their countries’ party systems are related with their support for democracy. We show that citizens who hold more extreme ideological positions are indeed less supportive of democracy and that such a negative relationship is strengthened as citizens’ extremism increases. However, we also show that the citizens who display higher levels of principled support for democracy are those who perceive parties to be neither too distant nor too close to each other in ideological terms. In other words, while a very polarized partisan supply seems to undermine popular commitment with democracy, very low polarization may have similar consequences.

Essential Victories, Painful Defeats: The Moderating Effects of Polarization on the Winner-Loser Gap in Political Support

“…Perceived ideological polarization is understood as the extent to which individuals perceive differences between political opponents' ideological positions and policy preferences (Torcal and Magalhães 2022). The concept concerns the observed dispersion of parties along an ideological continuum, which indicates the set of ideological choices that the parties represent to a voter (Dalton 2008b).…”

WhatsApp, Polarization, and Non-Conventional Political Participation: Chile and Colombia Before the Social Outbursts of 2019

“…In Colombia, the main leftist party was Polo Democrático (M = 3.51) and the most important party on the right was Partido de la U. Two criteria were used to establish the largest left and For perceived political polarization we used a measure that has been widely employed in the past in multinational studies (see, for example, Singer, 2016;Torcal & Magalhães, 2022;Yang et al, 2016). This measure is detailed in the literature review prepared by Tucker et al (2018, p. 8).…”

Affective polarization in low-partisanship societies. The case of Chile 1990–2021

“…Affective polarization can be a relevant indicator of how well the democratic system works. When affective polarization is high, the possibility of reaching agreements is hampered by the way in which conflicts between groups are faced and solved (Iyengar et al, 2012;Torcal and Comellas, 2022;Torcal and Magalhaes, 2022). Research has shown that higher levels of affective polarization have effects in the political arena (Druckman et al, 2020(Druckman et al, , 2021Kingzette et al, 2021;Rodon, 2022;Serani, 2022;Torcal and Carty, 2022), but also in other areas (Iyengar and Westwood, 2015;Iyengar et al, 2019;Rudolph and Hetherington, 2021).…”