As Trump rose to the presidency, one explanation that swept political science was the power of polarization, specifically a phenomenon known as affective polarization, but a keen group of scholars now suggests that this approach is inadequate.
It would be hard to describe the state of political competition in America more accurately than as “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — the subtitle of an article, “Political Sectarianism in America,” published by 15 important scholars in Science magazine in November 2020, including Eli Finkel, Peter Ditto, Shanto Iyengar, Lilliana Mason, Brendan Nyhan and Linda Skitka.
The Science essay argues that
The political sectarianism of the public incentivizes politicians to adopt antidemocratic tactics when pursuing electoral or political victories. A recent experiment shows that, today, a majority-party candidate in most U.S. House districts — Democrat or Republican — could get elected despite openly violating democratic principles like electoral fairness, checks and balances, or civil liberties. Voters’ decisions to support such a candidate may seem sensible if they believe the harm to democracy from any such decision is small while the consequences of having the vile opposition win the election are catastrophic.
The costs, the authors argue, are substantial:
Sectarianism stimulates activism, but also a willingness to inflict collateral damage in pursuit of political goals and to view copartisans who compromise as apostates.
Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, has his own description of the state of American politics:
Affective polarization is the canary in the coal mine. That is, it tells us things are dysfunctional without causing the dysfunction. Affective polarization as an indicator of dysfunction rather than a cause doesn’t diminish its importance, I think.
David E. Broockman, Joshua L. Kalla, and Sean J. Westwood, political scientists at Berkeley, Yale and Dartmouth, challenge the Science magazine argument. Instead, they make the case in their December 2020 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” that partisan hostility may be destructive, but attempts to moderate it will not diminish party loyalty or tolerance for anti-democratic changes in election law or the decline in political accountability.
Broockman and his co-authors agree with much prior research that has found, as they describe it:
Citizens’ more negative sentiment toward opposing political parties than their own” — affective polarization — “has been growing worldwide. Research on this trend constitutes one of the most influential literatures in contemporary social science and has sown alarm across disciplines.
Where Broockman, Kalla and Westwood differ is with those who take the growing partisan hostility argument a step farther, to contend that “if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook co-partisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions.”
“We find no evidence that an exogenous decrease in affective polarization causes a downstream decrease in opposition to democratic norms,” Broockman and his co-authors write, adding: “We investigate the causal effects of affective polarization on a variety of downstream outcomes,” in five political domains, “electoral accountability (measured by both levels of party loyalty and how individuals react to information about their actual representatives), adopting one’s party’s policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perceptions of objective conditions.”
The Broockman argument has some strong supporters. Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight colleagues, make a very similar case to Broockman’s in their May 2021 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Improve Anti-Democratic Attitudes.”
They write:
There is widespread concern that rising affective polarization — dislike for members of the opposing party — is exacerbating a range of anti-democratic attitudes, such as support for undemocratic practices, undemocratic candidates, and partisan violence. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions, and several promising interventions have been identified that successfully reduce affective polarization.
These efforts have mixed results:
We find that the depolarization interventions reliably reduce affective polarization, but this reduction does not reliably translate into reduced support for undemocratic practices, undemocratic candidates, or partisan violence.
“These findings,” they add, “call into question the previously assumed causal link of affective polarization on anti-democratic attitudes.”
Voelkel and his co-authors conclude that “Our findings suggest that affective polarization may not be as problematic for democratic societies as is widely assumed.”
Voelkel and his colleagues specifically tested whether a reduction in affective polarization has any impact on “the more societally-consequential outcomes of support for undemocratic practices, undemocratic candidates, and partisan violence.” They found that when they used a series of techniques to successfully lower affective polarization, it did not produce “significantly less support for partisan violence,” nor “significantly less support for undemocratic inparty candidates.”
In sum, their research shows that
interventions can reduce both attitudinal and behavioral indicators of affective polarization without reducing anti-democratic attitudes. This calls into question the commonly-held assumption that anti-democratic attitudes are downstream consequences of affective polarization.
Cynthia Shih-Chia Wang, a professor of management and organization at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, agreed that the Broockman and Voelkel articles suggest that analysts
proceed with caution with the amount of weight we have placed on affective polarization — while disdain for the other side has risen, there certainly needs to be a deeper analysis of the downstream consequences of affective polarization.
But, she added, “it may be a bit early to dismiss affective polarization as a predictor of anti-democratic attitudes and other potentially pernicious outcomes.”
I asked Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, about the Broockman and Voelkel articles, and he wrote back: “These papers are very important. Though more research is needed, I am convinced that we have potentially overstated the causal role of affective polarization in many negative phenomena in American politics.”
The Broockman and Voelkel papers suggest, Nyhan continued, “that we should renew our scrutiny of the role of elites and political systems in fomenting illiberal behavior” and that the problem “is not affective polarization as such; it’s a political system that is failing to contain significant democratic erosion and illiberalism being driven by G.O.P. elites (though affective polarization may help encourage and enable such tactics).”
Erik Peterson, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, elaborated in an email on the significance of the Broockman paper:
Broockman, Kalla and Westwood’s paper convincingly shows a change in affective polarization does not immediately translate into some of the political repercussions researchers had previously suggested. Most importantly, they show those who move toward a more negative view of their political opponents do not become more partisan in their voting behavior or more accepting of cues from co-partisan politicians.
Peterson cautioned, however, that research he and Westwood performed for an October 2020 article, “The Inseparability of Race and Partisanship in the United States,” found “that shifts in affective polarization do influence attitudes and behavior towards racial out-groups.”
What this suggests, Peterson continued, is that affective polarization
could still have plenty of indirect consequences for politics. At present, the evidence seems to point toward affective polarization as most closely related to the intrusion of partisanship into social and interpersonal settings.
