Partisan Affect in Times of Fractionalization: Visualizing Who Likes Whom in Germany, 1977 to 2020

Abstract

This data visualization describes the warmth of feelings that supporters of all major parties in Germany hold toward their own and all other major parties and how these feelings changed between 1977 and 2020. Data are from more than 700,000 respondents of the study Politbarometer. People have colder feelings toward ideologically more distant parties, and supporters of all other parties hold strongly negative feelings toward the radical right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). In most party pairings not involving AfD, feelings have been stable or trending positive. Today, Germany is not politically polarized in the sense of a divide running through the middle. Rather, the party landscape is fractionalized, with a deep affective division between the roughly 10 percent radical right and the rest and minor to moderate divisions between most other parties.

How warm are political interactions? A new measure of affective fractionalization

“…The next row displays the intensity of negative affect that partisans can expect to receive from people who prefer a different party (“Negative partisan affect received in out-group interactions only”), i.e., affective polarization, where higher numbers denote more intense dislike. We see that radical left and especially radical right parties’ supporters receive the most intense dislike from rival parties’ supporters, on average (see also [ 28 , 51 , 52 ], while conservative parties’ supporters also receive comparatively intense out-partisan dislike. The last row displays the intensity of negative affect that people can expect to receive in random interactions with all citizens including co-partisans, i.e., affective fractionalization.…”

Affective polarization in Europe

“…For example, they have been included in every round of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset (see, e.g., Ward and Tavits, 2019;Reiljan, 2020;Wagner, 2021), which covers countries around the world, not just in Europe. Like-dislike scores have also been collected monthly in Germany since 1977 as part of the Politbarometer survey (Hudde, 2022;Harteveld and Wagner, 2023) and yearly in Sweden since 1986 as part of the SOM survey. Boxell et al (2022) and Garzia et al (2023) provide useful overviews of the over-time availability of like-dislike scores or feeling thermometers across OECD countries.…”