Article Summary
Introduction
Politics can evoke strong feelings. After a political campaign, supporters of the winning candidate celebrate, while those on the losing side despair. At family events and social gatherings some avoid discussing politics because it can lead to intense disagreements. Despite the emotional resonance that politics holds, many of the theories and measurements social scientists use to evaluate political polarization do not address this and instead focus on policy-based disagreements among the American public. In “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization” Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes remedy this disconnect by studying affective polarization—the divide in how people feel about the political party they identity with compared to the other party.
The article’s theoretical argument is that partisanship is a psychological group attachment, also known as a social identity. People categorize and evaluate others based on whether they are members of the same party. Seen this way, partisan polarization is the difference between the positive feelings that partisans have towards their political party and their negative evaluations of the other side.
Analytical Approach
The paper measures affective polarization using several surveys conducted between 1960 and 2010, including the American National Election Study which conducted face-to-face interviews with nationally representative samples of survey respondents during this time. The authors consider feeling thermometer questions that measure how favorably people evaluate the Democratic and Republican parties. They also examine questions that ask people how comfortable they would be with their child marrying a member of a different party. Finally, they analyze trait rating questions where people report whether supporters of different parties are intelligent or selfish.
Main Findings
These measures reveal substantial affective polarization among the American public. In recent years there is a wide gap in how people feel about the political parties. They evaluate their own side much more favorably than the other party. Over 20 percent of people express unease with their child marrying an out-party member. Partisans also assess members of the other party as being much more likely to hold negative traits, and much less likely to hold positive traits, than their co-partisans.
Two comparisons establish that these high levels of affective polarization are distinctive. An overtime comparison using the feeling thermometers shows affective polarization in the United States has substantially increased since the late 1980s. This increase is primarily because people now provide much more negative ratings of the other party. Positive views of their own party have remained largely stable during this time.
A second set of comparisons shows the partisan divide in contemporary American politics is large compared to several benchmarks. Using the same feeling thermometers, the authors show the partisan divide exceeds other divides based on race or religion. Turning to a cross-national comparison, the inter-party marriage and trait rating questions show affective polarization has increased more in the United States since the 1960s than it has in the United Kingdom.
Implications
Prior to this paper, researchers considered political polarization mainly in terms of ideological polarization, or how different Democrats and Republicans were in the policy positions they supported. This produced mixed evidence about polarization among the public. There are some modest increases in ideological polarization, but substantial overlap remains in the issue positions preferred by members of different political parties.
“Affect, Not Ideology” is important because it focuses attention on the feelings members of the public have for political parties and their supporters. Relative to studies of ideological polarization, this consideration of affective polarization offers much stronger evidence that partisan division among the public has dramatically increased and that a broad swath of the public is now polarized. The paper’s discussion of partisanship as a social identity, and affective polarization as a product of the increased relevance of this identity, also substantially expands the areas of life it can impact. Beyond policy positions, the evidence of this paper suggests politics can spill into dating, hiring decisions and other interactions between members of different political parties. Finally, in methodological terms the measures of affective polarization used in the paper, particularly the difference in feeling thermometer ratings of the two political parties, have appeared in many subsequent studies.
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: Study was conducted before 2015
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: No
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: Yes
- Largest p-value presented as significant: 0.05
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: Yes
Limitations / Weaknesses
The paper raises some key questions that remain unanswered. First, what has caused affective polarization to increase so much in the United States? From the perspective of social identity theory, something must have occurred to increase the importance of partisan identify for evaluating other people since the 1960s. The paper offers some suggestive answers to this question. The authors show that exposure to negative political campaigns increases dislike of the other side, making the rise of negative campaigning one contributor to increased affective polarization. They also find those with more extreme policy views dislike members of the other party more than others, although the magnitude of the relationship between issue positions on economic policy and affective polarization is largely the same in 1988 as it is in 2004, suggesting this account cannot explain the increase in partisan animosity during this time. In other words, while there is some evidence for both negative campaigning and ideological polarization as contributors to affective polarization, more research is still needed to understand why it has increased over time. Second, how much does affective polarization impact politics and social life? Attitudes measures in surveys are important but may not always relate to how people behave. On the political front, it is important to understand whether affective polarization changes how people make political decisions. Outside of politics, affective polarization may have different implications for behavior depending on how well people can identify members of other side and whether other identities that cut across party lines can help to mitigate negative views of out-party members.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: No
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: No
Article Citation
Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideologya social identity perspective on polarization. Public opinion quarterly, 76(3), 405-431.
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@article{iyengar2012affect,
title={Affect, not ideologya social identity perspective on polarization},
author={Iyengar, Shanto and Sood, Gaurav and Lelkes, Yphtach},
journal={Public opinion quarterly},
volume={76},
number={3},
pages={405--431},
year={2012},
publisher={Oxford University Press}
}