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The Way We Were: How Current and Past Cooperation Between Co-Governing Parties Alleviates Affective Polarization in Mass Publics

Comparative Politics
Elections
Political Parties
Campaign
Electoral Behaviour
Noam Gidron
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Will Horne
Georgia State University
James Adams
Noam Gidron
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Will Horne
Georgia State University

Abstract

Lijphart and others argue that consensual democratic institutions that encourage power-sharing between parties promote ‘kinder, gentler’ economic and political outcomes. We argue that elite cooperation in consensual systems confers another important benefit: namely it alleviates affective polarization in the mass public, because governing parties’ supporters like their coalition partner(s) far more than we can explain based on policy agreement alone. We further argue that past co-governance also enhances inter-party relationships, even if the parties are not currently co-governing. Theoretically, there is good reason to believe parties who cooperate, and are incentivized to cooperate in the future, are less likely to engage in rhetoric to ramp up partisan hostility. We substantiate our arguments via analyses of CSES survey data from 20 western democracies between 1996-2017, showing that past co-governance from up to 20 years ago is associated with substantially warmer inter-party evaluations, controlling for present and past policy differences. This implies that consensual democracies, which feature vastly more instances of current and past co-governance than majoritarian systems, alleviate mass-level affective polarization