Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities

Abstract

This article argues that a common pattern and set of dynamics characterizes severe political and societal polarization in different contexts around the world, with pernicious consequences for democracy. Moving beyond the conventional conceptualization of polarization as ideological distance between political parties and candidates, we offer a conceptualization of polarization highlighting its inherently relational nature and its instrumental political use. Polarization is a process whereby the normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of “Us” versus “Them.” The politics and discourse of opposition and the social–psychological intergroup conflict dynamics produced by this alignment are a main source of the risks polarization generates for democracy, although we recognize that it can also produce opportunities for democracy. We argue that contemporary examples of polarization follow a frequent pattern whereby polarization is activated when major groups in society mobilize politically to achieve fundamental changes in structures, institutions, and power relations. Hence, newly constructed cleavages are appearing that underlie polarization and are not easily measured with the conventional Left–Right ideological scale. We identify three possible negative outcomes for democracy—“gridlock and careening,” “democratic erosion or collapse under new elites and dominant groups,” and “democratic erosion or collapse with old elites and dominant groups,” and one possible positive outcome—“reformed democracy.” Drawing on literature in psychology and political science, the article posits a set of causal mechanisms linking polarization to harm to democracy and illustrates the common patterns and pernicious consequences for democracy in four country cases: varying warning signs of democratic erosion in Hungary and the United States, and growing authoritarianism in Turkey and Venezuela.

The geographic evolution of political cleavages in Switzerland: A network approach to assessing levels and dynamics of polarization between local populations

“…Resulting maps suggests a strong influence of global connectivity on the current state of political dynamics in Switzerland. Those findings support similar observations across other national contexts, and illustrate how the evolution of political cleavages in the population follows global trends [84].…”

'It's Not About the Money. It's About Sending a Message!': Unpacking the Components of Revenge

“…Confessions are especially difficult to reconcile with standard economic accounts of behavior since they typically consist of information, revelation of which would be antithetical to the revealer's interests. Likewise, people care deeply about what other people believe, and about how other people's beliefs align with their own (c.f., Golman et al, 2016), which has important consequences for geographic mobility (Bishop, 2009;Motyl, Iyer, Oishi, Trawalter, & Nosek, 2014) and politics (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015;McCoy, Rahman, & Somer, 2018 justice condition (51%) than in the suffering condition (29%), χ 2 (1, N = 121) = 4.942, p = .026.…”

Measuring and Unpacking Affective Polarization on Twitter: The Role of Party and Gender in the 2018 Senate Races

“…We find little support that this polarization was being driven by specific candidates or topics, with the exception of the events leading up to Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court on October 6. Instead we find support that that U.S. Senate races of 2018 were dominated by an Us-vs-Them mentality [19], with Conservatives using the most strongly worded terminology in support of their own (in-group) candidates and against the opposing candidates.…”

“…We propose and define a Twitter-based measure of affective polarization as the difference between mean in-group party tweet sentiment [48] and mean out-group party sentiment [29]. This Us-versus-Them [19] measure provides a way to quantify the level of mass affective polarization, by measuring the animosity between ideological groups or political parties, in near real-time. We use the U.S. Senate elections in 2018 as the empirical context to test the validity of this measure and use the tweets gathered about (or by) candidates running for Senate to unpack what is behind affective polarization on Twitter.…”

“…While most studies, when measuring partisan polarization, have focused on ideological polarization, the focus of this work is to examine affective polarization. It is vital that we understand the drivers of this type of polarization since affective polarization can lead to democratic erosion [19]. As the general public increasingly turns to social media for their source of information [53], and partisan discourse leads to an increase in affective polarization [38,50], it is important to understand the discourse on social media during election campaigns [49].…”