"A Special Place in Hell": Affective Polarization Between Populist and Non-Populist Supporters in the Netherlands

There is increasing scholarly awareness that Western democracies are experiencing affective polarization: increasing hostility between citizens holding different partisan or ideological preferences. Affective polarization involves perceiving citizens with different views as a socially distant, distrusted and disliked (or outright hated) ‘outgroup’. Excessive affective polarization could erode deliberation, compromise, and other norms underpinning pluralist democracy. However, the fragmented and multidimensional nature of European multiparty democracies complicates easy representations of who the 'ingroup' and 'outgroup' are. In this study I investigate hostility across the populism/non-populism divide. ‘Populism’ is characterized by its Manichaean approach to politics, pitting the ‘good’ people against ‘corrupt’ elites and their supporters. This moralizing approach to politics likely turns all non-populist voters into a homogeneous disliked outgroup. At the same time, (right-wing) populists' implicit or explicit breach of anti-prejudice norms stigmatizes these parties and likely by extension their voters. In short, both the accusatory stance of populists and the often vilifying responses by mainstream politicians are expected to induce affective polarization among the public at large. To date there is little data to study the extent to which citizens loathe each other for their political identities outside the US. The goal behind the data collection I have conducted is to apply the measures commonly used in the US - 'feeling thermometers' and social distance indicators - on a large representative sample in the Netherlands (N=1072). I use these measures to gauge whether (a) supports of populist parties are uniquely disliked by fellow citizens (even controlling for ideological distance and other factors) and (b) whether these populist supporters themselves are uniquely and invariably negative towards all non-populist partisans. This provides valuable knowledge about “whom hates whom” in a fragmented multiparty system, exploring the role of populist party supporters in sending and receiving uniquely negative affect.