Advances in Affective Polarization: Causes and Constraints

Abstract

Affective polarization, the phenomenon that Democrats and Republicans increasingly dislike each other, is the most salient issue in contemporary American politics and poses the toughest challenge for American democracy. Research on affective polarization in the past decade has identified its downstream consequences in both political and nonpolitical settings. More recently, students of polarization started to examine its causes and constraints. However, no consensus has been reached on why it happens and how to mitigate it. Therefore, my dissertation project mainly focuses on the causes and depolarization approaches. This project has three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 addresses the causes of affective polarization by asking a fundamental question—who comes to your mind when thinking about political parties. This chapter has three major findings. First, individuals vary in whom they think of, but most envision partisan prototypes, when asked to think about the parties. Second, when asked to consider less prototypical partisans, partisan animosity decreases. Third, people have the warmest feeling towards the least prototypical out-partisans—nonvoters of the opposing party. Chapter 3 examines the solution to depolarize ordinary Americans by testing the robustness and external validity of an established approach—correcting partisan misperception. I first show that correction works when it is from high-credibility sources but not low-credibility sources. Further, my experiments reveal that correction fails to reduce affective polarization when it is from partisan slant of the sources and political incivility are salient. Chapter 4 investigates the causes of affective polarization by testing the external validity of partisan perceptions and more specifically how inter-party perceptions on racial attitudes shape affective polarization. I first find that partisans have an accurate perception of racial resentment and anti-white bias among the out-partisans. Further, Democrats’ overestimation (and Republicans’ underestimation) of racial resentment and anti-white bias among out-partisans increases animosity towards the out-party.