Asked what explains the “continued belief by Republicans in false allegations of widespread voter fraud in 2020” — if it isn’t affective polarization — Peterson emailed to say that he thinks that
this is something that is best explained by Republicans taking cues from political leaders and partisan media expressing skepticism in election results. Even if affective polarization does not amplify this process, cues from co-partisan politicians are still an important part of how people form their opinions about politics.
Mina Cikara, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry by pointing out that there was reason to doubt some of the claimed consequences of affective polarization before the publication of the Broockman and Voelkel work:
I’m not surprised that reducing affective polarization leaves anti-democratic preferences unaffected. The first piece of evidence is that we frequently see equivalent degrees of out-party dislike on both sides, but there’s only one party seeking to curb voting access and throw out election results. The second piece of the puzzle is that far more people dislike the other side than say they would take up arms against them. This suggests that while out-party dislike may be necessary for, for example, support for violence, it is clearly not sufficient. Other factors are doing the heavy lifting in correlating with support for and engagement in political violence so we should be working to characterize and intervene on those.
The publication in May 2019 of a seminal essay in the Annual Review of Political Science, “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” by Shanto Iyengar of Stanford, Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky of the University of Pennsylvania, Neil Malhotra of Stanford and Westwood, reflects the prominence of theory of affective polarization before the release of the Broockman and Voelkel papers.
Iyengar and his colleagues wrote:
While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines. This phenomenon of animosity between the parties is known as affective polarization.
Most recently, the issue of polarization and violence has become particularly salient. On Sept. 15, Westwood, along with Justin Grimmer of Stanford, Matthew Tyler Stanford and Clayton Nall University of California-Santa Barbara, published an essay, “American Support for Political Violence is Low,” arguing that claims by sociologists and political science of a growing threat of political violence are exaggerated.
They write:
Political scientists, pundits, and citizens worry that America is entering a new period of violent partisan conflict. Provocative survey data show that up to 44 percent of the public support politically motivated violence in hypothetical scenarios.
Careful examination of the data on which these claims are based, however, shows that
depending on how the question is asked, existing estimates of support for partisan violence are 30-900 percent too large, and nearly all respondents support charging suspects who commit acts of political violence with a crime. These findings suggest that although recent acts of political violence dominate the news, they do not portend a new era of violent conflict.
Insofar as there is a relatively small constituency that supports violence, the authors contend that this support is not directly linked to politics:
Our results are robust to several other predicted causes of political violence. We find that several standard political measures, i.e., affective polarization and political engagement, are less predictive of support for political violence than are general measures of aggression suggesting that tolerance for violence is a general human preference and not a specifically political preference.
I asked Westwood and Broockman about what they think the cause of our political dysfunction is, if, as they say, affective polarization is not the cause.
Broockman wrote back:
I see our paper as beginning an important conversation about rigorously measuring the political impacts of affective polarization, not representing the end of that conversation. I don’t see our paper as ruling out a possible role for affective polarization, but I do think our results should make scholars and activists pause before assuming that reducing affective polarization would automatically result in improvements to all aspects of democracy.
There is, Broockman continued, “some other research out there that thinks carefully about the sources of support for democratic norms that is grounded in thinking more carefully about the theoretical mechanisms by which such reductions might occur.” He specifically cited “Biased and Inaccurate Meta-Perceptions about Out-Partisans’ Support for Democratic Principles May Erode Democratic Norms,” which argues that partisan misjudgments of their opponents exaggerates hostility.
This paper, by Michael Pasek of The New School for Social Research, Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky of Brown, Alex Levy-Vene of the University of Bath and Samantha Moore-Bergof the University of Pennsylvania, makes the case that:
Both Democrats and Republicans personally value core democratic characteristics but severely underestimate opposing party members’ support for those same characteristics. In turn, the tendency to believe that political in-group members value democratic characteristics more than political out-group members is associated with support for anti-democratic practices. Results suggest biased and inaccurate intergroup ‘meta-perceptions’ — beliefs about what others believe — may contribute to democratic erosion in the United States.
They continue:
Individuals with more biased meta-perceptions — those who more strongly believed the average in-group member valued characteristics more than the average out-group member — were more willing to subvert democratic principles, in practice, to help their party.
Westwood, in turn, replied to my inquiry:
Affective polarization isn’t driving support for efforts to restrict democratic norms, which is reassuring insofar as affective polarization isn’t driving voters to call for limiting voter rights, but alarming because it means we don’t know what is causing the rise in support for anti-democratic legislation.
In Westwood’s view,
these efforts by elected officials are driven by self-interest in retaining power in a country experiencing rapid demographic change. It is also clear from opinion data that in many cases they are doing this against the wishes of voters. They seem to have calculated that the long-term strategic gains are worth short term losses in public support. We don’t have clear evidence of this and there is much research to be done, but it is the most parsimonious answer.
James Druckman, a political scientist at Northwestern and a co-author of the Voelkel paper, contended in an email that while the Broockman, Voelkel and Westwood papers may have diminished the salience of affective partisanship, at the same time the papers call for a wider ranging search in the effort to figure out how and why American politics have gone so far off track in such a short time:
The papers reveal that dynamics that may be imperiling democracy do not straightforwardly reduce to affective polarization. There are more nuanced dynamics to which we need to attend. For example, when it comes anti-democratic behaviors, other possible forces include racial/ethnic antagonism or partisan extremity. For violence, perhaps anti-establishment attitudes orientation matter. This is not to say affective polarization does not matter as I think there is sufficient evidence that it can under particular conditions. However, how it matters may be less than straightforward.
Figuring out what is driving us apart and what we can do about it was never going to be easy.
New York Times
