Affective Polarization

Did a new identity supplant traditional politics? This study investigates how opinions surrounding Britain's 2016 EU referendum birthed potent 'Brexit' identities.

A national field experiment convened more than 500 registered voters from around the country for in-depth deliberation over a long weekend on five major issues facing the nation. A separate pre–post control group was asked the same questions to enable before-and-after comparison.

Partisan animosity has surged in America over recent decades. This research shows moral conviction, not just partisan identity, drives affective polarization—heightened bias and hostility across party lines—even among politically similar individuals.

This study asks whether reducing affective polarization — people’s negative feelings toward opposing partisans — causally changes intentions to share true or false political news online. Using an experimental approach, the authors report that improving feelings toward out-party members relative to one’s own party produced no measurable change in intentions to share true news, false news, or in the gap between them (truth discernment). They also test an accuracy reminder and find modest evidence that such a prompt can improve truth discernment for respondents who report sharing political news. The paper argues these experimental results call for reexamining the assumed causal role of affective polarization in misinformation spread, while preserving the conditional and limited nature of the observed effects.

Democrats and Republicans clearly dislike one another, but scholars disagree about why. Some prior work argues this animus is spurious—driven entirely by inferred policy preferences. This study contends that policy preferences often act as signals of partisan identity when party stances are well-known, and it tests how much interpersonal dislike comes from identity versus policy disagreement itself.

Affective polarization—partisans' dislike and distrust of the other party—has reached historically high levels in the United States, but its effects on political beliefs are less understood than its effects on apolitical outcomes.

This study probes how political identification and ideology shape everyday social behavior. Behavioral games—dictator, trust, and public goods—were used to measure altruism, trust, and willingness to contribute to mutual benefits while varying the perceived party identity of interaction partners.

Electoral competition sharpens divisions among voters in Israel.

Affective polarization has been explained by two main theories: social identity theory suggests party-based feelings increase with political relevance, while others argue extreme actors drive polarization. This survey experiment assigns randomly either a candidate's ideology or their party to test which factor creates stronger negative reactions from respondents. Respondents showed significantly greater affective polarization toward the out-party's ideology than its assigned party label alone.