Affective polarization threatens democratic politics, yet little is known about how to reduce it among one of its key drivers: party activists. Studying activists over time and in real-world settings is difficult; this study leverages a rare longitudinal dataset to test whether election-day contact with out-party peers reduces partisan animus.
Part of broader research on changing political linkages in Argentina and Brazil, this paper focuses on political activist training. It asks how larger transformations—such as weakening partisanship and intense political fluctuation—shape the ways activists define and experience internal training within organizations that supported the Kirchner (2003–2015) and Workers’ Party (2003–2016) administrations.
A novel procedure uses the advertising option on Facebook to sample party activists across countries and over time. This approach targets different parties via ads, allows quota controls, and collects large samples at relatively low cost—making it possible to improve representativeness through poststratification and to check robustness with subsamples.